Presidential Campaigns and Presidential Accountability

1. The Meaning of Presidential Accountability

9 1 The Meaning of Presidential Accountability Democratic accountability is at the heart of a functioning democracy. Our current understanding of accountability, though, does not fit comfortably with the American system of separate institutions competing for shares of power. Citizens, meanwhile, stubbornly refuse to strive for the standards laid out by democratic theorists. Behavioral scholars have long sought to save the citizens from irrelevancy by noting alternative ways the public can come to act “as if” they are exercising accountability. If, instead, we begin by placing the institutions in which leaders reside at the center of the equation, we come to a different understanding of accountability—one from which citizens (or campaigns) do not need quite so much saving. Accountability, as a means of constraining power, requires three components : standards, information, and sanction (Grant and Keohane 2005). The accountability holders, citizens in this case, must recognize and endorse standards of evaluation, must have access to information about the behavior of power wielders, and must possess the means to sanction. The concept of democratic accountability has shifted over time from a model of prospective accountability to the currently dominant model of retrospective accountability. In both forms, accountability is understood as a sanction imposed by citizens through elections.1 Elections provide the only formal mechanism of sanction available to the mass public in the American system. Only during elections can citizens punish wayward leaders by voting them out of office. Leaders cannot be formally compelled by citizens to do anything in particular while in office, only sanctioned after the fact. Thus, incumbent leaders are expected, during the campaign, to “render an account” of their time in office; citizens are expected to judge their performance. Unfortunately, accountability is undermined by inherent informational asymmetries—politicians know more than do voters about their behavior in office. Further, since adoption of the Twenty-second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, termlimited presidents, faced with no direct electoral accounting, must feel less concern for future electoral sanctions. Nonetheless, for democratic citizens to exercise formal accountability, elections are the only game in town. Disagreement arises, though, with respect to what we hold those in power accountable for. Prospective Accountability Prospective accountability follows from the responsible party model of representation. In this view, parties present citizens with alternatives along important policy dimensions and citizens signal their preferred policies by their choice of candidate (Manin, Przeworski, and Stokes 1999). After the election, strong, cohesive, and sincere parties enact policies congruent with their stated platforms. This is the party mandate model. Accountability derives most clearly from the “promissory representation ” (Mansbridge 2003) embedded in this model, whereby citizens exercise a forward-looking power over leaders, exacting promises during the authorizing election that a leader will be obligated to perform in office and rewarding leaders in the next election for their faithfulness to those promises. In Jones’ succinct description of this model: “We promise , you support, we deliver, you judge” (2000, 18). Of course, in practice, it is hardly so simple. “Promises are partial, voters misunderstand or are unaware, delivery is indistinct, and judgments are incomplete” (Jones 2000, 18). Indeed, few explicitly advocate for responsible party government any longer. The failures of citizens and parties have become too well known, or, more charitably, the model simply asks too much. Citizens must have well-developed preferences and recognize which party best approximates those preferences. They must engage in “issue voting.” Parties, for their part, must differentiate on important policy solutions and make these differences clear to the public. And government must be structured so that, once elected, parties can implement their programs. Even a cursory reading of the work on political behavior is enough to dissuade most proponents that democratic citizens have well-defined 10 chapter 1 preferences (Campbell et al. 1960; Converse 1964). Making matters worse, the public frequently cannot identify the issue positions of the leading presidential contenders or their parties, even after a long and loud campaign (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1997). Consequently, they cannot reasonably be expected to vote on the basis of future policy.2 One of the enduring puzzles from the 2000 campaign is why Bush won, given a majority of voters agreed with Gore’s positions on the issues. The average level of in-depth political information found among the citizenry is far too low to sustain a true prospective accountability. Responsibility for this ignorance can hardly be placed entirely on the citizen’s shoulders...