Public Opinion and Democratic Accountability: How Citizens Learn about Politics.

By Vincent L. Hutchings. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 192p. $35.00.

The starting point of Vincent Hutchings's marvelous book is the common observation that the public appears to lack sufficient knowledge about political issues to participate meaningfully in democracy. As many observers have noted, the news media contain a paucity of substantive political information, and most Americans are uninformed about most issues and unaware of the positions taken by their elected representatives. The seemingly inevitable conclusion is that citizens cannot possibly hold their representatives accountable in any significant way.

Yet Hutchings argues that the American public (and mass media) are fulfilling their democratic responsibilities much more ably than is commonly believed. His position rests first on the obvious but often overlooked fact that not all political information is equally important for each citizen's political decision making. Most people care about a few issues rather than the full range of issues on the political agenda at any one time. Rather than every citizen needing to be sufficiently informed about all issues on the political agenda, citizens can fulfill their democratic responsibility if they are sufficiently informed about the particular issues that they personally care about. Thus, studies that find that most people are uninformed about most issues implicitly adopt an inappropriate standard and are of little relevance for judging the public's ability to perform its democratic function.

Consistent with this notion of “issue publics,” Hutchings shows that citizens with a greater concern about a particular issue are more likely to know their incumbent senators' votes on that issue or the position on the issue taken by candidates for senator or governor (net of general measures of political information, education, media consumption, campaign interest, etc.). Such knowledge is higher, he finds, among survey respondents who express clear preferences on an issue, who are personally affected by it, or who belong to interest groups (like unions or religious organizations) with ties to the issue.

Secondly, Hutchings notes that even within the issue domains that an individual citizen cares about, he or she need not keep tabs on all political developments at all times. Rather, citizens (and the media) can make a standing assumption that politicians will usually behave in expected ways (for example, by voting along party lines) and that the specifics of such behavior need not be attended to; only politicians' unexpected behavior needs to be brought to the public's attention. Consistent with this understanding, the author finds that while newspapers typically contain sparse information about individual senators' votes, they are far more likely to give prominent coverage to a senator's vote if it differs from the position of his or her party.

Combining these two sets of ideas and analyses, Hutchings arrives at a model in which citizens can effectively monitor their representatives by attending only to unexpected behavior relevant to the particular issues that they care about. But do the patterns of news content and citizen information acquisition suggested by this model really translate into citizens' voting behavior? He shows that they do.

Examining Senate elections from 1988 to 1992, for example, Hutchings found that a senator's objective voting record on relevant issues affected the vote choice of citizens interested in those particular issues (again, net of a wide range of controls for general political knowledge and engagement). For many groups, this pattern held only when the issue of interest was raised in a given election, but for the most attentive groups (e.g., union members), responsiveness to senators' objective voting record was evident across all elections.

Like many of the important advances in the social sciences, the ideas Hutchings develops in this book are simple—even obvious—but frequently neglected by researchers. Public Opinion and Democratic Accountability brings together insights from a disparate array of intellectual traditions. The author melds these ideas together in a comprehensive and integrated framework and tests them with a series of clever and rigorous analyses of both existing and original data.

What makes this book especially compelling is the care with which Hutchings conducts his work. He does not rest, for example, when his empirical findings are consistent with his hypothesis; instead, he considers alternative models that might also generate those findings and devises tests to distinguish one account from the other.

The public's ability to participate meaningfully in democratic governance is among the most central and enduring topics in political science. Hutchings goes beyond earlier work on this topic in describing and then testing a more sophisticated and strategic conception of what the public needs to know in order to perform its democratic function. To do so, he combines existing survey data with his own analyses of legislators' voting records and extensive coding of news media content.

This book will be widely read, and future research on democratic accountability will need to take both Hutchings's arguments and his empirical evidence into account. In short, this is a first-rate examination of one of the discipline's most fundamental concerns.