The U.S. Constitution explicitly grants the president a handful of clearly defined authorities: the veto, the power to nominate judges and ambassadors, the role of commander in chief, and so on. But the day-to-day influence any president wields stretches far beyond that short list. Informal powers are the tools a president uses to shape policy, public opinion, and the behavior of other political actors without pointing to a specific constitutional clause that says “you may do this.” These powers run on persuasion, timing, reputation, and strategic maneuvering rather than legal authority, and scholars have spent decades arguing that they matter at least as much as the formal ones.
What Makes a Power “Informal”
The dividing line is straightforward in theory: formal powers are written into the Constitution or enacted by statute, while informal powers emerge from the political environment, the office’s prestige, and the individual president’s skill at exploiting both. The veto is formal. Threatening a veto to reshape a bill before it ever reaches your desk is informal. Nominating a Supreme Court justice is formal. Holding a prime-time press conference to pressure the Senate into confirming that justice is informal. The distinction matters because informal powers are harder to check. Congress can override a veto with a two-thirds vote, but there is no procedural mechanism for overriding a president’s ability to dominate a news cycle.
Researchers studying presidential systems outside the United States have proposed useful ways to categorize these powers. One framework identifies four types based on whether the president already holds formal authority in a given area and whether the president believes public support is behind them. When formal authority exists and public support is perceived as strong, informal action runs parallel to the constitutional toolkit. When neither is present, a president who acts informally is essentially taking a political risk with no legal or popular safety net.
The Bully Pulpit and Going Public
The single most recognizable informal power is the president’s ability to speak directly to the American people and, by doing so, pressure Congress to act. Political scientists call this strategy “going public.” The logic is simple: if a president can rally public opinion behind a policy, members of Congress face electoral consequences for opposing it. The president effectively converts popularity into legislative leverage.
This is not just a theoretical idea. A large-scale study analyzing thousands of presidential remarks from 1977 through 1992, covering 186 significant pieces of legislation, found that going public actually increased the president’s odds of legislative success, particularly for bills the president initiated or publicly endorsed.1SAGE Journals. Gone Public That finding challenged an earlier skepticism in political science that public appeals were largely theatrical and did not move votes in Congress.
The mechanism is not pure arm-twisting. Scholars have drawn a sharp distinction between persuasion and bargaining as presidential strategies. Bargaining involves trading favors: a president offers support for a lawmaker’s pet project in exchange for a vote. Persuasion, by contrast, appeals to shared goals and collective purpose rather than individual deals. Research on Ronald Reagan’s economic proposals illustrates this difference. Reagan’s public appeals framed tax cuts and spending changes as broadly shared national priorities, which gave him a kind of leverage that transactional bargaining alone could not produce.2Governance. The Puzzle of Presidential Leadership: Persuasion, Bargaining, and Policy Consistency When Congress is fragmented and struggling to coordinate, a president who can articulate a coherent policy vision has a structural advantage that comes from the nature of the office, not from any enumerated power.
Bypassing the Press
Going public has always depended on the communication technology of the era, and presidents who mastered a new medium gained outsized informal influence. Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats used radio to speak past newspaper editors and directly into American living rooms. Decades later, Donald Trump used Twitter to do something structurally similar: bypass traditional media gatekeepers and deliver unfiltered messages to millions of followers in real time.3Journal of Marketing Development and Competitiveness. Political Marketing Through New Media: A Comparison and Contrast of FDR’S Fireside Chats and Trump’s Tweets The technology was different, but the political function was the same: direct access to the public without journalistic mediation.
This kind of disintermediation is an informal power because no statute grants or restricts it. A president who is bad at public communication still holds the same formal authorities as a gifted orator, but the practical reach of the two presidencies can be wildly different. The bully pulpit amplifies every other informal power on this list, because it is the channel through which threats, appeals, and agenda priorities reach the public and, through the public, reach Congress.
Setting the Agenda
Before anyone votes on anything, someone has to decide what gets discussed. The president’s ability to define the national policy agenda is arguably the most consequential informal power, because it shapes the terms of debate before a single bill is drafted. If the president spends a month talking about immigration, Congress tends to start talking about immigration too. If the president pivots to infrastructure, cameras and committee hearings follow.
The State of the Union address is the most visible agenda-setting tool, but researchers stress that it is only one of many. Presidents articulate priorities through budget proposals, public speeches, private meetings with congressional leaders, executive actions, and media appearances. How we understand a president’s agenda depends heavily on which tool we look at, because different tools target different audiences.4American Politics Research. Conditional Presidential Priorities: Audience-Driven Agenda Setting A president might emphasize economic growth in a public speech aimed at voters while quietly prioritizing judicial appointments in meetings with Senate allies. The public-facing agenda and the operational agenda are not always the same thing, and the gap between them is itself a form of strategic power.
