Measuring the President's Professional Reputation

Abstract

Professional reputation, unlike other components of Neustadt's presidential power, has received little scholarly attention. The president's professional reputation is the assessment of his performance in office by the Washington community. According to Neustadt, president's professional reputation can be determined by reviewing judgments of his performance by those who collect, synthesize, and disseminate elite opinion. We measure professional reputation based on the length and valence of nearly 3,600 editorials and opinion-editorials in The New York Times from 1961 to 1992. We compare these measures to previous operationalizations of the concept and test for convergent and discriminant criterion validity. This method provides a valid operationalization of Neustadt's concept of professional reputation, thus allowing for its inclusion in more fully specified models of presidential power.