The Presidential Expectations Gap: Public Attitudes Concerning the Presidency

Chapter 6: The Economy, Ethical Standards, and Partisanship

72 Chapter 6 The Economy, Ethical Standards, and Partisanship All our efforts as Republicans are guided by the fixed star of this single principle: that freedom always exceeds our highest expectations. This is the greatest task before the Republican Party: to raise the bar of American expectations. Of the potential of our economy. Of the order and civility of our culture. Of what a president can be, and what the presidency must be again. The 1996 Republican Party Platform In the previous chapters we examined the expectations gap from a historical perspective, by comparing evaluations of two incumbents with retrospective evaluations of their immediate predecessors, and by using the presidential prototype approach to compare an ideal/excellent president with an incumbent president. In this chapter we approach the expectations gap from yet another direction that is identified in the presidential literature: we test a performance-based model of presidential expectations. Another key assumption of the expectations gap paradigm is the idea that the public expects successful performance from its presidents. Although we do not have a dichotomous measure of the success or failure of various presidencies, and while available historical rankings of the presidents are too subjective to provide one, we can examine key aspects of the president’s job performance on such issues as the economy. Louis Brownlow (1969, 35), a main architect of the Executive Office of the President, argues that the public expects the chief executive to be “a skilled engineer of the economy of the nation.” Failure to lead on this dimension represents an inability to satisfy a key public expectation of presidential performance . According to Brownlow’s formulation, the entire public should The Economy, Ethical Standards, and Partisanship 73 expect the president to preside over a healthy economy. There is no distinction in this formulation between the president’s political supporters and opponents. All Americans expect a healthy economy and should, at least in theory, respond favorably to successful presidential performance. This means the president should have higher approval ratings among all Americans during good economic times. As Brownlow (1969, 4) adds, “Couched in the crudest form of political expression, the dictum runs that if the country is prosperous the President gets the credit, if it is not prosperous the President gets the blame.” Yet there are reasons to believe that all partisans do not give an incumbent equal credit for a good economy. In 2000, several electoral models based largely on the nation’s economic performance predicted a comfortable victory for Vice President Al Gore. Given the eventual closeness of that race, Michael Lewis-Beck later admitted the eventual outcome “totally” undermined his theory. John Green added, “The relationship between income and politics has changed—it’s not as dramatic” (both are quoted in Solomon 2000, 3870). Is it possible that as American politics has become more polarized, presidents are not equally likely to get credit for good economic performance from their political supporters and opponents? Is it possible that party effects mediate public expectations, a finding that would be more consistent with B. Dan Wood’s (2009) partisanship thesis? In this chapter we ask whether Democrats, independents, and Republicans were equally predisposed to reward Bill Clinton with higher approval ratings in response to the positive performance of the U.S. economy in the late 1990s. If so, this would be evidence supporting the broad performancebased assumptions of the expectations gap thesis as enunciated by Louis Brownlow, that is, the idea that all Americans should give the president credit for good economic performance. An alternative explanation is that the public is divided in its sentiments along partisan lines, with Democrats more likely to approve of the president’s performance and Republicans less likely to do so. Partisan divisions in assessments of the president would have to exist if both Democrats and Republicans had the same perceptions of the state of the economy and their personal finances. If there is no real variation in these perceptions of the economy, then differences in perceptions of the president’s performance would suggest that public expectations are mediated by partisan considerations. In other words, good performance would not be sufficient to satisfy the public expectations of all Americans! This finding would have important implications for how we conceptualize one key aspect of the expectations gap paradigm. It would indicate that expectations are not a constant, but rather that they vary across existing partisan divides. 74 The...