Promoting the President's Foreign Policy Agenda: Presidential Use of Executive Agreements as Policy Vehicles

Headnote

Executive agreements represent a powerful tool for pursuing commitments with other nations across the spectrum of foreign policy issues. In particular, the executive agreement gives presidents the flexibility to act independently of Congress. The audiors' research demonstrates, quantitatively, how presidents use international executive agreements to advance their foreign policy priorities. The authors evaluate the foreign policy agendas of the Carter, Reagan, G. H. W. Bush, and first Clinton administrations and test whether the executive agreements signed during each administration serve to further the individual foreign policy goals of each president. The authors find that presidents are more likely to devote personal attention to an agreement that furthers a specific policy priority, and they identify greater agreement activity in areas that correspond to presidential initiatives.

Keywords: executive agreements; international agreement making; U.S. foreign policy; presidential unilateral action; U.S. presidency

1. Introduction

When developing the dual system of separation of powers and checks and balances, the framers of the Constitution envisioned that the presidency and Congress would each play a role in enacting international agreements: the president would negotiate treaties, subject to me advice and consent of the Senate. Each year, however, literally hundreds of international commitments are made using nontreaty agreements, meaning that the executive branch has enormous latitude in crafting foreign policy without direct input from the legislative branch.1 In contrast, only a handful of treaties are submitted to the Senate by the president in a given year. Of the 4,204 international agreements reviewed by the audiors for this study, roughly 90 percent are executive agreements-not treaties (see Table 1). Unlike the treaty, the executive agreement offers the president a great deal of diplomatic flexibility, and as such, it represents a powerful presidential tool in the conduct of foreign policy.

Presidents have long enjoyed an advantage relative to Congress in the conduct of foreign policy, and the increasing reliance on executive agreements for international commitments has served to expand the president's influence. Executive agreements offer presidents an avenue for exercising unilateral policy making in the international arena. There is a burgeoning literature devoted to the study of unilateral action by the president and increasing attention to the use of executive agreements in the context of such unilateral powers.2

International agreements data collected by Johnson...