The Structure of Presidential Approval: Constraints within and across Presidencies

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Abstract
If approval polls are as important as they seem to be to presidents and president-watchers, they can tell us more about common constraints across administrations. While an extensive body of research has examined these polls, we know little about the dimensions of approval generally. Based on a priori expectations derived from the institutional literature, we propose a general model that partitions approval into mutually exclusive and exhaustive components: time, circumstances, and administration. This model is applied to pooled monthly observations from the administrations of Truman through Reagan. All three components are statistically significant and together account for most of the variation in approval. We find a time curve, common to all presidents, consisting of a cycle of deflation and partial restoration of approval. From month seven on, presidents suffer a statistically significant loss of support month by month until the erosion subsides when the next election approaches. This temporal dimension, we find, also structures specific presidential activities across the term. We also find significant effects for categories of circumstances holding across all presidencies. Economic conditions and some dramatic events exerted significant effects on approval. Finally, with time and circumstances controlled, we find that a significant amount of variation in approval still exists within each administration. The results of this analysis resolve many of the conflicts in the literature and point the way to a convergence about common constraints on approval. The results also tell us more about the presidential office. They indicate that while the relationship between each administration and the public is distinctive, all of these presidents operated within the same important and significant restraints.