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Presidential Campaigns and Presidential Accountability. By Michele P. Claibourn. Urbana:University of Illinois Press. 2011. 204 pp.

If a democracy is to thrive, elected officials must be held accountable to public opinion. But thedevil is in the details. What do we mean by “accountable”? In fact, what do we mean by “publicopinion”? Each term has a range of definitions, and the array of interactions between them can bedizzying. In this book, Michele Claibourn assesses frequently used definitions of “accountability”and presents an alternative approach to holding presidents accountable.

The notion of prospective accountability—that candidates make policy promises, voters judgethem, the elected candidate carries out his/her promises, and voters reward or punish—is clearlyunrealistic, she points out. But so, to a lesser extent, is the idea of retrospective accountability, askingvoters only if they think times are better now than when the incumbent was elected. In the first case,candidates who do make specific campaign promises are often disadvantaged because they will haverestricted their ability to respond to subsequent developments. Further, most voters emerge fromcampaigns unscathed by much knowledge about the candidates’ specific stands. And in both cases,when the winning candidate takes office, he or she cannot fairly be held responsible for creatingpolicy change. In the American system of separated powers, Congress does not have to approve thepresident’s initiatives, and courts can derail them.

Claibourn argues that we need to rethink accountability. The driver of her theory is thatcandidates communicate their policy agendas during a campaign: they identify their issue prioritiesto voters. The extensive repetition that is central to modern campaign advertising helps even manytuned-out voters perceive each candidate’s issue priorities. These priorities tell voters what to expectfrom each candidate after the election: which issues will engage the greatest portion of the presi-dent’s energy. Citizens then hold the president accountable by awarding higher approval ratings if heor she devotes attention to these priorities and lower ratings if he or she is distracted from them.

Thus, campaigns play a vital role in accountability. By communicating each candidate’s issuepriorities, they provide a standard for assessing the president’s performance, at least for the first yearor so. If the president devotes substantial attention to these issues and asks Congress to act on them,then he or she has been accountable and should receive higher public approval ratings. But theaccountability is limited to the president’s issue priorities, rather than to whether the president is ableto deliver the substance of any policy promises made during the campaign.

Here, of course, is the rub. This appears to be a thin form of accountability. A dovish presidentcould be termed “accountable” if he or she put a priority on foreign policy during the campaign andthen spent a lot of time on foreign policy once in office, whether that time was devoted to negotiatingan arms control treaty or invading an oil-rich country. A president who used “red herrings” to distractcitizens from his or her campaign themes would be judged not accountable. But a president who triedbut failed to accomplish something—anything—on the issues he or she identified as of primary

Political Psychology, Vol. 33, No. 4, 2012doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9221.2012.00905.x

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importance during the campaign would be seen as accountable. Claibourn’s agenda accountabilitystandard does pay greater respect to the reality of the separation of powers and the inattention andlack of expertise of citizens than do the prospective and retrospective definitions of accountability,not to mention the ease with which political scientists can measure the central terms. But there isroom to debate whether the resulting level of responsiveness satisfies the needs of a democracy.

The empirical test of her theory has a satisfying step-by-step logic. First, she analyzes candi-dates’ advertising and TV news coverage of the campaign to show that candidates do refer to severalimportant issues to varying degrees; they don’t ignore issues or focus primarily on trivial matters.She does not specify that some minimum proportion of campaign advertising refer to policy issues.So she concludes that the signals provided by candidates are present.

She finds, however, that the candidates’ relative emphasis on different issues is not faithfullyreflected in media coverage. NBC’s news coverage in 2000 gave much more equal attention to eachmajor issue than the candidates did in their advertising. If voters aren’t able to learn the candidates’actual issue priorities, of course, then their ability to hold presidents accountable is restricted.Claibourn notes this challenge but doesn’t stress it. She also notes that the lack of campaign ads innonbattleground states reduces the ability of voters in these states to perceive candidates’ issueemphases. (These findings would also prove problematic for other approaches to accountability.)

She then uses original survey data from the 2000 presidential campaign to examine the extent towhich voters hear the candidates’ emphases. Candidates who air more advertising on an issue areperceived as talking more about this issue. The relationship varies by issue, however. And partyimages affect respondents’ perceptions: Regardless of the actual distribution of ads, Gore is per-ceived as talking more about Social Security and education than Bush is, presumably because SocialSecurity is seen as a Democratic issue, and Bush is seen as talking more about taxes than Gore is. Shealso finds some evidence of issue projection: Partisans who give priority to an issue are more likelyto say that their party’s candidates are talking about the issue, whether or not that is accurate. Sheplaces greatest emphasis on the first: Respondents do pick up on candidates’ issue emphases. Butthere’s evidence of all three.

