Date of Award:

8-2026

Document Type:

Thesis

Degree Name:

Master of Arts (MA)

Department:

Political Science

Committee Chair(s)

Marika Csapo

Committee

Marika Csapo

Committee

Anna Pechenkina

Committee

Lauren Van De Hey

Abstract

Democratic backsliding has become an increasingly prominent topic in political science, yet relatively little attention has been devoted to how observable expressions of executive authority correspond with changes in democratic quality. Using the United States as a case study, this study examines the relationship between presidential executive orders and democratic quality from 2017 to 2025. More specifically, it investigates whether characteristics of executive orders correspond with changes in democratic quality, measured using the Liberal Democracy Index and the Judicial Constraints Index from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project.

Presidential executive order issued between 2017 and 2025 were collected from the U.S. Federal Register and systematically coded according to five characteristics: negative immigration references, negative identity references, the legal source of executive authority, emergency power invocation, and judicial challenges. Information on judicial challenges was obtained through Nexis Uni to identify executive orders subjected to judicial review. The data were analyzed descriptively alongside annual measures from the V-Dem Liberal Democracy Index and Judicial Constraints Index to identify observable patterns in executive authority and their correspondence with changes in democratic quality.

The findings suggest that executive order characteristics correspond with democratic quality to varying degrees. While immigration-related executive orders demonstrated the clearest relationship, the remaining characteristics exhibited more modest associations. Similarly, their relationship with judicial constraints remained limited, although judicial challenges increased substantially during the latter part of the study period. Overall, these findings contribute to the literature on democratic backsliding by highlighting the value of examining executive orders as observable expressions of executive authority.

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Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

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