Imagine that George W. Bush had run for reelection on a detailed program of Social Security reform that he could point to after his inauguration as a plan that had been considered and endorsed by the American people. Jittery Republican members of Congress, wary of making substantial changes to a popular program, could take comfort in the political shelter afforded them by voters who had, through the vehicle of the presidential election, already ratified the broad blueprints of the Bush plan, and opposition Democrats would feel pressure to come to the table to address the people's will. Similarly, imagine that John Kerry had opposed President Bush with a detailed plan of his own for making Social Security solvent, which, had he been elected, would have for the same set of reasons facilitated broad bipartisan support and congressional action.

Such is the world Bruce Buchanan envisions in his provocative book, The Policy Partnership. Combining political theory and practice around the important issue of democratic leadership, he offers a perceptive analysis of the disjuncture between voter policy preferences and official actions, which supports an institutional solution that is as creative as it is problematic.

Buchanan contends that the fundamental premise of democratic politics—that voters should influence public policy—is undermined by election campaigns devoid of substantive debate and a public content to defer to, rather than direct, the choices of elected officials who, all too often, are able to avoid accountability for their actions. He believes a remedy for this dilemma may be found in presidential elections, if only election campaigns could be referenda for intractable problems during cycles when such problems arise. He focuses on presidential elections as a forum for establishing what he calls “policy partnerships” between voters and officials because of what he regards as “a special reciprocal relationship between citizens and presidents” (p. viii), which at times over the past half century has produced presidential responsiveness to the public's policy desires.

However, such instances are rare. The deeper one gets into Buchanan's three-part typology of ways voters influence policy, the more it becomes clear that anticipatory influence, whereby presidents try to gauge and head off potential negative public response to their actions, has been a near-constant condition over the past two generations. Only twice in the 10 election cycles since 1960 does the author find evidence for direct influence, where presidents respond to clear voter demands, and only once does he find evidence for legitimizing influence, where newly elected presidents feel the need to go back to the public for ratification of their policy actions. This is hardly the strong link between voter and official that he correctly identifies as being at the core of a healthy democracy.

Buchanan devotes the final one-third of his book to outlining a possible solution to this problem, and he is to be commended for seeking a practical resolution to an important theoretical dilemma. His answer is the establishment of what he calls the American Citizens' Foundation (ACF), a bipartisan institute composed of leading policy experts and strategists from both parties charged with drafting and publicizing solutions to overriding policy questions that presidential candidates might be tempted to sidestep. By weighing in on an issue already on the minds of many voters, the ACF would work to build a voter consensus around finding a solution to the problem through the electoral process, educate voters on the solutions proposed by experts in both parties, pressure presidential candidates to endorse the solutions advanced by their party's experts, and make the election a referendum on the two competing approaches. Direct influence in the form of voter pressure would be applied to get the candidates to agree to solutions in advance of election day, coaxing them into a dialogue with voters that “gives the newly elected president a real (as opposed to an unverified) mandate. That, in turn, increases the likelihood that Congress will actually pass the legislation” (p. 80).

Implementing this blueprint would be an impressive task, and to his credit, Buchanan demonstrates a sober awareness of some of the obstacles his proposal would face. In two hypothetical examples of how it might work—one involving President (Jeb) Bush's embrace of a tax increase and optional private investment accounts for Social Security in his 2008 race against Democrat Howard Dean, the other involving President (Hillary) Clinton's successful second attempt at national health-care reform following her victory over Jeb Bush in 2012—Buchanan acknowledges that the efforts of the ACF would face resistance. Even so, he assumes that his organization would be taken seriously by the media and the candidates, even before it had time to establish legitimacy in the eyes of the press and even though its work would have to be superimposed on the horserace-oriented, candidate-centered media circus that is a national presidential campaign.

History suggests that candidates and the media might not cooperate. His discussion of the issue environment in past elections is filled with references to reporters ignoring complicated stories, such as the Savings and Loan crisis in 1988, or downplaying positive economic data that contradicted the 1992 storyline of an economy in crisis, not to mention candidates manipulating the news agenda to create false impressions, like John Kennedy's reference to a mythical missile gap in 1960. Buchanan is optimistic that an independent organization acting as a policy entrepreneur can cut through the fog of media coverage, but implicit in his faith are unspoken assumptions about elite and mass behavior.

At the elite level, the author assumes that policy advisors will buy into the idea of programmatic solutions to obstinate problems, leaving little room for, say, analysts whose interest in the Social Security debate rests not so much with fixing the program as in having a broader discussion about the proper role of the social safety net or, to those who see sinister motives in the Bush agenda, in finding a way to secretly undermine the program in the guise of fixing it. In this regard, the idea that there could be singular “Republican” and “Democratic” policy alternatives overlooks the potential difficulty of arriving at these positions without alienating and angering those with alternative goals or perspectives.

At the mass level, Buchanan needs to simplify the meaning of the vote choice in order for his plan to work. What would become of a Bush voter who strongly disliked the Republican plan for Social Security but believed that Bush was better able than his opponent to keep America safe, or a voter whose choice of a president is a symbolic rather than substantive act? The possibility for a false mandate remains, and we already live with that possibility without the additional complexity of adding a new institutional layer to the electoral process.