What drives popular support for political executives? Compared to normal times, we know little about how the public responds to executives in extraordinary circumstances, and we know even less about similarities and differences across crisis events. While a calculating public may sanction incumbents for adverse events, the unexpected nature of many crises has the potential to increase leaders’ approval ratings. Based on time series analyses of executive approval from 35 countries across 25 years and drawing on an original Crisis Events Dataset, we show that the strength of rallies corresponds to crises’ degree of plausible exogeneity and to whether their resolution requires concentrated action by the government. Crises in three domains – security, the environment, and public health – tend to produce rallies rather than reprimands, while economic shocks yield no direct effect on approval. Lastly, we find that institutional features are less important in predicting approval during crises than they are in normal times. By demonstrating crises’ potential to upend the mechanisms of political accountability, our findings lay a foundation for further inquiry into how political context matters for public opinion in extraordinary times.

Populists emerge when distrust of state institutions or dissatisfaction with democracy convince voters that claims about conspiring elites blocking the general will are valid. We propose that these dynamics change when populists are incumbents; once they command institutions, their sustained support becomes contingent upon trust in the new institutional order, and they are held accountable for making people think democracy is working well. Newly collected data on party populism and survey data from Latin America show that support for populist parties in the region is conditioned by satisfaction with democracy as well as the incumbency status of populists. Dissatisfied voters support populist opposition parties, but support for populist incumbents is higher among those satisfied with democracy and its institutions. While democratic deficits and poor governance provide openings for populists, populists are held accountable for institutional outcomes.

Does the type of democratic regime matter for public evaluations of leaders? We argue two characteristics intrinsic to presidential and parliamentary regimes lead to divergent patterns of executive approval. For presidents, direct elections foster more personal leader-voter linkages; for prime ministers, dependence on the legislature for survival contributes to more institutionalized party systems. These two mechanisms should generate higher approval at the outset of a term-larger honeymoons- for presidents than for prime ministers, but also more rapid decline. Analyses of data from 40 countries produce evidence consistent with these constitutionally-based distinctions. Yet we uncover important within-regime differences. Within presidential systems, approval patterns vary along with paths to power-first-election versus re-election, and elected versus unelected. Within parliamentarism, honeymoons are greater for prime ministers overseeing single-party majoritarian governments. Study findings advance long-standing debates about the relative merits of presidential and parliamentary systems-particularly the tradeoff between democratic responsiveness and stability.

Despite governors' crucial roles in shaping important policies, including abortion, education, and infrastructure, forecasters have paid little attention to gubernatorial elections. We posit that institutional idiosyncrasies and lack of public opinion data have exacerbated the classic problem facing all election forecasts: there are too many predictors and too few cases, leading to overfitting. To address these problems, we combine new governor and state-level presidential approval data with a machine-learning approach, LASSO, for variable selection. LASSO examines numerous variables but retains only those that substantively improve model performance. Results demonstrate the efficacy of gubernatorial and presidential approval ratings measured two quarters preelection in predicting both incumbent-party vote share and election winners in out-of-sample predictions. For 2022, our approach outperformed the Cook Political Report's Partisan Voting Index and compared well with 538's Election Day prediction. For 2024, our LASSO-Popularity model predictions indicate that it will likely be a difficult year for Democrats in gubernatorial contests.

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This article introduces the State Executive Approval Database, a dataset of gubernatorial approval ratings that updates and adds to data previously collected by Beyle et al. In addition to the survey marginals, the dataset presents continuous quarterly and annual measures of the latent level of governor approval that are amenable for time series analysis. After evaluating how survey data availability varies across states and over time, I use the data to evaluate whether governors receive a honeymoon. While new governors do not have higher than expected levels of approval, the public expresses comparatively low levels of disapproval for new governors. This honeymoon is largely restricted to their first quarter in office and only occurs when they are elected to their first term. Governors who take office after their predecessor resigned get a slightly longer and more sustained reprieve from disapproval. Governor approval is also significantly shaped by unemployment levels in their state. These data will provide scholars with new opportunities to study accountability and representation at the state level.

Democracy is weakened when citizens and elites do not criticize actions or actors that undermine its principles. Yet this study documents a widespread pattern of partisan rationalization in how elites and the public evaluate democratic performance in Latin America. Survey data show that those whose party controls the presidency consistently express positive evaluations of the current state of democratic competition and institutions even when democracy in their country is weak. This pattern emerges in both mass survey data and among elected elites. These data have a worrying implication: if only the political opposition is willing to publicly acknowledge and sound the alarm when democracy is under attack, public pressure to protect democracy is likely to be dramatically reduced.

Abstract Understanding the dynamics of the public’s response to the economy requires time-series measures. Collecting data over sufficient time periods and across varied national contexts, however, presents several conceptual and practical challenges. This chapter discusses how the Executive Approval Database addresses these challenges. The authors compare approval ratings to other commonly used indicators of popular support for leaders, such as trust, vote intentions, and past vote shares. They then describe how the Executive Approval Project generates estimates of approval ratings for presidents, prime ministers, and governments. They identify and address conceptual, methodological, and measurement problems and explain how these address issues of reliability and validity. The chapter closes by discussing the properties of the dataset and the specific countries examined in this volume.

