About

Douglas L. Kriner is the Clinton Rossiter Professor in American Institutions at Cornell University. His research interests encompass presidential and congressional politics, separation of powers dynamics, and military policymaking. Kriner's current research focuses on the role of public opinion as a constraint on presidential unilateral power. His most recent book, co-authored with Dino Christenson, The Myth of the Imperial Presidency: How Public Opinion Checks the Unilateral Executive (Chicago 2020), examines how public opinion limits presidential unilateral authority. Prior to this, Kriner published two books on inter-branch politics. Investigating the President: Congressional Checks on Presidential Power (Princeton 2016), co-authored with Eric Schickler and winner of the 2017 Richard F. Fenno Jr. Prize and the 2017 Richard E. Neustadt Award, explores Congress's ability to check presidential power through committee investigations. The Particularistic President: Executive Branch Politics and Political Inequality (Cambridge 2015), co-authored with Andrew Reeves and winner of the 2016 Richard E. Neustadt Award, analyzes how electoral, partisan, and coalitional incentives drive presidents to allocate federal resources unevenly across the country. Kriner's earlier work focused on domestic politics and American military policymaking. After the Rubicon: Congress, Presidents, and the Politics of Waging War (Chicago 2010), winner of the 2013 D.B. Hardeman Award, revealed informal mechanisms by which Congress influences major military actions despite lacking formal legislative control. His first book, co-authored with Francis Shen, The Casualty Gap: The Causes and Consequences of American Military Inequalities (Oxford 2010), documented socioeconomic inequalities in the human costs of war and their political and policy implications.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Medicine
• Internal medicine
• Sociology
• Environmental health
• Immunology
• Demography
• Biology
• Virology
• Public relations
• Nursing
• Economics

Selected publications

• Not with a Bang but a Whimper: Congressional Silence Amid an Historic Assault on the Power of the Purse

  PS Political Science & Politics · 2026-04-13

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT Although all presidents pursue their agendas unilaterally, President Donald Trump’s early second-term actions shocked the political system for their scope and breadth. One of Trump’s boldest moves was a frontal assault on Congress’s constitutional power of the purse through unprecedented impoundments and unilateral tariffs. Despite widespread public opposition to Trump’s gambits and clear statutory violations, Congress has offered little resistance, marking a stark departure from historical precedent. This analysis situates Trump’s actions within broader debates over the scope of executive authority and the weakening of institutional checks and balances. Partisan incentives and Trump’s dominance of the Republican Party have muted congressional resistance, raising urgent questions about the future of the separation of powers in an era of unprecedented executive overreach.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Replication Data for: Polling Across Borders: The Promise and Pitfalls of Convenience Samples in a Cross-National Context

  Harvard Dataverse · 2026-01-06

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This study evaluates the performance of two widely used survey platforms, Lucid and Morning Consult, across six diverse national contexts: Brazil, India, Japan, Nigeria, the Philippines, and the United States. We assess the impact of platform choice on sample composition, response quality, political judgments, and treatment effect estimation, focusing on a randomized corruption treatment embedded within the survey. Attention filter passage rates were similar and generally high across countries and platforms, while the percentage of high frequency survey-takers varied greatly across countries. Our findings reveal significant demographic skews, with both platforms consistently overrepresenting college-educated respondents. Despite these differences, political assessments and estimated average and heterogeneous treatment effects remain broadly consistent across platforms, and in Brazil our estimates largely tracked those from past research with a probability sample. We find some evidence of cross-national variation in the magnitude of treatment effects, but these differences were often platform-specific. These results suggest that convenience samples can provide reliable estimates of causal effects even in diverse contexts. Taken together, our research highlights the trade-offs between cost, speed, and representativeness in global public opinion research, offering insights into the challenges and opportunities of online survey platforms.

  PublisherDOI

• Sustainability benefits and science knowledge shape consumer preferences for novel smartphone battery technology in the United States

  Energy Research & Social Science · 2026-05-09

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Public attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccination: The role of vaccine attributes, incentives, and misinformation

  UNC Libraries · 2025-06-12

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Legal constraint through political means? Legal foundations and public support for executive action

  The Journal of Law Economics and Organization · 2025-02-27 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Many scholars question the extent to which presidents are legally constrained, but others argue that public opinion provides an indirect but important mechanism through which law checks unilateral power. Through thirteen survey experiments, we examine whether the legal foundations of executive action—whether framed as pursuant to delegated statutory authority or contra the will of Congress—affect public support for unilateralism. Legal frames can influence public support, particularly among those with the strongest attachments to the rule of law. However, these effects are highly concentrated in hypothetical vignettes or temporally distant cases. Legal frames have little effect on support for executive action by recent presidents, even when they shape public perceptions of an action’s legality. Our results inform debates about the conditions under which public opinion might serve as a backstop against democratic backsliding by checking presidential overreach, and the role of law in shaping public debates about presidential power.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Dynamic Democracy: Public Opinion, Elections, and Policymaking in the American States. By Devin Caughey and Christopher Warshaw. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 248p. $95.00 cloth, $30.00 paper.

