All the president's powers: Presidential leadership and executive policymaking in the United States

This dissertation consists of three parts that examine one of the most consequential areas of research in the presidency literature: presidential power. The first part, The Three Faces of Presidential Power: Legislative, Executive, and Rhetorical Leadership in the American Presidency , presents a conceptual framework based on the notion that presidential power has three distinct faces: a legislative one, an executive one, and a rhetorical one. It traces their origins and evolution and discusses how their institutionalization transformed the office of the presidency. It offers some preliminary observations about the way modern presidents may take advantage of these faces and introduces a research agenda for scholars to evaluate the exercise of presidential power using the framework presented here. It argues that the three faces of presidential power must be viewed in a complimentary manner, rather than in isolation from one another, and that successful presidential leadership is about skillfully and strategically taking advantage of all three faces.;The second and third parts focus on the President's ability to affect policy through executive means. Proclamations and the American Presidency (1789--2009) presents the most comprehensive dataset compiled by any scholar to date of all presidential proclamations issued from the George Washington through the George W. Bush administration. It surveys the proclamation landscape over the course of American political development and offers an empirical analysis of the way modern presidents use the proclamation as a policy instrument. A Memo From The President: Presidential Memoranda and Executive Power in the United States examines the role of the presidential memorandum as an instrument of executive action. It introduces an original dataset of policy memoranda issued during the modern presidency and analyzes statistical patterns in their use.;Using regression analysis, both parts conclude that few political, institutional, and contextual variables appear to affect the frequency with which presidents issue policy proclamations and memoranda. They offer empirical evidence to suggest, contrary to previous research on executive orders, that presidents are not necessarily increasing their use of executive directives to set policy by fiat and to bypass the traditional legislative process.