We thank Dan Butler for his insightful comments regarding our book and the opportunity to respond.

Butler emphasizes that there is a “two-way street” between politicians’ positions and public opinion with each affecting one another. Who Governs? revealed that the dynamics of elite politics in the US requires a shift from how constituents influence representatives (the focus of Butler’s own research and that of many others) to considering the reverse dynamics - how lawmakers affect citizens. Presidents, we demonstrate, have reorganized the White House to focus on changing public opinion; the nature and scope of their success is, in our view, the primary research question.

The study of political representation—and, specifically, the empirical studies of government “responsiveness” and citizen “influence”—must be thoroughly reexamined on several fronts to fully incorporate the strategic choices of presidents and other political elites. First, political representation research must reassess which issues to study. Who Governs? demonstrated that political elites select particular issues from a large pool because they advance their interests. The implication is that researchers must be alert to the issues that the media and political elites do not poll in order to avoid selection bias and miss the effects of elite agenda setting. Second, future research must specify the type of representation. We show that politicians make strategic choices about whether to rely on data on specific issues to respond to citizen policy preferences (as many researchers assume), collect general ideological data to align with public’s general mood (as Erikson and Stimson argue), or use research on personality traits to skip policy representation altogether in order to shirk policy representation and widen their leeway to act. Third, salience is not exogenous to elite influence. Focusing on whether elites are responsive on issues of strong public interest risks the endogeneity problem. As we show, politicians deliberately prime salience for strategic ends.

Butler’s speculation about whether we should worry about the expansive polling operations of politicians is moot: they exist and elites use them to move public opinion to create discretion to pursue the policies preferred by themselves and their allies. Indeed, our research finds a pervasive intent to manipulate within the White House.

It is time to recast our study of political representation from the simplistic and misleading concept of responsiveness per se and instead focus on the nature of competition and participation.^{Footnote 1} Competition fundamentally affects opinion formation and limits elite leeway while mobilized participation is a tool for citizens to influence policy agendas.^{Footnote 2} The threat to US democracy is not simply weak “responsiveness” but rather constrained competition and inequities in participation.