The Politics of Economic Leadership: The Causes and Consequences of Presidential Rhetoric.
Anderson, William D.
The Politics of Economic Leadership: The Causes and Consequences of
Presidential Rhetoric. By B. Dan Wood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2007. 203 pp.
The rise of the permanent campaign and the centrality of the
economy to a president's electoral fortunes require the president
to be attentive to how he leads on economic matters. B. Dan Wood's
The Politics of Economic Leadership focuses on the president's
economic rhetoric by analyzing its causes and consequences. The book
provides important insights into what motivates presidential rhetoric on
the economy and highlights how the president's rhetoric affects his
public standing and, more broadly, the U.S. economy.
The foundation of Wood's analysis is a meticulously collected
data set that uses all of the public speeches of presidents culled from
the April 1945 through January 2005 volumes of The Public Papers of the
President. Wood collected sentence-level counts of two rhetorical
measures: the number of mentions of the economy ("intensity")
and the difference between positive and negative statements on the
economy ("tone"). These counts are gathered for the general
economy and on more specific economic areas such as unemployment,
inflation, and the federal deficit.
Using these measures first as dependent variables, Wood tests the
hypothesis that the permanent campaign has dramatically increased
presidential use of economic rhetoric. The upper-left panels of Figure
2.1 (p. 27) and Table 2.3 (p. 31), respectively, support that recent
presidents increasingly have focused on the next election and used
economic rhetoric to help that effort. The remaining panels in these
charts suggest that diverse economic problems--such as high inflation or
unemployment--drive presidents generally to speak more frequently and
positively about addressing those problems. The Poisson Autoregressive
Regression (PAR) models in Chapter 3 support this latter finding, while
also suggesting that the president's public standing, the
public's view of the economy, electoral cycles, and the
president's personality are keys to shaping economic rhetoric.
Although the models in Chapter 3 indicate that presidential
personality matters, the dummy variable approach taken to measuring
these presidential personality differences is unsatisfying. Wood
recognizes this, and in Chapter 4 he presents four case studies--of
Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and George W. Bush--to examine how very
different presidents used rhetoric during adverse economic periods. The
cases offer a few nice surprises that run counter to some
characterizations of modern presidents (by, for example, Barber,
Presidential Character, 1992). For example, Ronald Reagan--whom Wood
suggests had a reputation as an "eternal optimist" (p.
61)--used economic rhetoric that paralleled the country's economic
ups and downs, including a surprising pessimism about high unemployment
during the 1982-83 recession (p. 83). However, Jimmy Carter--whose
"malaise" speech "highlighted his allegedly pessimistic
views on energy and the character of the American public" (p.
38)--remained optimistic in the face of high inflation during his term
(pp. 71-72). These findings suggest the value of additional study of how
presidents choose a rhetorical strategy during tough economic times.
Wood's final two empirical chapters treat the president's
tone as a covariate in models of public support for the president
(Chapter 5) and of public spending and business investment (Chapter 6).
To test these causal relationships, Wood uses vector autoregression (VAR) models and Granger causality tests. He finds that the relationship
between the president's rhetorical tone and both his public
standing and the public's economic behavior are direct, indirect,
and cumulative. The indirect relationships in both chapters' models
are mediated by whether or not the American public hears negative
economic news and how the public evaluates the country's economic
health.
Although the data and models in The Politics of Economic Leadership
advance the presidency and public opinion literatures, a few questions
linger in Wood's work. First, it is unclear if Ronald Reagan--by
being a pessimist during adverse economic periods and an optimist during
good times--was exerting more or less rhetorical leadership on the
economy than was the effusive Bill Clinton or the opportunistic George
W. Bush. A stronger definition of what constitutes economic leadership
would have been useful to clarify how the reader should consider the
relationships between presidential style and economic leadership.
Additionally and related, Wood focuses his attention on sentence
counts in presidential speeches. He says little, however, about the
causes and consequences of presidents staying private during periods of
economic adversity. A mention of the work of scholars such as Covington
(Journal of Politics, 1987) and Canes-Wrone (Who Leads Whom, 2005) on
the value of presidential silence, paired with more discussion of the
rhetorical strategies that presidents may consider during periods of
economic adversity and prosperity, would have been valuable.
Finally, Chapters 5 and 6 include a series of controls for dramatic
political events, inertia, and the president's base support. It is
unclear, however, how these variables are measured or what becomes of
them in the VAR models. The reader has little foundation for accepting
Wood's causal assertions on the right-hand side of Figures 5.8 (p.
143) and 6.8 (p. 158) without having this information available in the
text or footnotes.
Still, these concerns are minor. The Politics of Economic
Leadership offers scholars a picture of how the president's
economic rhetoric comes to be. Most importantly, it suggests how the
president can use the economic bully pulpit to affect public opinion and
economic behavior. The book is appropriate for graduate seminars on the
presidency and for quantitative methods courses that wish to include
strong examples of PAR and VAR models. More generally, it should prove
to be a resource for presidency, political psychology, and public
opinion scholars wishing to unpack the direct and indirect causal
relationships that the book identifies.
William D. Anderson
University of South Dakota