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Symposium on Policy Making, Accountability, and Executive Action: Introduction
Author(s) -
Rogowski Jon C.
Publication year - 2020
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.12640
Subject(s) - presidential system , accountability , political science , george (robot) , action (physics) , library science , citation , public administration , management , law , politics , computer science , artificial intelligence , physics , quantum mechanics , economics
Nearly two decades ago, current Supreme Court Associate Justice Elena Kagan (2001, 2246) famously (some may argue infamously) wrote, “The history of the American administrative state is the history of competition among different entities for control of its policies. ... We live today in an era of presidential administration.” Today, it is plainly evident that presidents place great emphasis on directing the administrative state, its agenda, and its outputs. While the struggle for political control over administration is not new, as Kagan points out, the president’s capacity to shape administrative outcomes now plays a central role in determining a president’s degree of policy and political success. Because they are often (though not always) the means through which presidents attempt to direct executive branch activities, presidential directives, in the form of proclamations, executive orders, memoranda, and the like, are increasingly important indicators of presidents’ attempts to achieve their goals. For reasons that are not altogether surprising, therefore, presidential unilateral action is arguably more politically and publicly salient than it ever has been. Figure 1 provides some basic context for evaluating this claim by displaying the volume of coverage of presidential unilateral action in the New York Times from 1922 through 2018. Several patterns are immediately clear. First, the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt appeared to usher in a new era of media attentiveness to direct presidential action. The first two years of the Roosevelt administration garnered more coverage (698 stories) than the previous decade combined (564 stories). Second, while patterns of attentiveness have waxed and waned throughout the years, media coverage has recently resurged. Nearly 750 stories on unilateral action appeared in 2017, the first year of the Trump administration. While that figure fell quite a bit (to 303) in 2018, the volume of coverage was the second highest in more than a half century. The impeachment hearings of President Donald Trump as of this writing suggest that questions of presidential power hardly receded in 2019.