Citizen Oversight of Presidential Performance

The performance of citizens as agents of presidential accountability is both important and understudied. The people are the arbiters of access to and retention of presidential power. They are the de facto anchor of a complex, multiagent presidential accountability system whose members (e.g., Congress, courts, and news media, among others) are also dependent on public support (Buchanan 2013, 33-59). Moreover, citizen judgments underlie presidential job approval, the most-watched statistic in American politics and "a proxy for the chief executive's power to persuade lawmakers, capacity to win re-election and ability to help or hurt in mid-term elections" (Harwood 2010, A15). It therefore matters how, and how well, citizens oversee presidents. Although there has been a significant ongoing effort to assess the general civic competence of voters (e.g., Borgida, Federico, and Sullivan 2009; Campbell et al. 1960; Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996) and some research attention to citizen conceptions of presidential prototypes (Kinder et al. 1980) and to presidential greatness (e.g., Simonton 2008), specific work on how Americans judge presidential performance is comparatively rare. The largest group of studies relies primarily on correlations between presidential performance events and public support scores to explain why presidential approval rises and falls (e.g., Kernell 1978; Mueller 1970, 1973; Ostrom and Simon 1985; Stimson 1976). Ostrom and Simon (1985, 354), for example, find that presidential approval depends upon "the quality of social, economic and international outcomes experienced by the public." One of the most important of these studies is Brody (1991). Building on the earlier work, Brody found that news reports of presidential policy successes and failures were correlated with higher and lower levels, respectively, of Gallup Poll-tested public approval of presidential performance. Brody (1991, 174) also found that "the clearer the results and the more news devoted to a particular topic the less likely it is that public reactions will differ along lines of partisanship." These findings convinced him that citizen oversight of presidential performance was adequate. By "basing rewards and punishments on performance" and by "resisting partisan blandishments "(t)he American people--despite minimal attention to politics, despite a lack of information, and because of the peculiar institutions of American politics--appear to have stumbled on the key" (Brody 1991, 175). Brody's work is the foundation on which the present study builds. Below I update and extend Brody by presenting cross-time interview evidence to show that, while results still matter and citizen partisanship is on the rise, the aggregate complexity of citizen assessments of presidential performance is greater than Brody or his predecessors could discern from inferential evidence alone. Assessing Citizen Competence: A Framework To use interviews to gauge citizen competence, a strategy is required. That used here is a theoretically grounded framework for classifying and interpreting citizen judgments of presidential performance expressed in interviews. The framework is a nine-cell classification scheme, the "Values and Targets" (VT) matrix, depicted in Table 1. It is derived from historical and political science research literature cited below. The matrix is intended as a comprehensive template for organizing, classifying, and interpreting the substance of citizens' evaluative commentary. Do the selected values and targets used to create the nine categories for classifying how Americans judge presidents create the most meaningful categories? Substantively the answer is yes. Effectiveness at problem solving has historically been the core test of presidential competence. And as shown below, the presidential traits and acts seen as helping or hurting presidential efforts to get results have (at infrequent but key moments) been subject to popular approval not just on effectiveness grounds but also on morality and prudence grounds. …