AUTHOR'S NOTE: I would like to thank Robert Erikson for telling me about the SurveyUSA polls and Costas Panagopoulos for his comments on this article.
The Polls: The Coalitional President from a Public Opinion Perspective
Article first published online: 24 AUG 2006
Presidential Studies Quarterly
Volume 36, Issue 3, pages 541–550, September 2006
How to Cite
COHEN, J. E. (2006), The Polls: The Coalitional President from a Public Opinion Perspective. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 36: 541–550. doi: 10.1111/j.1741-5705.2006.02562.x
- Issue published online: 24 AUG 2006
- Article first published online: 24 AUG 2006
Most public opinion research on the president utilizes a national leader perspective, in which the public holds the president accountable for the state of the nation. But the president may also be viewed as a coalition builder in which the executive makes specific appeals to groups or subsets of the population to induce them to join his coalition. Do specific groups hold the president accountable for presidential actions that target these groups? Do specific groups hold the president accountable for presidential policies and their consequences that affect these groups? In this article I test the coalitional hypothesis, which focuses on group-specific responses to the president, using a new data set on state-level presidential approval. Results indicate that, when it comes to the economy, the president is held accountable for both the nation's health and the state's economic performance. However, a presidential visit to a state, an action designed to target mass public support from a state, does not result in increases in presidential approval in the visited state.