Veto Threats as Legislative Bargaining Chips
The veto itself is a formal power, but the threat of a veto operates in entirely informal territory. A president who signals early that a particular bill will be vetoed can reshape the legislation long before it comes up for a final vote. The threat works because Congress generally prefers to pass something the president will sign rather than stage a confrontation that may end in an override attempt or a stalemate.
The evidence on this is striking. A study of all veto-threatened bills passed between 1985 and 2016 found that veto threats eliminated roughly half of the legislative provisions the president targeted, a rate far higher than for comparable provisions in bills the president did not threaten.5Political Research Quarterly. Veto Threat Bargaining with a Bicameral Congress In other words, a president does not need to veto many bills to exert enormous influence. The mere credible threat of a veto reshapes what Congress produces.
Veto threats also disrupt the normal legislative process in Congress. Research has shown that when a president threatens to veto a bill, the threat can trigger filibusters in the Senate, push bills into conference committees, and encourage the use of procedural maneuvers that would not have occurred otherwise.6American Journal of Political Science. Veto Rhetoric and Legislative Riders The president, without casting a single vote in either chamber, effectively alters how Congress goes about its own internal business. That is informal power at work.
Executive Agreements and the Treaty Workaround
The Constitution gives the president the power to negotiate treaties, but ratification requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate, a high bar that gives senators significant leverage. Over the past several decades, presidents have increasingly relied on executive agreements, which are binding international commitments that do not require Senate ratification. This shift has massive practical implications: the president can commit the United States to international obligations largely on their own authority.
There is an ongoing debate about why presidents choose executive agreements over treaties. The traditional view holds that presidents use them to dodge a hostile or skeptical Senate. But a study examining executive agreement use from 1949 through 1998 found stronger support for a simpler explanation: as the number of countries the United States deals with has grown, so has the volume of international agreements needed, and executive agreements are just a faster, more efficient way to handle that workload.7Presidential Studies Quarterly. The Changing Nature of Presidential Policy Making on International Agreements That said, the study also found that when the stakes are high, presidents do behave more strategically, taking the ideological makeup of the Senate into account when choosing between a treaty and an executive agreement.
The trend accelerated under George W. Bush, particularly on security matters. Research documented that Bush increasingly relied on executive agreements rather than treaties in response to congressional oversight on issues related to national security.8Conflict Management and Peace Science. Senate Influence or Presidential Unilateralism? The result is a foreign policy landscape in which the president has accumulated enormous room to maneuver internationally, often with minimal congressional input.
Presidential Memoranda and the Shifting Shape of Unilateral Action
Executive orders get most of the public attention, but they are not the only way presidents act unilaterally. Presidential memoranda serve a similar function: they direct federal agencies to take specific actions, often carrying the same legal weight as executive orders. The key difference is procedural. Executive orders must be numbered and published in the Federal Register. Memoranda have no such requirement, which makes them less visible and harder to track.
Research has found that as the issuance of executive orders has declined over time, the use of presidential memoranda has surged. This trend suggests that presidential unilateralism is not actually decreasing; the instrument of choice is just shifting to a less scrutinized format.9Presidential Studies Quarterly. The Contemporary Presidency After the Orders: Presidential Memoranda and Unilateral Action A president who issues relatively few executive orders may still be exercising extensive unilateral power through memoranda that receive far less media coverage. This matters for anyone trying to assess how aggressively a president is governing without Congress: looking only at executive order counts gives a misleading picture.
Executive Privilege
One of the most contested informal powers is executive privilege, the president’s claim that certain internal communications are confidential and need not be shared with Congress or the courts. The Constitution never mentions the phrase. Instead, the privilege is derived from the separation of powers and the practical argument that a president needs candid advice from aides, and that candor evaporates if every internal memo could be subpoenaed and published.
The legal landscape around executive privilege has been shaped primarily by court decisions rather than legislation. The presidential communications privilege, as courts have defined it, applies to confidential communications made in support of official presidential decision-making that directly involve the president or close advisers. It is qualified rather than absolute, meaning a court can order disclosure if the need for evidence outweighs the president’s interest in confidentiality.10Library of Congress. Executive Privilege and Presidential Communications: Judicial Principles In practice, though, the privilege gives the president substantial control over the flow of information out of the executive branch, and disputes over its boundaries tend to drag on long enough that the political moment passes before a court rules.
