The Policy Agendas of the President and the Mass Public: A Research Validation and Extension

Research on various forms of mass-elite representational linkage and on public-president links specifically suggests that a reciprocal influence process exists between the attention to policy issues of the mass public and the president. Other research suggests that issue attention for both the president and the public is shaped by real-world cues. Time-series regression analyses of data from State of the Union addresses, Gallup polls, and for various indicators of policy-specific, real-world phenomena are employed to test these propositions and to extend prior research that has assumed presidents influence the public, but not vice versa. For foreign policy and economic policy there is a reciprocal influence process between the president and the mass public. For civil rights policy there is a one-way influence process from presidential to mass attention to the issue. The issue attention of the mass public, but not that of the president, is consistently influenced by realworld cues relevant to the particular policy area.