Defying or deifying the public: The communication and conditional effects of presidential (un)responsiveness.

摘要

The empirical work assessing the degree to which the U.S. political system is responsive tends to either explicitly or implicitly use responsiveness as the only applicable normative criterion. My dissertation departs from this convention by focusing on the different ways people evaluate presidents who are responsive or unresponsive under different circumstances. More specifically, I argue that the effects of presidential responsiveness and unresponsiveness are conditional on contextual factors as well as citizen characteristics. In terms of context, I argue that issue domain matters and, as far as individual characteristics go, I contend that citizens' opinions about representation and about the usefulness and accuracy of public opinion polls are important to approval judgments. Moreover, I offer a novel look into the consequences of (un)responsiveness in terms on the image dimensions people use to evaluate presidents.;To test my hypotheses, I conduct a set of content analyses and an original experiment. The results of the content analyses suggest profound differences in how presidents talk about and journalists report on foreign versus domestic policy, with much more of an emphasis on public opinion and responsiveness on domestic policy. The experimental results show that foreign responsiveness has especially grave consequences for approval, and that opinions about polls and representation matter. Finally, the image priming analysis provides evidence that the trait perceptions that are changed by (un)responsiveness are not necessarily the ones that are subsequently used to evaluate the president, thus suggesting that image priming does not automatically result in image priming.