eo

Machine Readable Corpus of Executive Orders

Installation

Install eo from PyPI:

pip install eo

Usage

Get an updated corpus of Executive Orders

In [1]: import eo
In [2]: eos = eo.corpus.update()

# Let's see how many EOs we have records of for each president
In [3]: from collections import Counter
In [4]: Counter([eo.get('president') for eo in eos])
Out[4]:
Counter({'Barack Obama': 106,
         'Donald J. Trump': 12,
         'Dwight D. Eisenhower': 484,
         'Franklin D. Roosevelt': 1905,
         'George Bush': 166,
         'George W. Bush': 102,
         'Gerald R. Ford': 169,
         'Harry S. Truman': 908,
         'Jimmy Carter': 243,
         'John F. Kennedy': 125,
         'Lyndon B. Johnson': 325,
         'Richard Nixon': 346,
         'Ronald Reagan': 270,
         'William J. Clinton': 234})

Obviously to make meaningful comparisons across presidents we'd need to normalized based on time as president, but this is simply meant to illustrate what executive orders are recorded in the data.

Unfortunatly we don't have access to the text of each EO. I've only found digital access to EOs after President Clinton from the archives.

In [5]: Counter([eo.get('president') for eo in eos if eo.get('text')])
Out[5]:
Counter({'Barack Obama': 102,
         'Donald J. Trump': 12,
         'George W. Bush': 102,
         'William J. Clinton': 234})

While this is only 3 complete presidencies it is the text of executive orders for more than 20 years.