Political Drama, Economic Conditions, and the Dynamics of Presidential Popularity

This article reports on an examination of the movement of presidential popularity for the years 1963-1980. In particular, it compares public responsiveness to changing economic conditions, on the one hand, with responsiveness to dramatic events of a high political nature, on the other. The evidence indicates that each of these categories of influence plays an equal part. In addition, the analysis measures the temporal dimension of the various substantive influences on presidential popularity. The data suggest that the identifiable influences have distinctive dynamics, a fact leading to speculation that those influences may be of different characters. stunned the nation by announcing that Israel and Egypt had reached a peace agreement at Camp David. Within a matter of days his popularity rating had jumped a dozen points and the residue of that effect remained for nearly a year. On January 23, 1973, President Richard Nixon announced a formal end to the decade-long war in Indochina. The accompanying 15-point surge in his popularity disappeared in three months. These two instances of high political drama had substantial impact on the public's perception of the president, but impacts of differing duration. The data analyses reported here assess the importance of such dramatic events in forming presidential evaluations by addressing the size of each event's immediate impact, the duration of that effect, and the relative significance of such events when compared with other influences on popularity's movement. The study of presidential popularity itself needs no elaborate justification. As a substantive variable, it represents a measure of the public's judgment of the current government and may provide an indicator of coming electoral behavior (Sigelman, 1979). The numbers so frequently bandied about in the press not only provide politicians with a reading of how national politics play in Peoria, but also are used as political currency in the Washington political game. For social scientists they provide an example of public opinion on a salient entity (the president) that does seem to react to elements in the political-economic environment. Thus, assessing the dynamics and the meaning of popularity ratings will serve a