August 2004

When Do Presidents Ignore Public Will?

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 Business School, indicates that the conventional wisdom is wrong.

When Shotts and Brandice Canes-Wrone, associate professor of political science at Northwestern University, looked at presidential responsiveness over time, 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.

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 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 well above-average popularity and well below-average popularity make sitting presidents less likely to take citizen opinion into account.

The researchers discovered this 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:

When the next election is distant, the likelihood that the president chooses a popular policy is unrelated to his public approval.
When the next election is soon and the president's popularity is below average (an approval rating below 50 percent), the likelihood of the president choosing a popular policy increases as the president's approval increases. An unpopular president can only win re-election by achieving a major policy success. He therefore has an electoral incentive to choose the policy he believes is correct, even if it is unpopular.
When the next election is soon and the president's popularity is above average (60 percent or greater), the likelihood of the president choosing a popular policy decreases as the president's approval increases. Choosing an unpopular policy hurts his popularity a bit, but not enough to cost him the election, Shotts explains. Therefore, the president is likely to choose the option he believes is likely to produce a good outcome, even if voters prefer a different policy.
Presidents of average popularity tend to be the most responsive to public opinion when an election looms, "even if he believes it is not in their [the voters'] best interest," and that, says Shotts, is pandering.

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.

—BILL SNYDER

Save the Biggest Bribes for Television

When Do Presidents Ignore Pubic Will?

Big Banks Can Expedite Emerging Markets

Discount Tickets Star on Broadway

More Ideas from the Business School's Faculty

Faculty Publications

When Do Presidents Ignore Public Will?

Further Reading