I develop a formal model that investigates conditions under which the president acts unilaterally to establish a given policy. The key innovation is that unilateral action is considered a costly tool for voter mobilization. Presidential unilateral action activates voters' constitutional concerns, which increases the cost of voting and leads the president's supporters to abstain. However, it also provides extra expressive benefits of voting to the president's supporters who deeply care about the policy established by the unilateral action. Hence, the president acts unilaterally to establish the policy only if its mobilizing effects outweigh its demobilizing effects. This result implies that the president's unilateral action acquires popular support that can compensate for the lack of its constitutionality. I discuss the possibly benign effects of unilateral action that are conducive to an effective government and argue that it is necessary to account for these effects when making normative judgments about unilateral action.
We propose a formal model that investigates the institutional cause of the expansion of the gridlock region in a legislative body under supermajority rule. We show that the interaction between a legislative election and the supermajority rule in the legislative policy-making process causes an expansion of the size of the gridlock region under certain circumstances. More specifically, if the position of the status quo is neither too moderate nor too extreme, then certain voters will be incentivized to elect a more extreme representative than themselves, and this sophisticated voting results in the expansion of the size of the gridlock region. As a result, our model demonstrates that the expansion of the gridlock region is caused in part by sophisticated voting independent of the voters’ ideological distribution.
Congress’s power of the purse is effective enough to block the implementation of a policy Congress disagrees with, especially in the case of foreign policies initiated by presidents. However, it is puzzling that congressional deference to presidents, instead of defiance, has been common. Conventionally, presidents’ informational advantages over Congress have been presented as the main account for congressional deference. This account connotes that congressional deference is Congress’s surrender to presidents because Congress wants a successful outcome and presidents’ policies are more likely to succeed. However, I present a model demonstrating that congressional deference occurs even if there is no such asymmetric information. The result is that the deference can be Congress’s gambling on presidents’ failure. Congress may defer to presidents not because Congress wants the success of presidents’ policies but because Congress wants to show presidents’ failure to convince voters that Congress’s policy is better than those of presidents.
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