Presidential Leadership of Public Opinion: An Embedded Survey Experiment

Presidents increasingly go public to influence public opinion on issues, but research is divided over the effectiveness of such efforts. This presents us with a puzzle: Why do presidents go public so much if the effects of going public are so unpredictable? Debate in the literature on the effects of going public stems in part from the large number of variables that mediate between presidential public communication and public opinion. This article hypothesizes that different types of presidential communication provide voters with different types of information about the president. This information, in turn, interacts with the voter’s political predispositions, so that different types of voters will react differently to each presidential communication. An experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey is used to test the hypothesis, and results provide support for it. The conclusion discusses limitations of the experiment and directions for future research.