Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: One of the most important factors that have been asserted to have an influence on political elections in the United States is Presidential approval. The success of a candidate at every level of government has frequently been considered by scholars to be tied to the fortune of the President, specifically if the President is of the same party. Presidential coattails have actually been demonstrated to be second only to incumbency in most models of elections for Congress as well as those for the Governors of the various states. But are there factors that scholars have not considered when evaluating the role of Presidential approval? Mostly, scholars have controlled for economic conditions and incumbency. But in looking at the other offices in which the President’s evaluations are considered to carry so much weight, how does the approval of the other actors themselves weight in?
The purpose of this paper is to reconsider the effects of Presidential coattails by putting approval to the test: do voters make evaluations of the party, reflecting Presidential approval as a criterion for party success? Or do voters instead vote by making evaluations of candidates, separate from their party evaluations? Can a Governor with high personal popularity overcome a failing President with the same party label?
To investigate these important questions, I rely on time-series data from 1980-2004, using Pooled Cross-Sectional Time-Series analysis. The sample will include election data for over a twenty-five year span and across fifty states. The focus of this essay will specifically be on the approval of the Governor vs. the approval of the President, with a focus being on the candidate for Governor of the President’s party. I will control for the usual suspects, including economic variables from each of the states, incumbency, and national policy mood. The data for this study are readily available, and the model will go further through time and space than any other of its kind. It also provides a fresh look at Presidential approval by testing its effects against what could be one of the most important factors omitted from previous models; approval at other levels.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Trust in the federal government has declined greatly over the last fifty years, and over the past decade citizens have taken direct action to limit the actions of their politicians at both the national and state levels. Might negative feelings about national-level political actors be driving some of the punitive actions taken against state politicians? Research has long shown that governors benefit from a popular President of their party, and recent preliminary research suggests that state legislators may be rewarded when feelings about the U.S. Congress improve. Here we investigate another possible connection between attitudes about national and state actors. Using an augmented set of available public opinion, policy, and institutional measures, we test to see whether gubernatorial approval is affected by feelings about a state’s U.S. Senators. We find that the public’s feelings about their U.S. Senators (junior Senators specifically) are linked to state governor approval. In addition, this study also uncovered some interesting findings concerning state level forces. One of the more interesting findings concerned lame duck governor status. This status alone leads to a substantial decrease in gubernatorial approval. However, when combined with incumbency this effect reverses.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: How people evaluate their executive offices, both at national or local levels, has been a long term research interest in political science. Some scholars claimed that people’s perception of their quality of life should play an important role on affecting executive official’s approval. However, others pointed out that race did influence residence’s satisfaction to government and officials as well.
This paper examines the change of approval rates of Ray Nagin, an African American Major of the city of New Orleans, before and after Hurricane Katrina. In other words, the purpose of this paper is to figure out what factors influenced Nagin’s approval and what difference in public opinion had been made after the city experienced the catastrophe.
By taking advantage of the 2004 and 2006 Quality of Life Survey conducted by the University of New Orleans Survey Research Center, the findings indicates that some items of residence’s perception of quality of life affected the approval to Mayor Nagin and race also play a important role on changing people’s evaluation of their mayor drastically.

Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: Information on the rankings and information on the approval of candidates in an election, though related, are fundamentally different—one cannot be derived from the other. Both kinds of information are important in the determination of social choices. We propose a way of combining them in two hybrid voting systems, preference approval voting (PAV) and fallback voting (FV), that satisfy several desirable properties, including monotonicity. Both systems may give different winners from standard ranking and nonranking voting systems. PAV, especially, encourages candidates to take coherent majoritarian positions, but it is more information-demanding than FV. PAV and FV are manipulable through voters’ contracting or expanding their approval sets, but a 3-candidate dynamic poll model suggests that Condorcet winners, and candidates ranked first or second by the most voters if there is no Condorcet winner, will be favored, though not necessarily in equilibrium.

Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: Recently published SurveyUSA polls provide data to compare partisan evaluations of the job performances of President George W. Bush and the U.S. senators in all fifty states. The comparison shows that Bush is not only a far more polarizing figure than virtually every senator, but that evaluations of the president and the senators, and the degree to which they polarize state electorates, are driven by quite different sets of factors. State partisanship and ideology almost completely determine presidential approval, while senators inspire polarized responses to the extent that they vote like ideologues or party loyalists and take the lead in partisan battles in Washington. Thus senators can and often do avoid polarizing constituents by prudently adopting voting patterns that reflect local political sentiments.