Respect the Process: The Public Cost of Unilateral Action in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Executives often bypass legislatures to make policies by decree. How does public opinion react to this unilateral decision-making? Building from research on executive orders and theories of legislative politics, we argue that executives in both democratic and authoritarian political systems will face public disapproval for making policy decisions unilaterally. Through survey experiments implemented in the United States and Egypt, we show that executives consistently receive lower approval for unilateral action in both domestic and foreign policymaking, even among co-partisans. We find evidence that this effect is driven by the belief that excluding the legislature violates appropriate democratic procedure, but also that the effect weakens when unilateral action is used to advance policies known to represent the majority's preference. Observational survey data from dozens of countries corroborate the experimental results. The paper sheds new light on the contexts in which popular commitment to democratic principles may constrain unilateral decision-making.