Presidents, Prosperity, and Public Opinion.

A president skillful enough, or fortunate enough, to preside over a healthy economy is rewarded with public support. This paper examines two conceptions of the individual citizen that might underlie this relationship. A president's popularity might decline when economic times are bad because citizens in effect blame him for their personal hardships-the pocketbook citizen hypothesis-or because they see the president as failing to cope adequately with national economic problems, quite apart from the economic dislocations of private life-the sociotropic citizen hypothesis. Across a variety of tests, results from national surveys covering the Nixon, Ford, and Carter presidencies consistently supported the sociotropic hypothesis. The paper concludes by suggesting several promising explanations for the findings, and by exploring their normative implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]