Abstract
Current research demonstrates that instances where leaders’ promises and actions are inconsistent leads to lower public approval and support. While there are exceptions to this trend there is no cohesive framework to address this issue. We introduce a conceptualization where public reactions to a leader’s inconsistency is placed in a broader context of public perception of the leader’s overall competency. We claim the public evaluation of the leader is dependent on her competency. And while inconsistency of a particular act can negatively affect public evaluations of the leader, the extent of that effect is conditioned by leaders’ competency. To test this perspective we experimentally manipulate both the competency of the leader as well as her consistency in following up on her promises. Furthermore, we expand the context of inconsistency to include both international and domestic domains. We find both leaders’ competency and inconsistency matter in public approval. Our findings hold across policy domains and levels of issue salience.
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Notes
While we find domestic matters to be more salient, we acknowledge that there are cases where international politics and policies are seen as more salient to the public. For example, international affairs are often more salient to military families.
All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
The appendix contains a detailed exposition of the demographic distribution of the sample by condition.
In the online appendix we include information on the distribution of the participant characteristics across treatment conditions. This suggests that our randomization process was successful.
Replication data and code for all the results presented here can be found on the Political Behavior Dataverse, which can be found at: doi:10.7910/DVN/LK5ARP.
Analysis using ANOVA can be found in the appendix. We also include tables showing the average treatment effect (ATE) for each pair of treatment variables and the significance level on each dependent variable. Overall, these tables show that both consistency and competency have significant ATE’s across domains.
A figure showing the graphical representation of the marginal effect for this interaction can be found in the Online Appendix.
See Levendusky and Horowitz (2012) for an example.
These items were towards the end of the questionnaire and therefore should not affect responses to the dependent variable questions.
Our measure of perceived consistency was measured as a binary variable, where the respondent indicated if the president did what he said he would do by answering “Yes” or “No”.
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Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2015 Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting. The authors thank Michael Tomz, Paul Kellstedt, Joseph Ura, Michael Koch, Michelle Taylor-Robinson, the editor, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.
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Sorek, A.Y., Haglin, K. & Geva, N. In Capable Hands: An Experimental Study of the Effects of Competence and Consistency on Leadership Approval. Polit Behav 40, 659–679 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-017-9417-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-017-9417-5