Presidents and the Status Quo

Abstract

The dominant paradigm for policymaking by chief executives is they are first-movers who change the status quo. I re-evaluate this notion by extending recent advances in measuring the conservatism of policy, and by constructing a new comprehensive measure of presidential action. Though executive unilateralism theories predict whether a given status quo will change, empirical studies rely on aggregate analyses of executive productivity and second-order predictions based on assumptions about the spatial distribution of policies. I find evidence of the ecological fallacy in presidency research: despite aggregate findings in support of the theory, it poorly predicts policies addressed by presidential initiatives. Moreover, I show most of the prediction error is due to a high falsenegative rate—with the president acting despite supposed separation of powers constraints. This suggests either that Congress is a weaker countervailing policymaker than previously thought, or that unilateral action is a poor conceptual paradigm for understanding presidential policymaking.