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.

The recent crisis of democracy in the United States and around the world has highlighted the value of both historical and comparative analysis and brought the subfields of American political development and comparative politics into frequent conversation with each other. In fact, these subfields emerged from common origins and draw on similar conceptual and methodological tools. This essay identifies the historical and intellectual connections between the two fields and suggests the emerging possibilities of bringing the cross-national study of political development onto a common platform. It then draws out some themes that emerge from this pathway and considers how these themes might point the way toward a more systematic enterprise that can help illuminate some of the most pressing challenges of a turbulent political era.

This article provides an analysis of the potential danger to a president’s policy agenda that comes from appointing a sitting elected official to the cabinet. We present historical data on cabinet secretaries since the founding and demonstrate that concerns about seats falling to the other party following the appointment of an elected official to the cabinet date back at least to Martin Van Buren’s establishment of the first American mass political party in 1828. We then focus on the post-Seventeenth Amendment cabinet and show that almost 30 percent of cabinet secretaries in this era who were elected officials at the time of their appointment left seats that flipped to the other party by the next regular general election. We conclude by discussing how our results compare with Alexander Hamilton, Martin Van Buren, and Woodrow Wilson’s differing views on the cabinet and the implications for the president’s policy agenda.

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) was born out of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in the backdrop of highly racialised and otherizing fears about the mythical “welfare queen.” However, the perception of Black exploitation of public benefits to White detriment is not exclusively a modern phenomenon. One of its original manifestations can be found in White reactions to the Freedmen’s Bureau during the post-Civil War period of Reconstruction. We therefore argue that state decisions to allocate spending towards cash assistance and coercive programmes designed to motivate work participation and regulate private behaviour are shaped by the imprint of this historic institution. Using TANF spending data from 2001 to 2019 and data on Freedmen’s Bureau field offices, we find evidence of a link between these offices’ historic prevalence and contemporary, coercive allocations. However, we find little evidence that this link extends to spending towards cash assistance.

Do reserved seats yield substantive representation for traditionally marginalized groups? To answer that question, we turn to a remarkable and little-studied institution: reserved seats for Native American tribes in the Maine House of Representatives. Tribal representatives, who can participate in debate but lack a vote, have represented tribes in Maine’s House of Representatives since statehood in 1820. We take advantage of a 1995 rule change that allowed tribal representatives to initiate legislation, and an original dataset of pro-tribal bills, to estimate the effect of reserved seats on the production of pro-tribal bills. We find that once tribal representatives were allowed to write bills, they produced over half of all tribal-related legislation during a 36-year period. Legislators with tribal constituents sponsored fewer relevant bills after the reform but continued to cosponsor pro-tribal legislation. Although our results show tribal representatives contribute to the legislative process, we caution that reserved seats are not a panacea for improving Indigenous representation.

What explains variation in how committed postwar Democrats were to civil rights? I use evidence from state delegation behavior at national party conventions to assess this. I examine two types of issues: challenges to the credentials of all-white southern delegations and efforts to change the platform language on civil rights issues. While the latter is widely known, the former are more obscure but, I argue, important indicators of how strongly committed some state delegations were to civil rights. I use archival materials to trace the story of how these issues came onto the party committee’s agenda in the first place and then assess the correlates of state delegation voting behavior. In 1948, the strongest predictor of being willing to unseat the all-white Mississippi delegation was the increase in Black population percentage in a state. More states, however, were willing to strengthen the civil rights platform language, and here state population size was the strongest predictor. These results, though, obscure important variation, with a number of relatively smaller, whiter states in the upper Midwest playing a key role. Taken together, these findings elucidate variation in the civil rights preferences of non-southern Democrats, shed new light on debates about the civil rights realignment, and demonstrate the potential of using state delegation voting behavior as evidence.

In 1943, Georgia’s constitution was amended to lower the voting age to eighteen, making it the first—and for twelve years, the only—state in the Union to establish a voting-age requirement below twenty-one. Despite being widely considered at the time by several national and state political actors, Georgia’s reform represents an important and unappreciated historical puzzle. First, few would regard mid-twentieth-century Georgia as being even modestly progressive, especially regarding voting rights. Second, there is no evidence that an organized group lobbied for the reform. Further, there is no reason why lowering the voting age was inherently unique to Georgia qua Georgia. Instead, this study offers a detailed historical analysis highlighting the dedication of its young governor, and argues that Ellis Arnall’s political entrepreneurialism coupled with growing intraparty factionalism in Georgian politics and strategic timing facilitated this rare instance of electoral progressivism in the Deep South.