Presidents, Prosperity, and Public Opinion

RESIDENTIAL power rests partly—and often precariously—on public approval. Widespread support in the public augments a presi-dents ability to bargain and to persuade. Confronted with a popular president, Congress, the private sector, the bureaucracy, the execu-tive branch itself, all become more accommodating to presidential initiative (Neustadt, 1960; Edwards, 1976). And just how does a president manage to gain or lose public support? Beginning with Mueller (1970, 1973), many researchers have sought answers to this question through time-series analysis of Gallup Poll presidential performance ratings. The final word belongs, momentarily at least, to Kernell (1978). Capitalizing on the method-ological sins of his predecessors, Kernell finds that shifts in presi-dential popularity correspond closely to the flux of events. Dramatic international crises typically increase support for the president (as Abstract A president skillful enough, or fortunate enough, to preside over a healthy economy is rewarded with public support. This paper examines two conceptions of the individual citizen that might underlie this relationship. A presidents popularity might decline when economic times are bad because citizens in effect blame him for their personal hardships—the pocketbook citizen hypothesis—or because they see the president as failing to cope adequately with national economic problems, quite apart from the economic dislocations of private life—the sociotropic citizen hypothesis. Across a variety of tests, results from national surveys covering the Nixon, Ford, and Carter presidencies consistently supported the sociotropic hypothesis. The paper concludes by suggesting several promising explanations for the findings, and by exploring their normative implications.