Provisional Pulpit: Modern Presidential Leadership of Public Opinion

Chapter 1: Questions and Quandaries of Presidential Leadership

Chapter 1 Questions and Quandaries of Presidential Leadership We see presidents talking all the time, but what effect does this rhetoric have on the public’s policy preferences? All modern presidents spend time attempting to lead public opinion by speaking to groups, doing Saturday radio addresses, holding press conferences, giving speeches from the Oval Office, and more. Given an expansive executive office to help shape and control their message, an army of political surrogates to carry out their message, and a fully focused cadre of press devoted to their every word, presidents should see a significant amount of leadership success , and we should know much about how they accomplish this persuasion . Yet after decades of study on all of this presidential talking and public attention, we still do not have a full and systematic understanding of when and under what conditions modern presidents are successful at leading public opinion. Indeed, there has been significant debate about whether or not a president can lead public opinion and which factors enhance or detract from this prospect. This presents a challenging puzzle: if the president is constantly talking , why is there (it is argued) so little movement in public opinion? To address this puzzle, in this book I investigate modern presidential leadership of public opinion on public policy. Specifically, I investigate how, when, and under what conditions presidents succeed at leading public opinion on public policy. Although much has been written about presidential leadership of opinion (broadly construed) and recent scholarship has significantly advanced our understanding of the conditions and obstacles involved, there are still many questions pertaining to the success of presidential efforts to lead opinion throughout the modern presidency. For instance, how is presidential leadership systematically affected by soaring or souring approval ratings, midterm or presidential elections, high or low salience of an issue, presidential term, high or low public knowledge, presidential speechmaking in the nation or via television? 2 : CHAPTER 1 Although others have addressed the subject, surprisingly little is known about the conditions of leadership success, either in terms of political conditions or presidential strategies. It is a simple but important inquiry, yet only a handful of studies examine the effect of presidential leadership of public opinion using a comparative , systematic study across several administrations. For instance Benjamin Page, Robert Shapiro, and Glenn Dempsey make use of news coverage of presidential statements to determine the probable effect of presidential leadership on public opinion. Elsewhere, Page and Shapiro examine matched public opinion before and after presidential policy statements as sources in newspaper coverage. In both cases, small effects are found, but there were too few cases to generalize across issues and conditions. Further, several authors explore presidential leadership in a broad sense but only measure one aspect of the idea. For instance, scholarly works have addressed leadership as movement of congressional opinion, leadership as “responsiveness,” leadership as “anticipation” of public opinion, leadership as issue framing, and presidential preference signaling. Similarly, many studies do not expand beyond a specific president or type of leadership strategy. For instance, George Edwards’s influential work on this subject is the most direct and comprehensive to date, yet the measures of public opinion leadership are largely confined to recent presidents (Reagan, Bush, and Clinton) and only on selected issues. Several other works also only focus on one president, one issue, or one time period. An analysis of leadership must look past the nexus of individual president and impressionistic assumptions about what makes presidents “great” leaders to a more sustainable sense of how and when presidents are able to lead public opinion. Other studies address only presidential statements made on television or in State of the Union speeches, rather than all presidential speeches. These limitations also make for a lessthan -complete view of the multiple interactive conditions that might help or hinder presidential leadership strategies. What is still missing is a systematic, sequential, and direct approach to describing empirical trends in presidential leadership of public opinion (as positive opinion movement based on presidential influence). Such an approach would expand on important scholarly queries, establish a baseline figure against which to judge successful or unsuccessful leadership of opinion, resolve empirical disputes in the literature, and check the accuracy of conventional political wisdom on how, when, and why presidents Questions and Quandaries of Presidential Leadership : 3 lead public opinion. With the right approach, several improvements can be made in weaving a comprehensive story about presidential leadership...