Presidential approval has served as a focal point of scholarly research on the public presidency since the advent of modern polling. Because the question has been asked routinely and in almost the same form for decades, job-approval ratings serve as one of the most important metrics of a president’s political capital. However, the job-approval question fails to capture the full nuance of how Americans assess presidents’ performance in office. To be sure, Americans want competent managers who are able to handle the competing demands of the job with aplomb. But they also thirst for something more: leadership.

What is presidential leadership? Perhaps more so than any election in recent memory, the 2016 presidential race between Hillary and Clinton and Donald Trump was almost devoid of serious discussions of policy and instead focused squarely on questions of leadership. And yet, despite the frequency with which it is invoked, presidential leadership remains a protean, almost inscrutable, concept. In this important study, Jeffrey Cohen rescues the term from the often vacuous invocations of politicians and pundits, and seeks to uncover the essence of public perceptions of presidential leadership. Marshaling a wealth of empirical data at both the aggregate and individual levels, Cohen’s Presidential Leadership in Public Opinion is one of the first systematic assessments that examines what drives Americans’ perceptions of presidential leadership and how those perceptions have ripple effects across our political system. In so doing, The book charts a bold new course for scholars of the public presidency.

Cohen argues that Americans evaluate presidential leadership along two primary dimensions. First, Americans want leaders who exhibit strength. Compassion, understanding, and other qualities are all desirable; however, strength is the true sine qua non when assessing inhabitants of the Oval Office. Second, Americans want presidents who are broadly representative and reflect the interests and priorities of their national constituency. They want presidents who eschew the ideological extremism that increasingly permeates our body politic.

One of the book’s most provocative arguments is that there is an inherent trade-off between strength and representation. Presidents can demonstrate strength and resolve in many ways. However, Cohen argues, a core element of presidential strength is the president’s success rate on roll call votes in Congress. The media pay significant attention to presidential—congressional interactions over legislation, and transmit considerable information about presidential legislative success to average citizens. Moreover, Cohen demonstrates empirically that roll call success rates are strong and significant predictors of public perceptions of presidential strength. Success in Congress, however, is largely a function of the strength of the president’s party in Congress. When presidential copartisans control the legislature, presidents tend to win a high percentage of roll calls on which they take a position. By contrast, in periods of divided government, presidents face an uphill battle on Capitol Hill.

Presidents who enjoy strong copartisan majorities are thus best positioned to win roll calls in Congress and demonstrate strength. However, Cohen argues, this very strength simultaneously undermines presidential efforts to be widely perceived as representative of the nation as a whole. During unified governments, presidents and copartisan majorities in Congress are empowered to pursue bold policies that appeal to the party base, but strike many other Americans as ideologically extreme. Summarizing the dilemma, Cohen argues: “Majority party control of Congress promotes legislative success, but it also tends to pull presidents to take extreme positions” (p. 52). By contrast, divided government may encourage presidential moderation, which improves perceptions of representation. However, any benefit along this dimension during divided government routinely comes at a significant cost in legislative success rates. Moreover, the author argues that polarization has greatly reduced the incentives for moderation, even in divided government. As a result, contemporary presidents in divided government increasingly end up in the worst of all situations: perceived by the public to be both weak and unrepresentative.

Consistent with this argument, Cohen finds that a strikingly large number of Americans question presidential representation and believe that presidents routinely prioritize partisan interests over national ones. In the 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, 74% of subjects agreed that “presidents pay too much attention to the needs of their political parties,” versus only 16% who disagreed (p. 27). Cohen largely blames copartisans in Congress for pulling presidents toward the ideological extremes. However, it is equally possible that presidents themselves are perfectly willing and strongly incentivized to advance their party’s interests, even at the expense of representing the more moderate preferences of their national constituency. Whether this is the fault of Congress or of the president’s own inclinations is up for debate. However, the author clearly captures the potential costs to presidents of such actions in terms of public assessments of presidential representation and leadership.

Finally, Cohen shows that public perceptions of presidential leadership have important implications for understanding both Americans’ voting behavior and their perceptions of the polity more generally. Voters who perceive the president to be strong and representative of the national median are significantly more likely to back the president at the polls, even after controlling for partisanship, ideology, and job approval. More provocatively, he argues that in our increasingly presidentialized world, Americans evaluate other political actors and even the government as a whole through the prism of presidential leadership. When citizens perceive the president to be strong and representative, they are also more likely to approve of Congress as an institution, and even of their local representative. More broadly, Cohen shows that perceptions of presidential leadership and trust in government writ large are also strongly correlated.

This work makes important contributions to presidency scholarship by illustrating the pathways through which presidential actions in office shape public perceptions of presidential leadership, which are distinct from the venerable job-approval rating. These leadership perceptions, in turn, shape the president’s future ability to succeed legislatively and even influence presidential electoral fortunes. More broadly, Cohen also offers valuable insight into the forces driving the long-lamented decay in trust in government, while simultaneously identifying a possible remedy. Echoing recent calls for a strengthened presidency, such as those advanced in William Howell and Terry Moe’s (2016) Relic, Cohen’s analysis suggests that institutional reforms that strengthen presidential agenda control could bolster popular assessments of presidential leadership and also, in turn, Americans’ faith in the governing system writ large.