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The Culture of Spending: Why Congress Lives Beyond Our Means . By James L. Payne. San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1991. 225p. $24.95.

(4) emphasizing economic or international issues; and (5) emphasizing unemployment or inflation. Popkin then goes on to argue that people in fact make reasoned (and, by implication, "good") choices in primary and general elections. The abrupt changes in support for primary candidates make good sense once one recognizes that voters use heuristics and that candidates continually strive, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, to change the prevailing frame of the campaign. Moreover, the mystical campaign momentum that numerous scholars have documented and tried to understand is no more than a result of voters making reasoned choices. Unlike the other two books reviewed here, The Reasoning Voter presents little quantitative analysis. What Popkin has demonstrated, then, is the value of carefully and systematically integrating the literature and then deriving implications. I inevitably have a few quibbles about each book. Because Page and Shapiro had no control over the timing of the surveys and polls, they cannot completely rule out history effects. Moreover, it may be that the rhetoric surrounding policy proposals does more to influence opinion than the policies themselves. If so, Page and Shapiro may have underestimated how far the actions of public officials hold sway. Stimson unabashedly construes mood in cognitive terms. Perhaps mood reflects a growing anger on the part of citizens toward government. In this light, it would be helpful to know whether the documented changes in mood occur principally among certain segments of the population (e.g., the less interested). At times, Popkin presents as fact what others might consider an open empirical question. In no way should these quibbles detract from the significance of the works. If there is any doubt, consider two questions political scientists now face. First, if the purpose is to understand the nature and role of public opinion in American representative democracy, should scholars redirect their attention wholeheartedly to aggregate-level, rather than individual-level analysis? That The Rational Public and Public Opinion in America have just appeared is not completely happenstance. Many disciplines seem headed toward holistic perspectives, as exemplified by the emergence of chaos theory. Ironically, this movement within the discipline is occurring at the very time that political psychology, a highly reductionistic approach, has gained unprecedented prominence. The easy and perhaps correct answer is that we need both perspectives. Whatever one's own choice, the works reviewed here have brought the level-of-analysis problem to the fore, precisely where it belongs. Second, what criteria should we, as a discipline, bring to bear when evaluating representative democracy? All three works reviewed here reach optimistic conclusions about the quality of public opinion in American politics. Page, Shapiro, and Popkin, like others, view cue taking as an effective means by which people can make proper political judgments. One might argue, however, that the very fact that citizens must look to politicians and other elites for cues underlines a basic problem with largescale and increasingly complex political systems. "Knowing" via cues may or may not be equivalent to knowing via possessing factual, rooted-in-life information. If not and ordinary citizens cannot gain access to relevant data, what then? Or if, as Stimson argues, mood changes because the citizenry-at-large becomes disenchanted with government programs, why the continuing disenchantment? Thanks in good part to Benjamin Page, Robert Shapiro, James Stimson, and Samuel Popkin, these kinds of "big" questions beg answers more than ever before. The future of public opinion research could not be more challenging and exciting.