Are voters capable of the roles that representative government ascribes to them? Scholars don't necessarily agree on just what job voters have, but there is a sense that they should be able to hold politicians accountable as well as drive politicians toward their preferred policies, or at the very least, constrain politicians to some range of policy options.
In his book Follow the Leader?, Gabriel Lenz revisits these assumptions. While the book notes some instances in which voters successfully hold politicians accountable for their performance in office, it finds a general failure of voters to steer politicians toward their policy preferences. Indeed, Lenz reveals the opposite to be true: voters seem to pick their preferred candidate or party early on in the election process and then adjust their own policy preferences to what that party or candidate has said.
Lenz's primary test for measuring these effects is, by his own admission, a stringent one. As the book notes, many previous studies along these lines have been the product of cross-sectional or two-wave public opinion surveys. Such studies, Lenz claims, are necessarily unclear on the direction of the causal arrow. For example, Lenz cites the Bernard Berelson, Paul Lazarsfeld, and William McPhee study (1954) that found that Harry Truman defeated Thomas Dewey in 1948 thanks to the introduction of the Taft-Hartley Act, which Truman opposed and Dewey supported. This primed unions as an important issue among voters. Because pro-union sentiments were common among voters at the time and because it had become a more salient issue, more voters swung Truman's way. As Lenz notes, these results are observationally equivalent to a less flattering interpretation: People were inclined to vote for Truman thanks to an improving economy and thus adopted his pro-union stance. We can't know whether the voters or the politician led on policy.
Lenz escapes this problem of observational equivalence by creating a three-panel model of public opinion. He looks to see whether there was a change of policy views between time 1 and time 2, and then to see whether there was a concomitant shift in candidate evaluations between time 2 and time 3. So, in the 1948 example, Lenz would test to see whether some voters became more supportive of unions in the wake of Taft-Hartley, and then whether those who became more pro-union later became more pro-Truman.
The clear advantage of Lenz's approach is that it avoids the misinterpretation of causality. This is a significant advance in our study of public opinion and voting behavior, offering an important corrective to a number of previous studies and giving us a powerful tool for understanding just how voters reach decisions. Lenz does an excellent job explaining the test for each application and interpreting the results in an accessible manner.
There are two notable disadvantages to Lenz's approach, however. One is that there just are not all that many three-wave studies of public opinion. Lenz manages to find an impressive array of them from many different arenas, including evaluations of President George H.W. Bush around the time of the Gulf War, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan around the 1980 election, British politicians over many election cycles on the issue of European integration, and Canadian candidates in the 1988 elections that occurred during a discussion of a free trade agreement. The studies are interesting and engaging, and the results are surprisingly consistent across nations and eras, offering strong support for Lenz's arguments. However, generating further studies to test his claims would be difficult and expensive. This is a demanding test for scholars and limits what sorts of studies can be done in the future.
Just as this test is demanding for researchers, it is also demanding for voters. By Lenz's own admission, some amount of voter influence is omitted from his research design, which really only can detect whether a shift in policy perceptions between time 1 and time 2 leads to a shift in candidate evaluations between time 2 and time 3. Is it possible that voters in 2000 became more concerned about protecting Social Security in a lockbox and then decided to vote for Al Gore because of that issue the same day? Certainly, but Lenz's approach would miss that entirely. Thus he is quite likely understating the political sophistication of voters and their ability to lead on policy.
Moreover, Lenz’s interpretations of his findings are perhaps bleaker than they need be. For one thing, as he notes, even if voters do not have much capacity to constrain politicians on policy, politicians act as though they do. Lenz notes several examples (the Dutch Christian Democrats on nuclear power in 1986, Jimmy Carter on defense spending in 1980, etc.) of politicians and parties changing their stances on high salience issues to avoid retribution by voters. These examples offer evidence of a public that actually is aware of important issues and has some ability to drive the behavior of politicians.
Second, it should not necessarily be dispiriting to find that voters adopt the views of politicians. Probably the most damning evidence Lenz offers comes from the 2000 US presidential election, in which voters appear to pick a candidate first and then adapt their views on Social Security privatization (a prominent issue during that campaign) to match their candidate choice. Indeed, many voters seem to have come down on one side of the Social Security question initially and then shifted to the complete opposite position after learning how their preferred candidate felt. Lenz finds this same effect on a number of different issues in different venues.
While this is hardly a flattering portrayal of voters, it is helpful to keep in mind that the partial privatization of Social Security is a legitimately complex issue that has no objectively correct position and the consequences of which would only be apparent years or decades down the road. Given what we know about voters’ attention to public policy questions, just what kind of grasp should we expect them to have on this issue? Would we not indeed expect them to rely upon heuristics, such as the stance taken by the nominee of their own party, as they develop an opinion? To be sure, the route people follow before affiliating with a party is a convoluted one and need not involve specific policy stances. Nonetheless, American parties are, to a large extent, policy coalitions, particularly in the past few decades. A thought process along the lines of, “Given my support for free markets and my concerns about government-run programs, I should probably support partial privatization of Social Security” is probably a better informed one than a simple cold evaluation of the Social Security proposal. In this case, the campaigns are simply doing what they have always done—reminding people which side they are on. We need not see voters as dupes; they are making the best judgments they can given the information easily available to them.
Lenz’s book is a valuable and important contribution to the literatures on public opinion, campaigns, voter competency, and democratic theory in general. His research design is effective and appropriate, and his language is informative, clear, and helpful. This book would make a valuable addition to graduate level courses and upper division undergraduate courses on public opinion and elections.
