Presidential Approval and the Inherited Economy

Abstract

Are leaders held accountable for inherited conditions, and does accountability increase with time in office? I combine hundreds of opinion polls to test how new presidents are rewarded or punished for current economic perceptions, and how these judgments evolve over time. I find the economy influences voter evaluations in a president's first year, that it influences evaluations more so in the second year, and that it does not influence evaluations any more in later years. Surveys of governor approval and state economic conditions yield similar results, as does an original survey experiment exploiting the varying tenure of state governors in the wake of the 2018 elections. While raising questions about voter competence, these findings also suggest leaders have incentives to spread effort more broadly over their terms.

Partisanship, Economic Assessments, and Presidential Accountability

“…For instance, if contra‐partisans of the president are less responsive than copartisans (or are nonresponsive) to improving economic circumstances, we would expect partisan differences in economic perceptions to grow. In examining this possibility, we complement recent research that provides cross‐sectional evidence of variation in the relationship between economic conditions and presidential evaluations over the course of the president's term (Sances, forthcoming).…”

“…Despite recent scholarship that examines how political attitudes and behavior vary with the partisan composition of government (Gerber and Huber 2009, 2010; McGrath 2016; Reeves and Rogowski 2019), it is less clear how changes in presidential partisanship affect economic evaluations. Instead, previous research documents partisan differences in economic perceptions within a given presidency (Bartels 2002), the effects of partisan control of Congress on economic evaluations (Gerber and Huber 2010), and temporal variation in the importance of economic conditions as a predictor of presidential approval (Sances, forthcoming). The omission is surprising given attributions of economic responsibility to the American president (Klorman 1978; Rudolph 2003), the importance of economic factors in predicting presidential election outcomes (Rosenstone 1983), and the role of politics in shaping consumer attitudes (De Boef and Kellstedt 2004).…”

Post-electoral Promises and Trust in Government: A Survey Experiment on Signaling

“…The content of the information is important in a more fundamental sense: what the government says might be accurate or not. In other words, transparency initiatives complement other information voters have on government performance, like the state of the economy (Sances, 2021). Since respondents in our experiment live in the city, they can rely on their own experience to see whether the government actually keeps its promises.…”

“…40 Citizens' responses to information are influenced by their prior expectations and attitudes toward the government (Baekgaard, 2015;Marvel, 2016;Sances, 2021). Individuals who employ motivated reasoning make their perceptions correspond to their priors and partisan commitments (Bolsen et al, 2014;Slothuus and De Vreese, 2010).…”

Monetary policy and anxious presidents: The effects of monetary shocks on presidential job approval

“…This negative effect holds after controlling for a wide range of economic factors and non‐economic events that influenced presidential approval in the 26 years covered in this study. Building on the notion that the salience of the issues varies over the presidential life cycle (Edwards et al, 1995; Sances, 2021), I expand my analysis to assess the way the impact of exogenous monetary shocks varies over the incumbent's term. Vavreck's (2009) key insight is that the economy's relevance to presidential popularity becomes more consequential as the country approaches the presidential election.…”