Taking Matters into Their Own Hands: Presidents' Personality Traits and the Use of Executive Orders

Introduction Article II of the U.S. Constitution states that "executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States," and "he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed." While Congress is understood to be the primary institution in the policy-making process, ambiguity about the meaning of "executive power" and "faithfully execute" has opened the door for many influential policy decisions to be made by presidents acting unilaterally. The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Executive Order 9066), President Harry Truman's desegregation of the military (Executive Order 9981), the creation of the Peace Corps by President John F. Kennedy (Executive Order 10924), and the creation of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives by President George W. Bush (Executive Order 13199) are examples of consequential unilateral policy-making actions taken by presidents. Although legal scholars have long examined the constitutionality of executive orders and other unilateral actions, it is only within the last two decades that political scientists have paid significant attention to unilateral uses of presidential power. In explaining why executive orders have gone understudied, Mayer notes, "This neglect of executive orders, and the downplaying of their importance is largely attributable to the tendency among scholars of the presidency to concentrate on 'questions about the personalities, power, and leadership of specific presidents'" (Mayer 1999, 447). While scholars bemoan the focus on individuals in the study of the presidency, there has been no systematic study of how factors inherent to individual presidents influence their propensities to issue executive orders. In studying the use of unilateral actions, political scientists have focused exclusively on the influence of contextual factors including the partisan makeup of the legislature, the stage in a president's term, whether the country is at war, and the type and significance of the issues that executive orders address. Despite the obvious expectation that some presidents should be more inherently disposed to take power into their own hands, this hypothesis has never been systematically tested. Thus, this study is the first to examine the influence of presidents' personalities on the frequency with which they use executive orders to carry out their agendas. In the sections that follow, we review the literature on executive orders, taking note of the ways in which instruments of unilateral action relate to conceptions of presidential power. After describing the Big Five model, the dominant paradigm in trait psychology, we propose that several traits, namely, those that are related to risk taking and the desire to carry out goals, should influence the frequency with which presidents issue different types of executive orders. The results of our models provide support for the argument that presidents' personalities matter, as does the institutional context within which presidents act. Unilateral Action and Presidential Power According to Neustadt's (1991 [1960]) theory of presidential power, the persuasive president will carry out his objectives by using the status and authority of his office to augment his inherent personality (what Neustadt calls the president's "logic and charm"). Moe and Howell summarize the argument: "The key to strong presidential leadership, he [Neustadt] argued, lies not in formal power, but in the skills, temperament, and experience of the man occupying the office and his ability to put these personal qualities to use in enhancing his own reputation and prestige. The foundation of presidential power is ultimately personal" (1999, 850). While Neustadt's work remains seminal to presidency studies, scholarship in the field has moved away from the personal presidency to instead focus on the institutional presidency (Moe 1993). …