caa a22 4500 388028548 CHVBK 20180307124942.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e199806 xx s 000 0 eng 10.2307/420248 doi S1049096500054226 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.2307/420248 Zaller John R. University of California, Los Angeles Monica Lewinsky's Contribution to Political Science [Elektronische Daten] [John R. Zaller] The bounce in President Clinton's job ratings that occurred in the initial 10 days of the Lewinsky imbroglio may offer as much insight into the dynamics of public opinion as any single event in recent memory. What it shows is not just the power of a booming economy to buttress presidential popularity. It shows, more generally, the importance of political substance, as against media hype, in American politics. Even when, as occurred in this case, public opinion is initially responsive to media reports of scandal, the public's concern with actual political achievement reasserts itself. This lesson, which was not nearly so clear before the Lewinsky matter as it is now, not only deepens our understanding of American politics. It also tends, as I argue in the second half of this article, to undermine the importance of one large branch of public opinion research, buttress the importance of another, and point toward some new research questions. Whatever else may have transpired by the time this article gets into print, the Lewinsky poll bounce is something worth pondering. In a half-dozen commercial polls taken in the period just before the story broke, Clinton's job approval rating averaged about 60%. Ten days later, following intensive coverage of the story and Clinton's State of the Union address, presidential support was about 10 percentage points higher. Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1998 PS: Political Science & Politics Cambridge University Press 31/2(1998-06), 182-189 1049-0965 31:2<182 1998 31 PSC https://doi.org/10.2307/420248 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.2307/420248 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Zaller John R. University of California, Los Angeles NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- PS: Political Science & Politics Cambridge University Press 31/2(1998-06), 182-189 1049-0965 31:2<182 1998 31 PSC CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge