This project investigates the use of presidential proclamations to explore an underlying tension in executive power. Specifically, when presidents use unilateral powers, do they work with Congress or do they truly act alone? To address this question, the PIs create a new coding of proclamations, articulate a theory that unilateral power is shared between the branches, and examine how a president justifies unilateral action in terms of the source of legal authority invoked in each order and any delegated of authority from Congress that corresponds to the president?s order. The PI?s theory and new data speak to the evolution of executive power as well as to the ongoing controversy over the role of legal rules in guiding or enhancing presidential power. Each proclamation will be coded for the authority presidents used to justify the action taken and the amount of discretion provided in each statute cited by the president in each order. There are approximately 4,000 proclamations that need to be coded to complete the analysis. These data will also be made available to the public.
This new theory and data will show that, contrary to the current literature, presidents are both strategic actors who engage in independent executive action and participants in politically integrated activities with Congress for the purposes of enacting and implementing policy. Presidential unilateral orders are not uniformly used for one selective purpose or the other ¯ presidents vary their strategy depending on the amount of authority they have and nature of the political environment they face.
This project will contribute information to the public conversation concerning executive power. By making the data publicly available, the project will allow other scholars and citizens to evaluate presidential proclamations. In addition, this project will train students in social scientific research methods.
Presidential power relates to the effectiveness and efficiency with which executive power is applied. In the last two decades, journalists and scholars have emphasized the importance of the way that presidents use their unilateral powers to make policy "by the stroke of the pen," that is, without Congress. These actions are frequently called "unilateral orders" and include executive orders, signing statements, proclamations, and trade agreements. The implications of the use of these powers are important for the separation of powers and the scope of effective presidential powers, necessitating the study of these questions. In this project, we examined presidential proclamations and executive orders as a way of expanding the current understanding of these unilateral orders and, by extension, constitutional governance. We collected, codified and analyzed thousands of these orders. This work makes contributions both for scholars and for the wider public. First, with respect to the public, our primary contribution is one of access. We have expanded the public’s access to presidential orders in two ways. First, even though proclamations have the force of law, they are often very hard for the public to find. We have created a searchable database that allows users to search proclamations both by president and by the "issue area." For example, someone can quickly find the proclamations issued by Theodore Roosevelt with respect to early United States environmental policy. Interested parties can also examine the orders related to the lead up to World War I and Woodrow Wilson’s use of proclamations. Second, we have used this funding to locate and digitize proclamations that were previously unavailable on the Internet. We have uploaded over 400 of these proclamations. This website is located at: www.polsci.uh.edu/database/procdatabase.asp In addition to providing greater access to the public, we have contributed to the scholarly knowledge of executive power in three ways. First, while the common understanding is that proclamations are merely ceremonial, we have shown that many proclamations deal with important policy matters. In fact, the vast majority of the proclamations we digitized are policy proclamations. Moreover, we have published an article that is the first to examine 19th century proclamations about domestic unrest. Second, we coded early executive orders. Because most of the scholarship on executive orders covers presidents since FDR, our data will help scholars, journalists, and citizens study how these orders were used before FDR, allowing us to understand the growth of presidential power over time. Third, we have coded many of these orders with respect to the type of delegation given by Congress. This will assist scholars in understanding the extent to which Congress and the president work together by way of presidential unilateral power. Related to this, we have published one article with this research demonstrating that presidents "think politically" about whether they cite congressional authority in the text of the proclamations and executive orders.
