While there is some debate about the details, most recent research holds that mass media have minimal effects on attitudes and behavior. Even the president, the most recognizable and the most covered political figure in the American political landscape, fails to measurably influence public opinion. Recent research, most notably George Edwards’ work, On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit (2006), shows that presidents are most often unsuccessful in influencing the public’s policy attitudes.
Yet, presidents continue to go public. Why do presidents persist in addressing the public when their efforts do not influence support for their favored policies? Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha and Jeffrey S. Peake set out to resolve this puzzle. The authors propose that, instead of influencing the public’s policy attitudes, presidents influence the public agenda, the issues that the public considers important. These efforts to influence the public agenda occur indirectly through the media, which may or may not choose to cover presidential speeches, and therefore can determine how successful the president is in influencing the public agenda. Moreover, presidents communicate with the public not only to influence the public agenda, but also to respond to public concerns.
What emerges is a nuanced theory about presidential communication. The key prediction is the salience hypothesis: “…when an issue is of little concern to the public or news media, the president is in a strong position to lead the agenda. On the other hand, if an issue is already of high public concern or heavily covered by the news media, then the president is likely to be responsive to the public or media” (pp. 66-67). The authors complicate the picture by considering, with the indirect leadership hypothesis, the intervening role of the media, which may enhance or inhibit presidential attempts to influence the public agenda.
The authors’ most novel contribution is their identification of three presidential communication strategies. The three strategies consist of a focused strategy (a nationally televised speech about an issue), a sustained strategy (consistent presidential attention to a given issue), and a more recently employed strategy of “going local” (an appeal to favorable localities in order to gain media coverage and directly appeal to local publics, as when President George W. Bush campaigned for Social Security reform in areas inclined to support the proposal) (pp. 77 – 78).
The three empirical chapters of the book deal with each of the three presidential strategies. The authors use a variety of time series analyses (for the focused strategy and the sustained strategy) and case studies (for going local) to explore each of the three presidential communication strategies. The chapters each examine the relationship between presidential speeches, the public’s ratings of the “most important problem” facing the nation, and media coverage of the president, along with a host of other conditioning variables, such as presidential popularity, real world events, and other factors. The key results of the empirical chapter on a focused strategy fall in support of the salience hypothesis—that presidents use speeches both to influence the public agenda (when salience is low) and to respond to public concerns (when salience is high). Also, the authors provide evidence that presidents influence media coverage, which in turn influences the public agenda. The results for the chapter on sustained presidential attention are harder to characterize as the authors explore multiple issues, although again there is some evidence of presidential influence on the public agenda. Finally, the empirical chapter on going local provides evidence from three case studies, which the authors cautiously interpret as indicating that presidential efforts to go local do in fact influence the public agenda as well as local and national media coverage.
In moving from a relatively parsimonious set of results from prior work on the failure of presidents to influence public attitudes, the authors have developed a much more complicated theory about presidential communication. This complexity raises a couple of concerns about the book. First, the authors have set out to untangle a complex web of relationships between presidential leadership, media coverage, and the public, along with a host of other variables. Eshbaugh-Soha and Peake could do more to assuage concerns about their efforts to estimate simultaneous relationships between these variables. Each of the statistical models are introduced briefly, and interested readers will have to consult other work, including the authors’ other publications, for technical details. For example, the discussion of instrumental variables used in the analysis of the focused strategy is dealt with briefly in a few sentences (pp. 100- 101). Nonetheless, the authors are forthcoming with potential drawbacks to their approach and are cautious in interpreting the results.
Second, reading the authors’ complex theoretical and empirical work made me curious about the potential of evidence gleaned from some simpler relationships. For example, if, as the authors say, there has been little research on sustained presidential focus on a single issue (p. 122), perhaps it would be worthwhile to explore instances of sustained strategy in a relatively straightforward manner—before exploring more complex relationships, including the role of the media and reciprocal relationships between the public and media agendas and presidential communication.
But ultimately, the study of media effects, even when dealing with the president, is the quest for effects that are small, indirect, and conditional. Presidential power, according to Richard Neustadt’s classic work on the presidency, Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan (1991), is the power to persuade. Eshbaugh-Soha and Peake do much to add to our understanding of this power in influencing the public agenda, and raise a number of challenging questions in the process.
