Bully Pulpit
Cable and the Partisan Polarization of the President's Audience
Samuel Kernell & Laurie Rice
Presidential Studies Quarterly, December 2011, Pages 693-711
Abstract:
Presidents' audiences have been shrinking over time. Prior research suggests that the rise of cable television is to blame. We investigate whether this shrinkage is occurring disproportionately among those the president most needs to persuade - disapprovers of his performance. Analyzing both A. C. Nielsen's audience ratings and self-reports of speech watching from 32 post-speech surveys, we find that as the share of households subscribing to cable has grown, the statistical relationship between the president's approval rating and the percentage watching his televised speeches has strengthened commensurately for each group of party identifiers. Consequently, as presidential approval ratings have polarized during the past two decades, so too has the partisan composition of presidents' audiences, a phenomenon unknown during the broadcast era. Modern presidents thus find themselves increasingly preaching to their party choir and losing the capacity to influence public opinion more broadly.
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John Sosik, William Gentry & Jae Uk Chun
Leadership Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research on upper echelon (i.e., top-level) executives has focused on how character flaws or lapses in ethical judgment lead to detrimental outcomes. Research is lacking that specifically examines whether character strengths that are reflected in the behaviors of top-level executives are related to positive outcomes. Therefore, this study examined behavioral manifestations of the character strengths of integrity, bravery, perspective, and social intelligence as influences on executive performance in the context of top-level executive leadership of for-profit and not-for profit organizations. Using matched-report data from 191 top-level, U.S. executives' direct reports and bosses and board members, this study found positive relationships between direct reports' ratings of executive integrity, bravery, and social intelligence and bosses' and board members' ratings of executive performance. These character strengths each accounted for variance in executive performance above and beyond direct reports' ratings of executives' developing and empowering behaviors and other control variables. Among the character strengths examined, integrity was found to have the most contribution in explaining variance in executive performance via relative weight analysis. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
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Reality at Odds With Perceptions: Narcissistic Leaders and Group Performance
Barbora Nevicka et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although narcissistic individuals are generally perceived as arrogant and overly dominant, they are particularly skilled at radiating an image of a prototypically effective leader. As a result, they tend to emerge as leaders in group settings. Despite people's positive perceptions of narcissists as leaders, it was previously unknown if and how leaders' narcissism is related to the performance of the people they lead. In this study, we used a hidden-profile paradigm to investigate this question and found evidence for discordance between the positive image of narcissists as leaders and the reality of group performance. We hypothesized and found that although narcissistic leaders are perceived as effective because of their displays of authority, a leader's narcissism actually inhibits information exchange between group members and thereby negatively affects group performance. Our findings thus indicate that perceptions and reality can be at odds and have important practical and theoretical implications.
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I'm Not Voting for Her: Polling Discrepancies and Female Candidates
Christopher Stout & Reuben Kline
Political Behavior, September 2011, Pages 479-503
Abstract:
Although there is a large literature on the predictive accuracy of pre-election polls, there is virtually no systematic research examining the role that a candidate's gender plays in polling accuracy. This is a surprising omission given the precipitous growth of female candidates in recent years. Looking at Senate and Gubernatorial candidates from 1989 to 2008 (more than 200 elections in over 40 states), we analyze the accuracy of pre-election polls for almost the complete universe of female candidates and a matched sample of white male cases. We demonstrate that pre-election polls consistently underestimate support for female candidates when compared to white male candidates. Furthermore, our results indicate that this phenomenon - which we dub the Richards Effect, after Ann Richards of Texas - is more common in states which exhibit traits associated with culturally conservative views of gender issues.
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Strategic voting in open primaries: Evidence from Rush Limbaugh's "operation chaos"
Frank Stephenson
Public Choice, September 2011, Pages 445-457
Abstract:
Open primaries create the possibility of strategic crossover voting. On his March 3, 2008 program and subsequent broadcasts, radio personality Rush Limbaugh called on his listeners to extend the Democratic presidential contest by crossing over to vote for Sen. Hillary Clinton. Using voter registration data from North Carolina and election return data from Indiana, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania (states with open, semi-closed, and closed primaries, respectively), I find no evidence of a Limbaugh-motivated switch in political party registration or of a large or statistically significant Limbaugh-motivated increase in voting for Sen. Clinton.
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The President's Questioners: Consequential Attributes of the White House Press Corps
Steven Clayman et al.
