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Constitutional Qualms or Politics as Usual? The Factors Shaping Public Support for Unilateral Action
Author(s) -
Christenson Dino P.,
Kriner Douglas L.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
american journal of political science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.347
H-Index - 170
eISSN - 1540-5907
pISSN - 0092-5853
DOI - 10.1111/ajps.12262
Subject(s) - presidential system , action (physics) , scholarship , political science , politics , public opinion , preference , constraint (computer aided design) , law and economics , public administration , political economy , law , sociology , economics , mechanical engineering , physics , quantum mechanics , microeconomics , engineering
The formal institutional constraints that Congress and the courts impose on presidential unilateral action are feeble. As a result, recent scholarship suggests that public opinion may be the strongest check against executive overreach. However, little is known about how the public assesses unilateral action. Through a series of five survey experiments embedded in nationally representative surveys, we examine the extent to which Americans evaluate unilateral action based on constitutional, partisan, and policy concerns. We find that Americans do not instinctively reject unilateral action as a threat to our system of checks and balances, but instead evaluate unilateral action in terms of whether it accords or conflicts with their partisan and policy preference priors. Our results suggest that the public constraint on presidential unilateral action is far from automatic. Rather, the strength and scope of this check are variable products of political contestation in the public sphere.