Presidents and Parties in the Public Mind

Gary C. Jacobson

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780226589343, 9780226589206
• eBook ISBN: 9780226589480
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How is Donald Trump's presidency likely to affect the reputation and popular standing of the Republican Party? Profoundly, according to Gary C. Jacobson. From Harry S. Truman to Barack Obama, every postwar president has powerfully shaped Americans' feelings, positive or negative, about their party. The effect is pervasive, influencing the parties' reputations for competence, their perceived principles, and their appeal as objects of personal identification. It is also enduring, as presidents' successes and failures continue to influence how we see their parties well beyond their time in office.    

With Presidents and Parties in the Public Mind, Gary C. Jacobson draws on survey data from the past seven administrations to show that the expansion of the executive branch in the twentieth century that gave presidents a greater role in national government also gave them an enlarged public presence, magnifying their role as the parties' public voice and face. As American politics has become increasingly nationalized and president-centered over the past few decades, the president's responsibility for the party's image and status has continued to increase dramatically. Jacobson concludes by looking at the most recent presidents' effects on our growing partisan polarization, analyzing Obama's contribution to this process and speculating about Trump's potential for amplifying the widening demographic and cultural divide.
 

THREE

Evaluations of Parties and Party Leaders

The previous chapter documented how feelings about parties and presidents coevolve over the course of electoral careers. This chapter takes a more detailed look at how presidents influence general attitudes toward their parties during their presidencies. First I examine how, during the four most recently completed administrations (G. H. W. Bush through Barack Obama), popular assessments of each president’s performance affected the incidence of favorable or positive opinions of their party generally and of their congressional wings and congressional leaders more specifically. I then take a closer look at the president’s effect on party thermometer ratings across administrations from Jimmy Carter’s through Obama’s using both cross-sectional and panel data. In these analyses I also investigate whether presidential effects vary by party identification and consider the possible influence of the president’s public standing on opinions of the rival party and its leaders.

General Assessments of the Parties

To determine how recent presidents have influenced their parties’ general standing with the public during their administration, I assembled two data sets. The first consists of results from multiple iterations of diverse media-sponsored surveys that have asked both the standard presidential approval question and a question about whether the respondent had a favorable or unfavorable view of each party.1 To control for survey house effects (plainly evident in the data) and minor differences in question wording, I use survey sponsor fixed effects when modeling the relationships between approval and party favorability.2 The second set was assembled from the NBC News / Wall Street Journal polls, which regularly ask respondents to evaluate various leaders and institutions, including the president and the two major parties, as very positive, somewhat positive, neutral, somewhat negative, or very negative. For analytical purposes I combine the proportion of respondents with very or somewhat positive views of the president and of the parties; the results are not sensitive to this choice.

My treatment of these data explicitly assumes that the direction of causation flows from the president’s standing to the party’s standing. The same will be true of many analyses to follow. This assumption should not be controversial. The public holds presidents responsible for the state of the nation; two generations of research have sho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Preface
• one  /  Introduction
• two  /  The Coevolution of Affect toward Presidents and Parties
• three  /  Evaluations of Parties and Party Leaders
• four  /  Assessments of Party Competence
• five  /  Cognitive Views of Parties
• six  /  Party Identification I: Partisan Change
• seven  /  Party Identification II: Generational Imprinting
• eight  /  Elections
• nine  /  Polarized Parties, the 2016 Elections, and the Early Trump Presidency
• ten  /  Conclusion
• Appendix: Data Sources
• References
• Index
• Footnotes