The administrative politics of unilateral action: Measuring delegation and discretion in the executive branch

Abstract

Political scientists typically view unilateral action as the president “going it alone” in opposition to Congress. However, there is increasing recognition that, while such action may be unilateral with respect to Congress, its implementation relies on the cooperation of administrative agencies. In this article, unilateral action is considered an act of administrative delegation: in issuing a unilateral directive, a president is both authorizing an agency to act and indicating a discretionary window for such action. The article introduces the Administrative Delegation Dataset, which provides delegation and discretion scores for 1,641 presidential unilateral directives issued between 1936 and 2021. The scores are based on novel measures developed for the executive‐branch context, and the reliability and validity of the measures are discussed. I then use the dataset to show that the extent of delegation and discretion granted to administrative agents has shifted across modalities (executive orders, memoranda, proclamations) over time: the proportion of high‐scoring executive orders has been increasing, but that increase is offset by a corresponding decrease in high‐scoring memos. Additionally, I find that presidents use less administrative delegation in foreign policy than in domestic policy, which is consistent with existing literature on centralization of executive‐branch policymaking.