This excellent book takes on the difficult task of saying something new with familiar data applied to the well-studied topic of congressional policymaking and elections. The authors succeed in demonstrating that collective evaluations of Congress, the approval survey item that parallels the ubiquitous presidential job-approval question, has a systematic policy component and, further, that it has consequences primarily for—and here is what is genuinely new—the party controlling Congress, rather than the party controlling the presidency. They offer a model in which the public reacts to the policies passed by Congress (measured here as size of the majority party, as well as the ideological scores of bills that pass), and this collective policy assessment matters for the partisan composition of Congress and subsequent congressional policymaking. The contribution that David R. Jones and Monika McDermott make to the literature is their demonstration of a strong dose of collective policy responsiveness in the relationship among the public, elections, and congressional policymaking. Their discovery and exploration of this policy evaluation component in public evaluations of Congress in a genuinely original, and significant, contribution.

The plan of the book is to show first that the public reacts to what Congress does, for which Jones and McDermott use a survey experiment. It is designed to elicit evaluations, based on information provided in the survey, showing that policies passed by Congress were either compatible or not with the respondents' ideological preferences. Their results show that conservatives, when told Congress passed a liberal bill, are 10% less approving than the control group, which supports their argument. But their data also show (Table 2.2) that liberals, when told about conservative legislation being passed, were more approving of Congress than their counterparts who were told about Congress passing a liberal bill, which appears to be exactly opposite of what the authors' theory predicts. Their follow-up multiple regression seems to support their argument but loses fully a third of the respondents in the process, thus providing some grounds for skepticism, if one is so inclined. Fortunately, the evidence in subsequent chapters is more consistent in supporting the argument that congressional job performance evaluations actually reflect, or at least contain some, meaningful reactions to congressional policy.

In building their argument, Jones and McDermott show that the well-demonstrated information processing shortcuts allow for most of the public to know which party is in power and when control of Congress changes. The authors argue that voters, knowing that Democrats pass liberal legislation and that Republicans pass conservative bills, make reasonable evaluations without public tracking of individual pieces of legislation. The effective target is thus the party that controls Congress. To show the connection between congressional approval and majority party control, the authors first look at the individual relationship between voter ideology and control of Congress (American National Election Studies over 13 congressional elections), and they find that conservatives (liberals) are more likely to disapprove of Congress when Democrats (Republicans) are in power. They include measures of respondents' perceived ideological distance from the majority and minority parties in each Congress, and the coefficients for the majority party are consistently significant and in the expected direction. These analyses include controls for presidential approval, evaluations of the efficiency and fairness of the political process in Washington, and even party identification.

In one of the most convincing analyses, the authors show at the aggregate level that congressional approval is a function of variations in public policy liberalism (James Stimson's “mood” variable, which is a general policy liberalism scale constructed from hundreds of policy questions) and the liberalism of winning policy proposals in Congress (from Keith Poole and Rosenthal's NOMINATE scales, which measures the liberalism/conservativism of roll calls of both bills and legislative voting records). Here, the authors make use of a newly constructed quarterly approval series based on multiple polling organizations' questions gleaned from the Roper Center, covering the period 1974–2006. The authors adapt Stimson's method for constructing his public mood variable to deal with the sticky problems of differences in survey organizations and question wording. Again the analysis includes controls for an impressive array of factors that are cited in the previous work on congressional approval; their analysis finds a clear policy component to congressional performance evaluations that has not been identified as such in previous work.

The evidence provided by the authors for a policy component is persuasive. The only qualification that should be noted is that the effect is small. In their analysis, public evaluations of Congress are a combination of how liberal or conservative legislation is and the movement in public ideology (with appropriate controls). So when a Democratic-controlled Congress passes liberal legislation, especially if the public mood in headed in the other direction, public approval of Congress is expected to drop. And it does, but not by much. A quick calculation from the author's regression results (p. 94) shows that a combination of either party moving legislation one standard deviation in its ideological direction, while public opinion moves the same amount in the other direction, nets only a 2.3% drop in congressional approval ratings, and such movement is not a lot against the full variation of their measure, which ranges from 20% to over 55%. This is not to denigrate the policy effects they find, but only to acknowledge that the congressional-approval responses incorporate a number of other factors in addition to satisfaction with the directions of congressional policy.

