State-Level Presidential Approval and Senatorial Support

Abstract

The effect of public presidential approval on congressional support for the president has been the subject of considerable debate and controversy. Systematic, quantitative studies have been unable to demonstrate convincingly that public approval leads to greater legislative support for the president. The lack of constituency-level public approval data has hindered resolution of the controversy. Studies have relied upon either election results or national-level approval data as substitutes, but both alternatives are problematic as measures of public approval at the constituency level. In this paper, we use new data gathered from 50 state surveys in September 1996 that asked respondents, among other things, to rate the job performance of the president. We test whether or not public approval in the states affects senators' support for the president and also look at some hypotheses: whether or not minority party status, running for reelection, electoral vulnerability, and presidential coattails interact with constituents' approval of the president to affect senators' roll-call support for the president. With controls for partisanship and ideology of the senator and the state, analysis indicates no support for the hypothesis that public approval of the president leads to greater presidential support among senators. Presidents believe that high public approval will enhance their chances of legislative success with Congress.1 In contrast, among political scientists a diversity of opinion exists on this point. Studies have reported the full range of possibilities: that public approval leads to greater member support for the president, that it has no effect, and even that it has a negative impact!2 One source of the controversy among political scientists is the absence of appropriate measures of public approval. In particular, to date no study has been able to use constituency-level measures of public approval.

Presidential Approval and Legislative Success

“…Appendix Table B discusses this analysis and the results. Cohen, Bond, Fleisher, and Hamman 2000), and is applied to two samples of the data. The first includes all observations pooled without regard to the complexity or salience of the bills.…”

In defense of the lowly scorecard: What legislator ratings can tell us about interest groups

“…The first scorecard studies employed ratings as proxy measures for legislators' ideologies (for example, Kingdon, 1973;Deckard and Stanley, 1974;Markus, 1974). Not surprisingly, ideology measures based on scorecards were soon used for studying congressional behaviors (for example, Kau and Rubin, 1979;Mitchel, 1979;Kalt, 1981;Peltzman, 1984;Netter, 1985;Lott, 1987;Nelson and Silberberg, 1987;Grenzke, 1989;Stratmann, 1996;Cohen et al, 2000), finding links In defense of the lowly scorecard between legislative and constituent preferences (for example, Schwarz and Fenmore, 1977;Erikson and Wright, 1980;Zupan, 1990;Stratmann, 1996;Whitby and Gilliam, 1998), conducting longitudinal studies monitoring changes in Congress and public opinion (for example, Stimson et al, 1995;Stimson, 1999a), comparing legislators' ideology to the liberal or conservative bent of media outlets (Groseclose and Milyo, 2005), developing early spatial models for congressional voting (Poole and Daniels, 1985;Poole, 1990), and performing factor analysis to estimate congressional ideological positions (for example, Kirtzer, 1978;Poole, 1981). Others used scorecards to develop ideological ratings for the president (Zupan, 1992;Taylor, 1996).…”

“…For one, the vast majority of scorecard studies, including those to criticize the use of ratings, have relied entirely or primarily on cards issued by extremely liberal or conservative groups such as Americans for Constitutional Action (ACA), ADA or ACU (for example, Kingdon, 1973;Markus, 1974;Schwarz and Fenmore, 1977;Kau and Rubin, 1979;Mitchel, 1979;Erikson and Wright, 1980;Kalt, 1981;Fowler, 1982;Peltzman, 1984;Netter, 1985;Lott, 1987;Nelson and Silberberg, 1987;Grenzke, 1989;Zupan, 1990;Zupan, 1992;Stimson et al, 1995;Stratmann, 1996;Taylor, 1996;Hill et al, 1997;Groseclose et al, 1999;Stimson, 1999b;Cohen et al, 2000;Dempster and Westley, 2000;Herron, 2000). The notable exceptions to use a large mix of organizations' ratings include Kritzer (1978), who used 11 groups; Krehbiel (1990), 14 groups; Hetzner and Westin (1987), 20; Poole and Rosenthal (1997), 28;Poole (1981), 31; Poole and Daniels (1985), 40; Poole (1990), 45;Poole and Rosenthal (1998), 59;and McKay (2008), 72.…”

9/11 and Presidential Support in the 107th Congress

“…3 Recent research, however, has found only marginal support for the claim that a president's approval matters to his success in Congress. For example, Cohen et al, (2000) show that a senator's likelihood of voting with the president is not correlated with presidential approval in his state. Although Covington and Kinney (1999) find that approval increases the probability that the House floor considers a presidential proposal, it does not matter to roll call votes.…”