An important vein of presidency scholarship has focused on the president's instruments of unilateral action through systemic considerations of executive orders, proclamations, and most recently, signing statements. This article considers an additional tool: presidential memoranda. I argue these memoranda contain important policy content advancing the president's agenda, and—like executive orders—they often indicate unilateral action. Memoranda use has surged as the issuance of executive orders has decreased, indicating that unilateralism is not declining, but rather, the means of such action may be shifting.

A vast literature debates the efficacy of descriptive representation in legislatures. Though studies argue it influences how communities are represented through constituency service, they are limited since legislators' service activities are unobserved. Using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, we collected 88,000 records of communication between members of the U.S. Congress and federal agencies during the 108th-113th Congresses. These legislative interventions allow us to examine members' "follow-through" with policy implementation. We find that women, racial/ethnic minorities, and veterans are more likely to work on behalf of constituents with whom they share identities. Including veterans offers leverage in understanding the role of political cleavages and shared experiences. Our findings suggest that shared experiences operate as a critical mechanism for representation, that a lack of political consensus is not necessary for substantive representation, and that the causal relationships identified by experimental work have observable implications in the daily work of Congress.

Scholarship on oversight of the bureaucracy typically conceives of legislatures as unitary actors. But most oversight is conducted by individual legislators who contact agencies directly. I acquire the correspondence logs of 16 bureaucratic agencies and re-evaluate the conventional proposition that ideological disagreement drives oversight. I identify the effect of this disagreement by exploiting the transition from George Bush to Barack Obama, which shifted the ideological orientation of agencies through turnover in agency personnel. Contrary to existing research, I find ideological conflict has a negligible effect on oversight, whereas committee roles and narrow district interests are primary drivers. The findings may indicate that absent incentives induced by public auditing, legislator behavior is driven by policy valence concerns rather than ideology. The results further suggest collective action in Congress may pose greater obstacles to bureaucratic oversight than previously thought.

Studies of unilateral power typically analyze a single tool of presidential action (e.g., executive orders, memoranda, proclamations, and signing statements) in relative isolation. But scholars have long recognized that presidents boast a diverse toolkit with particular actions possessing variable suitability for a given political circumstance. We investigate one mechanism by which presidents may choose one tool over another: political cost. Specifically, we ask: does public perception of policy movement vary with the means used to alter the status quo? Leveraging a survey experiment conducted after the 2014 midterm elections, we find support for the idea that presidents have strong incentives to take action-any actionbut that more salient means like executive orders have the potential to damage respondents' evaluations of policy change. We report initial evidence that the means of unilateral action are endogenous to political circumstances and that studies that analyze them in isolation may be vulnerable to bias.

Scholarship on bureaucratic responsiveness to Congress typically focuses on delegation and formal oversight hearings. Overlooked are daily requests to executive agencies made by legislators that propose policies, communicate concerns, and request information or services. Analyzing over 24,000 of these requests made to 13 executive agencies between 2007-2014, I find agencies systematically prioritize the policy-related requests of majority party legislators-but that this effect can be counteracted when presidents politicize agencies through appointments. An increase in politicization produces a favorable agency bias toward presidential co-partisans. This same politicization, however, has a net negative impact on agency responsiveness-agencies are less responsive to members of Congress, but even less responsive to legislators who are not presidential co-partisans. Critically, this negative impact extends beyond policy-related requests to cases of constituency service. The results suggest that presidential appointees play an important, daily mediating role between Congress and the bureaucracy.