The book examines the development of the U.S. presidency since 1945 and describes the many ways, some of which are unknown or greatly underappreciated, in which the president's actions affect the daily lives of the American people.

Empirical studies analyzing the determinants of U.S. presidential popularity have delivered quite inconclusive results concerning the role of economic variables by assuming linear relationships. We employ penalized spline smoothing in the context of semi-parametric additive mixed models and...