What Determines a Governor's Popularity?

Abstract

Modern American state governorships have great formal policymaking authority, but, like the presidency, they also possess various informal powers to influence policymakers and policymaking. Among the most important of these informal powers is a governor's popularity with the public. Efforts to explain variation in gubernatorial popularity have yielded mixed results, in part because of limited data on governors' approval ratings and underspecified models. We assess the determinants of gubernatorial popularity that fall along both a national-state dimension and an economic-political dimension using the new U.S. Officials Job Approval Ratings dataset. Our results suggest that the proper focus of gubernatorial popularity research should be to distinguish not between its national and state influences but between its economic and political influences, as both national and state unemployment rates are central to explaining public assessments of governors in our models.