Executive privilege is a useful case study in how informal powers work. The president’s ability to shield internal deliberations does not come from any statute. It rests on a judicial interpretation of constitutional structure and on the practical difficulty of forcing compliance. Each time a president invokes the privilege, the scope of the power is tested and potentially expanded or contracted by however Congress and the courts respond.
Emergency Declarations and Crisis Leadership
National emergencies sit in a gray zone between formal and informal power. Congress has passed laws granting the president specific authorities that activate only during a declared emergency, so in that sense the powers are statutory. But the decision to declare an emergency, and the choice of which statutory authorities to invoke, is largely at the president’s discretion. Research on how presidents use emergency powers has found that the political environment, including the state of foreign policy and the president’s relationship with Congress, influences when and how emergencies are declared.11Wiley Online Library. The Contemporary Presidency: How Presidents Utilize Their Emergency Powers The formal authority exists on paper, but its activation is a judgment call shaped by informal considerations like public opinion, political timing, and the credibility of the crisis claim.
This makes emergency powers a kind of hybrid. The raw legal authority is formal, but the political calculation about when to deploy it, and the expectation that Congress will not immediately revoke the declaration, depends on the same informal dynamics that drive every other power discussed here. A president with high approval ratings in the middle of a genuine crisis has far more room to declare emergencies than an unpopular president facing a skeptical Congress during peacetime.
The Public Cost of Going It Alone
Informal powers are not free. Research consistently shows that the public reacts negatively when presidents achieve policy goals through unilateral action rather than through legislation. In a series of nationally representative survey experiments spanning multiple policy areas, people evaluated the same policy less favorably when told it was enacted by executive action than when told it passed through Congress.12American Journal of Political Science. The Public Cost of Unilateral Action The disapproval was not limited to people who disagreed with the policy. Even supporters of a policy gave it lower marks when it came via executive power rather than the legislative process.
This creates a genuine dilemma. A president who cannot get Congress to act faces a choice: use informal and unilateral tools to achieve a policy goal now, or wait for legislation and risk getting nothing. The unilateral path delivers results but erodes public approval of both the president and the policy itself. The legislative path preserves legitimacy but may never produce an outcome. Most presidents oscillate between the two approaches depending on the issue, the political moment, and how much political capital they are willing to spend.
How Informal Powers Vary Across Presidents
Not every president uses informal powers the same way, and the variation is not random. A president facing a Congress controlled by the opposing party has stronger incentives to go public, issue executive orders and memoranda, and strike executive agreements. A president with large congressional majorities has less need for those tools and can pursue legislation more conventionally. Personal skill matters too. Some presidents are gifted communicators who can move public opinion with a single speech; others struggle to hold attention and find their public appeals falling flat.
The institutional environment also evolves. The rise of cable news, social media, and the 24-hour news cycle has given presidents more channels for going public but also made the information environment noisier and harder to dominate. A fireside chat in the 1930s reached a captive national audience with virtually no competing voices. A presidential tweet in the 2020s competes with millions of other posts for a fragmented audience’s attention. The tools for direct communication have multiplied, but so has the difficulty of cutting through.
Similarly, the norms around unilateral action have shifted. Executive agreements were once used primarily for routine international business. Now they cover matters of significant policy substance. Presidential memoranda were once bureaucratic housekeeping. Now they carry major policy directives. Each generation of presidents inherits a slightly expanded toolkit from its predecessors, which raises ongoing questions about whether informal powers are gradually substituting for, rather than supplementing, the legislative process.
Informal Powers Beyond the American Presidency
The concept of informal presidential power is not uniquely American. Scholars studying semi-presidential systems in Western Europe, where a president coexists with a prime minister, have identified patterns of informal power that look structurally familiar. A typology proposed for European presidents organizes informal powers along two dimensions: whether the president has formal authority in the relevant policy area, and whether the president perceives strong public support for action.13Political Studies Review. The Elephant in the Room in Presidential Politics: Informal Powers in Western Europe When formal powers exist and public support is perceived, informal action runs in parallel and tends to reinforce the official role. When formal authority is absent but public support seems strong, presidents may attempt to substitute informal influence for missing legal tools.
The most fraught category in this framework is what the researchers call “subverting” informal powers, where a president acts without formal authority and without clear public backing. These instances are rare precisely because they are politically dangerous, but they illustrate the outer boundary of what informal power can attempt. Understanding these dynamics in other systems puts the American case in perspective: the U.S. president operates with a unique combination of global visibility, military authority, and media access, but the underlying logic of informal power, converting political resources into policy influence outside formal channels, is universal to executive politics.