The good news: The public actually does influence policy decisions at least some of the time, and presidential demagoguery is not pervasive. The unremarkable: We can only judge these facts for issues within the scope of polling, and presidents act strategically when they attempt to influence policy.

Brandice Canes-Wrone takes up important issues of presidential demagoguery and pandering, and convincingly brings coherence and clarity to often contradictory findings from a large field of scholarship. She directly addresses multiple sets of literatures and a range of plausible alternatives to explain presidential decisions to have strategic incentives go public, along with the normatively important question of when doing so constitutes pandering. Using formal modeling and extensive empirical testing, she provides evidence contrary to recurring themes in presidential persuasion scholarship. She demonstrates that presidents rarely cater to ill-reasoned and transitory public opinion that they believe is not good for the country, and that in going public, presidents attempt to shift Congress and/or the public on policies they want, not just manipulate public opinion. Saying so far too simply, Canes-Wrones identifies circumstances under which presidents have strategic incentives to go public because doing so leads to legislative success. She also finds that presidents pander only in certain circumstances.

The author succeeds in her wish to say something novel and precise about presidential demagoguery and pandering by exhaustively examining processes of policymaking and crossing subfields dedicated to institutional elites and the mass public. Here, formal theory successfully meets data, in an approach to emulate. This book also contributes to the growing literature that applies formal theory to political history, improves upon explanations of presidential behavior, and addresses the enduring normative concern of presidential pandering and executive demagoguery. The methodology she employs is particularly suited for future applications, although the evidence used may need to be adjusted. Her approach and findings certainly offer a potent tool for political strategists to predict when a president should go public and a means for pundits and analysts to critique presidential behavior with greater accuracy. Her primary contribution is to make formal and precise the ways that structural conditions shape the politics of public appeals (p. 21).

Organizing her book into two parts and eight chapters that include lucid summaries, Canes-Wrone systematically demonstrates the merits of her formal theories. Part I addresses a theory of public appeals and Part II a theory of contingent pandering. Despite being inescapably dense, the writing is remarkably comprehensible for this genre of study. After laying out each formal theory in detail, specifying all assumptions clearly, and addressing every conceivably relevant literature, she tests the theories using national speeches of presidents from Dwight Eisenhower through Bill Clinton, recurring budget issues, polling data, three case studies, the election cycle, an enormous data set of presidential decisions, and more. She distinguishes between domestic and foreign policy, traces several policies over several presidents, and combines veto models with a role for the electorate. One is left with a firm sense that she has covered all bases and reached important and valid conclusions.

Who Leads Whom? nonetheless suffers three shortcomings worth noting, although they do not unduly harm its contributions. First are the obvious problems that derive from formal theory. This approach gains precision by simplification. For example, the model relies upon a unitary voter and singular Congress, assumes that actors prefer choices equally, and does not take into account the congressional capacity—albeit it a weaker one—also to appeal to the public. Findings such as “success from appealing to the public depends on strategically choosing the initiatives he advocates” (p. 48) or “he has the incentive to publicize initiatives that are already popular” (p. 49) seem much ado about something far simpler than would require this high-powered methodology.

Second, the study relies upon discretionary national speeches as its primary measure of presidential attempts at influence. Since Ronald Reagan, television networks have been more discriminating as to when or whether to cover prime-time speeches. Further, so many channels are now available that speeches no longer achieve “national” status. While appropriate for historical analysis of the time frame, changes in broadcast technologies, and presidents' responses to them—taking a message to an entertainment venue, moving speeches out of the White House but still achieving national coverage—this measure likely will prove not only a product of its time, but also of technology and reverence for the president. The methodology nonetheless remains sturdy enough to insert other national-attention events, such as widely covered speeches “of the week,” employed often by G. W. Bush. The form of public appeal will need to adjust to carefully orchestrated settings, with greater network mediation if the approach is to remain potent. This observation does not, however, detract from the findings here.

Third, the title of this book misleads. Readers will not learn much about leadership. Only indirectly is the topic covered, and then, not until page 105. Canes-Wrone uncritically employs the term “lead” in the title and in naming Part II and Chapter 6. In doing so, she keeps company with many presidential scholars who seem to assume that anything a president does constitutes leadership. Given the title, one could wish for more thought about the elements and processes of leadership. The author juxtaposes policy pandering with policy leadership and defines the latter as a president pursuing “the policy he believes will promote societal welfare despite a lack of public support” (p. 105). Hence, she reduces leadership to the act of pursuing a policy even though the public does not yet support it. She contrasts this with “democratic leadership,” “which occurs when a politician moves public opinion toward his or her policy position” (p. 105, n. 6). Yet, to move public opinion is invariably part of policy leadership as defined, precisely because—as she found in Part I and in her case study of Reagan (pp. 150–56)—public opinion can influence Congress on policy. Instead of focusing upon leadership per se, she distinguishes between pandering and leadership. Given the difficulty of ascertaining presidential motives and discerning pandering from presidential and public concurrence, this research remains important, even though it says little about leadership.