Representative democracy essentially depends on a feedback loop of policies and
elections. Voters elect politicians to implement certain policies, and the policies
delivered by politicians are then evaluated by the electorate. However, with shared
responsibilities, how does the public assign credit or blame for policies that are produced
by more than one branch of government? Major public policy is made by laws that must
pass both Congress and the president. Who does the public hold accountable for tasks for
which the Constitution divides responsibility?
This paper answers part of this question by examining the impact of the passage
of major legislation on presidential approval. After briefly summarizing some of the
literature on presidential approval and positing some simple theories that have been
developed elsewhere (Jarvis 2003), the paper describes the data and methods used to
investigate the question at hand. The paper shows that people do indeed take some
measure of what has happened legislatively in the last few years when evaluating the
president. Finally, this paper concludes by summarizing the effects of legislative
production on presidential approval and briefly setting up some contrasts with
congressional approval, which is explored in other work.
Previous Research
There is a very rich literature on presidential approval. It has been used as both
an independent variable and dependent variable. As an independent variable, scholars
have shown that public approval of the president affects veto politics (Rohde and Simon,
1985), congressional elections (Jacobson 2001; Lewis-Beck and Rice 1992; Marra and
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Convention