The following chapter has two basic parts to it. First, I briefly sketch a theory that explains why it is reasonable to assume that instrumental religious rhetoric could be of use to a goal oriented president. And, second, I explain the process by which cases were identified and evaluated.
The definition that I adopt of a successful religious rhetorical strategy is as follows: A successful use of instrumental religious rhetoric will improve the public’s opinion of both the president and his objective, improve the president’s media coverage and result in Congress supporting his goals.
A president has three important relationships that he must constantly work to maintain- his relationship with his constituents, his relationship with the press and his relationship with the membership of Congress. If instrumental religious rhetoric “works,” it is reasonable to argue that it should strengthen the president’s ties to each of these three separate, but interconnected, actors. Based on existing research there is solid enough evidence to believe that this may, in fact, be a possibility.
Chart 3.1 provides a visual illustration of the causal pathways by which religious rhetoric might benefit a goal-oriented president. To begin, effective religious rhetoric should impact public opinion, both by boosting a president’s approval ratings as well as by moving opinion on the specific issue in the president’s preferred direction. In fact, these two effects are likely related; when a president is more popular, there is reason to think that his activities will have
69 Presidential Religious Rhetoric Opinion (Approval and Issue Specific) Media Coverage Congressional Action A B C D
more of an impact on the public’s opinion on the issues.
In terms of the effect of rhetoric on presidential approval, a number of scholars have documented that major speeches can improve a president’s standing. Brace and Hinckley (1993) have shown that a major speech occurring in a president’s first term will lead, on average, to a six point bounce in the polls. However, an address falling in a president’s second term will not produce a significant change in approval. A well-known study by Ragsdale (1984) finds a slightly smaller effect. Her analysis of presidential speechmaking from Truman to Carter finds that, controlling for other significant predictors, a major speech will cause a three point increase in a president’s popularity. Exactly how a speech might change a president’s approval is unclear, but Druckman and Holmes (2004) suggest that the mechanism at work might very well be priming. Their research finds that presidential rhetoric is capable of changing the criteria on which the head of state is evaluated, thereby potentially boosting his standing with the public.
In terms of the effect of rhetoric on issue opinion, a scattering of studies argue that a president can through his words persuade the public to support his agenda. For instance, in an early paper Conover and Sigelman (1982) used data collected from an original poll to test the impact President Carter had on opinions on the Iranian hostage crisis. Their analysis confirms that presidents can have great success when it comes to changing minds. At least 40% and as many as 63% of respondents who initially did not approve of a policy changed their minds once President Carter’s endorsement was made clear. Similarly, Meernik and Ault’s (2001) model finds that a major presidential address can boost support for a president’s foreign policies by about six points. In terms of domestic issues, Zaller (1992, 97) comments on data that showed a
dramatic effect for Richard Nixon’s national address on wage and price controls in 1971. Almost overnight support for controls among Republican activists rose 45%, while Democrats remained unaffected. The public as whole grew about 10 points more favorable towards controls in the weeks ahead.
As it is, the effect that a president’s rhetoric can have on issue opinion may very well be circumscribed by their own popularity at the time. Mondak (1993) finds that a well-liked president can transform his popularity into support for his agenda by promoting those ideas at a time when he is riding high in the polls. Specifically, Mondak shows that a presidential source cue produces a positive effect once a president’s approval exceeds 57%. Page, Shapiro and Dempsey (1987) also point to the importance of presidential approval in moderating the effect that presidential speeches might have on public opinion. Their models suggest that popular presidents tend to have a small positive effect on opinion. A popular president could “hammer away” at an issue by means of repeated speeches and statements and in return he can reasonably expect to see a 5 or 10 percentage point change in public opinion over the course of several months. Unpopular presidents, however, are totally out of luck; they can trigger no positive change in opinion at all. In another study, Page and Shapiro (1984) discovered that the effect of a presidential speech increases in tandem with their popularity. More popular presidents can even more effectively lead public opinion. For instance, Franklin Roosevelt received the support of 71% of Americans at the start of 1941. Over the course of two months, FDR made a number of speeches advocating aid to Britain, including a major address on Lend-Lease that he delivered at the Academy Awards. When Gallup surveyed Americans in March, the results showed that
the percentage of Americans willing to help Britain even at the risk of war had risen 7 points, an unusually large effect that the authors attribute to Roosevelt’s efforts.
