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What Determines a Governor's Popularity?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2021

James D. King  and
Jeffrey E. Cohen
James D. King
Affiliation:
University of Wyoming
Jeffrey E. Cohen
Affiliation:
Fordham University
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Abstract

Modern American state governorships have great formal policymaking authority, but, like the presidency, they also possess various informal powers to influence policymakers and policymaking. Among the most important of these informal powers is a governor's popularity with the public. Efforts to explain variation in gubernatorial popularity have yielded mixed results, in part because of limited data on governors' approval ratings and underspecified models. We assess the determinants of gubernatorial popularity that fall along both a national-state dimension and an economic-political dimension using the new U.S. Officials Job Approval Ratings dataset. Our results suggest that the proper focus of gubernatorial popularity research should be to distinguish not between its national and state influences but between its economic and political influences, as both national and state unemployment rates are central to explaining public assessments of governors in our models.

Type
Research Article
Information
State Politics & Policy Quarterly , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , Fall 2005 , pp. 225 - 247
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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