In 2008, the political scientists Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller released a book called The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform. The basic argument is that, despite the ostensible democratic machinery of state primaries, party elites were the ones who really made the decisions. The authors showed that even after the presidential primary reforms in the late ’60s and early ’70s made the nomination process more reliant on voters, the candidate who collected the most endorsements from party grandees still ultimately locked up the nomination.
A semi-bastardized version of this argument quickly became conventional wisdom among the pundit class. Although The Party Decides itself contained extensive caveats and qualifications (especially concerning its minuscule sample size), the book came to be treated as all but ironclad proof that the voters had no say whatsoever in the selection of their party’s nominee. When it comes to presidential primaries at least, The Voters Are Stupid. They might think they have some say in choosing their party’s nominee—said the wonks, nodding sagely to one another—but in reality, they were merely validating the pre-existing choices of the elite class.
But by 2015, this consensus was melting like snow before a stream of hot urine, as Donald Trump contemptuously bulldozed the Republican establishment and locked up that party’s nomination. Indeed, not only did he casually brush aside unified opposition of nearly the entire Republican elite, but he did it despite having no formal political experience of any kind. It seemed the voters had some kind of a voice after all.
But this changed political context did not spell the end of the Stupid Voter narrative: It merely changed form. Whereas voters were previously deemed stupid because they had no influence on political outcomes, they were now deemed stupid because they had too much influence, influence that thwarted the wise and sensible aims of political elites who otherwise would have governed in the public interest. In 2016, political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels published a much more ambitious book called Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. It is, basically, The General Theory of Stupid Voters. It has become the latest conventional wisdom about democracy, garnering near-universal praise in the elite press, from the London School of Economics to Foreign Affairs to the New York Review of Books. The Economist deems it “the most influential recent book on voting.” (...)
First, let’s take a look at the central argument of Democracy for Realists. Achen and Bartels assemble a huge body of evidence to demonstrate that the voting public is vastly ignorant about policy, tends to rationalize pre-existing biases, and blames the incumbent party for things they could not possibly control, like shark attacks. Even when voters can be shown to be making a sort of judgment about political success on the merits—namely, voting the bums out during times of economic crisis—their decision tends to be severely myopic. Voters generally judge economic performance only on the last few months before election day, not based on how the whole last electoral term has gone.
The authors take aim at something they call the “folk theory” of democracy, which they define as the idea that democracy is about simply representing the will of the voters. The “folk theory” of democracy is the animating force behind initiatives to increase popular participation in decision-making by adding ballot initiative and referendum procedures to various constitutions, so that “the people” can have a direct voice on policy matters. The authors demonstrate many severe problems with this sort of direct democracy — most notably, that it is at least as vulnerable to elite influence as any other sort of democracy, if not more so. Ordinary citizens really are not equipped to make decisions on complicated policy questions, and have often shot themselves in the foot by voting down water fluoridation measures and so forth (often egged on by well-funded right-wing extremists).
The trouble starts with their formal model of the folk theory, which they represent with an elaborate mathematical system descended from neoclassical economics called the “median voter theorem.” By this view, voters select candidates closest to their own ideology, and assuming voter preferences are represented by a single left-right spectrum with two equal-sized peaks, parties will rationally appeal to the median voter directly in the political middle. This predicts that each party will have the exact same centrist platform. The “rationally ignorant” median voter doesn’t have to do anything to see his preferences validated by the political system.
This model was directly based on similar economic models, which take a lot of assumed background conditions, run them through some intimidating math, and produce a result demonstrating that free market institutions automatically produce the best of all possible worlds. Voting, it’s just like buying peanut butter! It’s sort of an appealing notion, so long as it doesn’t make any close contact with reality.
Achen and Bartels blow this theory out of the water, thus defeating their conception of the folk theory of democracy. Most obviously, the parties do not have the same platform and never have, not even during the mid-20th-century period of relative political consensus when this kind of model was somewhat plausible. But since 1980 especially, the idea that the parties don’t have strong and increasingly stark disagreements is prima facie ridiculous.
The authors have a lot of smart things to say about the negative influence economics-style reasoning has had on political science. But they don’t consider the idea that using the median voter theorem to represent the folk theory may itself be misleading.
This can best be seen in their implicit theory of reasoning, which is based on the same neoclassical bullshit. They define it in exclusively individual terms—a fundamental premise of this style of economics. By their lights, political reasoning happens when someone has pre-existing, fully worked-out ideology, and perfect knowledge of how the political system has affected their personal well-being , who then calculates the most rational political decision in terms of their own pocketbook and principles.
It is true that virtually nobody behaves in this way. Many people don’t have a clue what each party stands for, while others are egregiously mistaken about who believes what. But more importantly, Achen and Bartels argue that even very well-informed people tend to rationalize their group identities by adopting whatever the consensus view is—and then argue that, by definition, adopting a consensus view cannot be a “reasoned” decision: “[T]he political preferences and judgments that look and feel like the bases of partisanship and voting behavior are, in reality, often the consequences of party and group loyalties … the more information a voter has, often the better able she is to bolster her identities with rational-sounding reasons.”
