Mar. 6th- 12-1pm in 27 Persson AuditoriumAnnie Ben (POSC)Assistant Professor in Political ScienceTitle: Participatory Unilateralism: Understanding Congress's Role in Presidential Unilateral PolicymakingDescription: Executive orders signed by the president receive significant media attention, and give the impression that presidents can "go it alone" to move policy according to their own preferences. Political science scholarship on the topic of executive orders has traditionally shared a similar perspective, investigating the president's use of such directives as a function of his alignment with Congress, his popularity, or other macro-political variables. Recent scholarship, however, highlights that executive orders are not truly ‘unilateral’ at all, but rather require cooperation from bureaucratic agencies for implementation. I argue that this need for cooperation creates a previously under-appreciated opportunity for Congress to respond to presidential directives. Because executive orders are generally acts of delegation to agencies, Congressional committees can exercise oversight to shape agency implementation of them. I demonstrate this dynamic using two datasets: a sample of executive orders that have been coded using measures of executive-branch delegation and discretion, and a collection of Congressional hearings focusing on an executive order or its implementation. I find that Congress engages in more oversight activity when an order delegates more authority and a wider discretionary window to agencies. This relationship is generally not conditioned by partisan division, but rather persists during periods of both unified and divided government. This finding supports the theory that Congress is able to participate in unilateral policymaking by shaping agency implementation, recasting our understanding of the inter-branch politics of executive unilateralism.