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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 ofAmerican 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.
In the typical rendering of the American presidency, chief executives encounter formidable barriers to decisive leadership: a far-flung, entrenched bureaucracy (Wilson 1989); a largely independent and often recalcitrant Congress (Mayhew 1974; Peterson 1990; Jones 1994); an array of news media operating under distinctive incentive structures (Bennett 1988; Entman 1989); and a sporadically attentive, increasingly cynical public (Zaller 1992; Black and Black 1994; Cooper 1999). Richard Neustadt's (1990) description of presidential power as "the power to persuade" captures the conventional scholarly wisdom of a constrained executive office. Indeed, many of us deploy the premise of "the impossible presidency" as we teach undergraduates that presidents struggle to achieve and sustain success.
Presidents clearly labor under the dual burdens of high expectations and contested power, a challenge apparent to many occupants of the White House. In a typically forthright moment, President Truman suggested a man would be crazy to want the office if he knew what it required (McCullough 1992). Decades earlier, President Grover Cleveland offered a young Franklin Roosevelt one wish as they shook hands: that the boy not grow up to be president of the United States. Only a handful of postwar presidents-Eisenhower, Reagan, and Clinton-have left office with public approval ratings substantially above the low point of their respective administrations.
Notwithstanding the conventional view of the impossible presidency, political scientists have rediscovered arguments that chief executives enjoy meaningful unilateral authority even in a system of separated institutions sharing power. Amassing a rich body of descriptive...