Micro and Macro Level Explanations of the Presidential Expectations Gap

2005

The idea that the public expects more from its presidents than they are able to deliver long has been a mainstay of the presidential literature. When presidential scholars ask whether the expectations gap exists, they generally provide microlevel explanations that focus on the relationships among various presidential characteristics and how these characteristics are perceived by the public. This approach makes sense if expectations are chiefly responsive to perceptions of the Presidency itself.

The Journal of Politics, 1997

Americans' feelings about the performance of Congress range across the spectrum from positive to negative, but tend to be negative. What accounts for supportive or unsupportive orientations toward Congress? The effects of personal attributes like socioeconomic status, or beliefs about the efficacy of congressional processes, account for only part of citizens' evaluations of Congress. We argue that discrepancies between what people expect Congress to be like and what they perceive it actually is like independently affect evaluations of Congress. We measure this "expectation-perception discrepancy" and demonstrate in a multivariate explanatory environment that this discrepancy affects the extent of Americans' favorableness toward Congress, drawing upon data gathered in a 1994 postelection survey (N = 808) conducted in Ohio by the Polimetrics Laboratory for Social and Political Research at Ohio State University. Our argument is elementary. Citizens carry with them expectations, however rudimentary, about political institutions, Congress in particular, and about processes taking place within Congress. Such expectations may develop in the form of fuzzy images of the institution as a whole, arise from very partisan or ideological perspectives, biases, and distortions, focus on particular institutional actions or events, or concern the characteristics or attributes of the institution's members. Citizens' expectations about Congress may develop from specific socialization, perhaps in early life experience, about what Congress should be like. Civics textbook expectations about Congress's constitutional function, its members and their conduct, its representativeness, its accessibility, or its reliability in passing legislation may shape citizens' expectations, forming an image or "prototype" of the congressional ideal. Citizens' perceptions of the congressional reality-what they think Congress

This article explores political trust, delving into its subcomponents and the relationship between them. It is interested in explaining why governmental trust and trust in regulative state institutions are similar in some countries and different in others. It argues that the variation can best be explained by checks on the executive. This is the case because the more restricted the executive, the less regulative state institutions are affected by the fluctuations in governmental trust. When the government cannot encroach upon state institutions, the impartiality and efficacy of regulative institutions are maintained. The less governmental interference to regulative state institutions, the more such institutions will be devoted to the public rather than partisan interests, resulting in a wider gap between state and government trust. The argument is tested through an empirical analysis of a crossnational panel data based on all existing waves of the World Values Survey.

2010

Journal of Trust Research, 2014

To date, the political trust literature has been bifurcated along micro-macro lines. Some scholars have studied differences in political trust across individuals, while others have studied aggregate political trust levels over time. In this paper, I propose a micro-macro model that joins the two. I use the model and data from the 1958-2008 American National Election Studies to examine the effects of incumbent, economic and policy assessments on individual political trust and on political trust over time. The results show that although economic and policy assessments impact individuallevel political trust, they do not explain the more general trend. Assessments of incumbents, however, explain both. I argue that studies of political trust need to pay greater attention to the distinction between effect, mean and compositional changes. Only those predictors that exhibit the latter two can usefully explain why political trust changes over time. The paper concludes with a discussion of the utility of the micromacro approach for the study of political and other forms of trust.

Revista Mexicana De Analisis Politico Y Administracion Publica, 2013

Assumptions that higher levels of trust in government are always beneficial to democracy may be inappropriate, and the extent to which residents of the United States (us) trust government is often underestimated due to common interpretations of public opinion data. Reexamining the widely used American National Election Studies (anes) data, we find that us citizens are more trusting than is generally portrayed and typically have attitudes and behaviors that are healthy for democracy. We also outline shortcomings with the anes trust question. Using an alternative measure of political trust, we demonstrate that the anes question hides important variation in citizens' levels of trust and tends to understate levels of trust. In sum, the often-expressed concern over current levels of political trust in the us is likely misplaced and researchers there and elsewhere should give careful consideration to measuring and interpreting trust.

Journal of Politics, 2003

We analyze the relationship between public approval and presidential success in Congress using time-varying parameter regression methods. Cues from constituency, ideology, and party dominate congressional vote choice, so the effect of public approval of the president is typically marginal. Because the strength of these primary cues varies through time, the effect of public approval on presidential success should also be time varying. Analysis of conflictual roll-call votes from 1953 through 2000 using the time-varying Kalman filter reveals that the effect of public approval on presidential success is marginal and changing through time. These models assume that the time variation is a stochastic process, and finding time-varying relationships may indicate model misspecification. Our theory, however, suggests that this time variation depends on a systematic factor-partisanship. A better specified model that allows systematic parameter variation confirms that the level of partisanship conditions the relationship between public approval and presidential success in Congress.

East European Politics, 2024

People seem to trust the president more than other national political institutions. In the context of semi-presidential regimes, it is plausible that the role of the president being "above party politics" is an explanatory factor behind this pattern. This study challenges the argument by analysing the impact of citizens' party preferences and attitudes towards the political system on trust in president in select CEE countries. The results confirm that trust in president is often context specific and cannot be disassociated from partisan factors. In general, similar patterns are found between trust in president and trust in prime minister.

Although it is generally accepted that political trust is reflective of satisfaction with the performance of the incumbent administration, this is only considered true for White Americans. Because their trust reflects a larger discontent with the political system, Black Americans, it is held, do not respond in the same way in the short term. This argument has yet to be tested with overtime data. Time matters. Not only does the race gap in trust change over time but the impact of partisanship and political winning is, by definition, time-dependent. The results of an analysis of the 1958–2012 American National Election Studies data show that Black Americans and White Americans are equally likely to tie short-term performance to trust in government. However, the relationship between partisanship and political trust and, therefore, system discontent, clearly differs for the two groups. Aggregate models that do not take race-partisan subgroup differences into account will therefore be misleading.

Political Behavior, 1986

Six alternative hypotheses about public responses to "out-of-character" presidential actions were tested in an experiment that manipulated both the president's preexisting policy position (a hawkish or a dovish stance in international affairs) and the nature of his action in an international crisis ~hawkish versus dovish). In addition, subjects themselves were classified as hawks or doves, Approval of the president and of his response to the crisis was a complex function of the policy views of the subject and the consistency of the president's action with his past record. Doves supported presidents and actions that were compatible with their own dovish leanings but resented a dovish president who behaved hawkishly, generally confirming the view that similarity breeds attraction. By contrast, hawks were willing to tolerate dovish behavior if it was undertaken by a hawk, supporting the expectation that out-of-character actions are uniquely capable of disarming would-be opponents. For neither hawkish nor dovish presidents were these findings consistent with the "waffling" interpretation, which holds that inconsistency per se is downgraded. Compared to presidents whose actions were consistent with their previous beliefs, out-of-character presidents were perceived as more changeable, in both positive and negative senses; were believed to have disliked doing what they had done; and were judged to have been relatively uninfluenced by internal causes.