Hence, if instrumental religious rhetoric is important, it should improve the public’s evaluation of the president, and then either directly or indirectly (through that higher approval) move issue opinion towards the president’s position. Bear in mind that this is both a limited and selective review of the literature. Much research exists that should instead make us question the possible impact of presidential rhetoric. Indeed, that research will be discussed extensively in the conclusion and, ultimately, this study will agree with the pessimists on the other side. But, for now, remember that all I am trying to accomplish is to outline how religious rhetoric might function in theory. And there is ample enough support behind pathway A.
If religious rhetoric is ultimately found to improve the opinion the public holds of a president, then it is logical to expect that Congress will be more favorably disposed to act upon his agenda (B). Admittedly, the literature is a bit mixed in this area as well. Rivers and Rose (1985), for instance, discover that, holding the size of a president’s program constant, a 1% increase in a president’s support in the Gallup poll translates into a 1% increase in the president’s legislative approval rate. Brace and Hinckley (1992, 81) reach almost the same conclusion. They report that presidents will experience 7.5% more Congressional victories for every 10% they rise in the polls. On the other side, however, Collier and Sullivan (1995) fail to document any positive approval effect.
Most likely, the relationship between presidential popularity and legislative support is a contingent one. Canes-Wrone and de Marchi (2002), for example, argue that high approval
ratings can lead to policy influence but only on issues that are both salient and complex. Bond, Fleisher and Wood (2003) posit partisanship, rather than saliency and complexity, as their condition. As partisanship worsens, presidents are less able to capitalize on their high popularity in Congress. Thus presidents from Reagan on have struggled to use their high ratings, when they had them, to their advantage.
It appears somewhat safe to conclude that, at least in certain circumstances, presidential approval and Congressional action are indeed linked. But we also need to avoid getting tangled up in these vagaries of the literature. Neustadt (1960, 86-107) lucidly writes about the
importance of “prestige” to a president. People in and about the Capitol try to gauge how a president is being received and alter their behavior accordingly. Hence, in many cases Neustadt explains how Truman’s low ratings were a hindrance, while Eisenhower’s high ratings a boon. Although his book is not particularly comprehensive, Neustadt’s assumption that a president with high approval ratings will be more successful agrees with what we see when we watch politics taking place in the real world. Members of the government certainly do seem to act more deferentially to a well-liked President, the Democratic reluctance to challenge “Teflon” Ronald Reagan perhaps being an example.
Path B on the diagram, it must be emphasized, also represents issue specific opinion. If instrumental religious rhetoric leads to more public backing for a policy, then we would also expect this to impact Congressional behavior. As it turns out, the U.S. governmental system actually is fairly responsive, all things considered. Early work by Miller and Stokes (1963) made scholars a bit skeptical of the correspondence between opinion and policy. They examined the
correlations between constituency opinion and roll call behavior in the House on social welfare, civil rights and foreign policy issues. Their path analysis, however, showed a very low level of responsiveness. It was up to Erikson (1978) to point out the flaw in their methodology. Miller and Stokes used just one national survey, with only 13 respondents per district, on average. This was hardly large enough to generate reliable estimates of district opinion. Erikson corrected for this flaw by simulating district opinion based on other measurements. His correlations were much more substantial. Since that time, far more scholars have agreed with Erikson than with Miller and Stokes.
