Policy Attitudes as the Basis for Updating Political Evaluations: The Case of Presidential Assessments

Abstract

The pervasive influence of partisanship on political evaluations is well known and understood. Whether citizens rely on their policy attitudes has received less attention, especially in the context of how people update and revise their evaluations. This paper focuses on presidential assessments and uses panel data covering three presidencies to model the determinants of opinion change. The results indicate that policy attitudes are often as important, and sometimes more important, than party identification for explaining how citizens update their presidential evaluations. Thus issues appear to belong alongside party identification as the basis for how citizens respond to new political information.

Keywords: issues, party identification, presidential assessments