Volume 9, Issue 1

Campaigns are strategic contests between candidates and reporters. While candidates have proven to be adept at gaming news coverage of their campaign advertisements, journalists have maintained their autonomy by curtailing coverage of the candidates’ stump speeches. The advent of online media, however, advantages the candidates by permitting direct communication between candidates and voters.

Political scientists frequently lament the media’s neglect of our research. Although reporters should have a basic understanding of the field, it is not reasonable to expect them to restate the conclusions of academic research on a daily basis. Moreover, it is not always clear how research findings apply within the conventions of political journalism, which is context-specific and episodic in nature. In this article, we propose an approach that would bring more political science to journalism while respecting the professional norms and organizational constraints of news organizations. Although academic research is not always conducive to the demands of the news cycle, political science provides a novel perspective that could improve reporting in five respects: putting episodic developments in a structural context; providing new angles on the news; countering spin about the effects of events by elites; better describing historical trends and comparisons; and identifying known unknowns in politics.

The increasing acceptance of “sabermetric” perspectives by sports media outlets provides a useful framework to think about the relationship between political science and political journalism. In many ways, the experience in the sports world, in which the conventional journalistic narrative proved flexible enough to accommodate quantitative methods and new analytical frameworks, represents an optimistic model for those who hope to see political reporting become more informed by scholarly research. On the other hand, there are important differences between the two cases. For example, political science poses a much larger challenge to the prevailing approach among journalists to everyday reporting than sabermetrics did. For this reason, it have the field may have less influence on practicing journalists than its supporters hope.

Whose interests do major news dailies serve when they report on policy debates in Congress? This study compares what members of the U.S. House of Representatives say about major policy with what is later reported in two news dailies: one liberal (Washington Post) and one conservative (Washington Times). The data include one-minute floor speeches by House members (168) and published stories—news and editorials—in the print media (117). Three high-profile policy initiatives of the 107th Congress (2001-2002) anchor the investigation: No Child Left Behind Act (HR 1), Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act (HR 1836), and Airport Security Act (S. 1447). The evidence shows a discrepancy in the perspectives between reporters and officeholders. Where news coverage stresses talk of the president and the process, lawmakers stress the problem and the stakes for the American people. When the debate breaks along party lines, news coverage shows a weak ideological bias that favors Democrats.

Scholars offer differing accounts of the roles played by political elites, on the one hand, and ordinary citizens, on the other, in the highly polarized partisan conflict of contemporary American politics. Some take polarized elite conflict to indicate, in itself, that elected policymakers have escaped the constraints of democratic control and act essentially independently. In sharp contrast to this view, I outline a case for the importance of what I call polarized populism—a condition of politics in which elected officials accord very substantial deference to ordinary citizens, especially those who hold relatively extreme ideological views. I clarify the differences between elite centered and populist accounts of polarized policymaking, and then develop the argument for polarized populism, presenting theoretical considerations in support and assessing several kinds of relevant evidence. I also reply to some claims by Lawrence Jacobs and Robert Shapiro, proponents of the elite-centered view, in an earlier exchange in the Forum. In concluding, I comment briefly about some directions for research to assess the case for polarized populism and discuss some broader implications of this pattern of policymaking.

In using parts of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as a down payment on an ambitious education reform agenda, Barack Obama has accomplished what few others presidents have. The strategy has given his administration three distinct advantages: a large discretionary funding source with little Congressional scrutiny; flexibility in pursuing education reform goals without crowding out other policies on the president’s agenda; and the ability to shape the national reform discussion for more than a year on the administration’s terms, without being constrained by negotiations over a specific piece of legislation. Now the question is whether the Obama administration’s political dexterity can be matched by skill in fashioning institutional arrangements that ensure the long-term sustainability of these reforms.

Several studies of the post-war American political economy find that Democratic presidents have been more successful than Republicans. Most recently, Bartels (2008) found that economic growth had been greater and that unemployment and income inequality had been lower under Democratic presidents since 1948. If true, these findings combined with the frequent success of Republicans in presidential elections pose a challenge to theories of retrospective voting and responsible party government. This reexamination of these findings indicates that they are an artifact of specification error. Previous estimates did not properly take into account the lagged effects of the economy. Once lagged economic effects are taken into account, party differences in economic performance are shown to be the effects of economic conditions inherited from the previous president and not the consequence of real policy differences. Specifically, the economy was in recession when Republican presidents became responsible for the economy in each of the four post-1948 transitions from Democratic to Republican presidents. This was not the case for the transitions from Republicans to Democrats. When economic conditions leading into a year are taken into account, there are no presidential party differences with respect to growth, unemployment, or income inequality.

At the very least, presidential memoirs can serve as cautionary tales. Many of the same political and policy challenges facing President Bush are likely to prevail in the near future. Additionally, the Twenty-Second Amendment is unlikely to be repealed, thus continuing to set a termination date for second-term presidents. Therefore, Decision Points is relevant text for whoever is inaugurated in 2013 and beyond.

American readers need to know that British politicians are inveterate memoir-writers. On leaving office, prime ministers write their memoirs, but so do chancellors of the exchequer, foreign secretaries, and politicians far less significant than that. British publishers clearly reckon that, even if the sales of most such volumes are unlikely to be enormous, the village-like quality of British political life means that a fair number of copies will be bought and read by the author’s fellow politicians, civil servants, and other citizens whom the politician in question will have encountered in the course of a long working life.