How much has executive power increased?

federal register pagesAs Andrew Rudalevige notes, in response to fellow Monkey Cage inmate, Erik Voeten, presidents do not exercise power only through executive orders. Moreover, many executive orders are trivial while others are important, so one can learn only so much from their absolute numbers. For that reason, it is important to look at other measures of executive power. The graph above shows the number of pages in the Federal Register each year to provide a rough sense of regulatory activity of the executive branch. For many reasons, this measure is extremely crude, but it reinforces two important points: that executive power has increased dramatically since World War II, and that in recent years any particular president such as Obama or Bush does not act much differently from his predecessors.