Public Opinion and Presidential Policymaking: Exploring the Impact of the Public’s Most Important Problems on Presidential Executive Orders between 1947 and 2021
Open Access
Author:
Wittenberg, Max
Area of Honors:
Political Science
Degree:
Bachelor of Arts
Document Type:
Thesis
Thesis Supervisors:
Michael J Nelson, Thesis Supervisor Michael Barth Berkman, Thesis Honors Advisor
Keywords:
Executive Orders Presidency Public Opinion
Abstract:
Outstanding research on the presidential executive order focuses on institutional and personal decision-making, but it has largely failed to consider the executive order from a policymaking standpoint. My research seeks to understand how the president’s national electoral mandate and the public’s policy priorities influence their decision-making regarding executive orders. To evaluate the executive order from this lawmaking perspective, I utilize data from Gallup’s Annual Most Important Problem Survey series and data on the content of executive orders from 1947 to 2021 to understand if changes in the public’s policy priorities are reflected in the likelihood of executive order issuance in the modern era. The results suggest that intra-policy changes in the percentage of the public who feel that a certain policy area is the most important do not impact the likelihood of executive order issuance. However, there are notable differences in the likelihood of executive order issuance across different policy areas. Moreover, I find support for several institutional and personal explanations of executive order issuance consistent in the existing literature. Overall, this research has important implications for the future of executive order research in hopes of understanding the increase in presidential power in the modern era more comprehensively.