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10 - Fire Alarms and Democratic Accountability

from Part III - Policymaking, Information Provision, and Accountability

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2023

Charles M. Cameron
Affiliation:
Princeton University, New Jersey
Brandice Canes-Wrone
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Sanford C. Gordon
Affiliation:
New York University
Gregory A. Huber
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
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Summary

Charles Cameron and Sanford Gordon continue the focus on governance by studying the incentives facing elected officials when voters rely on challengers and interest groups – ---"sentinels” – ---to sound “fire alarms” about incumbent behavior. The authors find that three factors affect the impact of sentinels: the verifiability of fire alarm information, potentially a critical issue in the age of “fake news”; the incentives of sentinels to withhold information, either to make incumbents look bad or to advance favored policies; and the ability of incumbents to counter sentinel bias through credit-claiming. Importantly, the presence of sentinels can lead incumbents to reduce the chance of bad news even at the expense of voter welfare, a perverse effect not fully eliminated by incumbent credit-claiming. The authors illustrate these insights with a case study of changes in the politics of criminal justice. The chapter concludes that fire- alarm oversight of incumbent politicians sometimes helps voters, but its potentially perverse effects render it a distant second -best to a fully informed electorate in ways that imply the media effects studied in Part II strongly affect elected officials.

Type
Chapter
Information
Accountability Reconsidered
Voters, Interests, and Information in US Policymaking
, pp. 221 - 241
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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