The (Lack of) Predictability in Obama's Executive Action

One criticism political scientists often get is that there is a pretty strong “conservative” bias in the sense that political science generates a lot of null predictions. There was never going to be a Romney upset; there are rarely any very big policy changes; everything just sort of continues along the same path it has been on for however long. Big things do happen every now and then, but we’re just not very good at predicting when or what, so we assume minimal change day to day.

Caution may stop political scientists from making big predictions, but it doesn’t stop pundits from trying. No one can blame them — they’re fun to read and probably drive page views. Here is one example in Bloomberg News, listing five things Obama could do to “mess with Republicans in 2015.” The thing about that list is that everything except signing a nuclear agreement with Iran is pretty vanilla — the President acting unilaterally on Keystone, campaign finance, or climate change all seem highly likely. In that way, the article is sort of bland, because even though the author is trying to predict what might happen, the actual predictions are cautious.

I’m inclined to think that whatever further executive action President Obama pursues will include a healthy dose of stuff we didn’t see coming (for another version of this point, see this great article by George Condon). I can’t imagine many people saw the climate change agreement with China coming, and the same goes for the Cuban re-engagement. The President has freely admitted he was going to do whatever he could do on his own, most recently in an interview with NPR — so while he’ll probably pursue the things everyone expects, he’ll probably keep mixing it up too. What will those things be? I’m willing to predict they’ll happen, I just have no idea what they’ll be.