The Presidential Expectations Gap: Public Attitudes Concerning the Presidency

Chapter 4: Analyzing Public Expectations

29 Chapter 4 Analyzing Public Expectations The people of the United States . . . are looking to you for guidance and intelligent leadership. They have a right to expect from you a constructive program of action in which they as individuals, and collectively as communities and organizations, may participate. It should be a challenge to you to respond to these expectations. President Franklin Roosevelt, conference on crime, December 10, 1934 Thus far we have examined public expectations from a historical perspective and indirectly by comparing retrospective evaluations of past presidents with two incumbent president’s approval ratings. In this chapter we shift the focus to a more direct test of the expectations gap thesis. A direct test is important because, while some scholarly work suggests that an expectations gap exists, research methods to date generally have employed surrogate measures to test the gap thesis. We therefore use the literature on expectations to operationalize and test the gap thesis for two presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Before we do so, however, we first review how scholars conceptualize the expectations gap. Defining the Expectations Gap How does one define and operationalize the expectations gap? To answer this question we turn first to an examination of the presidential literature. Even though the expectations gap is a central thesis in the presidential literature , little empirical work has been conducted to determine its validity or generalizability. And surprisingly, while the concept is often cited, scholars 30 The Presidential Expectations Gap seldom define it. Most studies either mention an expectations gap without discussing its specific parameters or, when there is an attempt to measure the concept, proxy measures are used. For example, in an early empirical work on the gap, Seligman and Baer (1969) measured the concept by asking party activists whether they believed presidents should choose a moral course rather than an expedient one when they make decisions. They found that activists in the late 1960s favored a moral course. As we shall discuss in this chapter, other studies analyzed results from existing public opinion polls or polling data. Still, as Simon (2009, 135) notes, “there are no long-standing and well-agreed upon measures of public expectations.” Despite Simon’s warning, fortunately we do not have to start from scratch. An analysis of the presidential literature provides several useful ways of conceptualizing the gap: 1. The gap is represented by a pattern of declining presidential approval ratings over time, with ratings declining as each president fails to satisfy excessive and unrealistic public expectations. 2. The gap is the idea that the public compares an incumbent president to an ideal prototype (often referred to in the presidential literature as a comparison to an ideal image of Franklin Roosevelt), resulting in increased dissonance between expectations and reality. 3. The gap is related to perceptions of presidential performance; that is, whether the president is living up to expectations on key issues of peace and prosperity. We examine the first two of these definitional approaches in this chapter. Later, in chapters 6 and 8, we directly test the performance-based assumptions of the expectations gap thesis. Approval Ratings We start with a simple question. Do all presidents face a pattern of declining approval ratings? Since scientific polling commenced only with Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency: we must limit our analysis to the so-called modern presidents. Of these, complete data exist for Presidents Truman through George W. Bush. Advocates of the declining approval rating gap thesis posit that newly elected presidents are generally popular during their first months in office, with the recently elected candidate’s approval ratings increasing substantially between their November election and Inauguration Day Analyzing Public Expectations 31 (Wood 2009). With a few notable exceptions (e.g., Ford or Clinton), the weeks and months following the actual inaugural represent a time of goodwill , often referred to as the “honeymoon period,” a time when the public, the media, and even the president’s staunchest political opponents are optimistic or at least restrained in their criticism of the new president. Praise of the new president is common, reflecting the high expectations generated by the arrival of the latest incumbent. The first several months of a new president ’s term generally exhibit relatively high levels of public approval. This is the period when presidential scholar James Pfiffner (1988) recommends that presidents should “hit the ground running” to take advantage of high public approval and a muted opposition...