Newswise — Are unpopular incumbent presidents likely to pander to wrong-headed popular opinions in the hope of winning re-election? The conventional wisdom says yes.
But work by Kenneth Shotts, associate professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, indicates that the conventional wisdom is wrong.
When he and Brandice Canes-Wrone, associate professor of political science at Northwestern University, looked at presidential responsiveness, they found the expected " presidents are more responsive to public opinion when elections are imminent " and the unexpected. "Presidents with approval ratings that are significantly above or below average have the greatest propensity to take unpopular positions," they wrote in a paper that will be published in the American Journal of Political Science in October 2004.
Beyond its scholarly significance, Shotts' carefully nuanced work is important for the light it sheds on the mechanics of decision making in the White House and the House of Representatives, and for developing a definition of political "pandering" that should prove useful during what promises to be one of the dirtiest political campaigns in recent history.
When are presidents the most responsive to public opinion? When re-election time looms, of course. Shotts and Canes-Wrone knew that when they began their study of presidential responsiveness. But neither researcher expected to find that both above-average popularity and below-average popularity make sitting presidents less likely to take citizen opinion into account.
The researchers found this out when they examined 235 budgetary issues that were acted upon between 1972 and 1999 and for which public opinion polling data are available.
Overall, the study showed that the president and the voters agreed only 51 percent of the time, but for three of the issues " health, crime, and Social Security " they agreed more than 90 percent of the time. Agreement is relatively rare on foreign policy issues; the White House and the public agreed 32 percent of the time about defense spending and foreign aid.
This variation suggests that presidents are more likely to take popular positions on the issues that voters are more likely to encounter in their daily lives. Shotts and other researchers call them "doorstep issues."
Drilling deeper, the researchers found that:
Leadership, on the other hand, "is doing what is in [voters'] interest, even if the people disagree," said Shotts. "The bad news is that the electoral system provides an incentive to pander; the good news is that it doesn't happen all of the time."
Other related areas that could be the subject of future research include the effect of snap elections " such as occur in parliamentary systems " on popularity, and the effect of limiting or changing the length of a president's term in office.
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