Samuel Kernell’s seminal book Going Public (1986) pushed scholars of American politics to think more seriously about how U.S. presidents utilize the media to further their legislative agendas. Although Congress has been subject to similar political tides and changes to the media environment over the past several decades, little scholarly attention has been given to examining how members of Congress similarly use the media to communicate with the public in the pursuit of their policy goals. C. Danielle Vinson does precisely that in her outstanding book, Congress and the Media. Drawing upon a wealth of data, Vinson argues that legislators use the media to gain leverage beyond their institutional powers.
The public strategy offers members of Congress a means of building public support for their legislative causes and public opposition to the legislation they wish to block. Vinson’s core theoretical argument is that members turn to the media to overcome the institutional barriers that prevent them from having the influence they desire. She notes that both internal and external changes in Congress have set the stage for members to make more expansive use of the media in recent decades. A decline in the traditional communication apparatus, a corresponding proliferation of media, a more aggressive public strategy by the president, and a more internally competitive environment, to name just a few factors, have encouraged members of Congress to engage in more concerted communications efforts.
Yet members vary across time in both their desire and ability to attract media attention, based in part on the given political context. Party status and control of Congress have meaningful implications for the public strategy by way of affecting the media’s calculus. Polarization has also changed the contours of going public by making party leaders more central to messaging strategies, by transitioning power from committee chairs to party leaders, and by discouraging members from using the media to target their own party. Moreover, polarization has created greater need for minority party leaders to make public appeals, both to cultivate the conflict demanded by the media and to overcome the increasing disadvantages they face in accomplishing their legislative agendas.
To empirically explore these dynamics, Vinson examines 40 years of members’ public statements, the result of a herculean data-collection undertaking. The bulk of the analysis relies on two data sets generated from the New York Times. Examining these cases, Vinson finds that context indeed affects media coverage of Congress, as expected. And while some things have changed over time with respect to members’ use of the media, other things have remained constant. For instance, party leaders have garnered more attention in recent years (p. 32), likely due to polarization, yet members have consistently had success going public on only a small set of issues across time (p. 38). By coding each case in her data sets for whether members went public with the intension of passing policy, stopping it, or something else, she further explores the connections between public strategies and contextual factors. The author hypothesizes that majority party members go public more often to pass legislation, since they have more formal powers to do so, and conversely, minority party members are more likely to make public appeals to block policies, given their institutional disadvantages. The evidence supports these claims (pp. 58, 64). Furthermore, she argues that members tend to use the media as a reaction to their political environment and other politicians, most importantly the president, because they are ill-suited to act in a more assertive manner (p. 68).
These are clearly interesting findings, and a contribution in their own right. However, I am somewhat less convinced about the sufficiency of the theoretical framework motivating Vinson’s expectations, namely, the notion that members pursue a public strategy as a means of supplementing institutional powers. One might reasonably expect that members always want to supplement their powers regardless of their relative institutional influence. Alternatively, one could take this to mean that diminishing institutional power yields comparatively greater demands for members to communicate directly with the public, which I read to be Vinson’s central thesis. Yet this argument would seem to generate expectations that public efforts are linear in (and inversely related to) institutional power. By this logic, we might expect the minority to go public more often than the majority, for instance. However, the hypotheses and results seem to reflect a far more involved relationship with the media that is never fully fleshed out.
Vinson also makes the important distinction between traditional print media and other media sources. She examines member appearances on NBC’s Meet the Press between 1990 and 2009, and finds that interviews map closely onto the results from the New York Times data, which is not entirely surprising given the natural commonalities of these forums (p. 86). However, innovations in the media environment, such as Twitter, have created additional opportunities for members to bypass more traditional outlets in communicating with the public. Importantly, members with more limited institutional powers (e.g., junior members) find greater success in gaining attention using new media (p. 94), and members possess considerably more autonomy in controlling the issue agenda (p. 97).
Vinson concludes the book with three case studies that allow her to gather data from a wider array of news outlets and to explore the varied ways in which members use the media to exert influence (Chaps. 5–7). Consequently, these chapters add some valuable theoretical richness by offering a more nuanced and multifaceted account of the public strategy that goes beyond the relatively simplistic theoretical arguments that motivated the earlier chapters. She finds evidence that members use the media to frame debate, and that members must achieve a certain level of influence in order to attract media attention. She also makes an interesting argument that members occasionally use the media not to influence the public but, rather, to signal other elites, with the goal of directly influencing the legislative process and positioning themselves for future negotiations. While some discussions of these cases raise the question of whether all public appearances qualify as “going public,” since some are not intended to engage the attentive public, the case studies effectively underscore the diversity of goals that motivate members’ use of the media.
While growing, the literature examining the intersection of media and legislative behavior is still in its nascent stages. This book advances the conversation in an important way, by systematically examining the evolving use of the media by members of Congress. What the book lacks at times in theoretical development it makes up for in its empirical rigor. Vinson offers the reader a comprehensive view of the behaviors of members who successfully attract media attention. Unfortunately, and by her own admission, this project is unable to address those members who were unable to gain media access, and so attempts to generalize these findings to the population of members, all of whom presumably pursue a public strategy from time to time, is more speculative.
This work only scrapes the surface of the ways in which members communicate with the public via the media. That is not an indictment of the project by any means. After all, one can only cover so much ground in a single monograph, and a lot of ground is covered with this one. Rather, it is a testament to the importance of the topic and Vinson’s significant contribution to pushing the conversation forward. Data limitations pose considerable impediments to scholars working in this area, and this project is among the most ambitious and impressive I have encountered. Vinson’s rich data analysis and elegant presentation make this book essential reading for students of Congress and the media.
