Public support for Latin American presidents: The cyclical model in comparative perspective

Abstract

What characterizes the dynamics of presidential popularity? Research based on the United States of America finds popularity exhibits an almost law-like cyclicality over a president’s term: high post-election “honeymoon” approval rates deteriorate before experiencing an end-of-term boost as new elections approach. We contend that cyclical approval dynamics are not specific to the USA, but rather characteristic of presidential systems more generally, despite heterogeneity in their socio-economic and political contexts. Testing this proposition requires overcoming a key empirical problem: lack of comparable data. We do so by employing time-series inputs from 324 opinion surveys from a new publicly available database—the Executive Approval Database 1.0—to craft quarterly measures of popularity across 18 Latin American contemporary presidential democracies. Our analysis strongly confirms the cyclical approval model for the region. The conclusion identifies avenues for future research on the relationships across approval, presidentialism, and electoral, institutional, and socio-economic factors afforded by the new data resource we present here.

Introducción Número Especial: OUTLIERS OF PRESIDENTIAL APPROVAL: DYNAMICS, LEVELS, AND RATES

“…Conceptually, sus-tained and high popularity is not the only way popularity can deviate from the typical cyclical dynamic. As it turns out, although approval dynamics in Latin America look very similar on average to the pattern Mueller and others found for the U.S., recent research reveals a number of presidencies that buck this trend in a variety of ways (Carlin, Love, and Martínez-Gallardo 2015a;Carlin et al, 2018). In this special issue we describe and examine a handful of these outlier cases.…”

“…The EAD covers 140 presidential administrations in 18 Latin American countries from the late 1970s to the second quarter of 2016. 4 A recent study by Carlin, Hartlyn, Hellwig, Love, Martínez-Gallardo and Singer (2018) uses EAD 1.0 to analyze approval dynamics in Latin America and finds striking similarities between presidential approval in the region and in the world's longest-standing presidential democracy, the United States (Brace and Hinckley, 1992;Gronke and Newman, 2003;Mueller, 1970;Stimson, 1976). Like their counterparts in the United States, Latin American presidents exhibit strong cyclical dynamics: approval rises after the presidential election, remains elevated during a honey-moon period of less than one year, then inevitably falls until it recovers as new elections approach.…”

“…Until recently, limitations on cross-nationally comparative measures of presidential approval had precluded anything but a piecemeal understanding of the dynamics of presidential approval in Latin America. The introduction of the Executive Approval Database (EAD) 1.0 (Carlin, Hartlyn, Hellwig, Love, Martínez-Gallardo and Singer, 2016), however, has helped overcome most of these limitations.…”

“…Pollsters and scholars throughout the Americas have studied presidential approval for decades. Only recently, however, has a "typical" approval dynamic -a honeymoon that decays after a few quarters, before recovering as a new election approaches-been identified in both the United States and in Latin America (Carlin et al, 2018). Such a pattern hints at a degree of determinism by which presidents are destined to lose support over the course of their administrations and only partially recover it towards the end.…”

Modeling Dynamic Comparative Public Opinion

“…In recent years, there have even been applications of Stimson's dyad-ratios method to each of many countries. Carlin et al (2018), for example, generate time series of presidential approval in eighteen Latin American countries, and Guinaudeau and Schnatterer (2019) generate annual measures of attitudes toward European integration in the countries of the European Union. A shortcoming of this approach, however, is that because each country's series is estimated separately, the results are not assured to be fully comparable across countries.…”