To cite a few examples, Bartels (1991) finds that the estimated preferences of individual members for defense spending were strongly related to their constituency’s opinion on a build- up. In fact, this result held for safe seat members as well. On controversial Cold War trade and aid programs, Bailey (2003) shows that opinion also rules. Senators hailing from regions where people were more supportive of aid and military action were shown to be more supportive of foreign assistance. In a wider sense, House members’ roll-call ideology regularly matches the ideological leanings of their district (Erikson and Wright 2000). Moreover, a relationship
between issue opinion and policy definitely is visible in the aggregate. Broad measures of policy activity and public mood frequently move in tandem (Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson 2002). When the public is more conservative, it gets more conservative policy. When the public is more liberal, it gets more liberal policy.
The fact that members of Congress appear to pay close attention to what their
(Mayhew 1974). There are exceptions, for sure (see Jacobs and Shapiro 2000). Other pulls, such as interest groups (Hall and Wayman 1990) and party goals (Cox and McCubbins 1993) do exist. And certain opinions, such as those of voters (Griffin and Newman 2005) or the wealthy (Gilens 2005) might count more than others. But as Burstein (2003, 29) wisely wrote in a review of the opinion-policy literature, “No one believes that public opinion always determines public policy; few believe it never does… What distinguishes those who believe democracy gives citizens genuine control over their government from those who believe it does not, is thus disagreement over matters of degree.”
The next pathway on Chart 3.1 connects instrumental religious rhetoric to the reporting of the press (C). This is defensible, as well, for in multiple settings it has been proved that rhetoric has the power to structure media coverage of the president’s agenda. In an interesting paper, Gershkoff and Kushner (2005) attempt to analyze the consequences of President Bush’s strategy of implicitly linking the Iraq War with the 9/11 attacks. As part of their article, they perform a content analysis of the New York Times coverage of Bush’s major speeches between September 11, 2002 and May 1, 2003, coding articles printed in the two days following each speech. Their sample size is small- just 35 stories- but the results are still telling. In only 12 stories were Democrats quoted and just 9 stories included criticisms casting doubt on Bush’s case. These findings lead the authors to conclude that the press by and large accepted Bush’s arguments.
In another study on the Bush presidency, Coe et al. (2004) focus on the President’s use of binary discourse, themes of good versus evil and security versus peril. Binary themes, the
conflict driven stories and catchy sound-bites. By coding the content of major Bush addresses prior to the Iraq War in addition to editorials from 20 newspapers, the authors are able to show that the editorials frequently echoed the president’s own rhetorical structure.
As usual, there do seem to be limits to the president’s ability to dictate the terms by which the media covers an issue or event. Perhaps, according to Entman (2004), these limits have even increased following the end of the Cold War. News is now, as he calls it, “messier.” Entman proposes a “cascade model” of news coverage of foreign affairs where the
Administration competes with other elites and the media themselves in a contest to define
problems and solutions. In certain scenarios, the President will struggle to prevail. If an issue or event is ambiguous, journalists will have professional motivations that will lead them to want to include the views of the opposition. Or if public opinion is split, other elites will be more likely to challenge the president’s thinking. But even in this competitive model, Entman positions the president as the first and most important actor; power flows both ways, but most frames flow from the White House to elites then to the media and so forth.
Lastly, there seems to be little question about the impact of the media on opinion (D), at least not anymore. In the early days of social science, academics agreed on a so-called “minimal effects” model of media influence. The primitive voting studies of Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet (1944) convinced many people to dismiss the media’s role in political behavior. This perspective has gradually evolved, however, to allow a more nuanced role for the media, a key transition point being the groundbreaking work of Iyengar and Kinder (1987). The experiments
conducted by these two researchers provide strong evidence of the existence of both agenda- setting and priming effects.
Agenda-setting occurs when the problems receiving the most prominent coverage on the news become the problems the viewers consider to be the nation’s most important. In one Iyengar and Kinder experiment, participants initially ranked national defense as the nation’s sixth most important problem. Following exposure to a series of newscasts highlighting inadequacies in the U.S. military, however, those same participants now ranked defense as the country’s second most important problem. The ranking of defense in the control group, which did not see any defense stories, did not change (17-18).
