Trust the Party Line

• Published date: 01 November 2006
• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X06290906
• Author: David B. Holian
• Date: 01 November 2006
• Subject Matter: Articles

American Politics Research

Volume 34 Number 6

November 2006 777-802

© 2006 Sage Publications

10.1177/1532673X06290906

http://apr.sagepub.com

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777

Trust the Party Line

Issue Ownership and Presidential

Approval From Reagan to Clinton

David B. Holian

University of North Carolina at Greensboro

This study incorporates the issue-ownership concept into the aggregate presi-

dential approval literature. A content analysis of media coverage from the

Reagan through Clinton administrations of four party-owned issues—Social

Security or Medicare, environmental protection, national defense, and size of

government—demonstrates that when the agenda is dominated by issues on

which the president’s party enjoys credibility, approval increases, controlling for

the typical economic and event variables. Similarly, increased coverage of issues

owned by the opposition party leads to decreased approval, all things equal.

Thus, when the media primes a party-owned issue, the public responds by eval-

uating the president consistent with his credibility on the issue. These relation-

ships are robust across the typical functional forms used to model approval.

Keywords: presidential approval; issue ownership; priming; media coverage

Interested observers of American politics have long been concerned with the

constitutional underpinnings, general nature, and specific applications of

presidential power. Richard Neustadt’s (1960) work remains the seminal state-

ment regarding the president’s position in the political environment. Neustadt

claimed that one way in which the American chief executive could overcome

limited constitutional powers was by drawing on public popularity as a resource

to advance his policy agenda. To Washington elites in the Congress and the

bureaucracy, the president’s ability to get things accomplished would rise and

fall with his personal prestige, which in large measure his public standing

helped determine.

Author’s note: Many thanks to Gerald Wright, Pat Sellers, Michael Wolf, and the three anony-

mous reviewers for their helpful comments on various incarnations of this manuscript. Thanks

also to Alicia Hilton and Jennifer Lusc for their research assistance. Any mistakes,of course, are

the author's. This research was supported in part by a Summer Excellence grant from the

University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

778 American Politics Research

But what is at the heart of public approval? Scholars have demonstrated

that economic performance, dramatic events, and national addresses are all

important, to varying degrees, in determining attitudes regarding the presi-

dent’s job performance. Yet the unfortunate implication of the aggregate-

level approval literature, much of which focuses entirely on the economy

and events, is that the president serves out the term as a captive of the office,

largely dependent on forces outside his control, that move his public stand-

ing. Economic and world events that affect approval ratings, such as the

business cycle, oil shocks, or acts of foreign or domestic terrorism, buffet

the president who then must react to these phenomena. Clearly, economic

forces, over which presidents exert relatively little short-term control, and

unexpected, dramatic events play large and important roles in determining

the president’s public standing at any given time. Thus, presidents may well

be political actors whose fortunes ultimately depend on a good economy or

a bad war.

In the tradition of studies that have examined the importance of the issue

agenda to approval, this article incorporates media coverage of key issues

into the conventional approval model in a straightforward,theoretically rea-

sonable manner. Brody (1991) argues that a complete account of presiden-

tial approval must somehow more fully incorporate media coverage.

Krosnick and Kinder (1990) demonstrate that as the news varies over time,

the public alters its evaluation of the president consistent with the change

in coverage. This study attempts to incorporate media coverage of party-

owned issues into the conventional approval model to suggest that the

media prime the public to evaluate the president positively or negatively,

depending on whether the president or his party enjoy credibility on the

primed issue. In other words, when the media focus on certain key issues

owned by Democrats or Republicans, the public response is to evaluate the

president in light of these issues, all things equal.

The article proceeds in the following manner. The next section discusses

literature pertaining to presidential approval and issue ownership. The third

section covers the operationalization of the variables in this analysis,

including measures of the issue agenda, which are based on a content

analysis spanning 20 years. The fourth section presents and discusses the

findings generated from the conventional approval model, which I estimate

in various ways. The article concludes with a discussion of the research’s

implications.