2
There is much concern in political science about what to expect from democracy and
how to achieve it, especially when it comes to the role of citizens. Like Robert Putnam
(2000), James Fishkin (1995) and others I want to strengthen the citizenry. But my concern
is neither with social capital, nor political deliberation. It is instead with policy influence,
particularly the influence made possible by voting in presidential elections.
The key function of elections in the theory of democracy is to ensure the
responsiveness of public officials to the preferences of citizens. That makes policy influence
the bottom line. If voters can’t influence policy—by which I will mean here what the
national government does about big controversial problems that concern them—then what is
the point of democracy?
The best chance voters have to wield such influence is with the help of presidents.
The potential for mutual benefit—voter-assisted political leverage in Congress for presidents
in return for policy influence for voters—point s up the logic of such a relationship. But
while presidents sometimes claim the voter seal of approval for their policies, they are not
eager to reciprocate by taking direction on either policy priorities or solutions from voters.
In fact, recent evidence suggests that the public’s influence on policy is declining, largely
because presidents and other officials simulate responsiveness through “crafted talk” while
actually pursuing their own agendas (Shapiro and Jacobs, 2000; Jacobs and Shapiro, 2000).
The current president Bush is a case in point. He is pressing a bold agenda which the mass
pubic did not help to choose and in some cases—e.g., tax policy-- does not support.
Background
This paper is the latest of three, all concerned with the state of public influence on
presidential policy.
The first step was to clarify how elections create influence opportunities. That was
the intent of my 2001 paper, a typology of voter policy influence. There I argued that voters
can wield influence in three ways: through a president’s fear of future electoral punishment,
leading that figure to choose or avoid policy because of that fear (anticipatory influence); by
uniting to demand and get a problem addressed, thereby exerting direct influence on policy,
and by conferring policy mandates on election winners, thus helping at least to set the
agenda and sometimes to pass legislation by legitimizing it—legitimizing influence
The second step, my 2002 paper, reflected my conclusion that the best way to
combat the decline of citizen influence was to focus on legitimizing influence--mandates, or
policy partnerships as I prefer to call them.
The third step, the one I take here, is to set out a plan for making legitimizing
influence happen more often. Legitimizing influence is my choice. But as will be apparent,
the influence it can produce even under ideal circumstances is still quite limited. In fact,
none of these three influence types comes close to giving voters the power to set policy, as
happens in formal referenda (Cronin, 1989:2).
Convention