Elite Economic Forecasts, Economic News, Mass Economic Judgments, and Presidential Approval

Nadeau, Richard; Niemi, Richard G.; Fan, David P.; Amato, Timothy

doi:10.2307/2647777

Cited by 119 publications

(120 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…As might be expected, negative economic news turns voters away from the incumbent party, and positive economic news generally leads people to support the incumbent party (Holbrook 2001;Nadeau et al 1999;Shah et al 1999). Of course, it is also plausible from the priming perspective that more economic news encourages economic voting and less economic news discourages it.…”

Section: Economic Newsmentioning

confidence: 91%

Economic Considerations and the 2008 Presidential Election

Holbrook

2009

APSC

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The idea that economic conditions influence election outcomes and voting behavior is hardly novel and would appear to be close to uniformly accepted, especially in the case of American presidential elections. Beginning with the early aggregate studies (Arcelus and Meltzer 1975; Bloom and Price 1975; Kramer 1971; Tufte 1978) and the important individual-level work that followed soon thereafter (Kiewiet 1983; Kinder and Kiewiet 1979, 1981; Fiorina 1981), election scholars have devoted considerable attention to the influence of the economy on voting behavior and election outcomes. Although the findings are many and sometimes disparate, a few general conclusions have emerged: economic voting is incumbency oriented rather than policy oriented (Fiorina 1981; Kiewiet 1983); at the individual level, evaluations of the national economy are more closely tied to vote choice than are evaluations of personal finances (Kiewiet 1983; Kinder and Kiewiet 1979, 1981; Kinder, Adams, and Gronke 1989); and, with the exception of 2000, the incumbent party is habitually returned to office when economic times are good and tossed out when economic times are bad (Campbell and Garand 2000). In short, we know a lot about how the economy influences voters and elections, and it would seem that there are few issues left to resolve.

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Section: Economic Newsmentioning

confidence: 91%

Economic Considerations and the 2008 Presidential Election

Holbrook

2009

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“…Whatever the specific explanation for the rally phenomenon, there is wide agreement nowadays that foreign policy exerts a significant influence on presidential popularity and voting that may rival the influence of the economy, which has received more attention (e.g., MacKuen, Erikson, & Stimson, 1989, 1992Norpoth, 1996;Nadeau et al, 1999;Marra, Ostrom, & Simon, 1990;James & Rioux, 1998). Some studies, which have examined the relationship between economic and foreign policy evaluations, have found that these forces have a roughly equal influence on overall approval (Nickelsburg & Norpoth, 2000;Cohen, 2002).…”

Section: Theoretical Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 98%

Mission Accomplished: The Wartime Election of 2004

Norpoth

Sidman

2007

Polit Behav

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The war in Iraq, so the widely accepted view, hurt the reelection of George W. Bush. We contend, to the contrary, that the war helped him get reelected. First, we show that his victory fits the dominant pattern of wartime elections in American history. Second, we find that Bush's approval ratings benefited from a complex rally where the Iraq war prolonged rather than diminished the 9/11 effect; most Americans affirmed rather than disputed a link between the war in Iraq and the war on terror. Third, while Bush's approval proves sensitive to U.S. casualties in the Iraq war, any damage to his standing prior to the election was mitigated by sufficient popular support for that war. And finally, on Election Day, Bush was able to garner the vote of two critical blocks with favorable feelings about the Iraq war, be it the decision to invade or the prospect of success.

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“…But in this case, the nature of news coverage for economic and character stories differs in an important way. While there is some tendency to emphasize the negative in economic reporting, economic changes in both the negative and positive direction are newsworthy as changes from the status quo (Nadeau, Niemi, Fan, & Amato, 1999). In the case of character, negative stories tend to be more newsworthy than positive, as journalists prefer a critical tone rather than complimentary in order to be perceived as objective (Patterson, 1993).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…The newspaper coding includes a broader range of topics, as not every issue among the presidential headlines can be matched to survey data-the questions are not available. We use the universe of presidential news headlines to avoid excluding important news coverage that is topically similar but not directly related to survey questions.11 The appropriate modeling strategy for presidential approval over time has been debated, but ordinary least squares regression with a lagged dependent variable is considered the conventional approach(Nadeau, Niemi, Fan, & Amato 1999) Newman (2002). applies several different estimation strategies in his study of presidential approval and finds a similar pattern of results across models.…”

mentioning

confidence: 96%

Priming Presidential Approval: The Conditionality of Issue Effects

Kelleher

Wolak

2006

Polit Behav

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Variations in the effectiveness of media priming are traditionally attributed to individual differences in political sophistication and news exposure. We contribute to this literature by considering the degree to which the content of an issue prime drives its use in presidential approval. Using a macro level approach, we combine public opinion data on presidential approval from 1981 to 2000 with content analyses of presidential news coverage to see how media attention affects the way issues are weighted in presidential approval. We find that the effectiveness of issue primes depends on issue content, such that familiar and understandable issues are more likely to be primed than more complex and difficult issues.

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Elite Economic Forecasts, Economic News, Mass Economic Judgments, and Presidential Approval

Cited by 119 publications

References 40 publications

Economic Considerations and the 2008 Presidential Election

Economic Considerations and the 2008 Presidential Election

Mission Accomplished: The Wartime Election of 2004

Priming Presidential Approval: The Conditionality of Issue Effects

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