Deconstructing Presidential Approval:
The Issue Agenda’s Differential Impact on Independents and Partisans
At least since Neustadt’s seminal claim that a successful American president overcomes
limited constitutional powers by drawing on public popularity to enhance prestige and bargaining
power, scholars have tried to come to terms with the underpinnings of presidential popularity.
Neustadt’s conclusions led scholars to explore the determinants of public approval and the
motivations underlying the vote to reelect the incumbent president's party. Understanding
presidential popularity as a dependent variable has been motivated to a certain extent by its
explanatory power, consistent with Neustadt, as an independent variable. Approval has been a
powerful predictor of the president’s success in the political and policy domains. High approval
influences the president’s standing among members of Congress (Kernell 1997), the president’s
electoral success, as well as his party’s, in presidential and midterm elections (Tufte 1975;
Kernell 1977; Abramowitz 1985; Abramowitz, Cover, and Norpoth 1985). Furthermore, in the
policy arena, popular presidents are more successful in advocating their legislative programs
before the Congress (Rivers and Rose 1985; Bond, Fleisher, and Northrup 1988). Because
presidents are ultimately judged by electoral- and policy-related criteria, understanding the
dynamics of presidential approval represents an inherently interesting question for political
scientists and politicians alike.
However, the unfortunate implication of much of the aggregate-level presidential
approval literature is that the president serves out the term as a captive of the office, utterly
dependent on forces outside his control, that move his public standing up or down. Economic
and world events that affect approval ratings, such as the business cycle, oil shocks, or acts of
foreign or domestic terrorism, buffet the president who must then deal with these from a
Convention