Political Party Linkages to Presidential Popularity: Assessing the "Coalition of Minorities" Thesis

Abstract

S ince John Mueller (1970) published his pathbreaking article, a huge literature has emerged to assess the impact of political (Sigelman 1979) and economic (Monroe 1984) conditions on presidential popularity. Mueller attributed the decline in presidential popularity to a effect; a president's electoral coalition is unstable because it represents dissimilar minority-voter blocs rather than a true majority mandate. A replication study by James Stimson (1976) employed a curvilinear function, since incumbents showed a general surge of popularity before reelection. Stimson reasoned that people lacking political knowledge and partisanship rally behind a new president based on unrealistic expectations, which eventually give rise to inexorable disillusionment and a decline in presidential popularity. In his critique, Samuel Kernell (1978) countered that popular reactions are experiential and incremental because peace and prosperity are the foundations of presidential popularity. These scholars operate on different assumptions about public opinion. Mueller finds a body politic factionalized into autonomous voter blocs and interest groups; Stimson focuses on that segment of the electorate who are fickle; and Kernell views a public opinion reacting uniformly to presidential leadership. But they do not consider a fourth model of public opinion mobilized by political party identifications. Our research note evaluates this party cleavage model relative to the coalition-of-minorities and consensus models to determine which best explains the trend of presidential popularity over time.