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The Contemporary Presidency: Do Presidential Memo Orders Substitute for Executive Orders? New Data
Author(s) -
Woolley John T.,
Peters Gerhard
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
presidential studies quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.337
H-Index - 5
eISSN - 1741-5705
pISSN - 0360-4918
DOI - 10.1111/psq.12374
Subject(s) - presidential system , presidency , proclamation , executive branch , executive order , political science , order (exchange) , executive power , public administration , law , politics , business , finance
We describe and implement a text‐search strategy for reliably identifying, among published presidential documents, orders not titled “executive order” or “proclamation.” Given the inconsistent use of terms and titles in these documents, we refer to them with an umbrella term: “memo orders.” We identify over 1,600 memo orders in the archives of the American Presidency Project (APP) from 1977 to 2012. Drawing on the Federal Register for the same period, we find additional orders not in the APP archives. This produces a comprehensive estimate of the total number of published presidential orders from 1977 to 2012. We further apply our strategy to presidential signing statements from 1985 to 2008 and estimate that around 10% can be considered to include presidential orders.