There are a lot of problems with the premise of this argument.
A semi-bastardized version of this argument quickly became conventional wisdom among the pundit class. Although The Party Decides itself contained extensive caveats and qualifications (especially concerning its minuscule sample size), the book came to be treated as all but ironclad proof that the voters had no say whatsoever in the selection of their party’s nominee. When it comes to presidential primaries at least, The Voters Are Stupid. They might think they have some say in choosing their party’s nominee—said the wonks, nodding sagely to one another—but in reality, they were merely validating the pre-existing choices of the elite class.
But by 2015, this consensus was melting like snow before a stream of hot urine, as Donald Trump contemptuously bulldozed the Republican establishment and locked up that party’s nomination. Indeed, not only did he casually brush aside unified opposition of nearly the entire Republican elite, but he did it despite having no formal political experience of any kind. It seemed the voters had some kind of a voice after all.
But this changed political context did not spell the end of the Stupid Voter narrative: It merely changed form. Whereas voters were previously deemed stupid because they had no influence on political outcomes, they were now deemed stupid because they had too much influence, influence that thwarted the wise and sensible aims of political elites who otherwise would have governed in the public interest. In 2016, political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels published a much more ambitious book called Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. It is, basically, The General Theory of Stupid Voters. It has become the latest conventional wisdom about democracy, garnering near-universal praise in the elite press, from the London School of Economics to Foreign Affairs to the New York Review of Books. The Economist deems it “the most influential recent book on voting.” (...)First, let’s take a look at the central argument of Democracy for Realists. Achen and Bartels assemble a huge body of evidence to demonstrate that the voting public is vastly ignorant about policy, tends to rationalize pre-existing biases, and blames the incumbent party for things they could not possibly control, like shark attacks. Even when voters can be shown to be making a sort of judgment about political success on the merits—namely, voting the bums out during times of economic crisis—their decision tends to be severely myopic. Voters generally judge economic performance only on the last few months before election day, not based on how the whole last electoral term has gone.
The authors take aim at something they call the “folk theory” of democracy, which they define as the idea that democracy is about simply representing the will of the voters. The “folk theory” of democracy is the animating force behind initiatives to increase popular participation in decision-making by adding ballot initiative and referendum procedures to various constitutions, so that “the people” can have a direct voice on policy matters. The authors demonstrate many severe problems with this sort of direct democracy — most notably, that it is at least as vulnerable to elite influence as any other sort of democracy, if not more so. Ordinary citizens really are not equipped to make decisions on complicated policy questions, and have often shot themselves in the foot by voting down water fluoridation measures and so forth (often egged on by well-funded right-wing extremists).
The trouble starts with their formal model of the folk theory, which they represent with an elaborate mathematical system descended from neoclassical economics called the “median voter theorem.” By this view, voters select candidates closest to their own ideology, and assuming voter preferences are represented by a single left-right spectrum with two equal-sized peaks, parties will rationally appeal to the median voter directly in the political middle. This predicts that each party will have the exact same centrist platform. The “rationally ignorant” median voter doesn’t have to do anything to see his preferences validated by the political system.
This model was directly based on similar economic models, which take a lot of assumed background conditions, run them through some intimidating math, and produce a result demonstrating that free market institutions automatically produce the best of all possible worlds. Voting, it’s just like buying peanut butter! It’s sort of an appealing notion, so long as it doesn’t make any close contact with reality.
Achen and Bartels blow this theory out of the water, thus defeating their conception of the folk theory of democracy. Most obviously, the parties do not have the same platform and never have, not even during the mid-20th-century period of relative political consensus when this kind of model was somewhat plausible. But since 1980 especially, the idea that the parties don’t have strong and increasingly stark disagreements is prima facie ridiculous.
The authors have a lot of smart things to say about the negative influence economics-style reasoning has had on political science. But they don’t consider the idea that using the median voter theorem to represent the folk theory may itself be misleading.
This can best be seen in their implicit theory of reasoning, which is based on the same neoclassical bullshit. They define it in exclusively individual terms—a fundamental premise of this style of economics. By their lights, political reasoning happens when someone has pre-existing, fully worked-out ideology, and perfect knowledge of how the political system has affected their personal well-being , who then calculates the most rational political decision in terms of their own pocketbook and principles.
It is true that virtually nobody behaves in this way. Many people don’t have a clue what each party stands for, while others are egregiously mistaken about who believes what. But more importantly, Achen and Bartels argue that even very well-informed people tend to rationalize their group identities by adopting whatever the consensus view is—and then argue that, by definition, adopting a consensus view cannot be a “reasoned” decision: “[T]he political preferences and judgments that look and feel like the bases of partisanship and voting behavior are, in reality, often the consequences of party and group loyalties … the more information a voter has, often the better able she is to bolster her identities with rational-sounding reasons.”
There are a lot of problems with the premise of this argument.
by Ryan Cooper, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: Matt Lubchansky
