Senator Edwards is not alone in observing a lack of accountability in America’s democracy. Indeed, both popular and academic media offer considerable support for this sentiment. The popular Cable News Network (CNN) criticized “government, big business, and special interest groups” for enriching themselves at the expense of the common electorate and characterized elected offices as “accountability free zones” while arguing that “our government no longer works for us.”2 Important scholars like John Matsusaka have added weight to this type of argument. Building on Robert Erikson et al.’s (1993) measure of government quality as “the responsiveness of public policymaking to the preferences of the mass public”, for example, Professor Matsusaka.
