While presidents frequently create new policies through unilateral power, empirical scholarship generally focuses on executive orders and overlooks other categories of directives. We introduce data on more than 50,000 unilateral directives issued between 1877 and 2020 and use machine learning techniques to characterize their substantive importance and issue areas. Our measures reveal significant increases in unilateral activity over time, driven largely by increases in foreign affairs and through the substitution of memoranda for executive orders. We use our measures to formally evaluate the historical development of the unilateral presidency and reassess theoretical claims about public opinion and unilateral power. Our research provides new evidence about variation in the use of presidential authority and opens new avenues for empirical inquiry.

Presidents possess vast authority over policies and outcomes. Recent studies suggest the public checks this unilateralism through expressive opinions and political participation. We reevaluate this accountability link with a preregistered panel survey that incorporates a number of design and conceptual improvements over existing experimental studies. Our findings reveal a more complex relationship between presidential actions and public opinion. We find no evidence that the public reacts negatively to unilateralism – and some evidence they react positively. Respondents, however, may punish an incumbent for failing to implement the proposed policy change. While such a result suggests that the public can hold presidents accountable, we close by discussing how a lack of information likely renders this check moot.

Presidential directives are often assumed to be checked only by external actors, like Congress and the courts. But the internal constraints facing presidents can also be substantial. I study a model where a president can induce compliance with a directive by removing some subordinate agents (the appointees) but not others (the careerists), and where the relative contribution of each agent to the directive’s success is unobservable. The model suggests that the formal authority presidents have to issue directives and remove subordinates can advance presidential goals, affording presidents real authority. But real authority is not guaranteed, and the resulting uncertainty can shape presidential decision-making: when to issue a directive, how ambitious to make it, and which agencies to target. To illustrate, I analyse two prominent directives in Clinton’s regulatory planning order, E.O. 12866, showing why they targeted different agencies, despite belonging to the same order, and why compliance has been uneven.