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"The United States Constitution recognizes the president as the sole legal head of the executive branch and thus the one in charge of the administration. Despite this constitutional authority, the president's actual control over administration varies significantly in practice from one president to the next. Through extensive empirical analysis, Patrick O'Brien argues that presidential control over administration operates as a historical variable and functions as a key component of policymaking. To explain the different configurations of presidential control that recur throughout history and to test the argument, this book develops a new theory and then traces the policymaking process in the domain of public finance across nearly a century of history, beginning with the Great Depression and ending with the first two years of the Trump presidency. O'Brien shows that the initial efforts of Obama and Trump to change the established course during a period of unified party control of the government were largely undercut-or "effectively blocked," respectively-by their own limited control over administration. Due to factors such as time, knowledge, government structure, and incentives, O'Brien demonstrates that presidential control over administration conforms to four configurations that recur in succession: collapse, innovation, stabilization, and constraint. He then shows how these configurations played out in the New Deal, Reagan, and Great Recession eras, thus providing readers with an empirically tested theory for how unilateral and legislative policymaking differs over time. Presidential Control over Administration is a groundbreaking contribution to our understanding of the presidency and policymaking"--

The unitary executive framework assumes that all presidents hold the same structural advantages relative to Congress or the Court—a first‐mover advantage, a collective‐action advantage, and an informational advantage. Therefore, variation is sought in changes in peripheral institutional conditions such as party control of the presidency, congressional support, and public approval. In this article, I provide a theoretical critique of the unitary executive framework. I show that its foundational assumptions do not hold in practice, and I develop an argument based on the simple idea that systems of administration for individual policy domains change substantially from time to time. Specifically, I contend that when the president relies on the established collective‐action and informational arrangement, it often obstructs or compromises his first‐mover advantage. Conversely, the president's first‐mover advantage in a policy domain is strengthened when he restructures the established collective‐action and informational arrangement.