The President and
Public Opinion
Representation, Power, and Public
Opinion
From the standpoint of democratic theory, the
president is the only elected official in the U.S.
who represents the public at large.
Congress viewed in macro does, but individual
members do not, except in the sense that they
have a duty as public persons.
The Supreme Court represents the law.
Accordingly, the president should reflect some
overarching sense of public preferences. Which
public preferences? The public at large? The
electoral coalition? These are important questions
in democratic theory.
Presidents also care about public opinion because
of power concerns.
Public sentiment is very important to the president.
A principal source of influence for presidents is the
approval they receive from those in the policy
environment. This includes the public at large, a
policy community of elites, as well as fellow
partisans.
The president wants to please the public, or at
least avoid irritating it. Presidents also want to
lead the public. Moreover, presidents are
expected to be leaders.
There is a reciprocal relationship here. Presidents
want to both please and lead the public.
Impediments to Leading Public
Opinion
Gauging public opinion is a difficult task.

The public may not have clear views on many issues

The public is often ill informed

The public is volatile, often being set off at symbolic
issues

Polls may be inaccurate, biased by methodology.

Public sentiment can be soft.
People around the president may tell the chief executive
what he wants to hear, rather than what they need to
hear. Nixon surrounded himself with loyalists, rather than
professionals. George W. Bush also to a great extent.
The president is in the limelight of American politics, with
the media focusing in on every little detail.
The media is very important to public opinion.
The media may not provide the sort of favorable
treatment that the president wants. As a result,
presidents may lose control of their message and public
opinion.
The public has extremely high expectations of the
president. Personally their lives are expected to be
conducted at a much higher level than almost any
individual citizen. They are also expected to be “all
intelligent”, prescient, exhibiting strong personality,
effective leadership skills, decisive, effective in public
speaking, hard negotiators. It is not clear that any
individual can meet up to the public’s expectations.
Thus, there is a substantial gap between the presidential
reality and the public’s expectations. This is often called
the “expectations gap.”
Part of the reason for the public’s high expectations of
the president lies in its lack of understanding of the
context in which the presidency operates. He is
assumed all powerful; yet the presidency is probably our
weakest institution in terms of formal powers and ability
to exercise power. Presidents must often persuade.
Contradictory expectations of the president:




Leader, an independent figure who speaks out and
takes stands on issues. Responsive to the electorate
and mass public. A no win situation.
If they are too independent they can’t be responsive;
if too responsive they are considered to be “wafflers.”
Clinton perceived as a “waffler” early on as he was
more responsive.
Flexible and willing to compromise on issues; decisive
and taking a firm stand reflecting strong values and
well reasoned positions.
A statesman who places the “nation’s” interests
ahead of “particularistic” interests. A skilled politician
who can build coalitions and get things done.



Open administrations with a free flow of ideas, and
keeping the details of government visible to the
public. No secrecy. President should be in control of
things. Evidence of internal dissent is seen as that
the president in not in charge.
We want our president to “keep us safe”! Yet, we also
want our president to respect civil liberties. Are the
two things compatible? Can the president keep us
safe without conducting surveillance operations
directed at those who would make us unsafe? Who
decides who these are?
Populist tendency to relate to the average person is
desirable. Yet citizens do not really want the
president to be like them, since he is held to a much
higher standard. Average citizen has lied, stolen,
been unfaithful maritally, been divorced, seen a shrink
at one time or another, been drunk, sampled illegal
drugs, etc.
Great presidents are not passive followers of public
opinion; they are leaders of it. Teddy Roosevelt.
“People used to say of me that I ... divined what people
were going to think. I did not ‘divine’. I simply made up
my mind what they ought to think, and then did my best
to get them to think it.”
Presidents can offer several rationales for not following
public sentiment.


