Public Opinion Quarterly Advance Access originally published online on September 18, 2007
Public Opinion Quarterly 2007 71(4):511-538; doi:10.1093/poq/nfm033
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Predispositions and Public Support for the President During the War on Terrorism
Address correspondence to Jonathan McDonald Ladd; e-mail: jml89{at}georgetown.edu.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and their aftermath offer a rare opportunity to examine how presidential approval responds to a sudden and severe national security crisis. I utilize the 2000–2002 National Election Studies panel to track change in public attitudes toward George W. Bush over the first two years of his presidency. An advantage of using panel data is that it allows me to go beyond aggregate change in presidential approval to examine how change is related to defense policy predispositions and prior political awareness. I find important differences. Over these two years, those high in political awareness experience priming of their defense predispositions but very little rally effect. In contrast, those low in political awareness experience a rally in support for Bush but very little priming. These results reaffirm that those with different levels of political awareness respond to dramatic messages in distinct ways.
JONATHAN MCDONALD LADD is an assistant professor in the Public Policy Institute and Department of Government, Georgetown University, 3520 Prospect Street, NW, 4th Floor, Washington, DC 20121, USA. For helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper, the author thanks Doug Arnold, Larry Bartels, Shana Gadarian, Martin Gilens, Gabriel Lenz, Tali Mendelberg, and other seminar participants at Princeton University. Any remaining errors are his own.