The nature of government accountability in the twenty-first-century United States often seems murky. Canonical works on representation and accountability have often painted a picture of the US government as at least reasonably functional and of voters as vaguely attentive enough to hold elected officials accountable for their policy-making activities. Accountability Reconsidered, edited by Charles M. Cameron, Brandice Canes-Wrone, Sanford C. Gordon, and Gregory A. Huber, pushes us to rethink government accountability in light of the many changes to the informational environment surrounding voters. In this remarkably comprehensive set of essays, these scholars and their stellar team of chapter authors push researchers to think about how accountability might work in the United States across different policy-making venues given a fractured media ecosystem, ideologically polarized and homogeneous parties, hyper-concentrated wealth, and electoral instability (3). These essays taken together provide an important collection of insights for any student of representation and accountability in the United States.
The editors are uniquely focused on how information winds its way into public hands and how the modern US information environment might condition the accountability of political actors. I was quite pleased to see this as a work bridging the mass–elite gap. Too often, research on institutions, representation, or accountability focuses on political elites or on voters, but representation is a two-way street; any work that wishes to discuss how information might affect elites, for example, should also take the time to consider how that information changes the way voters evaluate elites. The collection is centered around four broad themes: (1) candidate evaluation and selection, (2) the evolving media landscape and its role in informing the public, (3) information availability and policy making, and (4) private interests and their role in facilitating or hampering accountability.
The central contribution of this book is that our attempts to evaluate the accountability of any government actor require careful attention to the specific environment (informational and institutional) in which they are embedded and to how that environment has changed both the actors’ incentives and the incentives of the actors’ principals. That is, any general notion about the broad quality of accountability in the United States is probably beyond our reach as scholars. Instead, we can think about specific circumstances, such as accountability in the notice and comments period (chap. 14) or accountability under changing media landscapes (chaps. 6–8). Of course, such nuance is not always the headline-grabbing, eye-catching clickbait that the press and publishers often want us to produce, but it is the best way for us to assess any tendency of growing or diminishing accountability. As a scholar who often tries to think about broad, general patterns across many political venues, I found that the text serves as a useful reminder of the real complexity underlying almost any evaluation of representation and accountability.
The book also does an excellent job of thinking about the informational environment from many points of view. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking about the information environment and the media landscape as interchangeable, but this book wrestles with how information affects candidate entry, the success or failure of lobbying efforts, and the criteria used to evaluate the success of public policies. Importantly, these bits of information can come from a wide array of sources including but not limited to the media.
I came away particularly impressed by several essays in the book. For example, chapter 6 by Canes-Wrone and Michael R. Kistner on local newspapers does a nice job demonstrating that ideological accountability in elections is conditional on the scope of the local media market. When media markets have limited incentives to cover local congressional elections, the relationship between candidate ideology and electoral outcomes disappears. This is an intuitive result, but to my knowledge, it has never been so straightforwardly demonstrated. I also enjoyed Daniel Carpenter and Brian Libgober’s chapter 14 on administrative politics. In a book so heavily focused on Congress, it was nice to see some attention to the administrative state. Taking advantage of the Durbin Rule’s requirement that the Federal Reserve regulate debit card transaction fees, Carpenter and Libgober are able to examine how firm lobbying affects administrative policy. When paired with the other chapters on lobbying and its influence on policy making—Eleanor Neff Powell, Devin Judge-Lord, and Justin Grimmer in chapter 12, and Lee Drutman in chapter 13—these contributions provide important new insights into how lobbying shapes the policy-making informational environment.
This book’s focus is exclusively on the US federal government, with a heavy dose of attention given to Congress, all of which is understandable given the predilections of the editors. They rightly point out that a focus on comparative or subnational accountability is likely beyond the scope of their text. Nevertheless, as a scholar of US state politics, it would have been nice to see some nod toward the ongoing work in state politics research that builds on many of the arguments the book reexamines. Mary A. Kroeger’s article (“Bureaucrats as Lawmakers,” Legislative Studies Quarterly, 47, 2022) and John Cluverius’s piece (“How the Flattened Costs of Grassroots Lobbying Affect Legislator Responsiveness,” Political Research Quarterly, 70(2), 2017) would make excellent companions for those looking to extend this text’s lessons to the subnational level. The book also avoids any case studies of specific institutional reforms and how they succeeded or failed in altering the information environment, which might have been a nice practical addition to the stellar work already included. In the end, however, no book can do all things at once, and this text does an excellent job at what it sets out to do.
In sum, for any scholar looking to think more carefully about the interplay between information and accountability at the US federal level or for anyone looking for a strong collection of essays engaging with how changes in the political environment might require us to reevaluate long-standing theories in political science, this is a must-read work. It provides a strong foundation to build future studies on, and many of the essays will be required reading in my own seminars moving forward.
