Record Details


Field	Value

Title	Replication Data for: Presidential Policymaking, 1877-2020

Identifier	https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/6SGSTI

Creator	Kaufman, Aaron

Publisher	Harvard Dataverse

Description	While presidents frequently create new policies through unilateral power, empirical scholarship generally focuses on executive orders and overlooks other categories of directives. We use new data on more than 50,000 unilateral directives issued between 1877 and 2020 and machine learning techniques to measure their substantive importance and issue areas. Our measures reveal significant increases in unilateral activity over time, driven largely by increases in foreign affairs and through the substitution of memoranda for executive orders. We use our measures to formally evaluate the historical development of the unilateral presidency and reassess theoretical claims about public opinion and unilateral power. Our research provides new evidence about variation in and the use of presidential authority and opens new avenues for empirical inquiry.

Subject	Social Sciences executive politics, text as data

Date	2024-02-19

Contributor	Kaufman, Aaron

ICAR Research Data Repository for Knowledge Management