Politicians Don't Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness (review)

Lawrence R. Jacobs and Robert Y. Shapiro, Politicians Don't Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness. University of Chicago Press, 2000. 425 pp. $50.00 cloth; $17.00 paper.

Politicians Don't Pander (a misleading title) demonstrates all the virtues, and a few of the defects, of the extended case study with ambitions to generalize. It tells two intriguing stories (one much more fully than the other), tackles critical concerns of democratic theory and practice, presents elaborate empirical propositions about national-level politics in the United States, refutes much of what other political scientists have argued, and seeks to show deep historical change. That is a lot for one book, and it succeeds in some tasks better than in others. But the most important thing to be said is that Politicians Don't Pander accomplishes most of its purposes impressively well.

Lawrence R. Jacobs and Robert Y. Shapiro begin by rejecting the long line of argument that presidents, and perhaps all national-level elected officials, are too immediately responsive to the vagaries of public opinion. Instead of "pandering"--acting as a Burkean delegate who seeks to enact into law the expressed preferences of his or her constituents--politicians use their constant polls and focus groups to shape and articulate the policy messages that they hope in any case to convey. Elected officials have ideologies, sometimes strong ones; they care about policy proposals, sometimes passionately; and they also want to get reelected. That combination of motivations, in the context of an increasingly polarized and individualistic party system, leads them to be exquisitely attentive, but not necessarily responsive, to public opinion. A politician's goal is to craft his or her message so that citizens come to believe that what they want is best achieved by the policy that the politician has proposed. If the strategy works, elected officials can simultaneously achieve their own ideological and policy goals, satisfy the advocates and party activists who provide most of the pressure and resources for governance, and win reelection.

But the strategy does not always, or even often, work. After all, other politicians counter these moves by behaving similarly--using polls, focus groups, or any other means of understanding public preferences to craft their countermessage, with the goal of persuading the public that their own policy proposal (which may well be the status quo) is what citizens really want. Jacobs and Shapiro do not argue explicitly that both sets of politicians thereby deceive voters, but they come very close to that claim. In their view, only in the press of an immediately looming election do politicians move to respond to the wishes of centrist voters. (They define centrist arithmetically rather than substantively--that is, a centrist voter is one in the middle of the distribution of citizens' preferences, whatever that distribution is.)

Jacobs and Shapiro further complicate their story by seeking to refute another body of social science literature. They argue that the media have not become a "fourth branch of government," deliberately setting an agenda for public action, taking independent stances on policy disputes, and pushing the nation in one or another substantive direction. Instead the media respond to signals put out by important political actors (mostly elected officials) in what they cover and how they cover it. The media do, however, amplify and distort partisan disputes and increasingly report on political stratagems rather than substantive policy proposals. In so doing, they contribute to, although they do not cause, growing public cynicism about governmental capacity and responsiveness. As fewer and fewer citizens attend to politics at all, and mistrust of public officials' capacity and motivation rises, advocates and activists move in to fill the void. Thus politicians become even more likely to "craft" and less likely to "pander," to the detriment of democratic governance.

Jacobs and Shapiro claim, finally, that this whole...