And she reports that the priorities candidates placed on different issues in the 1992, 2000, and2008 campaigns seemed to set the agenda for presidential approval. Compared with issues that werenot emphasized during the campaign, the extent to which the winning candidate spent early effort onthe issue agenda he set out in the campaign correlated more strongly with the president’s approvalratings during much of his first year, whereas the connections were weaker on issues that were notemphasized during the campaign. Presidents who changed their focus from this agenda (e.g., BillClinton in 1993) paid a price in approval ratings.

The broad pattern is not universal. In Clinton’s case, the deficit was an exception. Althoughreducing the deficit was not a Clinton priority during the campaign, he did increase his effort on theissue after the beginning of his term, and his effort was related to somewhat stronger public approvalratings. In the case of George W. Bush, his campaign emphasis on health care did not seem to registerwith citizens; Bush was not closely connected with the issue in poll data, nor did public approvalratings of Bush’s presidential performance on health care have much influence on his overallapproval ratings. Similarly, Claibourn mentions that President Obama’s tax cuts “may not havepenetrated the public consciousness” (p. 141). She notes that some issues—especially the economyand foreign policy—are important in explaining a president’s public approval ratings whether or notthey were emphasized by the president during the campaign. In short, not all issues conform to thetheory’s expectations. She points out that some issues will enter a candidate’s agenda in response tothe opponent’s stress on that issue. It may be that something about the candidate’s handling of suchissues can interfere with voters’ willingness to hold the candidate responsible for them.

Another point deserving consideration is whether agenda-setting is genuinely separable from thecontent of policy. David Weaver (1991) shows that telling people what to think about is not easily

576 Book Reviews

distinguished from telling them what to think. Although Claibourn writes that “citizens frequentlycare more that a problem is solved than with how” (pp. 58–59), it might be that “how” a problem isdealt with has direct implications for whether citizens believe that it is in fact “solved,” as Obama’sefforts to deal with the continuing economic decline may indicate.

There are many good things about this well-written book. It incorporates a wide range ofliterature on representation, public opinion, and voting as well as priming and agenda setting into thetheory. Claibourn makes the useful argument that public approval ratings are a form of sanction thatcitizens can deliver during a president’s term of office to help hold the president accountable.Chapter 5 offers an interesting discussion of priming through frequency of exposure as opposed torecency of exposure and points out the difference in the implications: frequency of exposure canresult in a clearer view of candidates’ emphases, whereas recency of exposure can produce volatilityin citizens’ expectations.

Claibourn’s approach is insightful and provocative. It needs further specification (particularlywith regard to falsification) and empirical examination. But it is a worthy step in the Fenno traditionof exploring the links between campaigning and governing as well as the relationships betweencitizens and presidents.

Marjorie Randon HersheyIndiana University

REFERENCE

Weaver, D. (1991). Issue salience and public opinion. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 3, 53–68.

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Overcoming Evil: Genocide, Violent Conflict, and Terrorism. By Ervin Staub. New York: OxfordUniversity Press. 2011. 581 pp.

The evil Staub addresses is the direct mass violence that is involved in genocide, terrorism, andviolent conflict. He wants to demystify this evil so that the public can understand how, under certainspecifiable circumstances, ordinary people can become engaged in mass violence. He reasons that ifwe understand this evil we can act to prevent it. The first of the book’s two sections is devoted toreviewing the origins of mass violence. It avoids oversimplification by examining the multiplefactors involved in many different examples of terrorism and genocide. Examples include thegenocides in the Holocaust, Rwanda, the Congo and Cambodia, the conflict between Israelis andPalestinians, the conflict in Bosnia, the Netherlands, and Northern Ireland. There are careful descrip-tions of the sources of intergroup conflict and the conditions that encourage its escalation, theimportant role played by bystanders, and the cultural, historical, and socioeconomic conditions thatmake mass violence more likely. These descriptions clearly demonstrate that any explanation of massviolence requires an understanding of both political considerations of intergroup conflict overresource and privilege and psychological considerations of needs and the dynamics involved inidentity and vulnerability.

Staub’s account of the origins of mass violence begins with a description of instigating con-ditions. These include difficult life situations (such as war and economic deterioration) that, in theabsence of adequate societal institutions, lead to the frustration of a number of basic human needs,including the need for a positive identity. These conditions lead people to satisfy needs by increas-ing their reliance on their primary ingroups. If different groups are in conflict over basic resources

577Book Reviews