Democratic Accountability

Public opinion towards human-induced climate change is polarized along partisan lines. Indeed, scholars debate whether direct experiences with the consequences of climate change result in durable effects on opinions or behaviors. Our analysis of hundreds of thousands of survey respondents and nearly 30,000 precinct-level voting returns challenges this emerging consensus for one kind of climate change outcome: rising sea levels. We find that persistent vulnerability to rising sea levels is associated with opinions and behaviors about global warming. Coastal residents affected by sea-level rise are more likely to support climate mitigation policy. This association is strongest among those firmly attached to their communities, as opposed to those with the most to lose financially. We speculate that sea-level rise is exceptionally salient in the minds of those affected as an ever-present reminder of the inevitable toll of climate change.

We explore the foundations of the urban-rural political gulf, which is well-documented in the United States and other western democracies. We theorize that it is anchored in the variable extent of residents’ satisfaction and place attachment. Consistent with a long tradition of sociological findings, we first demonstrate that attachment to one’s neighborhood of residence is much higher among rural populations than in big cities. This variation in place attachment is an important font of political and policy attitudes, substantively contributing to the ideological differences between urban and rural areas. Politically relevant grievances arise most acutely when they are shared as prevailing conditions in specific social environments. The more dissatisfied one is with the place they live, the more attractive they find the policy goals and political agenda of liberal progressivism in US politics. Greater contentment with place, on the other hand, is predictive of politically conservative viewpoints.

Attempts by elected executives to consolidate power have generated alarm and raised concern about democratic backsliding. We study mass attitudes toward the institutional power of the office of the presidency and argue that individuals' democratic values shape views of executive power. Using data from 26 countries in the Americas and 37 countries in Africa, we find support for our perspective. While supporters of the incumbent president express more favorable views toward executive power, we also show that individuals who express stronger commitments to democracy are less supportive of institutional arrangements that favor the executive. Our results demonstrate that attitudes toward the institutions of government are not shaped only by partisanship and other ephemeral political factors, but also by citizens' core commitments to values over governance.

Americans are anxious about crime regardless of their actual exposure or risk. Given this pervasive concern, US presidents frequently talk about crime, take actions to address it, and list crime prevention efforts among their top accomplishments. We argue that presidents act this way, in part, because fear of crime translates into lowered presidential approval. However, this penalty is not applied evenly. Given the parties’ stances toward crime and the criminal justice system, White Americans punish Democratic presidents (i.e., Clinton and Obama) more severely when they are anxious about crime, while Black Americans are more punitive toward Republican presidents (i.e., Bush and Trump). We examine twenty years of survey data and find evidence consistent with our theory. Our results suggest that the relationship between fear of crime and presidential accountability is conditioned by an individual’s race and the president’s party.

Politically relevant identities and opinions about politics and government are neither randomly nor evenly distributed across space. The task of social scientists studying electoral geography is to understand why. Explanations go to individual characteristics, the characteristics of the settings where they live out their lives, or interesting interactions of the two. Moreover, social influence apparently has a physical and geographic component in the sense that proximity matters. Although people can form more contacts over longer distances than in the past, that does not seem to have diminished the greater weight placed on contacts close-by, pointing to the sustained coincidence of social and geographic space. Size and density of settlement also matter over and above compositional effects, continuing to account for many negative social outcomes. The chapter closes with the consideration of challenges to social scientific inference posed by the effort to account for the experience of a living in a multi-level world.

When things go wrong, and the government may be to blame, the public support enjoyed by elected executives is vulnerable. Because attribution of responsibility is often not straightforward, elected executives can influence citizens’ evaluations of their performance through presentational strategies, or explanatory frames which describe their roles in the management of the crisis. We examine the effectiveness of two ubiquitous presentational strategies: blame claiming, where the executive accepts responsibility, and blame deflecting, where the executive shifts blame to others. Using survey experiments incorporating stylised and real-world stimuli, we find that blame claiming is more effective than blame deflecting at managing public support in the aftermath of crises. In investigating the underlying mechanism, we find that blame claiming creates more favourable views of an executive’s leadership valence. While elected executives are better off avoiding crises, we find that when they occur, “stopping the buck” is a superior strategy to deflecting blame.

Presidents routinely overpromise and underdeliver, especially amid partisan polarization, narrow congressional majorities, and persistent gridlock. As Congress routinely stymies their legislative agendas, presidents consider alternative courses of action. We study public reactions to unilateral power in the context of congressional inaction. While some research suggests that presidents cannot afford to pass up opportunities to act, more recent scholarship indicates that the public holds negative views of unilateral power and disapproves of its use. Survey experiments conducted with a national sample of Americans provide evidence of the costs of unilateral power. Across three policy areas and between- and within-respondent analyses, the public responds negatively when presidents exercise unilateral power rather than accept the status quo, even among individuals who share the president’s policy views. Our results suggest that while legislative gridlock may increase the appeal of unilateral power, its use may come at a public cost.