Priming occurs when the media emphasizes the importance of certain matters relative to others, thereby causing viewers to judge political objects on those grounds. In one priming experiment, Iyengar and Kinder randomly assigned their participants to one of three treatments. One group saw stories on unemployment, another on arms control and a third on civil rights. In a post-experiment questionnaire, the participants evaluated Ronald Reagan’s performance on each issue as well as his overall performance as president. The results offered solid proof that priming had occurred. In each of the cases the impact of the issue rating on Reagan’s overall mark more than doubled (67-68).
A third effect the media is believed to have on public opinion is framing. This is the most intrusive of the three. A framing effect occurs when a change in how an issue or event is presented leads to a change in the public’s opinion of it. This happens because many questions can be viewed from different perspectives and which perspective a person adopts will lead them
to weigh certain considerations more heavily than others as they make up their minds (Chong and Druckman 2007, 104-106). If the question of whether gay and lesbian partnerships should be legally recognized is framed as a matter of special rights or as one of equal rights, for
example, will influence how an individual responds (Price, Nir and Cappella 2005). Likewise, if a racist rally is framed as a matter of free speech instead of as a disruption of public order, respondents will express more toleration for it (Nelson, Clawson and Oxley 1997) and so on.
Note that the diagram does not show pathways directly connecting rhetoric to Congress or the media to Congress. It may be questionable to presume such linkages exist. The truth is that Congress is increasingly independent these days. Edwards (1989) offers a good deal of evidence to support the point that presidential influence over Congress is quite bounded. Mainly, Edwards works with a dataset of CQ support indices as he assesses the importance of the various different resources presidents have to work with, things like approval, party ties and leadership skills. If a president has a good amount of one of these resources, does he draw more
Congressional support? The chapter on skills is illuminating. Here, Edwards shows that a president reputed to be a wizard of Congressional leadership, “master of the Senate” Lyndon Johnson, was surprisingly outperformed by the disinterested Kennedy. Overall, Edwards argues that the president can only lead Congress “at the margins.”
In their own significant study of presidential-Congressional relations, Bond and Fleisher (1990) agree. Taking roll-call votes as the unit of analysis, the two men show that presidency- centered explanations of presidential success (approval and skill) explain much less than
Congressional-centered explanations (party and ideology). From their view, presidential success is a function of variables outside of the president’s control.
There are many reasons that can account for the insulation of Congress from media and presidential pressure. For one, the incumbency advantage has grown steadily over time (e.g. Cox and Katz 1996; Erikson 1971; Levitt and Wolfram 1997; Mayhew 1974). In between 1946 and 2006, 92.4% of House incumbents won re-election. In the Senate, that number is 79.0%. In some years, almost no sitting members go down to defeat; in both the 1998 and 2000 House races, 99% of representatives were re-elected (Jacobson 2009, 28-30). Plus, in a related
development, partisan gerrymandering has reduced the number of potentially competitive seats to begin with. Many Representatives and Senators need not fear a serious challenge absent a scandal. Furthermore, the explosive growth of PACs and other sources of contributions have made it more feasible for candidates to raise their own funding without reliance on party leaders (Sabato 1984). This reality undercuts the willingness of any member to kowtow to the president. What does he have to threaten them with? As such, it might be a bit naïve to believe that an inspiring presidential speech would directly result in Congressional action.
Still, as discussed above, Congress does, at least some of the time, react and respond to public opinion. That is something they do have to worry about. Consequently, members spend a lot of their days and nights back home in their districts sounding out their constituents and
developing persuasive ways of explaining their actions to them (Fenno 1978). Opinion, therefore, is the crucial part of this overall conceptualization. Rhetoric might be able to
press coverage, which then will have beneficial effects on the polls, which then will force