Presidential Approval and Legislative Success

Abstract

While a large body of work exists on presidents' public approval, no study identifies the conditions under which approval generates policy influence. This gap is particularly significant since empirical research has produced inconsistent findings on whether popularity affects a president's legislative success. In the following, we argue that public salience and issue complexity determine the extent to which a president can capitalize on approval, and we proceed to test this hypothesis on U.S. House of Representatives roll-call votes between 1989 and 2000. The empirical analysis provides strong support for our hypothesis, which holds across a variety of econometric specifications and estimates of approval.

“Shaping history” or “Riding the wave”?: President Bush's influence on the public opinion of terrorism, homeland security, & crime

“…Presidential speeches increase the public's attention towards the issues they address (Cohen, 1995(Cohen, , 1997Hill, 1998). This is especially true when the policy area is complex or technical, such as foreign policy (Canes, Wrone & de Marchi, 2002;Hurwitz, 1989;Sigelman, 1980), partly because many Americans tend to be uninformed about foreign affairs (Almond, 1950;Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996;Downs, 1957). Since many people remain uninformed, they are more likely to support a policy if they are told that the president favors the policy (Conover & Sigelman, 1982;Hurwitz, 1989).…”

The Presidency and the Executive Branch in Latin America: What We Know and What We Need to Know

“…On the dependent variable, policies have been categorized using various typologies: by objectives, as in Lowi's (1972) famous typology of distributive, regulatory, redistributive, and constituent policies; by salience and complexity, as in Gormley's (1986) typology of regulatory policies; by size and novelty, as in Peterson's (1990) and Light's (1999) typologies of new/old and large/small policies; by scope, and in Eshbaugh-Soha's (2005 typology of major and minor policies. As independent variables, this literature has utilized not only institutional and partisan variables-such as unilateral institutional powers, divided government, size of presidential legislative party, timing within the presidential term, and presidential popularity (Edwards, 1985;Fleischer 1990, 2008;Peterson 1990;Canes-Wrone and De Marchi, 2002;Barrett and Eshbaugh-Soha, 2007;Eshbaugh-Soha, 2010); but also organizational variables-such as the source of policy formulation, the locus of leadership during policymaking processes, and the resources employed to influence legislative outcomes (Light, 1999;Rudalevige, 2002: Larocca, 2006. The relevant findings of this literature for the present discussion show a) that policies, particularly domestic policies, tend to be smaller and less novel because presidents lack organizational and informational resources to develop and promote other types of policies (Light,1999;Krause, 2009) except in crisis situations (Dickinson, 1997), and b) that presidents are more successful in getting legislative approval for policies developed in a decentralized, rather than centralized, manner-as the former implies collaboration between the presidential center, cabinet departments and congressional committees both in policy design (Rudalevige, 2002: pp.…”

Roll Call Votes on Cabinet Confirmations

“…Finally, a popular president is expected to wield Downloaded by [The University Of Melbourne Libraries] at 02:28 23 June 2016 greater influence, as congressmen may worry about their own political standing if they oppose a president whose public standing is high (Neustadt 1960). Various studies have provided empirical support for the proposition that high levels of public approval translate into presidential success on legislation (Canes-Wrone and de Marchi 2002;Edwards 1980;Gleiber and Shull 1992;Rivers and Rose 1985;Rohde and Simon 1985;Shull and Shaw 2002) and nominations (Krutz, Fleisher, and Bond 1998;Segal, Cameron, and Cover 1992).…”