Home  › Publications  › APSA Journals  › American Political Science Review  › In This Issue

This issue's articles address two large and related themes in political science: (a) mutual accountability between leaders and followers and (b) constraints on political actions and decisions.

Political scientists typically focus on electoral accountability between politicians and voters. In our lead article, however, “Religious Competition and Ethnic Mobilization in Latin America: Why the Catholic Church Promotes Indigenous Movements in Mexico,” Guillermo Trejo looks instead at how religious leaders respond to changes among their following. Roman Catholic clergy in Mexico, their previous religious monopoly vigorously challenged by mainline Protestant evangelism, answered with a new “market strategy,” namely secular advocacy of indigenous movements and ethnic identities. Trejo advances both quantitative and qualitative evidence to show that it was Protestant competition, and not the new doctrines of Vatican II, that moved Latin American Catholicism in this direction.

Competition, this time in politics, plays a similarly important role in “Campaign Communications in U.S. Congressional Elections,” by James N. Druckman, Martin Kifer, and Michael Parkin. Examining new data taken directly from the Web sites of congressional campaigns over three election cycles and controlling for other factors, they find that, as races become more competitive, challengers more often engage in “risky” tactics (e.g., “going negative”), whereas incumbents play it safe by avoiding issues and talking up their achievements in office. Challengers, moreover, are likelier at all levels of competition to encourage interaction with voters. Like Trejo, Druckman et al. supplement their quantitative work with such qualitative evidence as interviews with campaigns' Web designers.

Looking at how (or even whether) politicians respond to citizens in “Gay Rights in the States: Public Opinion and Policy Responsiveness,” Jeffrey R. Lax and Justin H. Phillips ask whether state-level public policy in the United States responds to, lags behind, or gets out ahead of public opinion on the rights of gays and lesbians (e.g., non-discrimination laws and civil unions). Using a novel approach to estimate state-level public opinion from large national surveys and controlling for other relevant factors, they find a high degree of responsiveness to shifts in public opinion but less congruence between policy and levels of public sentiment, with policy often remaining more conservative, and almost never more liberal, than what voters support. Perhaps most surprisingly, standard measures of variation in state-level institutions (most notably, the extent of direct democracy) seem not to affect either responsiveness or congruence.

One domain in which politicians may properly calibrate policy to citizen preferences is that of spending on natural disasters, but the result nonetheless leaves much to be desired. According to Andrew J. Healy and Neil Malhotra in “Myopic Voters and Natural Disaster Policy,” voters reward incumbent presidents (or their party) for disaster relief but not for disaster preparedness (or—think Hurricane Katrina—lack thereof). Presidents have gotten the message, cutting federal spending on preparedness to the bare bones and boosting spending on relief to record levels. This finding seems a peculiarly perverse instance of voter myopia, since by the authors' calculation of net present value, a dollar of prevention is worth at least ten dollars of cure. It also raises larger questions about whether responsiveness to voter preferences, as expressed in elections, is a wholly good thing (to which we return below).

So politicians respond, if sometimes in ways we wish they wouldn't, to voters; but citizens, as we see in our next article, also respond to politicians. In particular, they adjust their economic expectations and behavior according to whether their preferred party is in power. The idea, considered almost heretical when it was first advanced, is by now supported by much survey evidence. Respondents, for example, regularly claim to feel better about the economy when their own party holds the Presidency. But are such responses only “cheap talk,” or do they affect voters' real economic behavior? In “Partisanship and Economic Behavior: Do Partisan Differences in Economic Forecasts Predict Real Economic Behavior?”, Alan S. Gerber and Gregory A. Huber provide the first solid evidence that U.S. voters actually do put their money where their partisanship is. Examining county-level sales tax data, they find that, in the months immediately after a Presidential election, consumption rises significantly in counties that share the new President's partisanship. This effect sets in before the new President takes office (i.e., before new policies can have any effect), affects consumption strongly, and endures (i.e., does not quickly recede to previous levels). To the extent that this finding is sustained and refined by subsequent research, it will better explain some things we already know (e.g., why markets respond to elections) and set new research agendas (e.g., are voters really as deeply partisan as these new findings suggest?).

How then can citizens, or leaders, become more responsible in their responsiveness? Here our second large theme emerges—namely, how citizens can constrain themselves or their leaders. Perhaps the most challenging of such problems is that of intergenerational distribution and justice, for if citizens cannot attend adequately to their own future welfare, how can they duly regard that of future generations? The problem, on reflection, is yet harder: Even as our own generation helps or hinders the following ones, so are we fettered or freed by our ancestors' choices. Modern democratic theorists such as Rawls and Habermas have explored (or, in Rawls's case, only adumbrated) the problem of democratic citizens' accountability to past and future generations but not resolved it. In “Birthrights: Freedom, Responsibility, and Democratic Comportment in Aeschylus' Oresteia,” Elizabeth Markovits finds a deeper examination, with strong implications for the present, in Aeschylus' tragedies. In newly democratic Athens, Markovits argues, where tragic drama was a civic institution that addressed a broad public, the trilogy invited popular reflection on powerful issues of intergenerational guilt, freedom, and responsibility. By exemplifying modes of democratic comportment worthy of praise and blame, Aeschylus' plays intimate how democratic justice might resolve (or absolve) inherited conflicts, how democratic deliberation might leave future generations with the possibility of their own democratic choice. Perhaps more profoundly, Markovits suggests, the Oresteia addresses us, no less than the Athenians, by modeling the inescapable tensions and sometimes impossible choices that past and future alike impose on every present generation.

