No abstract

How effective is unilateral presidential power? Recent developments have shifted presidential scholarship in the direction of a more institutional approach, and one of the most important tenets of this work holds that the president has the ability to make policy on his own. However, there is significant anecdotal evidence suggesting that agency responsiveness to executive orders is not at all guaranteed. This study leverages a unique data set tracing the implementation of executive orders across 10 government agencies, and the results indicate that despite conventional wisdom, presidential directives are not universally implemented, and a host of factors come to bear on an agency’s decision as to whether they will respond. This project represents among the first quantitative empirical assessments of the utility of unilateral power and suggests that the field may benefit most from shifting toward a bargaining-based model similar to those used in legislative scholarship.

The passage of (and debate over) immigration laws in Arizona highlights the increasing linguistic diversity of the US. To date, 31 states have passed an English-official bill. In this paper, we test several hypotheses concerning the adoption of such legislation across the states. Using data spanning the past three decades, we present event history models on the timing of adoption since the start of the modern movement in 1980. Like previous works, we find that the timing of adoption in states is structured by immigrant population and the initiative process. However, we find a conditional story that has been overlooked to date: the effects of immigrant threat only increase the likelihood of English-official legislation adoption when the issue of immigration is nationally salient.

reality is a social construction" (p. 14). In this reading, Derrida and Foucault paved the way for Breitbart and Hannity. It speaks strongly for the impact of ideas. Readers who take the title literally may wonder whether the bulk of a nation has "lost its mind," or whether it is only the 46 percent who chose a casino magnate. Patterson inspired me to look back a few years. In 2008, a contender with an African parent and an unusual name won with 9,549,105 votes to spare. Up again, his margin was still 4,984,100. If those electorates seemed pretty open-minded, they were largely similar to 2016's, not to mention today's. We are taken to the author's native state, much of it now Trump terrain. "Their opinions were honest and heartfelt," Patterson recounts, "rooted in a lifestyle they've always known" (p. 47). The message is that these beliefs deserve respect and warrant an attentive hearing. That is a tenet of political civility. But there is another step. It is to grant that there can be a cogent case, let's say, for allowing military-level weaponry in any household so disposed. Or that to maintain that all conceptions must be made to end in birth can be an intellectually viable position. Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito provide as many footnotes, citing evidence and authorities, as Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. Not a small lesson from How America Lost Its Mind is how hard it is to engage when every node on the spectrum insists it is empirical and analytical. It has been a long time since I have met a book as gratifying as Patterson's. He forces his readers to think, especially where issues defy familiar responses. At least this was the experience of this reviewer.

Why do presidents use signing statements? Past research has approached presidential strategy in using such statements from both policy-oriented and institutionally oriented perspectives. However, scholars have not adequately addressed the consequences of congressional ideology and gridlock on the use of presidential signing statements. This article considers congressional composition and offers two different perspectives on presidential strategy: a separation of powers perspective (i.e., presidents use signing statements to protect their office from congressional encroachment) and a political perspective (i.e., presidents use signing statements to counteract the actions of an adversarial Congress). I find that political factors are more important: under conditions of unified government, gridlock predicts fewer substantive signing statements than under conditions of divided government. The results suggest a theory of unilateral power, which posits that presidents are strategic and will change their use of particular policy-shaping tools depending on various political circumstances.