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The Credible Executive Adrian Vermeule, Harvard Law School Eric A. Posner Download the Paper (PDF format) - September 19, 2006 Tell a colleague about it. Printing Tips: Select 'print as image' in the Acrobat print dialog if you have trouble printing. ABSTRACT: Legal and constitutional theory has focused chiefly on the risk that voters and legislators will trust an ill-motivated executive. This paper addresses the risk that voters and legislators will fail to trust a well-motivated executive. Absent some credible signal of benign motivations, voters will be unable to distinguish good from bad executives and will thus withhold discretion that they would have preferred to grant, making all concerned worse off. We suggest several mechanisms with which a well-motivated executive can credibly signal his type, including independent commissions within the executive branch; bipartisanship in appointments to the executive branch, or more broadly the creation of domestic coalitions of the willing; the related tactic of counter-partisanship, or choosing policies that run against the preferences of the president’s own party; commitments to multilateral action in foreign policy; increasing the transparency of the executive’s decisionmaking processes; and a regime of strict liability for executive abuses. We explain the conditions under which these mechanisms succeed or fail, with historical examples. SUGGESTED CITATION: Adrian Vermeule and Eric A. Posner, "The Credible Executive" (September 19, 2006). Harvard Law School. Harvard Law School Faculty Scholarship Series. Paper 4. http://lsr.nellco.org/harvard/faculty/papers/4 | REPOSITORY HOME  | SEARCH  | MY ACCOUNT  | NELLCO HOME | Powered by bepress.