The presidency and the challenge to communicate

First word

IN his fourth month in office, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. senses at this point what political scientists and communicators have described as a decline or erosion of public support.

It was political scientists Paul Brace and Barbara Hinckley who baptized this decline as "a decay curve" in their 1997 study, Follow the Leader. They said that the decay that most presidents experience in their approval ratings can be attributed to the deflation of unrealistically high expectations of performance. The curve typically bottoms out near the thirtieth month of an initial term. Brace and Hinckley suggest that the decay normally occurs "irrespective of the economy, the president, or outside events."