Electoral Democracy.

Edited by Michael B. MacKuen and George Rabinowitz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. 351p. $69.50 cloth, $29.95 paper.

This is a collection of essays originally written for a conference held in honor of Philip E. Converse. While all of the chapters here do engage Converse to a certain degree, this is due primarily to the importance of his work in the areas of public opinion and electoral behavior. This is not a set of worshipful essays, but rather a collection of thoughtful and, in some cases, provocative pieces on public opinion and democracy in the United States.

The book is organized into three sections, each of which deals with one element of the relationship between public opinion and electoral democracy. The first section, focused on how individuals process information and develop political opinions, begins with a piece by Donald Kinder. Building on his work on the politics of race, Kinder argues that citizens organize their political thoughts and develop their political views through the use of a group-centered model, specifically one of in-groups and out-groups. Citizens form opinions on issues, to a certain degree, on the basis of their evaluations of the groups connected to or affected by a particular issue, and some citizens do so more than others. The degree to which an individual uses this “ethnocentric” method goes a long way toward explaining his or her opinions on a wide variety of issues. Larry Bartels picks up on the theme of individual opinions, and argues that public opinion in a democracy is really a set of highly variable and in many ways arbitrary attitudes, rather than a grouping of fixed and stable preferences. After making his case, Bartels examines the implications of this lack of preferences for democratic theory. The final two chapters in the first section serve to bring readers up to date on two crucial areas of public-opinion formation. Herbert Weisberg and Steven Greene review the last 50 years of social psychology research on intergroup relations, and focus specifically on what this research means for the concept of party identification. Marco Steenbergen and Milton Lodge close the first section with a detailed account of the 20-year research effort in the area of political cognition, an effort that has been fundamentally concerned with how the mind deals with information and ultimately forms political decisions. Steenbergen and Lodge review the key findings produced by this research program and outline the questions that remain unanswered.

The second section of this book examines vote choice. Attempting to engage the reader in a theoretical exercise, Robert Luskin asks: What exactly would a “fully informed citizenry” look like, both in terms of the characteristics it would possess and the decisions it would make? While Luskin offers few answers, he does at least raise important questions. Stuart Elaine Macdonald, George Rabinowitz, and Holly Brasher examine the role that issues play in vote choice, specifically questioning whether voters base candidate selection on a proximity model that asks how close a candidate is to the voter's position on a particular issue, or on a directional model that asks if the candidate is on the same side as the voter on an issue. Using data from the 1996 National Election Studies, the authors present strong evidence for the directional model over the proximity model, and discuss the implications of their finding for democratic theory. The third chapter in this section is an investigation by Michael MacKuen, Robert Erikson, James Stimson, and Kathleen Knight of the role ideology plays in party identification and vote choice. The authors find that the percentage of voters who are “ideologically literate” has risen dramatically since the 1970s, that the effect of ideology on vote choice has increased in recent years, and that ideology and partisanship are now more closely and coherently linked than at any time for which survey data exist. These results mirror those produced recently by many other scholars, and are of critical importance for making sense of current American politics.

The third section of this volume focuses on the linkages between the opinions and behaviors of elites and those of the masses. Michael Traugott analyzes a topic that has been largely overlooked in public opinion research: Do citizens think the government should heed poll results in the formulation of public policy? In short, the answer is “no,” which seems to surprise Traugott and leads him to question the degree to which Americans support the democratic principle of citizen influence over public policy. John Zaller endeavors to revive interest in V. O. Key's concept of latent opinion, defined by Zaller as “opinion that might exist at some point in the future in response to the decision makers' actions and may perhaps result in political damage or even defeat at the polls” (p. 311). Although the concept is difficult to get a grasp on, Zaller convincingly argues that because latent opinion is the kind of opinion that politicians pay most attention to, scholars need to devote greater time and effort to the investigation and understanding of the nature of this phenomenon.

The final chapter to be discussed here is the strongest in the volume. John Aldrich attempts to combine accounts of electoral politics during periods of change (think Key) with accounts of electoral politics during periods of stability (think Converse and his Michigan colleagues). In a little under 30 pages, Aldrich comes up with an elegant theory of politics during periods of stability (“equilibrium”) and periods of instability (“disequilibrium”). In short, and at the risk of taking away from the force of the argument, Aldrich's explanation of how electoral politics moves from equilibrium to disequilibrium and back again is as follows. Opinion change occurs among the mass public, initiating the move of politics into disequilibrium. In response to changes among the mass, the behavior of elites changes, sending a new and differing set of cues to the mass. Gradually, mass behavior changes in response to the alterations in elite behavior. Issue positions, partisanship, and vote choice—among both the mass and the elites—are now back into alignment, and politics is once again in a state of equilibrium. Aldrich tests his explanation with an empirical examination involving multiple measures of belief and behavior from 1952 to 1996 and finds strong support for his theory.

Often, edited volumes are little more than a recycling of material that is available elsewhere. This is not the case here. While it is highly unlikely that all of the chapters in Electoral Democracy will appeal to one scholar, there is something for everyone involved in the study of public opinion and electoral behavior. Graduate students and those making the switch from another subfield will find the chapters by Weisberg and Greene and Steenbergen and Lodge quite useful. Those interested in the normative implications of public opinion for democratic governance would be well served by reading the chapters of Kinder, Bartels, Luskin, Traugott, and Zaller. And those wanting new empirical work on emerging issues can turn to the pieces by Macdonald et al., MacKuen et al., and Aldrich. This is a welcome and valuable contribution to the discipline.