The expectations gap thesis: Public attitudes toward an incumbent president

In a recent article, Kimball and Patterson (1997, 722) found that citizens appear to make a comparison between what they expect of their representativ es in Congress and what they perceive congressional behavior to actually be like-what they call the "expectations-perceptions differential" and what p residential scholars call the "expectations gap." In this article, we repli cate and expand Kimball and Patterson's study and relate it to the presiden cy. Through an analysis of survey data collected at the beginning and the e nd of the 1996 presidential election campaign, and by using four separate m easures of the expectations gap, we demonstrate that public expectations ex ert a significant impact on evaluations of an incumbent president. They als o have a direct impact on Vote preference.