Abstract

ABSTRACTChristopher Achen and Larry Bartels’s Democracy for Realists offers a compelling critique of voters’ role in democratic politics and underscores the importance of group identity to vote choice. Even so, there may be grounds for attributing greater policy meaning to elections than Achen and Bartels acknowledge. Politicians have an incentive to respond to widely shared views in the electorate; this can often make it difficult to detect issue voting even when ordinary citizens’ issue preferences are critical. Group-based voting also may have policy content. Understanding the connections between group identity and policy substance constitutes an important challenge for future work building upon Achen and Bartels’s foundation.