| Executive orders are an important but little-studied aspect of the U.S. presidency. They are not mentioned in the Constitution and are arguably in tension with aspects of it, yet presidents have often turned to them to enact their own policy preferences by a mere stroke of a pen. My dissertation seeks to situate presidential executive orders in the context of American political and constitutional development. I examine how the Constitution permitted the development of this controversial but legally recognized tool, which has considerably enhanced the power of the presidency, and what its impact has been on American politics and policymaking. I analyze the development of executive orders in terms of two developmental preconditions (constitutional ambiguity and early judicial sanction) and four developmental phases (executive orders before the twentieth century, the administration of Theodore Roosevelt, Taft through FDR, and the postwar era to the present). |
