Interest Groups and Presidential Approval

Job approval ratings are important to presidents and scholars of the presidency for a number of reasons. First, presidents view approval as a source of bargaining leverage with Congress (Edwards 2009): Recent scholarship supports this contention (Cohen 2011). Approval, too, has been used to predict the president and his party's prospects in the upcoming elections (Holbrook 2010). Most important for this article are the representational implications of approval. Approval can be thought of as an interelection barometer of public support for the president and his policies. Given the importance of presidential approval, presidents spend a lot of time on activities geared at enhancing and/or preserving their standing with the public, and scholars have invested considerable energy into studying the sources of presidential approval. For the most part, research has centered on the macro sources of presidential approval. Commonly, studies look at temporal movement in national approval, asking such questions as whether changes in economic indicators or major presidential addresses to the nation affect the level and trend in approval (Gronke and Newman 2003, 2009). Cohen (2008, 2010), however, argues that recent changes in the political system, notably the rise in party polarization and the new media, has undermined the effectiveness of a national "going public" strategy (Kernell 2006) for building presidential support. Presidents now supplement going national with a going narrow strategy, in which they target their party base, certain localities, and interest groups. There has been very little research on either the efficacy of the going narrow strategy or the importance of interest groups to presidential support. The lack of attention to interest groups for presidential approval is also somewhat odd given their importance in politics and to the presidency (Baumgartner and Leech 1998; Baumgarmer et al. 2011; Walker 1991). Interest Groups and Presidential Approval This article asks whether interest groups can affect their members' evaluation of the president. Recent research suggest the growing importance of interest group support to presidents, especially as the parties have polarized and the media have fragmented, two trends that limit the ability of presidents to generate support in the public at-large (Cohen 2008, 2010; Holmes 2008). Party polarization reduces the likelihood that opposition party members will support the president (Bond and Fleisher 2001; Jacobson 2007; Newman and Siegle 2010). A fragmented media reduces the size of the audience for presidential communications, simultaneously forcing the president to compete with other media voices for the public's attention (Baum and Kernell 1999; Young and Perkins 2005). As a consequence, presidents have turned to other sources for support, like interest groups. The literature on presidential-interest groups ties, however, focuses primarily on institutional-level linkages, for instance, the willingness of interest groups as organizations to support the president, to coordinate their congressional lobbying efforts with the president's, etc. (Loomis 2009; Peterson 1992; Pika 1991, 1999, 2009). Although knowledge of the institutional linkages between presidents and interest groups is scant, even less is known about the factors associated with the ability of the president to generate support from members of interest groups, or even whether interest group membership is relevant to member opinions about the president. Scholars believe that interest groups may influence opinions on issues: "Citizens' judgments about ... issues rely crucially on the descriptions and rhetorical representations of political elites and other information sources, including the media and interest groups" (Joslyn and Haider-Markel 2002, 690). Several studies suggest a linkage between group membership and approval of the president. For instance, Mueller's (1970) "coalition of minorities" concept hints at a possible linkage between interest groups and presidential approval. …