The demonstration that congressional approval is influenced by policy considerations provides the foundation for the authors' substantial amendment to the orthodoxy that congressional-election outcomes are primarily about the economy, presidential approval, and challenger quality. The analysis here is thorough and convincing. They first draw on the collected polls of the Roper Center to show that the public attributes a lot of responsibility to Congress for changes in national conditions and events; policy responsibility is less presidency-centric than many of us probably expect. Jones and McDermott then repeat the approach of first individual-level and then aggregate analyses, but here looking at the impact of congressional approval on voting. With controls for evaluations of the economy, the president, and individual incumbents as well as party identification, they find that evaluations of congressional performance have a clear and significant effect on voting for majority party candidates in House elections. Their aggregate analyses of percentages of the vote for major party candidates reveal the same clear pattern.

The book then demonstrates some interesting patterns by which aggregate congressional approval levels are reflected in strategic calculations, as revealed by levels of challenger quality and incumbent retirements (Chapter 6). The strongest test, and the one many might have bet against—at least before the analyses summarized here—is the independent effects of congressional approval in the authors' national-level time series of seat changes in House elections. They show that congressional performance evaluations are a substantial component in seat changes in the House of Representatives. Adding the congressional approval measure to a standard House election model (17 elections) with presidential approval, evaluations of the economy, and seat exposure on the right-hand side raises estimated R² from .45 to .78. They clearly have found something here.

Their final chapter does a nice job of pulling the various pieces together to tell a story in which public evaluations of the ideological directions of congressional policy play a substantially larger role than in major extant accounts. If their story if right, then the substantial legislation passed in the first years of the Obama administration (the stimulus package, health care, and financial reform) should yield a drop in congressional approval (more policy distant from the voters) and, indeed, the run-up to the 2010 election has congressional rating at an all-time low. According to their analysis, this should add substantially to Democratic midterm losses, even if Obama were able to regain some of his popularity and the economy improved. [Editor's note: This review was written before the Republicans regained control of the House in the 2010 elections.]

Jones and McDermott accept the limited information-processing proclivities of the average citizen and show that within these, the public gleans adequate impressions of congressional policy to alter, via elections, the general directions of national policy. The account is fully compatible with the general picture of the mutual responsiveness of voters, the institutions of national policymaking, and policy outputs offered by Robert S. Erikson et al., in Macro Polity (2002). Jones and McDermott's book is more narrowly focused on the role of congressional performance evaluations. The findings alter our accounts of congressional elections in ways that strengthen the hand of those who believe that the democratic process works reasonably well.

Any good analysis raises new questions, and this book is no exception. One is that responses to the congressional job performance question seem to be in reaction to the House rather than the Senate. This odd asymmetry is noted but not explored. One wonders whether the Senate somehow has no effect on the public, or perhaps that when asked about “Congress,” many citizens think of the House of Representatives. That possibility opens up a further question of what the congressional job item actually measures. Specifically, how much do responses to the items reflect ideological judgments about policy directions (which the authors emphasize) versus process dissatisfaction, scandals, or generalized frustration with the partisanship and intensity of conflict? Is this the best measure of the public's policy judgments about Congress? Future work might ask, for example, whether other variables that seem not to have made their way into the congressional prediction models—such as whether the country is moving in the “right/wrong direction” or public responses to the “generic ballot” about which party respondents would prefer to control Congress—might pick up the policy evaluations perhaps even more cleanly than the congressional job performance item. But these are questions, the answers to which would most likely only underline and reinforce the authors' main argument about the important role of policy evaluations of the majority party and how they deserve a place right next to presidential evaluations and the state of the economy in our explanations for the makeup of Congress and changes in congressional policymaking. This is an important book, and it will change how we think about the linkages among congressional policymaking, elections, and the publics' policy preferences.