Life in the Political Machine: Dominant Party Enclaves and the Citizens They Produce. By Jonathan T. Hiskey and Mason W. Moseley. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 282p. $74.00 cloth. - Volume 20 Issue 1

Leaders are normally held accountable for economic outcomes. Yet accountability for the economy may weaken when other issues compete for the public’s attention. I posit that during the COVID-19 crisis, the public paid less attention to how leaders managed the economy and focused instead on how they managed the disease. I test this hypothesis using a time-series dataset of gubernatorial approval in 46 states based on 10,000 measures of governor popularity. While governor approval was strongly correlated with unemployment levels before COVID-19, governors were not punished for increasing unemployment during the crisis. Instead, governors were rewarded for enacting stringent policies early and then were held accountable for preventing COVID-19 deaths. Individual-level data shows, however, that Republicans diverged from the rest of the public and did not hold governors accountable for lockdown policies or for death rates. The results show the public’s issue agenda is not constant.

A robust economy is assumed to bolster leaders' standing. This ignores how benefits of growth are distributed. Extending the partisan models of economic voting, we theorize executives are more likely rewarded when gains from growth go to their constituents. Analyses of presidential approval in 18 Latin American countries support our pro-constituency model of accountability. When economic inequality is high, growth concentrates among the rich, and approval of right-of-center presidents is higher. Leftist presidents benefit from growth when gains are more equally distributed. Further analyses show growth and inequality inform perceptions of personal finances differently based on wealth, providing a micro-mechanism behind the aggregate findings. Study results imply that the economy is not purely a valence issue, but also a position issue.

Public evaluations of the economy are key for understanding how citizens develop policy opinions and monitor government performance. But what drives economic evaluations? In this article, we argue the context in which information about the economy is distributed shapes economic perceptions. In high-quality information environments-where policies are transparent, the media is free, and political opposition is robust-mass perceptions closely track economic conditions. In contrast, compromised information environments provide openings for political manipulation, leading perceptions to deviate from business cycle fluctuations. We test our argument with unique data from eight Latin American countries. Results show restrictions on access to information distort the public's view of economic performance. The ability of voters to sanction governments is stronger when democratic institutions and the media protect citizens' access to independent, unbiased information. Our findings highlight the importance of accurate evaluations of the economy for government accountability and democratic responsiveness.

Economic voting models usually assume that the economy is usually salient to the public, especially during a recession, yet the public's attention to the economy is likely to wane when other, more pressing issues are salient. This analysis tests whether health outcomes during the pandemic pushed the economy off the public's agenda. Cross-sectional survey data from July 2020 show that individuals who experienced a personal economic setback during the first few months of the pandemic did not significantly differ in their evaluations of President Trump from those whose finances had not been similarly affected. Instead, presidential approval was lower among those who had gotten sick/knew someone who had gotten sick or who were afraid of getting sick. Time series analyses confirm the economy's importance has diminished; President Trump's approval ratings were less strongly connected to economic outcomes in the post-pandemic period than they were in the first three years he was in office. In the context of a health emergency, the public seems to value minimizing health threats, not limiting the economic fallout from the pandemic and thus the dynamics underlying presidential approval during the pandemic differ from normal times and previous crises.

While political accountability requires that voters can form an accurate picture of government performance, public evaluations of government performance in established democracies are often distorted by partisan considerations. We test whether the same factors bias evaluations of government performance in a new democracy where partisanship is less stable and defined. This analysis estimates individual-level models of retrospective national economic evaluations in South Korea’s 2017 presidential election. South Korea has unstable party politics, low levels of party institutionalization, and high levels of public distrust in political parties. Yet even in this context we find that voters’ economic evaluations are significantly affected by political loyalties such as party identification. This endogeneity is sufficiently large that it results in aggregate consumer evaluations of the economy that systematically vary across regions depending upon the relationship of the president to that region. The findings confirm that party identification shapes citizen opinions even in a context where its effect would likely be weak.

Abstract Voter choices in Latin America have structural roots that are similar to what is observed in other regions, but these structures are weaker and more fluid than in more established democracies. In particular, while cleavages emerge in the average Latin American country and voters’ choices vary across demographic traits, issues, ideologies, and partisanship, these cleavages are weaker than in Western Europe and the United States. These cleavages are particularly weak in countries where parties do not take ideologically distinct positions from each other and instead emphasize clientelism, which suggests that the overall weakness of these cleavages in the hemisphere reflects the weak commitment of political parties to programmatic competition. Elections in Latin America are strongly shaped by government performance, especially economic trends, but these forms of accountability are weakened in countries where the party system makes it hard to identify the degree to which any specific party is able to dominate the policy process or where identifying a credible alternative to the incumbent is difficult. Thus, while voters are trying to use elections to hold politicians accountable and to ensure that their policy preferences are represented, the weaknesses of Latin America’s party systems often make this difficult.

ABSTRACT The association between how citizens perceive economic performance, insecurity, or corruption and how they evaluate the president varies systematically across Latin American countries and within them over time. In particular, while presidential popularity reflects these outcomes in the average Latin American country, survey data from 2006–17 confirm that the connection between government performance and presidential approval is generally stronger when unfragmented party systems or single-party majority governments make assessments of political responsibility easier. While these results suggest that the region’s citizens do not blindly blame the president for outcomes where political responsibility should be shared, they also remind us that there are many countries in the region where fragmented party systems weaken the conditions for effective political accountability.

Noam Lupu, Virginia Oliveros, and Luis Schiumerini, eds., Campaigns and Voters in Developing Democracies: Argentina in Comparative Perspective. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. Figures, tables, bibliography, index, 304 pp.; hardcover 64.95. - Volume 62 Issue 2

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