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