james_nicoll: A trivia question

james_nicoll (

james_nicoll) wrote,
@ 2008-05-12 16:03:00

A trivia question
Something Americans are not very good at is withholding approval for their own elected heads of government. An approval rating close to 30% sounds bad in an American context, down there with the lowest ratings Nixon managed. In a wider context, that rating is practically popular success, at least compared with Brian Mulroney's approval ratings in the early 1990s (11%). The NDP even managed to explore the single-digit approval space, thanks to two simultaneous inept provincial NDP governments.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel appears to have hit lows of about 3% approval. Is that a world record for an elected leader or has someone ever pulled off a 2%, 1% or that Mount Everest of imploding administrations, 0% approval?

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countess_sophia
2008-05-12 08:52 pm UTC (link)

More than one American friend of mine has suggested to me that the reason why even unpopular US rulers never seem to dip below 25-30% is that the head of government is also the Head of State, and a substantial minority of their fellow citizens approve of the president simply because he is the President and for them to not to would feel somehow unpatriotic, perhaps even verging on lese majeste. Considering the quasi monarchical way so many Americans seem to think of their presidents this argument makes sense.

Soph x

(Reply to this) (Thread)

brooksmoses
2008-05-12 08:58 pm UTC (link)

Possibly. My (completely un-backed by statistics-to-hand) guess is that that theory fails on grounds that it's not always the same 25-30%, as could I think be demonstrated by comparing the numbers for Republican and Democratic voters for Republican and Democratic presidents.

Assuming that guess is true, I'd say it's because of an effect very similar to what you describe, except that the President is also the figurehead for his party, and that admitting disapproval of him is tantamount to betraying the party. (And, of course, no matter how bad our party's leader is, the other party's options are worse.)

I dunno. Maybe I'm being too cynical.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

oldsma
2008-05-12 09:12 pm UTC (link)

I had a friend once who was involved in the local Republican party. There was an office once for which they had no candidate, so they did an experiment. They had one of their staffers with a completely generic name (I forget exactly what, something like Stacy Johnson) stand. Stacy did not campaign at all and never took calls from the press. The only thing a voter could know about Stacy was that this person had "R" next to the name on the ballot.

Stacy polled around (IIRC) somewhere in the 25-30% area.

MAO

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	rezendi 2008-05-12 09:19 pm UTC (link)
	This kind of behaviour is not unique to America. I have voted for a party in the past without knowing anything about the person. (Mind you, I also knew it was a foregone conclusion that my candidate would lose, but still.) (Reply to this) (Parent)

	joenotcharles 2008-05-12 10:18 pm UTC (link)
	Yep, that's right at the Crazification Factor (search for "27%" in that page). (Reply to this) (Parent)

redbird
2008-05-12 11:29 pm UTC (link)

That gets you the "I'll vote for anyone endorsed by this party" vote and the "I hate the other candidate" vote. Not quite the same thing, because it could be specific dislike for personal reasons--somewhere out there will be the voter who still resents the candidate for something that happened in high school--dislike of an incumbent and what s/he had or hadn't done while in office, or disliking the other candidate's (actual or perceived*) race or gender.

*Names are not infallible clues to either.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

casaubon
2008-05-13 07:45 am UTC (link)

If the office was so irrelevant that it wasn't worth the party bothering with, why would the voters care who stood? :)

The London Assembly elects 11 of its members from Party lists. i.e. you vote for the party rather than the specific person and the seats are divided up based on percentage of vote. The lists were public, so theoretically you could look up details about the candidates, but if you disliked the person at the top of the party list there was no provision for saying you'd rather skip that person...

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	countess_sophia 2008-05-13 02:15 am UTC (link)
	You make a strong argument. Perhaps both could be true though, there is a certain percentage who will always approve the Head of State and a certain percentage who will always approve a ruler of their own party out of partisan loyalty and between them they produce the solid 25-30% support that an American ruler always gets no matter what they do. Soph (Reply to this) (Parent)

(Anonymous)
2008-05-12 09:00 pm UTC (link)

It seems like it may also have something to do with the "yellow dog" phenomenon, as in "I'd vote Democrat even if they ran a yellow dog against Abraham Lincoln". It's possible that 30% core is the people who approve of their guy because at least he isn't one of them.

Of course, I would have said we had a fair core of yellow dog Conservatives, and 1993 still happened, so what do I know?

- Ken

(Reply to this) (Parent)

genomekelly
2008-05-12 09:00 pm UTC (link)

Americans put up with low approval ratings on their elected heads of government because, unlike you folks with parliamentary forms of government (especially those with multi-party systems dependent upon coalition building), we can't call a vote of no-confidence & hold new general elections at the drop of a hat.

Impeachment & trial as constitutional means of removal don't really work, see R.M. Nixon, W.J. Clinton and A. Johnson for cases. As if that weren't proof enough, for y'all who'd like GWB's head on the impeachment spike consider that his successor would be the Sith Lord of Wyoming; and if you got rid of them both in one pair of impeachments & trials, the successor's successor would have been Dennis Hastert at one point, Nancy Pelosi at another.

So, instead, when a president's approval ratings sink we tend to spank his party in the congressional midterm elections, and vow to throw the bum out at the end of his first term or to deny his party's nominee the White House at the end of the bum's second.

