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Constitutional Qualms or Politics as Usual? The Factors Shaping Public Support for Unilateral Action

Constitutional Qualms or Politics as Usual? The Factors Shaping Public Support for Unilateral Action The formal institutional constraints that Congress and the courts impose on presidential unilateral action are feeble. As a result, recent scholarship suggests that public opinion may be the strongest check against executive overreach. However, little is known about how the public assesses unilateral action. Through a series of five survey experiments embedded in nationally representative surveys, we examine the extent to which Americans evaluate unilateral action based on constitutional, partisan, and policy concerns. We find that Americans do not instinctively reject unilateral action as a threat to our system of checks and balances, but instead evaluate unilateral action in terms of whether it accords or conflicts with their partisan and policy preference priors. Our results suggest that the public constraint on presidential unilateral action is far from automatic. Rather, the strength and scope of this check are variable products of political contestation in the public sphere. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png American Journal of Political Science Wiley

Constitutional Qualms or Politics as Usual? The Factors Shaping Public Support for Unilateral Action

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Publisher
Wiley
Copyright
©2017 by the Midwest Political Science Association
ISSN
0092-5853
eISSN
1540-5907
DOI
10.1111/ajps.12262
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

The formal institutional constraints that Congress and the courts impose on presidential unilateral action are feeble. As a result, recent scholarship suggests that public opinion may be the strongest check against executive overreach. However, little is known about how the public assesses unilateral action. Through a series of five survey experiments embedded in nationally representative surveys, we examine the extent to which Americans evaluate unilateral action based on constitutional, partisan, and policy concerns. We find that Americans do not instinctively reject unilateral action as a threat to our system of checks and balances, but instead evaluate unilateral action in terms of whether it accords or conflicts with their partisan and policy preference priors. Our results suggest that the public constraint on presidential unilateral action is far from automatic. Rather, the strength and scope of this check are variable products of political contestation in the public sphere.

Journal

American Journal of Political Science – Wiley

Published: Apr 1, 2017

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