Respect the Process: The Public Cost of Unilateral Action in Comparative Perspective (With Jonathan Chu).
The Journal of Politics
Executives often bypass legislatures to make policy by decree. How does public opinion react to this unilateral decision-making? Building from research on executive orders in the United States and comparative theories of legislatures, we argue that executives in both democratic and authoritarian political systems will incur a public approval cost for making policy decisions unilaterally. Through survey experiments implemented in the United States and Egypt, we show that executives consistently receive lower approval for unilateral action, even among co-partisans. We find evidence that this effect is driven by the belief that excluding the legislature violates appropriate democratic procedure, but also that the effect weakens when unilateral action is used to advance policies known to have majority support. Observational survey data from dozens of countries reinforce the experimental results. The paper contributes to understanding of the contexts in which popular support for democracy may constrain unilateral decision-making.
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