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American Governors and their Constituents: The Relationship between Gubernatorial Personality and Public Approval

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2021

Jay Barth  and
Margaret R. Ferguson
Jay Barth
Affiliation:
Hendrix College
Margaret R. Ferguson
Affiliation:
Indiana University at Indianapolis
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Abstract

Public approval is an important tool for chief executives. It helps predict their re-election success and it may translate into greater legislative and administrative policy success. Does a governor's personality influence his or her public approval? We address this question by examining the effects of three gubernatorial motives—affiliation-intimacy, achievement, and power—on public approval. We hypothesize that governors who are especially motivated by affiliation-intimacy will be more successful with the public. However, we find that governors motivated by a desire for power have greater public approval, while the affiliation-intimacy motive is unrelated to approval. Furthermore, the achievement motive is negatively related to approval in our data. We contrast these results with our earlier findings that a combination of power and achievement motives leads to gubernatorial success in the legislative arena. It appears that personality is important in determining gubernatorial success with both the public and the legislature, but in decidedly different ways.

Type
Research Article
Information
State Politics & Policy Quarterly , Volume 2 , Issue 3 , Fall 2002 , pp. 268 - 282
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association, 2002

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