Left, Right, Left: Presidential Policy Oscillation and the Erosion of American Democratic Bonds 44 views

Why do some executive policies endure across decades while others seem to be reversed every time the White House changes parties? This dissertation develops and tests a theory of “disruptive policy oscillation”—when presidents terminate or reverse a policy at least once across administrations. Moving beyond traditional dyadic models of executive constraint, this research introduces a triadic relationship framework to explain why presidents rationally engage in this type of presidentialism and how this behavior strains the democratic bonds between presidents, institutions, and citizens. Descriptive analysis of an original dataset of 8,304 executive orders and presidential memoranda from 1945-2025 reveals a structural shift in 1995: presidents have increasingly used unilateral reversals to target principled issues based on values and identity rather than policies based on pragmatic problem solving. A discrete-time logit survival analysis demonstrates that a policy’s inherent traits—its age, history of reversals, and directive visibility—are the strongest predictors of its vulnerability to future reversal. Survey experimental and observational data suggest that policy oscillation induces loss aversion through a partisan victory/loss framework, leading to a net decrease in aggregate trust in the federal government because partisans punish losses on principled issues more than they reward equivalent victories. Finally, the dissertation isolates pernicious consequences of this behavior for American civil-military relations. As presidents repeatedly reverse principled personnel policies, the military absorbs the collateral damage of the culture war. This repeated oscillation fractures veterans’ approval of the Commander in Chief, degrades civilian trust in the armed forces, and actively depresses willingness to recommend military service to qualified young Americans, jeopardizing the intergenerational pipeline that sustains the all-volunteer force. Ultimately, this research illuminates a modern democratic paradox: presidents rationally engage in disruptive policy oscillation despite the behavior eroding the legitimacy of the very government they lead.

PHD (Doctor of Philosophy)

Disruptive Policy Oscillation; Policy Oscillation; Policy Instability; Policy Reversals; Policy Mutability; Policy Durability; Policy Endurance; Executive Unilateralism; Presidentialism; Executive Orders; Presidential Memoranda; Administrative State; Administrative Presidency; Institutional Trust; Trust in Government; Affective Polarization; Loss Aversion; Negative Partisanship; Civil-Military Relations; Politicization of the Military; All-Volunteer Force; Veterans; Military Personnel Policy; Principled and Pragmatic Policies; Issue Domains; Culture War; Survival Analysis; Survey Experiment; Text Analysis; Large Language Models

English

2026-07-02