Approval Ratings

Basic Question Format

While versions of the job approval question were asked by George Gallup in the late 1930s, the modern form of the presidential approval question was finally adopted by Gallup in the mid-1940s, according to the Gallup Organization. Since then, the Gallup wording remains unchanged, giving journalists and academics an historic record of public evaluations of their presidents for more than 60 years.

The basic form reads: Do you approve or disapprove of the way (name of president) is handling his job as president? Some polling organizations use slightly different wording, but most have adopted the Gallup language, in part so they can compare the results with Gallup's historic data without having to worry about the effect of wording differences. A variation of the question is frequently used to measure a president's performance in specific domains, as with this trend question asked by The Los Angeles Times: Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling the war on terrorism?

The question's basic format is easily altered to evaluate the performance of other public officials or institutions, such as Congress, individual members of a president's cabinet, or state and local officials, as well as other prominent leaders. It also is a useful measure of public attitudes toward government programs or policies and frequently is used to measure attitudes toward a range of nonpolitical issues, such as this question by USA Today and Gallup: Do you approve or disapprove of marriage between blacks and whites?

Polling organizations often include language that measures the intensity of approval or disapproval, as with this approval question asked in 2005 by the Pew Center for the People and the Press: There is now a new Medicare law that includes some coverage of prescription drug costs. Overall, would you say you strongly approve, approve, disapprove, or strongly disapprove of the way Medicare will now cover prescription drug costs? These strength-of-support measures allow survey respondents to indicate a degree of approval or disapproval, and thus are more sensitive to change in public attitudes. For example, declining public support for elected officials is often first seen as a decline among those who strongly approve of him or her and a comparable increase in those who somewhat support the official, with little or no decline in the overall support.

Presidential Approval Ratings

President George W. Bush has the distinction of having the highest as well as one of the lowest overall job approval ratings in Gallup polls of any president in the modern era. In an ABC survey conducted 4 weeks after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Bush recorded a 92% job approval rating, the highest job performance rating ever achieved by an American president in a major national poll. Other polling organizations also recorded historic highs for Bush in this time period. Coincidentally, Bush's father, George H. W. Bush, achieved the second-highest job approval rating in Gallup surveys, 89%, in February 1991, after the quick Allied victory in the Gulf War. Both numbers stand as striking illustrations of the power of the presidential job rating to measure rally effects in American politics, that is, the tendency of the public to rally behind their leader in times of national crisis. In a survey conducted by The Washington Post and ABC News the week before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, George W. Bush's job approval rating stood at 55%, 35 percentage points below his approval rating in a Post/'ABC survey 2 weeks after the attacks.

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