A burgeoning amount of recent scholarship argues that American policymakers do not represent the views of all citizens equally, but rather the views of particular subsets of the public—usually, the moneyed and well organized. This work has taught us much about how the political system does (or does not) live up to the ideals of a truly representative democracy. But it has nearly always implicitly taken “public opinion” as a constant: something that exists independently of elite influence. Druckman and Jacobs’s Who Governs? adds significant nuance to this view of representational inequality, arguing that “representation” is not a clean, unidirectional line from mass opinion to policymaker action. It is, rather, a much more complex process in which policymakers try to manipulate public opinion in addition to representing it, and in which policymakers make strategic use of data in order to explicitly cater their messages to small subgroups of citizens. Using a wide variety of data from the private polls of three recent presidential administrations, the authors seek to show how presidents gather and use mass opinion data to shape—rather than simply understand—public will.
The book argues that presidents’ use of polling has two significant effects on democratic governance, both of which serve to subvert public will. First, presidents make strategic use of public opinion data to shift the criteria on which their administrations are evaluated (by either changing which issues are most salient in citizens’ minds, or trying to prime citizens to think of the president in terms of his personality, not issue positions). Second, presidents will use polling data in order to practice “segmented representation”: aligning their policy activities with the opinions of narrow sub-constituencies (the wealthy, particular kinds of political activists) rather than the public at large.
What emerges when one connects the dots between these two things is a powerful argument about representational inequality: policymakers are not only interested in catering to the opinions of certain privileged groups, but they can also use a variety of tools to shape public opinion in the way that serves the interests of those groups. Presidents can, as a result, use the power of persuasion to “shirk” (11) their responsibilities to represent the public at large.
This theory of presidential persuasion is tested through analysis of the private polling data collected by, and the public communications of, three presidents: Reagan, Nixon, and Lyndon Johnson. The book essentially tries to connect the data that presidents collect to what they say and do while in office. The motivations and goals of each of these presidents vary. Nixon, for example, wanted to prime citizens to think of issues that cast his leadership style in a particularly strong light. Reagan was most interested in representing the opinions of affluent “core support groups” and conservative religious groups that were relatively new additions to the Republican coalition. Johnson wanted to develop support for his domestic antipoverty agenda and prime citizens to think about particular kinds of foreign policy issues. But the book finds that all three presidents collected an extensive amount of public opinion data on topics of strategic importance to them and used these data to craft their messaging to the public in deliberate ways.
This analysis has much to recommend it. The data themselves—collected through extensive archival research of presidential papers and other sources—add an enormous amount of empirical rigor to a topic that doesn’t lend itself to the sorts of large-N survey analyses that dominate much work on opinion-policy linkages, but deserves better than simple “N = 1” accounts of the motivations of individual presidents (19). Druckman and Jacobs tell a data-rich, theoretically compelling story of what presidents are doing when they communicate to the public, showing that presidential communication is strategic, goal oriented, and informed by large amounts of data.
The book also adds a good deal to our understanding of representational inequality. Existing research on this topic has offered little good theory for why elected officials prefer to represent the interests of certain types of constituents over others (or has offered rather simplistic explanations—“the rich donate more money than the poor,” for example—that don’t always stand up to empirical analysis).
This book looks at unequal representation from what is essentially a “supply side” perspective: the view of those who are actually doing the representing. The book’s examination of the “black box” of presidential data collection is substantively fascinating, but also sheds much needed theoretical light on the motivations that presidents have to represent certain sub-constituencies over others. Just as importantly, the authors recognize the limits of this kind of work, wisely not offering a single, unified theory of presidential communication and segmented representation, but rather arguing that presidential incentives for both communication and representation vary across a number of dimensions. This perspective, as well as the broader study of presidential motivations and speeches embedded in the book, is sure to inform discussions in a number of areas: democratic representation, political inequality, political communication, and the study of the presidency, to name just a few.
At the same time, the book’s arguments regarding what the results here imply for the quality of American democracy are overly pessimistic and at times seem forced: the book’s concluding thoughts seem as if they are trying to fit the nuanced theoretical and empirical richness of the analysis into a sweeping normative argument that does not quite fit.
As the book makes clear (e.g., 99), the general consensus among scholars is that presidential persuasion efforts actually have quite limited effects on mass attitudes. In the book itself, evidence that presidential communication actually matters for mass attitudes is presented only in the study of LBJ, and even here, the effects were contextual and contingent: LBJ was marginally effective in shaping perceptions of his domestic programs, but his influence was much more limited in other realms (including, importantly, the Vietnam War). Citizens’ opinions may not be organically formed without elite influence, but there is little reason to think from this book that strategic communications on the part of presidents shape public opinion in any deeply fundamental way.
And even if presidents were successful in shaping the tenor of public discourse, it’s not entirely clear that this is de facto a bad thing for democracy. The book makes a compelling case that if we think of political representation as a principal-agent problem, the “agent” has significant opportunity to shirk its responsibilities. But at the same time, it is hard to imagine a functioning democracy in which elites do not try to structure issue agendas or shape public support for their proposals, or where elites are not given significant latitude to implement the specifics of broad, vague, and often contradictory public demands.
As much recent research has noted, elite frames can provide useful simplifying information that citizens use to make sense of complex, distant political issues that they have little interest in spending much time thinking about. The fact that presidential communications are routinely contested by opponents (132–34) is important, too, given evidence that sorting through competing cues from those on opposite sides of political issues actually helps citizens form more informed opinions, not less informed ones (Sniderman and Bullock 2004). While the book’s warnings about the dangers of “insulated” (xiv) elite governance leading the country astray are well taken, it’s not entirely clear that any realistic alternatives—that is to say, that do not require a public that is extraordinarily more engaged and informed about policy than it currently is—would produce better outcomes.
Even with these caveats, though, the book is notable in that it offers a rich and complex view on the process of representation in democratic society, one that takes seriously the notion of elite influence over public opinion and that provides compelling evidence that unequal representation exists because of the conscious, strategic actions of political elites. This represents a significant step forward in understanding both why representational biases continue to exist in American politics, and how we might remedy them.
Reference
- Sniderman Paul M. , and Bullock John G. 2004. “A Consistency Theory of Public Opinion and Political Choice: The Hypothesis of Menu Dependence.” In Studies in Public Opinion: Gauging Attitudes, Nonattitudes, Measurement Error, and Change, pp. 134–165. edited by Saris Willem E., Sniderman Paul M. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar]