The conventional sense of presidential power remains anchored in Neustadt's notion of persuasion in a fragmented constitutional system. Here, the authors add to an emerging literature that redirects attention to formal sources of presidential authority. They examine the frequency of executive orders from 1949 to 1999 and offer new evidence that presidents rely on executive orders to effect significant policy change and send strategic signals to other actors in the political system. They contend that executive orders enable presidents to recast the organization and activities of the federal government and, at times, the larger contours of American politics. After assessing the political and temporal logic behind this manifestation of institutional power, the authors conclude with several observations about the implications of the findings for the study of the American presidency.

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Interrogating one case of what Stephen Skowronek calls the “preemptive” Presidency, I examine Dwight D. Eisenhower's New Republican project as it manifested itself in House elections and lawmaking. To that end, I assess the ideological characteristics, electoral dynamics, and roll-call behavior of the four cohorts elected to the House between 1952 and 1958. Synthesizing qualitative accounts and quantitative evidence, I determine that the Eisenhower years reshuffled party commitments in the House by leaving more-moderate but numerically decimated Republicans to battle ideologically galvanized and numerically strengthened Democrats in the 1960s. In short, Eisenhower affected the party system in identifiable ways, but he struggled to leave the legacies he envisioned when he took office. Beyond the specifics of the Eisenhower case, the methodology developed here is broadly applicable across Presidencies.