Does Presidential Rhetoric Matter? Priming and Presidential Approval

Does Presidential Rhetoric Matter? Priming and Presidential Approval

The public’s approval of the president plays a critical role in determining the president’s power and policy-making success. Scholars and pundits have thus devoted a large amount of attention to explaining the dynamics of presidential approval. Surprisingly, this work has overlooked one of the more important potential forces behind approval—that is, what the president himself says. In this arti...

Presidential Rhetoric

While presidents are often credited with agenda-setting powers over the public, empirical support is limited. Important exceptions to this limited evidence were provided by Cohen (1995, 1997) and Hill (1998). They found a link between the content of State of the Union addresses and subsequent pub lic concern about policy problems for the period 1953-1989. Recently Baum and Kernell (1999) demons...

Consensus and Volatility in Presidential Approval

One of the central themes in research, teaching, and popular commentary about American politics is the power of the Presidency. This is no surprise, since American domestic politics and policymaking, and even many decisions on the world stage, rotate about the axis of the U.S. president. Presidential approval plays a particularly critical role in presidential power, as ample studies have demons...

The Micro Foundations of Presidential Approval

The “miracle of aggregation” has become the key to understanding how an uninterested and uninformed electorate can produce systematic and responsive presidential approval. This paper, however, presents a set of theoretical considerations, which predict that not only do the least informed contribute to aggregate measures of presidential approval, but that the most and least informed update their...

Priming Presidential Votes by Direct Democracy