Nicholas Carnes continues the focus on media and information, examining how local newspapers cover incumbents and challengers. Some voters may value information about the pre-election employment history of candidates, for instance, if voters believe Congress would benefit from members with a range of socioeconomic classes and work experiences. What do the media actually say about employment histories? Carnes examines the coverage of 32thirty-two House incumbents and their challengers running for reelection in 2006 (or their most recent contested election), selected to oversample those with a working- class background prior to taking office. Content analysis reveals that occupational backgrounds rarely receive much coverage. The backgrounds of challengers are more newsworthy, but overall coverage of this aspect remains modest. Instead, coverage near elections focuses on incumbent party, issue positions, and performance in office. This lack of information about class background is arguably problematic for descriptive representation, particularly if it would shape voter choices were it more frequently provided.

In Chapter 8, Gregory Huber and Patrick Tucker provide a critical overview of the role of media in informing citizens about candidates. They identify important developments in the media landscape, including the decline in local print media, the expansion of national newspapers and cable TV into local markets, and the growth of the Internet. The chapter begins by discussing the theoretical relationship between these developments and the nature of coverage of politics, focusing on how this shapes the incentives of both incumbents and individuals running for office. Then turning to a review of prior empirical work, the authors highlighting areas where we currently lack a solid empirical foundation, for example, local television coverage and more recent newspaper coverage. Finally, they propose an agenda for a unified cross-media data collection project on citizens’ political informational environments vis-à-vis Congress.

Chapter 4, by Patrick Egan and Markus Prior, continues with the examination of electoral accountability and the psychology of citizen evaluation of incumbents by using R. Douglas Arnold’s The Logic of Congressional Action as a springboard. The authors carefully explicate Arnold’s assumptions about voter psychology and then evaluate them in light of recent scholarship and political developments. In their account, tighter voter association between incumbents and parties, decreased information about incumbents and policy outcomes, and heightened motivated reasoning require significant modification of Arnold’s classic assumptions. Still, they argue, a realistic appreciation of the new voter psychology of accountability does not imply Westminster-style accountability of legislators based exclusively on party labels. The real consequences of policies continue to matter to voters. But, the changes do imply that party labels and primaries matter more than formerly.

Part IV focuses on the role of private interests in shaping political accountability. In Chapter 12, Eleanor Neff Powell, Devin Judge-Lord, and Justin Grimmer examine the relationship among financial contributions to congressional members, constituency interests regarding energy regulation, and congressional oversight of the bureaucracy. The authors analyze a novel dataset of over 6,000 communications between legislators and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) from 2000 to 2018. This analysis suggests that Republican legislators are more likely to write to FERC on behalf of energy companies while Democrats are more likely to write to FERC on behalf of individual constituents, who overwhelmingly oppose energy company interests. The energy sector increasingly funnels campaign contributions primarily to Republican candidates, with Democratic candidates receiving about a third as much as their Republican counterparts. Finally, consistent with the argument that private interests influence congressional oversight, the authors find a statistically significant positive association between energy sector contributions and pro-business communications by legislators.

In the first chapter in Part III, Frances Lee shifts the focus from elections to governing in the context of contemporary American politics. She examines the strategies of coalition leaders in Congress, who now operate in a world of highly polarized congressional parties. She scrutinizes the two major legislative efforts of the 115th Congress (2017-18): tax reform and the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act. Lee finds that coalition leaders used many of the same techniques as in earlier periods. In particular, coalition leaders substantially modified their proposals to reduce the costs imposed on the constituents of legislators whose votes they needed. Similarly, leaders deployed procedural tactics to break the linkage between Congressional action and painful policy effects. These efforts were successful on tax reform but ultimately failed with the efforts to repeal the ACA, and Lee finds the failure was related to the traceable costs of the proposed policy change. She concludes that although polarization has arguably created new challenges for enacting major legislation, the strategies of coalition builders exhibit a good deal of continuity.

