The growth of public opinion measurement in the last 40 years has added a new dimension to the study of presidential behavior. Not only have public evaluations become more newsworthy, but the importance of public support as a resource and determinant of political survival has been enhanced. Recent scholarship on the presidency has documented the value of public support, attempted to identify its major determinants, and speculated about the manner in which presidents might influence these evaluations.This research is designed to integrate these concerns into a single model and thereby to examine the interdependence between public support as a product of citizen decisions and as a political resource. First, a characterization of the citizen as an evaluator of the president is developed and used to construct an equation of presidential approval. Next, we develop an equation that explains presidential effectiveness in the legislative arena and illustrates the operation of public support as a presidential resource. The public support and legislative effectiveness equations are specified as a simultaneous equation system, estimated, and evaluated. The results of the model are then used to expand the conventional wisdom about the determinants of public support, to examine the consequences of the reciprocal relationship between public support and legislative success, and to generate ex post forecasts of President Reagan's support from 1981 through 1983.

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Considerable attention has been devoted in recent years to the use of political drama by the president, with the most discretionary forms of drama-speeches and foreign travelreceiving much scrutiny. In fact, there has arisen a conventional wisdom which asserts that televised speeches and foreign travel by the president (1) have increased over time, (2) exert a uniformly positive impact on public evaluations of the president's performance, and (3) can therefore be used as a strategy for influencing the president's approval ratings, a vital resource for the modern president. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate this conventional wisdom and thus assess the value of televised speeches and foreign travel as influences on presidential approval. The paper first defines political drama and casts the conventional wisdom in the form of three propositions. It next develops a research strategy for evaluating these propositions in an appropriate manner. Finally, the paper tests the propositions. The results cast considerable doubt on the conventional wisdom and lead to the conclusion that the use of political drama is not an all-purpose strategy guaranteed to halt declines or replenish sizable losses of presidential approval.One hallmark of the recent literature on the American presidency is the increasing attention devoted to the relationship between presidential behavior and public evaluations of presidential performance. This growth reflects a recognition among students of the presidency that the context in which the chief executive operates and the value of opinion poll results encourage systematic and similar behavior among presidents. First of all, recent descriptions of the modern presidency em-

This research is designed to generalize a referendum voting model and investigate its ability to account for the aggregate outcomes of elections for the House, Senate, governorships, and upper and lower chambers of state legislatures. Our analysis shows that these outcomes are influenced by the same systematic short- and long-term forces. In addition to this common referendum structure, the analysis reveals that there is a common response to random shocks, a subtle form of interdependence found in systems of seemingly unrelated regressions.