Why Presidents Persist: A Two-Step Theory of Presidential Leadership

• In Event: Presidential Leadership and Political Time

Abstract

Presidents expend considerable energy going public to build public support for their agendas, yet the direct effects of such efforts are quite limited. If true, what do presidents hope to achieve with frequent public appeals? I theorize that while the direct effects of going public are small, the president is able to lead the public indirectly. In a twist on the classic ``two-step flow'' theory of information transmission, I argue that the president acts as a first mover, leading the attention of other political institutions—especially Congress and the media—who amplify his message to an inattentive public. To provide evidence for this theory, I classify 1.5M presidential statements and congressional floor speeches into topics using a semi-supervised method and match these with measures of media and public issue attention. I then use vector autoregression to trace evolving attention to issues from 1981-2020 and provide evidence of this two-step flow of presidential leadership. I supplement this analysis with casual evidence from a panel experiment conducted during the 2022 State of the Union Address. This research highlights the importance of incorporating mediating political actors and institutions in theories of presidential leadership of the public.

Author

• Benjamin Noble, Washington University in St. Louis