Despite the substantive growth and increasing methodological sophistication of the presidential approval literature over the last four decades, almost all analyses continue to focus exclusively on the mean of the approval distribution—the percentage of Americans who approve of the president at a given moment. However, changes in the variance of popular support for the president may be as politically and substantively important as shifts in the mean. To illustrate how a focus on variance can enrich our understanding of changes in the president’s public standing, this analysis examines the effects of the economy and World War II on the variance in popular support for Franklin D. Roosevelt. At the aggregate level, the study shows that high peacetime unemployment and mounting casualties increased the volatility of FDR’s standing among federal relief recipients, erstwhile his most consistent base of support. At the individual level, the analysis demonstrates that individuals with conflicting partisan, economic, and war-related considerations for evaluating the president were more variable in their approval of Roosevelt than were other respondents. Exporting a similar focus on variance to other lines of research across the public opinion subfield could produce a richer understanding of the complex processes driving opinion change over time.
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Douglas L. Kriner (2006) studied this question.