Not that we always succeed in doing any of these.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

	redbird 2008-05-12 11:58 pm UTC (link)
	The question isn't why Americans tolerate low approval ratings in our leaders; it's why the ratings we're tolerating don't go lower than they do. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	zeborahnz 2008-05-13 01:44 am UTC (link)
	If you can't change something, disapproving of it is a waste of emotional energy. I'm thinking something the opposite of the sour grapes effect. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	james_nicoll 2008-05-13 03:31 pm UTC (link)
	If that's true, it seems to predict that right-wingers who think the MSM are a bunch of tree-hugging, gay-approving, wine-sipping communists and that this will always be the case should be resigned to this and therefore rarely complain about it. Is that the case? (Reply to this) (Parent)

	mmcirvin 2008-05-13 02:09 am UTC (link)
	Not that it really disproves your general point, but in Nixon's case it did work. He just resigned instead of playing it out to checkmate. I'd expect that to be the usual pattern if conviction is likely. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	countess_sophia 2008-05-13 02:34 am UTC (link)
	In the post 1830 Westminster system prime ministers rarely get unseated by no confidence votes, it's usually by being dumped by his or her own party concerned about their jobs, party grandees engaging in backstabbing or a PM betting on a dissolution to reinforce their authority and losing the subsequent election. Soph (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	james_nicoll 2008-05-13 03:33 pm UTC (link)
	Don't forget the ever-popular "PM resigns position so that some other sap can take the rap for PM accumulated policy errors and scandals," like John Turner in the 1980s and Kim Campbell in the 1990s. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	maruad 2008-05-12 09:23 pm UTC (link)
	"In a wider context, that rating is practically popular success, at least compared with Brian Mulroney's approval ratings in the early 1990s (11%)." I seem to remember that when the statiscal error was taken into account that his lowest possible rating co-incided with the number of people who believed in bigfoot, alien abductions and that Elvis was still alive (Reply to this) (Thread)

	james_nicoll 2008-05-13 03:11 am UTC (link)
	My memory is that more Canadians thought Elvis was alive than would have voted for BM by the end of his time as PM. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	maruad 2008-05-13 01:21 pm UTC (link)
	Your recollections seem more accurate but mine seem more colourful. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	pauldrye 2008-05-12 09:24 pm UTC (link)
	I found a reference to Paraguayan president González Macchi at 2%: http://www.nuevamayoria.com/english/analysis/fragaarg/ifragaarg191201.htm In retrospect, I'm not surprised that pretty much every one I found under 10% (except the Takeshita government in Japan) was in Latin America. (Reply to this)

	roseembolism 2008-05-12 09:58 pm UTC (link)
	A big part of it is that there is still a substantial minority who buy into the president's platform and think he's doing a good job. This is combined with the very American trait of believing that the media companies are part of a liberal conspiracy and are lying. I wish I had the names of these people. I mean, just IMAGINE the stuff I could sell them. (Reply to this)

	lederhosen 2008-05-12 10:45 pm UTC (link)
	And I thought Brendan Nelson (nominally the .au Opposition Leader) was doing poorly at 9%... (Reply to this)

	ecbatan 2008-05-13 01:43 am UTC (link)
	The likes of Trujillo (can you tell I'm just now reading Junot Diaz's The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao?) did not exactly subject themselves to approval ratings. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	ecbatan 2008-05-13 03:47 am UTC (link)
	Can you tell I'm having a hard time remembering the title of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao? (Reply to this) (Parent)

(Anonymous)
2008-05-13 02:23 am UTC (link)

Another thing to keep in mind is that in the American system, people don't get to be President at all (barring Gerald Ford) unless a substantial number of voters have already expressed strong approval of them (voting for them in a primary against other opponents, or a final election), as opposed to parliamentary systems where people can get onto parliamentary lists with little or no direct approval from the voters.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

james_nicoll
2008-05-13 03:42 pm UTC (link)

It's possible for someone to become Canadian Prime Minister without facing the general electorate, although they will have been elected to some position first. Examples come to mind like Paul Martin (who replaced Chretien), Kim Campbell (who replaced Brian Mulroney), John Turner (who replaced Trudeau), Trudeau (who replaced Lester Pearson). Usually the new PM ends up facing the electorate in fairly short order and quite often they end up out on their ear.

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	nwhyte 2008-05-13 08:17 am UTC (link)
	Shevardnadze was pretty low in the polls before he was thrown out in Georgia - I think certainly down to 3%, which is in any case within the margin of error of zero! (Reply to this) (Thread)

	matgb 2008-05-14 12:14 am UTC (link)
	I'm guessing it's not being measured the same way the UK does it, given Brown's currently on minus 55 and falling... (cough the way things are going, next GE might be a wipeout of the likes of Canada '93 for Labour, a top 150 target seat paper candidacy might be a consideration) (Reply to this) (Parent)

	Re: A trivia question (Anonymous) 2008-05-13 02:47 pm UTC (link)
	The ObSF has to be Beta Colony's president "Steady Freddy" a man so unpopular every mention of him prompts passersby to note that they didn't vote for him Andy (Reply to this)

	womzilla 2008-05-24 06:40 am UTC (link)
	I'm pretty sure I remember reading an article about Olmert some months ago indicating that he did, in fact, have a 0% approval rating. Cheney has that level of approval among black Americans. (Reply to this)

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