Kent Tedin, Brandon Rottinghaus
Department of Political Science

Although scholars have described how legislative efforts to spur bipartisanship fare, we have little knowledge about how president can affect perceptions of bipartisanship with their rhetoric. Using various matched bipartisan and partisan speeches by President Obama and Minority Leader John Boehner, we conduct a large survey experiment to ascertain the president’s ability to affect perceptions of bipartisanship among the public and whether these efforts are undone with progressively more partisan messages from the opposition. The results suggest that if the president’s initial message of bipartisanship is met with bipartisan agreement from the opposition party, approval of the President by all partisan groups increase (Democrats, Republicans and independents). However, if the President’s bipartisan message is met with partisan disagreement from the opposition party, the President’s approval is hurt among both his party and opposition party members, yet the demand for bipartisanship in the legislative process declines and support for a more active legislative presidency increases.