With Chapter 6, the volume shifts its focus to the role of the media in creating an informational environment that affects voters’ ability to hold elected officials accountable. Opening Part II, Brandice Canes-Wrone and Michael Kistner exploit variation across districts and over time in the congruence between local newspaper markets and House members’ districts. Using this variation, the authors estimate the effect of media coverage on the link between candidate ideology and election outcomes. For incumbents, who have track records of roll- call voting in Congress, differences in coverage only modestly affect the relationship between incumbent ideology and election outcomes. For challengers, however, reduced coverage is associated with a substantial reduction in both the penalty for ideological extremity and the reward for ideological moderation. The authors also find, consistent with the decline of local media and the rise of the internet, that the effect of local newspaper congruence may have decreased over time. Overall, media coverage and information are important in accountability, but in surprisingly subtle ways.

In Chapter 3, Eric M. Patashnik, Patrick Tucker, and Alan S. Gerber employ evidence from two original survey experiments to explore voter responses to representatives’ actions. In the first set of experiments, voters learn that their representative has claimed credit for bringing the district a grant. But how do voters evaluate the lawmaker’s performance? Do they rely on the absolute size of the grant, or on its size relative to other grants when allocating rewards and punishment to a representative? The authors find that individuals are responsive to information about the relative, but not absolute, size of grants, and are more inclined to punish legislators for delivering below-average grants than reward them for securing above-average ones. The second set of experiments manipulates information about different kinds of benefits, and shows respondents react more strongly to information about specific policies than abstract ones. Together, the results indicate that citizens’ ability to hold representatives accountable depends on citizens’ ability to put policy actions into a concrete context they find meaningful.

Opening Part I, Josh Clinton, Michael Sances, and Mary Sullivan examine the extent to which constituents evaluate incumbents based on their policy actions in office. The authors focus on situations in which representatives cast a vote contrary to the constituent’s views and present two different analyses. First, they examine the universe of issues in the 2008-2017 Congressional Cooperative Election Study (CCES) surveys, which include items designed to relate constituents’ policy preferences to specific roll- call votes in the House. Second, they conduct an in-depth analysis of legislative activity around the Affordable Care Act (ACA), investigating how members of different demographic groups vary in holding House members accountable for policy positions. In both analyses, partisan labels exert a substantial, independent effect on voter evaluations, but issue positions nonetheless matter. Moreover, the ACA analysis indicates that policy effects are larger among wealthier individuals. The findings imply that despite the increasing role of partisanship in U.S. elections, issue representation remains an important force in voter evaluation of incumbents.

Rounding out Part 1, Kathleen Bawn, Knox Brown, Angela X. Ocampo, Shawn Patterson, Jr., John L. Ray, and John Zaller report results from one of the largest “on the ground” studies of candidate selection ever undertaken. Focusing on fifty-three potentially winnable open seat House races in the 2013–14 election cycle, the authors interviewed local participants and observers to probe the processes behind candidate selection in primary elections. The extensive fieldwork reveals that groups, which may include local party organizations, are the central political actors in the selection process. Voters rely on signals from the groups, whose primary objective is to minimize uncertainty about a candidate’s commitment to particular policy goals. Because this objective may lead groups to promote nominees who are not closest to the primary electorates’ ideological preferences, the candidates who win may be more ideologically extreme than even the primary electorates are. The chapter therefore highlights how analyses that focus on the general election, such as Chapters 2 and 6, are dependent on the candidates that emerge from the primary selection process.

In Chapter 13, Lee Drutman asks more generally whether the contemporary Congress can serve the general public interest or merely narrow, particularistic ones. The chapter examines the effects of crucial changes in the contemporary Congress vis-à-vis earlier periods, including increased efforts by incumbents to raise money through campaign donations, a growth in advocacy and lobbying by private special interests, and intense party polarization. Moreover, the chapter considers whether the recent developments invalidate earlier understandings of congressional representation and policymaking. In Drutman’s view, much remains unchanged. Taken together, however, the changes strengthen the hands of special interests and lessen the probability that Congress can rise above the preferences of organized groups to pursue policies that serve the general interests of inattentive citizens.