Rethinking Public Appeals: Experimental Evidence on Presidential Performances

William G. Howell, Ethan Porter and Thomas J. Wood

Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy, 2020, vol. 1, issue 1, 137-158

Abstract: While scholars have traditionally evaluated the influence of presidential appeals on approval and policy preferences, we investigate a different site of possible effects: on the public's evaluations of whether the president represents the best interests of the country, embodies national values, and fulfills the essential obligations of his office — that is, whether he is presidential. We construct a novel presidentialism scale, which we show to be meaningfully distinct from other measures of perceptions of the president. Across four experiments conducted during the Trump presidency, we recover consistently positive and substantively large effects. Members of the public randomly encouraged to watch Trump's Inaugural Address were more likely to say that he fulfills the duties, expectations, and norms of his office. Though these effects attenuated in magnitude, they remained discernible in every experiment we conducted. We find no evidence that Trump's addresses changed people's policy views. Our findings point toward new ways of assessing the character and significance of presidential appeals.

Keywords: Public appeals; president; performance; public opinion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/112.00000002 (application/xml)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:now:jnlpip:112.00000002

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy from now publishers
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucy Wiseman ().