The Athenians understood, probably better than we do, that democratic accountability presupposes as one kind of constraint the education and formation of democratic citizens. America's founders also saw this and sought ways to inculcate and preserve a “love of liberty” and its requisite virtues.1 Not least among these ways of forming and maintaining a republican sensibility, the founder James Wilson contended, was the American innovation of a written constitution. In “The Language of Liberty and Law: James Wilson on America's Written Constitution,” James R. Zink finds in Wilson's unduly neglected political thought a powerful argument about how a written constitution, if regularly taught and reflected upon, could uplift and refine the character of a nation's citizens, indeed itself help to constitute a people, and reconcile natural rights with vigorous government. In Wilson's thought, Zink further argues, we find an answer to some of contemporary liberalism's critique of a “rights-centric” political order.

We do not usually think of Plato as having much to say about the education of democratic citizens; rather, from Isaiah Berlin onward, the Plato of The Republic has often been taken as the avatar of authoritarian rule and defender of the “noble lie.” In “Moral and Criminal Responsibility in Plato's Laws,” however, Lorraine Smith Pangle draws a clear and convincing link between the modern concerns of “restorative justice” movements and Plato's explorations of anger, retribution, and punishment in the criminal code proposed for the city of Magnesia. Unlike some modern advocates of restorative justice, she notes, Plato accepts the community's need for retribution and punishment, even as he shows how—by introducing philosophical reasoning into the preambles of the Laws—ordinary citizens might be constrained not only to become more responsible themselves, but also more thoughtful in their treatment of offenders. In closing, Pangle brings Plato's striking arguments to bear as applications and lessons for the projects and practices of restorative justice today.

Returning to constraint in the purely American context, and addressing a current controversy that came again to the fore in the Senate's confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, Brandon L. Bartels examines the extent to which the ideology (or policy preferences) of Supreme Court justices is constrained by the Court's own rules. Employing a method of multilevel or hierarchical modeling, Bartels tests the levels-of-scrutiny rules for the justices' review of acts by government agencies that affect the right of free expression under the First Amendment. Analyzing all the Court's free-expression prescribed cases between 1953 and 1998, he shows that not all rules are equal, that the constraining force of individual rules, even within a single prescriptive framework, varies according to their substance. Where the rules call for “strict scrutiny” of content-based governmental acts affecting free expression, they constrain ideological decision making; where the rules call for deference—or where they are neutral in their stance toward government acts—ideological decision making is unaffected, proceeding as if the rules were not in place. Bartels's findings might be expected to influence future scholarship on “legal” and “attitudinal” models of judicial decision making. Assuming Supreme Court clerks read relevant scholarship, they could well influence the way justices prescribe legal rules.

Finally, democracies' written constitutions constrain very differently governments' abilities to “manage their own demise” or, more specifically, to resign, be toppled, or dissolve parliament and call early elections. While we have traditionally focused on the distinction between governments and parliaments with fixed terms (the United States) and governments that can call new parliamentary elections at will (the United Kingdom), the variation among contemporary democracies is much broader. Exploiting a new and more inclusive dataset on constitutional rules and government terminations, the first to include both West and East European democracies, Petra Schleiter and Edward Morgan-Jones establish that (a) constitutional constraints on, and presidential influence over, government termination and parliamentary dissolution are now the norm rather than the exception, particularly among the newer democracies, and (b) such constraints have powerful and sometimes theoretically unanticipated effects on government survival and termination. (It turns out, to take one example, that presidential power to dismiss governments has no discernible effect on their duration.) Their findings, Schleiter and Morgan-Jones observe, should influence future work on such related topics as the opportunistic calling of elections, political business cycles, electoral synchronization and—to return to our first theme in this issue—electoral accountability. Paradoxically, they argue, constraining a government's ability to dissolve parliament at will, and thus to “surf” any handy uptick in popularity, may make governments more accountable to their citizens.

Thus we see a somewhat pessimistic complementarity between the twin themes of this issue's articles: If myopic citizens impel leaders to respond to short-term changes more than long-term or intergenerational needs, and if citizens' own behavior overreacts to anticipated changes of policy, then constraints—whether internalized by the citizens themselves, binding the laws and the impulse to retributive justice, or embodied in what the French call grandly the “organization of the public powers”—may produce policies that better reflect citizens' long-term interests.