Nixon and Vietnam and the “silent majority.”
Doing what’s “right”, rather than what’s “popular.” Johnson
and civil rights, the poor.
Presidential goals are often to “move” public opinion.
However, reasonableness suggests that they cannot move
it too far. Moving public opinion provides a quintessential
test of a president’s ability to lead.
George Edwards book “On Deaf Ears” makes a convincing
case that presidents cannot systematically move public
opinion.
Yet, there are critical examples through history where
presidents did move public opinion. Washington and the
Jay Treaty, Adams and the quasi-war with France.
Roosevelt and the New Deal. George W. Bush and the Iraq
Invasion.
Presidents who lead, move public opinion to their
perspective. Presidents who facilitate simply channel
already existing public opinion into policy initiatives.
Understanding Public Opinion
In order to effectively use public opinion to their
advantage, presidents have to know what public
sentiment is.
Citizens don’t have crystallized and coherent views
on most issues. Moreover, on the details of policy
they haven’t the foggiest. It requires great effort to
become informed on the issues. Citizens lack the
time, expertise, and inclination to do so.
Citizens have preferences only over the general
contours of issues and governmental activities. A
mean and a variance exists for specific issues;
however, citizen preferences also involve
aggregations of issues.
People operate more at the symbolic level than a
rational level on issues and policy. Question
wording matters.
Want a balanced budget; want all of the programs
currently in the federal budget.
Want lower taxes; want no reduction in
government programs.
Want an end to “big government”; want all of the
benefits that government currently offers, and
more.
Hate “bureaucracy”; if ask those who have dealt
with the U.S. federal bureaucracy about the quality
of their relations they overwhelmingly approve of
interactions with bureaucracy.
James A. Stimson claims that citizens have only a
nebulous sense of liberalism/ conservatism on the
issues. Collective public opinion has different
properties than the opinions at any one time of the
collectivity. Changes occur at the margins.
Measuring Public Opinion
Opinion Polls-A common tool for studying and
understanding public opinion is opinion polls.
Gallup, Harris, Roper, CBS-New York Times, etc.
Presidents since Roosevelt have used pollsters.
Presidents don’t typically have exclusive use of
pollsters; too expensive; do hire outside firms and
pollsters.
Roper Center
http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/data_access/ip
oll/ipoll.html
Polls have their problems.
Public opinion is nebulous and volatile on some issues.
When citizens don’t have strong views it is possible to
get a lot of variability in responses.
Polls don’t always measure what the president needs to
know. Agree/disagree, yes/no questions tell little about
the details of policy and the nuances of issues.
Responses may reflect the particular wording of
questions. If you ask about “welfare” you are likely to
get a different response than if you ask about the “poor,
homeless, and needy”. Citizens are overwhelmingly
opposed to “welfare”, but also overwhelmingly
“humanitarian” in their desire to help the poor and
homeless.
Polls are not taken in a timely fashion and when
presidents need them when taken by independent
polling organizations. Yet public opinion is dynamic.
Election Results
Presidents often attempt to claim a mandate based on
the presidential election. Yet elections are aggregations
of preferences and do not constitute mandates on
particular issues.
Problems with using election results:



Voters may approve of candidates, but not have opinions on
particular issues or policies. Symbols are more important in
elections, as well as party id.
Voters often do not know candidate’s stands on the issues.
Candidates have an incentive to not be clear on the issues and
policies they support. Downsian model.
The election reflects the views of only part of the electorate;
those who turned out; those who voted for the candidate.
Does the elected have the obligation to represent all or only
the winning coalition.
The president may not know what the public’s views are, even
after an election.
What does the election mean? Reagan in 1980 claimed that
citizens were favorable to the message of reducing “big
government” and “getting the government off the backs of
states and citizens”. However, they were not favorable toward
reducing environmental protection, equal employment
opportunity, consumer protection, anti-trust regulation, etc.?
In other words, election outcomes do not produce a clear
message for the president. Reagan was unsuccessful in both
reducing the size of government and diminishing government
regulation.
Election results are a rather tenuous way to gauge public
opinion.
Mail from the Public-The White House receives several
million pieces of mail annually, including email. All are
answered by someone. The White House staff typically
will prepare a synopsis of public views for the president.
Is the mail a random sample? Skewed toward activists;
those who have intense feelings on the issues.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questionsand-comments
Presidents have a lot of trouble understanding public
opinion. Even if they could understand public approval
it is not clear what it means. It is extremely volatile.
Public Approval of Presidential Job
Performance
Presidents seek a favorable job approval rating from the public.
Job approval translates into power along various dimensions,
including in Congress and with regard to controlling the general
agenda of the media and Congress. It generates respect for
presidential leadership.
Aggregate approval of the president’s job approval is dynamic.
For this reason it may not be very useful to simply look at
averages over an entire term.
However, here is a table from the Gallup site reporting
averages for each president since Truman.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/116677/presidential-approvalratings-gallup-historical-statistics-trends.aspx
Five presidents since WWII have averaged
approval less than 50 percent over their entire
terms, Truman, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and George
W. Bush. However, this set of averages can be
misleading since there can be substantial
variations on a month to month basis.
The averages hide substantial variation within
presidencies that are significant to
understanding the president’s job approval.
Here are graphs of presidential job approval
since World War II.
Gallup, Roper Center Approval
• http://www.gallup.com/poll/124922/Preside
ntial-Approval-Center.aspx
• http://webapps.ropercenter.uconn.edu/CFI
DE/roper/presidential/webroot/presidential
_rating.cfm
• http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/popu
larity.php?pres=&sort=time&direct=DESC
&Submit=DISPLAY#axzz2j8pOtHsV
How do people arrive at their
evaluations of the president?
Party identification. Research shows that there is a
partisan basis for public approval of the president.
Democrats overwhelmingly approve of a Democratic
president; Republicans overwhelmingly approve of
Republican presidents.
Polarization along party lines in approval/disapproval.
The public was especially polarized along party lines
during the Reagan administration. On average the
polarization has been about 40 percent; during Reagan it
was about 52 percent. Now it is even higher.
Independents represent a group that increase the
variability in approval for the president. Independents
tend to be less polarized in approval/disapproval for the
president running about 20 percent from both Democrats
and Republicans.
Positivity bias-Presidents are almost always evaluated
positively at the beginning of their terms. Citizens give
them the benefit fo the doubt. Moreover, approval tends
to go up substantially between the time of the election
and over the first few months. Show graph again here.
Comparison of Electoral Percentages and First Post-Inaugural Approval
President
Eisenhower
Kennedy
Johnson
Nixon
Carter
Reagan
Bush I
Clinton
Bush II
Obama
Source: Gallup
Polls
Popular Vote in First
Election %
55
Approval in First PostInaugural Poll %
69
50
61
72
71
43
50
51
60
66
51
53
43
48
51
58
60
53
68
Persistence of approval-Honeymoon period in approval
ratings is variable with the presidency.
Long term decline in approval
During each presidency there is a tendency toward
decline,

There is also a longer term decline across
presidents. Trust in government after Vietnam,
Watergate.
There is a relatively constant factor for most presidents
that explains the mean level of approval. Things like
personality, style, perceived ability, etc. enter into this.
However, these things are not dynamic. Compare
Kennedy to Nixon for example.
The Economy- Clinton’s mantra was “It’s the economy, stupid!”
The state of the nation’s economy is the single most important
factor driving presidential job approval. Presidents are held
accountable for the economy, regardless of whether they
inherited a good or bad one.
Rally events- Dramatic events affect the largest dynamic in
presidential approval. Things like the Oklahoma City Bombing,
the Persian Gulf War, the bombing of the U.S. embassy in
Lebanon, the assassination attempt on Reagan in 1981, the
invasion of Grenada, the negative images flowing from
Somalia, September 11th, the invasion of Iraq.
Scandal may affect approval. However, it may not always
affect it in the logical direction. Watergate and Iran-Contra
depressed the approval respectively of Nixon and Reagan. In
contrast, Lewinsky-gate either increased or had no effect on
Clinton’s approval.
Presidential honesty, integrity, intellect, leadership
capability. These are all dynamic and may enter into the
way the public perceives the president. Nixon and
Watergate. Carter was perceived as a weak leader
when he had no ready solution to the Iran Hostage crisis.
Bush I was perceived as vacillating when he went back
on his pledge of “no new taxes.” Whitewater and media
coverage of various other issues hurt perceptions of
Clinton along this dimension. Bush II was generally
perceived as dishonest in the reasons for invading Iraq.
Obama has been perceived as a weak leader, probably
due to his inability to get things relating to the economy
approved in a partisan Congress.
Issues may affect approval. For an issue to affect
approval it must be
 Salience- The issue must be important to large
numbers of people. Economy, environment, foreign
policy events.
 Valence-Within issue areas, bad news may outweigh
good news in capturing the public’s attention. Bad
news about the economy has more impact than good
news.
 Responsiblity- people need to see the president as
responsible for the issue for it to affect approval.
Presidential performance on the issue must be seen
as responsible.
Summary: Public approval of the president may be a
result of many factors. However, quantitative scholars
do a fair job of explaining the aggregate series that we
showed earlier using only two variables, economic
performance and rally events.