In times of crisis, citizens look to their leaders for aid and assistance. In the democratic context, the focal figure is likely the chief executive accountable to the whole of the nation. With a specific focus on the American president and the incidences of natural hazards, public opinion and governmental response to these crises are analyzed. While one may expect such a universal actor to aid each according to their need, new scholarship finds that voter behavior and electoral institutions incentivize the president to support only a small slice of the electorate. Empowered by federal disaster relief legislation in the 1950s, the president targets electorally valuable voters when disbursing aid or allocating resources in response to disaster damage. Voters in those areas respond myopically and tend to vote for the incumbent for reasons ranging from economic to emotional. Thus, elites anticipate voter reactions and strategically respond to disasters to mitigate blame or punishment for the event and capitalize on an opportunity for electoral gains.

This article examines attitudes of the public toward delegation to presidential commissions. Using four survey experiments across a range of contexts, the authors compare public response to the creation of a commission versus direct presidential action. The findings indicate no significant difference in approval for taking action alone or delegating to a commission, at either the policy formulation or implementation stage. Additionally, policies formed by commissions are not seen as more effective than those formed by the president alone.

In this chapter, we give an overview of the ways that scholars and policymakers are currently using individual geolocation data. We also describe some new analytic and service-provision possibilities that geolocation data enables. We discuss several challenges inherent in obtaining geolocation data and making that data useful for social, political, and policy research and practice. We highlight the unique concerns over privacy that arise in this rich data environment, and note some promising approaches for addressing them.

This article reports a series of survey experiments (N > 7,500) examining whether public support for presidential unilateral action is sensitive to contextual factors such as the president's identity, the unilateral tool used, justifications for action, and the policy pursued. The authors find little evidence that context affects attitudes toward unilateral powers except in circumstances that invoke explicitly political factors. The findings suggest that public attitudes toward unilateral power are generally stable and have implications for understanding how public opinion constrains presidential power.

This article examines public attitudes toward the levers of presidential power using data from a nationally representative survey. The authors find that respondents who provide higher approval ratings of the president are significantly more supportive of presidential powers. The findings suggest that views toward executive power are shaped by presidential approval and that popular presidents can use their prestige to expand the scope of powers available to the presidency.

This essay provides an overview of the research on the politics of disaster relief in the United States, focusing on the response of voters and politicians in the aftermath of severe weather events. It reviews foundational research, discusses recent advances, and addresses important issues for future research on this topic.

We examine the contours of support for the Clinton and Obama health care plans during the 1990s and 2000s based on our own compilation of 120,000 individual-level survey responses from throughout the debates. Despite the rise of the Tea Party, and the racialization of health care politics, opinion dynamics are remarkably similar in both periods. Party ID is the single most powerful predictor of support for reform and the president’s handling of it. Contrary to prominent claims, after controlling for partisanship, demographic characteristics are at best weak predictors of support for reform. We also show that Clinton and Obama did not ‘‘lose’’ blacks, seniors, or wealthy voters over the course of the debate. The small and often nonexistent relationship between these characteristics and support for the plan are constant over time. Instead, the modest fluctuations in support for reform appear to follow the ebb and flow of elite rhetoric. Both mean levels of support and its volatility over time covary with elite partisan discourse. These findings suggest that presidents courting public opinion should seek consensus among their own party’s elites before appealing to other narrower interests.

Assessment of the nation’s economic performance has been repeatedly linked to voters’ decision-making in U.S. presidential elections. Here we inquire as to where those economic evaluations originate. One possibility in the politicized environment of a major campaign is that they are partisan determinations and do not reflect actual economic circumstances. Another possibility is that these judgments arise from close attention to news media, which is presumably highlighting national economic conditions as a facet of campaign coverage. Still a third explanation is that voters derive their national economic evaluations from living out their lives in particular localities which may or may not be experiencing the conditions that affect the nation as a whole. Drawing upon data from the 2008 presidential election, we find that varying local conditions do shape the economic evaluations of political independents. Moreover, unemployment is not the only salient factor, as fuel prices and foreclosures also figured prominently. Local economic factors, what we call geotropic considerations, shape national economic evaluations especially for those who aren’t making these judgments on simple partisan grounds.

Do selection methods for public officials impact how they represent their constituents? Municipal clerks in the New England states offer an ideal case to examine this question. As key government actors in full-service local governments with minimal overlapping jurisdictions, clerks in these states vary in how they are selected—either through election or appointment. Using an original online and mail survey of municipal clerks across five New England states, we find that elected clerks demonstrate a stronger orientation toward public service and are more responsive to constituent concerns. However, selection methods show little impact on substantive ideological, partisan, or policy representation. These findings highlight the relationship between the mode of selection and representation, offering a foundation for future research on other offices and dimensions of representation.