International Journal of Press/Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Are members of the White House press corps unified in their treatment of the president at any given time, or does their behavior differ by demographic and professional attributes? This study addresses this issue through multidimensional measurement of the aggressiveness of questions put to nine presidents (1953-2000) in news conferences. In addition to the familiar print/broadcast distinction, three largely unexamined attributes are explored: (1) organizational status (journalists affiliated with prominent vs. marginal news outlets), (2) interpersonal familiarity (frequent vs. infrequent news conference participants), and (3) gender (male vs. female journalists). The results indicate that print/broadcast and organizational status, which received the most attention in previous research, are the least consequential here. By contrast, previously unexamined attributes of familiarity and gender were more consequential. Frequent participants were in some respects more aggressive than infrequent participants. Female journalists were in some respects more aggressive than their male counterparts in the earlier part of the study period, but these differences attenuated over time. Explanations for these differences, which may include processes that govern entry into the press corps and/or subsequent on-the-job factors, are also discussed.
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Barack Obama's "American" Problem: Unhyphenated Americans in the 2008 Elections
Brian Arbour & Jeremy Teigen
Social Science Quarterly, September 2011, Pages 563-587
Objectives: The largest increase of any ancestry group between the 1990 and 2000 Census in the United States were "unhyphenated Americans," those whites who claimed an "American" or no ancestry. This article measures this group's voting habits in the 2008 elections.
Methods: With individual-level attitudinal data and county-level voting data from the 2008 primary and 2000-2008 general elections, the analyses use quantitative methods to estimate unhyphenated Americans' voting behavior.
Results: Evidence indicates a strong rejection of Obama among counties with high proportions of unhyphenated Americans in both the 2008 primary and general elections.
Conclusion: While spatially concentrated in and near Appalachia, unhyphenated Americans' politics are distinctive irrespective of socioeconomic status, religion, and geography, being one of the few groups in which Barack Obama lost votes compared to previous Democratic nominees. Variation in the share of unhyphenated Americans explains more of the difference between 2008 and past elections than variation in the share of African Americans per county.
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The Presidential Authority Problem and the Political Power Trap
Steven Schier
Presidential Studies Quarterly, December 2011, Pages 793-808
Abstract:
Inconstant political support is a central problem for presidents, a problem of political authority. This article provides empirical evidence of the decline of political authority for American presidents over the last seventy years by examining several indicators comprising the related concept of political capital. Declining political capital lies at the core of the political authority problem besetting recent presidents. The evidence of declining political capital presented here reveals that none of Barack Obama's post-1965 predecessors solved the political authority problem. It is the central political challenge confronted by modern presidents and presently by Barack Obama.
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Peter Calcagno & Edward Lopez
Public Choice, forthcoming
Abstract:
Divided government is known to correlate with limited government, but less is understood about the empirical conditions that lead to divided government. This paper estimates the determinants of continuous and categorical measures of divided government in an empirical macro political economy model using 30 years of data from the American states. Voters support more divided government after increased government spending per dollar of tax revenues, but more unified government after worsening incomes and unemployment rates. Only conditional support is found for the strategic-moderating theory (Alesina and Rosenthal in Econometrica 64(6):1311-1341, 1996) that focuses purely on midterm cycles and split-ticket voting absent economic conditions.
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Noah Grand
Poetics, October 2011, Pages 358-379
Abstract:
Prior studies of news are based on a model of individual sources seeking journalists' attention. The potential for one newsmaker's actions to influence how journalists treat other sources has received relatively little attention. Using data from print and television coverage of 105 presidential press conferences from 1981 to 2009, I show that the scheduling of events can influence both journalists' determinations of newsworthiness and the concentration of opinion in their stories. As journalists determine events to be more newsworthy, norms of objectivity and preferences for conflict are triggered, causing journalists to seek out more comments from other sources. When presidents attract major media attention, they create what I call "journalistic coattails" - added opportunities for other sources to get into the news as well. I argue that a broader theory of news production as an organizational field is necessary to understand how journalists often bind newsmakers to their rivals.
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Follow My Eyes: The Gaze of Politicians Reflexively Captures the Gaze of Ingroup Voters
Marco Tullio Liuzza et al.
PLoS ONE, September 2011, e25117
Abstract:
Studies in human and non-human primates indicate that basic socio-cognitive operations are inherently linked to the power of gaze in capturing reflexively the attention of an observer. Although monkey studies indicate that the automatic tendency to follow the gaze of a conspecific is modulated by the leader-follower social status, evidence for such effects in humans is meager. Here, we used a gaze following paradigm where the directional gaze of right- or left-wing Italian political characters could influence the oculomotor behavior of ingroup or outgroup voters. We show that the gaze of Berlusconi, the right-wing leader currently dominating the Italian political landscape, potentiates and inhibits gaze following behavior in ingroup and outgroup voters, respectively. Importantly, the higher the perceived similarity in personality traits between voters and Berlusconi, the stronger the gaze interference effect. Thus, higher-order social variables such as political leadership and affiliation prepotently affect reflexive shifts of attention.
