Samuel Kernell

Explaining Presidential Popularity: How Ad Hoc Theorizing, Misplaced Emphasis, and Insufficient Care in Measuring One's Variables Refuted Common Sense and Led Conventional Wisdom Down the Path of Anomalies

Within the last ten years a new conventional wisdom has surfaced in political science which tells us that presidents inexorably become less popular over time. Not much else matters. Neither the economy, nor the Vietnam War, not even Watergate seems to have had much independent effect on presidential popularity once time is taken into account. Before embracing these conclusions we need to reconsider the method that produced them. I argue that previous research too willingly accepted time as an explanatory variable, enshrouding it with theoretical meaning. To preserve its explanatory power alternative, substantive variables were shortchanged in their operational definitions and measurement. In this article I reverse the emphasis. Here, time is rejected as an explanatory variable and is employed only as a diagnostic indicator of the adequacy of the equations. A variety of alternative representations of real-world forces such as the economy and war are tested and some considerably improve the time-series correlation between the environment and presidential popularity. With these substantive variables I propose a simpler, if less glamorous, theory of presidential popularity consisting of two hypotheses: first, popularity is related to real events and conditions, and second, that it responds slowly to environmental change. Popularity is then both experiential and incremental. The findings for Presidents Truman through Nixon support this common-sense view. The Korean War (measured by U.S. casualties), the Vietnam War (measured by the number of bombing missions over North Vietnam and the U.S. war dead), the economy (especially six-month changes in consumer prices), Watergate, international “rally” events, and early term surges of approval all contribute independently to short-term fluctuations in presidential popularity. Moreover, as predicted, popularity appears to be autoregressive even when represented by an instrumental variables surrogate measure to minimize serial correlation. When the equations are specified in this way, time proves to be unnecessary in order to explain trends in presidential popularity.

Toward Understanding 19th Century Congressional Careers. Ambition, Competition, and Rotation *

The growing careerism of congressmen at the turn of the century has been widely viewed as a chief cause for the modernization of the House of Representatives. Thus, a prominent concern of recent research in congressional development has been the reasons for career development at that time. In this paper I attempt to distinguish the effects of three contributors to the nineteenth century turnover: competition, rotation, and ambition. After analyzing six decades of nineteenth-century congressional elections, I found that all three variables served to reduce turnover toward the end of the century, but that the decline in voluntary retirement, reflecting political ambition, was the primary contributor to increased membership stability.

Congress and the Presidency as News in the Nineteenth Century

However successful some recent presidents have been in exploiting their newsworthiness to define the national agenda and promote their politics before Congress, the available evidence suggests that presidents have enjoyed an advantage in press coverage over Congress throughout the twentieth century. The research reported here extends the comparative study of news about these institutions back into the early nineteenth century. A content analysis of 3,335 news articles in the Cleveland press for ten selected years from 1820 to 1876 reveals that the president did not always enjoy such an advantage. Rather, news during this era tended to be bifurcated, with presidents receiving most of the election-related reporting and Congress most of the news on the daily affairs of government. Congresss predominance in this latter realm persisted even as the volume of news about national affairs increased sharply in the 1870s. We conclude with the speculation that changes in the pattern of news coverage early in this century reflected the particular character of modernization of Congress and the presidency.

Strategy and Choice in the 1982 Congressional Elections

Common to both political folk wisdom and political science is the idea that the mid-term congressional election is a referendum on the performance of the current administration. The more popular a president and the more successful his policies, the better his party does at the midterm. The presidents party almost invariably loses some congressional seats in off-year elections (since the Civil War the presidents party has added House seats only once—in 1934—though it occasionally picks up Senate seats). But the extent of its losses varies widely (from one to 56 House seats in postwar midterms), depending, so the theory goes, on how the electorate rates the administrations performance. The 1982 congressional elections will, in this view, be a referendum on President Reagans administration and in particular on his economic policies, which have been the focus of political attention since inauguration day. If this is true, then economic conditions prevalent through the spring of 1982 (a potentially devastating combination of deep recession, high unemployment, and high interest rates) and Reagans shaky support in the polls (less than 50 percent approving his performance in all Gallup surveys during the first four months of 1982), portend a Republican disaster of major proportions in the fall. Remarkably, almost no one is seriously predicting anything of the kind. And it may indeed be a mistake to bet on enormous Republican losses—partly, we will argue, because they are not widely anticipated.

The Early Nationalization of Political News In America

When Alexis de Tocqueville toured America in the 1830s, he found Washington occupying a lowly position in the political life of the country. In a footnote, Democracy in America informs the European reader, “America has no great capital city where direct or indirect influence is felt over the whole extent of the country.” Throughout the book, he expands on the effects of this decentralization. And we may fairly suspect that as much as any other, this observation led de Tocqueville to concentrate his inquiry on the performance of democracy in communities across the country.

Rural Free Delivery as a Critical Test of Alternative Models of American Political Development

During roughly the half-century straddling the turn of the twentieth century, America’s national government underwent a dramatic transformation. It proceeded on two fronts, politics and administration. At the beginning of the era, politicians were deeply enmeshed in a system of patronage and graft reflecting their indebtedness to the local and state political parties without whose support their careers would have languished. Local party organizations recruited and sponsored candidates, ran election campaigns, and directed subsequent career moves among its cadre of politicians. In return, these politicians used their offices to stoke the party machine with a steady supply of patronage appointments and government contracts. By the end of the era, a variety of state and national reforms had effectively dismantled the patronage system. The party politician was gradually replaced by a more independent and entrepreneurial kind of elective officeholder, someone who assumed personal responsibility for his own reelection and political advancement. These new-styled politicians did not exist in the 1870s, but by the 1920s they were familiar figures throughout Washington.1 Over this same time period the federal government rapidly evolved both programmatically and organizationally. When the era began, Washington offered few direct services to the citizenry, and these were unreliable and inefficient.2 Administrative routines were honed, less to implement policy, than to process nominees for patronage appointments, to extract donations to the party coffers from a large population of federal workers, and to award contracts to those bidders who had won political clearance. In the bureaucracy as in politics, public service came second to party service. Yet, by the 1920s, hundreds of new federal programs and services had been created. The federal government’s payroll swelled to nearly 600,000 civilian employees, over five times the size of the government sector in the late 1870s. Just as impressively, the federal bureaucracy rationalized organizationally to keep pace with the dramatically rising expectations for its performance. From the cabinet secretary to the field service offices, the bureaucracy reorganized in ways that brought its organizational structure into conformity with its programmatic mission.3 Civil service expanded rapidly, as well. By 1921, over 80 percent of the federal civilian work force was covered and protected by a national merit system. The broad contours and historical significance of these turn-of-the-century trends in the politics and the administration of the federal government have long been acknowledged. Henry Jones Ford’s contemporaneous characterization of the national government as reflecting “the accretion of so much coral rock” emphasizes the growth and layering of new government over old.4 Others have discerned a more Rural Free Delivery as a Critical Test of Alternative Models of American Political Development

Party ballots, reform, and the transformation of America's electoral system

1. An era in need of explanation 2. The puzzle of responsive elections 3. National forces in presidential elections 4. House of Representatives elections 5. Senate indirect and direct elections 6. State legislative elections 7. Gubernatorial elections 8. Dismantling the party-ticket system Appendix: states as bundles of electoral laws, 1840-1940.