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The Rise of Candidate-Centered Politics: Presidential Elections of the 1980s

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Wattenberg makes an argument that the weak party system has caused many voters to search for new ways to identify who they will vote for when participating in presidential elections. The information these voters would find rests in the performance of the sitting president. If the sitting president is doing a good job, then the voters will elect them, but if not the and the president is not seen as doing a good job then the voters will vote them out of a job. Further evidence of this is found in the Obama results of 2008. A great deal of voters elected Obama without knowing much about him. What they did know was the Bush did a poor job, and they voted against the republican in that race. That was all it took for them to vote for Obama, just the idea they were voting against four more years if the Bush administration. This is how voters decide issues today, but the book is silent on what the consequences of this happen to be.

Wattenberg starts by reviewing theories of how people vote. Do people vote because of where they live? Do people vote because their families have always voted for this or that party? Do people vote for one party because they are dissatisfied with economic conditions? With changing social values? Or do people choose someone because the candidate seems to be the right person for the job?

The book then presents presidential election returns and polling data ranging between 1952 and 1988 and the trend is unmistakable. People are voting less and less along party lines, less and less according to policy trends (which had stabilized) and more according to performance. The data indicates that voters in the 1980 election didn't so much elect Ronald Reagan as they rejected Jimmy Carter. Likewise in 1988, they didn't so much elect Bush senior as they re-elected Reagan to a third term.

Interestingly, being elected doesn't seem to confer a policy mandate of any sort on a candidate, or at least not as strong a mandate as first impressions would lead us to think. What matters most is not which policy platform the candidate will adopt, what matters most is who the candidates are and how people expect them to perform.

Conservatives should not dismiss the liberal author's conclusions since they seem to have been corroborated by election results since 1992. Wattenberg uncovered trends that all politicians need to consider.

Vincent Poirier, Tokyo