Annie Benn Receives the 2026 E.E. Schattschneider Award for “Unilateral Action Reconsidered: Congressional Responses to Presidential Directives”

The E. E. Schattschneider Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best doctoral dissertation in the field of American government.   

Citation from the Award Committee:

In her dissertation, “Unilateral Action Reconsidered: Congressional Responses to Presidential Directives,” Annie Benn provides a significant advancement in the study of presidential power and the separation of powers. While previous scholars have demonstrated that presidents do not act alone during the creation of executive orders, Benn’s work shifts the focus to the critical implementation phase. By reframing executive orders as acts of administrative delegation rather than isolated “going it alone” directives, she reveals a vital, often overlooked channel of legislative influence.

Benn’s empirical contribution is truly heroic. She constructed a massive new dataset by coding over 1,400 executive orders and 522 congressional hearings. Using this data, she finds that when presidential orders grant greater discretion to agencies, they inadvertently provide Congress with more opportunities to shape policy through oversight. This Administrative Delegation Dataset is a major resource that will undoubtedly benefit future research on unilateral action. Selected from a highly competitive pool of over thirty nominations, the committee is honored to award Annie Benn this year’s prize.

Annie Benn is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Colgate University. She received her PhD from UC Berkeley in 2024. Her research focuses on US political institutions, primarily the US executive branch. She is particularly interested in bureaucratic control, presidential administration, and separation of powers. Her work has been published in Political Science Research and Methods and Presidential Studies Quarterly. Annie is currently working on a book manuscript investigating congressional responses to unilateral directives issued by the president. The book analyzes congressional hearing transcripts, executive orders, and archival materials to reveal the multifaceted ways that Congress engages with presidential unilateralism. The findings offer a new perspective on the shifting role of unilateralism in the context of separation of powers.

APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Jeremy Bailey (Chair) of the University of Florida, Terri Bimes of the University of California, Berkeley, and Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha of the University of North Texas