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Jeffrey Harden & Thomas Carsey
Public Choice, forthcoming
Abstract:
Spatial proximity theories of representation focus on the importance of the average views of constituencies in guiding legislators' decisions. However, legislative scholars also identify political parties as central in structuring behavior. We present and test a theory of how legislators might resolve this tension. We propose that heterogeneity in constituent preferences conditions how legislators balance the (sometimes) rival pressures of constituency and party. Specifically, greater preference heterogeneity weakens the impact of the average constituency views on roll-call behavior while strengthening the impact of party. We show support with data from the US Senate and discuss the implications for democratic representation.
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Not All News Is the Same: Protests, Presidents, and the Mass Public Agenda
Corwin Smidt
Public Opinion Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Few studies examine whether the public agenda responds to different types of issue coverage in the same way. After outlining why such differences are likely, this study takes advantage of daily polling data and a rare sequence of news cycles surrounding the issue of gun control to compare how coverage of different political actors and events drives an issue's placement on the public agenda. Coverage generated by the citizen activist group, the Million Mom March, is estimated to have a greater influence on public opinion compared to coverage of a string of school shootings or, finally, President Clinton's campaign. Tests show that group or political biases do not drive these results but, along with evidence from the 2009 health care protests, coverage of citizen demonstrations consistently outperforms presidential news in its association with the mass public agenda. Although elected officials are granted greater access to news media coverage, the findings suggest that such access does not grant a corresponding influence on the public agenda. More generally, it demonstrates that news storyline content has measurable implications for news media agenda setting at the national level.
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Alan Partington
Humor - International Journal of Humor Research, October 2011, Pages 371-398
Abstract:
In this paper, I consider whether the theory of bisociation, the sudden shift from one script (or narrative outline), or language mode or register to another, first developed in relation to joke humor, can help shed light on other forms of laughter-talk (defined as the talk preceding and provoking, intentionally or otherwise, an episode of laughter), particularly that observed in one form of (semi-)spontaneous discourse, namely White House press briefings. Two corpora of briefings transcripts were compiled, one from the Democrat era and one from the subsequent Bush administration, and the laughter bouts, along with their contexts and information on speaker and audience kinesics, were collected and transferred into separate laughter files. Not only was it found that several different forms of bisociation play an important role in briefings laughter-talk, but also that these forms are employed to attempt to achieve an intriguing variety of particular rhetorical argumentative aims, from criticizing the President to threatening an opponent's face to winning audience affiliation. Corpora have only rarely been used to investigate participants' interaction in discourse and still less in studies of laughter-talk or humor interaction. This paper, therefore, is intended as a contribution to the nascent interdisciplinary field of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS).
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Prerogative Power and Executive Branch Czars: President Obama's Signing Statement
Mitchel Sollenberger & Mark Rozell
Presidential Studies Quarterly, December 2011, Pages 819-833
Abstract:
In his April 15, 2011, signing statement President Barack Obama implied that, as president, he may suspend laws, or portions of laws, and that he is not controlled by statutory language that interferes with his ability to receive advice from White House aides or other executive branch officials. This article analyzes the claim that presidents have the prerogative to wall themselves and their aides off from statutory direction and controls, and concludes that there is no constitutional or legal basis for such an understanding of the executive power.
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Political parties and political shirking
Jason DeBacker
Public Choice, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using ADA roll call voting scores for the 1947-2006 period, I find that senators shirk in their last term. The degree of shirking is limited by political parties, which constrain the politician in his last term, and varies by post-Senate career choices. The results highlight the importance of political parties in the repeated game that is electoral politics.
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Winning and Competitiveness as Determinants of Political Support
Shane Singh, Ignacio Lago & André Blais
Social Science Quarterly, September 2011, Pages 695-709
Objectives: This study examines the impact of competitiveness, winning, and ideological congruence on evaluations of democratic principles, institutions, and performance. We posit that winning matters most. Individuals will hold favorable views toward democracy when it produces the outcomes they desire, independent of other contextual factors associated with elections.
Methods: We use cross-sectional multiple regression models to analyze survey data from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Results: We find that the psychological effect of being an election winner at the national level greatly boosts evaluations of democracy, as measured with a host of different indicators, while competitiveness and congruence do not systematically affect these evaluations.
Conclusions: This study sheds light on what factors boost regime support among the populace by sorting out the relative impact of being in a competitive district, winning (at the local and national level), and having a representative with a similar ideological outlook.
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The Swedish Pirate Party and the 2009 European Parliament Election: Protest or Issue Voting?
Gissur Erlingsson & Mikael Persson
Politics, October 2011, Pages 121-128
Abstract:
In the 2009 Swedish European Parliament election, the Pirate Party gained 7.1 per cent of the votes. We evaluate the sudden and unexpected success of the Pirate Party by testing two competing explanations: did voters cast their votes for the party as a protest against the established parties, or can the result be explained by voters' opinions regarding the party's main political issues? Contrary to popular beliefs, empirical evidence indicates that the success of the Pirate Party cannot be explained with reference to protest voting. Rather, the most important reason why individuals voted for the Pirate Party was the importance they ascribed to the party's main political issues.