Presidential Popularity and Congressional Voting: a Reexamination of Public Opinion as a Source of Influence in Congress

Abstract

IN ORDER to achieve his policy goals, the President must persuade Congress to support his preferences. Richard Neustadt (1960) suggests that the President's task is eased considerably if he is popular with the public. More recent quantitative studies tend to supports Neustadt's conclusions (Edwards 1976, 1977, 1980; Bond and Fleisher 1980). Although the findings of these studies have gained wide acceptance, major conceptual and methodological flaws in the analyses raise doubts about the importance of public opinion as a source of presidential influence in Congress. The purpose of this paper is to reexamine the link between the President's popularity with the public and the success of his policy preferences in Congress using a research design that corrects some of the major problems in previous studies. The paper is divided into four sections. The first section reviews and critiques past research on the relationship between public opinion and presidential success in Congress. The second section describes the data and measures used in our analysis. The third section presents results indicating that the effect of public opinion on presidential success in Congress is more limited than previous work would suggest, while the final section offers conclusions and possible explanations of the limited influence of public opinion on presidential-congressional relations.