Crisis Events, Elite Sentiment, and Dynamics of Macro Government Support

• In Event: The Politics of Crises and Disasters

Abstract

Leaders’ approval ratings provide a continuing referendum on their actions, conditioning future decision-making. While we generally understand the general drivers and cyclical dynamics of approval of presidents and prime ministers, we know less about approval under extraordinary circumstances. Existing work does not capture the complexity of the public response to leader performance under the stress of a crisis on the order of the COVID-19 pandemic or prolonged interstate conflicts with ripple effects across many democracies, like the war in Ukraine. During these times, neither cyclical dynamics nor a simple reward-punishment hypothesis – that citizens approve of leaders who perform well and disapprove of those who perform badly – are likely to remain consistent over time.

In this paper we extend and adapt arguments on the drivers of executive approval to test how leader popularity moves during four types of crisis: economic, security, natural disaster, and public health. We argue that elite framing of the severity and sources of crises condition whether the latter will influence popularity.

To test arguments, we pair quarterly time series data on executive approval from over fifty countries across 25 years--provided by the Executive Approval Project--with measures on the presence, severity, and spillover potential of crisis events and with text-based measures of elite sentiment.

Authors

• Ryan Carlin, Georgia State University

• Timothy Hellwig, University at Buffalo

• Will Horne, Clemson University

• Cecilia Martinez-Gallardo, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

• Jonathan Hartlyn, Univ North Carolina, Chapel Hill

• Gregory Love, University of Mississippi

• Matthew Singer, University of Connecticut