  Perspectives on Politics · 2024-05-06

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Dynamic Democracy: Public Opinion, Elections, and Policymaking in the American States. By Devin Caughey and Christopher Warshaw. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 248p. 30.00 paper. - Volume 22 Issue 3

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: The Potential Impact of Emerging Technologies on Democratic Representation: Evidence from a Field Experiment

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-02-15

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Advances in machine learning have created natural language models that can mimic human writing style and substance. Here we investigate the challenge that machine generated content such as that produced by GPT-3 presents to democratic representation by assessing the extent to which machine-generated content can pass as constituent sentiment. We conduct a field experiment in which we send both hand-written and machine-generated letters (a total of 32,398 emails) to 7,132 state legislators. We compare legislative response rates for the human versus machine-generated constituency letters to gauge whether language models can approximate and scale up inauthentic constituency voice. Legislators were only slightly less likely to respond to AI-generated content than to human-written emails; the 2% difference in response rate was statistically significant but substantively small. Qualitative evidence sheds light on the potential perils that this technology presents for democratic representation, but also suggests potential techniques that legislators might employ to guard against AI-sourced astroturfing.

  PublisherDOI

• Treaty obligations and support for collective defence: Evidence from Italy after the invasion of Ukraine

  European Journal of Political Research · 2023-12-15 · 5 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract Whether countries and their publics are responsive to the international legal commitments they make is the source of long‐standing academic debate. Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine brought real‐world significance to these debates. While Ukraine is not a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the invasion raised the prospect that other NATO members could be targeted and that Article 5 collective security commitments would be invoked. While recent research suggests that emphasizing mutual defence treaties can increase public support for defending an ally, prior work focuses on US opinion in a less fraught political environment. We constructed and fielded a survey experiment in Italy in the initial weeks of the Ukraine invasion to probe support for defending a NATO ally, the relevance of the Article 5 legal commitment on support for defending an ally, and the potential moderating influence of gender and political party. Our findings show that the Article 5 commitment significantly increased support for defending an ally. Consistent with past research, we find a significant gender gap, with men being more supportive of defending an ally than women; however, both men and women responded to the Article 5 commitment to virtually the same degree. The estimated treatment effect was larger for supporters of right‐wing parties than for the left; however, the difference was not statistically significant.

  PublisherDOI

• Executive politics in an era of democratic crisis

  Presidential Studies Quarterly · 2023-05-29 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The author declares no conflict of interest.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: Treaty Obligations and Support for Collective Defense: Evidence from Italy after the Invasion of Ukraine

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-07-24

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Whether countries and their publics are responsive to the international legal commitments they make is the source of long-standing academic debate. Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine brought real-world significance to these debates. While Ukraine is not a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the invasion raised the prospect that other NATO members could be targeted and that the Article 5 collective security commitments would be invoked. While recent research suggests that emphasizing mutual defense treaties can increase public support for defending an ally, prior work focuses on U.S. opinion in a less fraught political environment. We constructed and fielded a survey experiment in Italy in the initial weeks of the Ukraine invasion to probe support for defending a NATO ally, the relevance of the Article 5 legal commitment on support for defending an ally, and the potential moderating influence of gender and political party. Our findings show that the Article 5 commitment significantly increased support for defending an ally. Consistent with past research, we find a significant gender gap, with men being more supportive of defending an ally than women; however, both men and women responded to the Article 5 commitment to virtually the same degree. The estimated treatment effect was larger for supporters of right-wing parties than for the left; however, the difference was not statistically significant.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Dino Christenson

  55 shared

• Sarah Kreps

  Cornell University

  35 shared

• Francis X. Shen

  34 shared

• Eric Schickler

  21 shared

• Jillian L. Goldfarb

  19 shared

• Andrew Reeves

  17 shared

• John S. Brownstein

  Boston Children's Hospital

  13 shared

• Marric Buessing

  7 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Government

  Harvard University

  2006

Awards & honors

• D.B. Hardeman Prize
• Richard F. Fenno Jr. Award
• Richard E. Neustadt award