Democracy for Realists, Part 5 of 19
The voters do not understand political issues, they never have and they never will
From the book:
Democracy for Realists, 2016
Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government
By Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels
Page 34-35
Research in other countries has generally produced similar portraits of democratic citizens. Their ideological self-placements are often driven more by partisanship than by policy position (Inglehart and Klingemann 1976). Indeed, left-right terms are sometimes meaningful primarily as alternate names for the political parties – often, names that the parties themselves have taught the voters (Arian and Shamir 1983). Even in France, the presumed home of ideological politics, Converse and Pierce (1986, chap. 4) found that most voters did not understand political “left” and “right”. When citizens do understand the terms, they may still be uncertain or confused about where the parties stand on the left-right dimension (Butler and Stokes 1974, 323-337). Perhaps as a result, their partisan loyalties and issue preferences are often badly misaligned. In a 1968 survey in Italy, for example, 50% of those who identified with the right-wing Monarchist party took left-wing policy positions (Barnes 1971, 170).
Lest younger readers be tempted to suppose that this sort of confusion is a remnant of an older and less sophisticated political era (or an artifact of older and less sophisticated scholarly analysis), we note that careful recent studies have repeatedly turned up similar findings. For example, Elizabeth Zechmeister (2006, 162) found “striking, systematic differences...both within and across the countries” in the conceptions of “left” and “right” offered by elite private college students in Mexico and Argentina, while André Blais (personal communication) found half of German voters unable to place the party called “Die Linke” – the Left – on a left-right scale.*
Also:
Page 36-37
Political Ignorance, Heuristics, and “The Miracle of Aggregation”
Confusion regarding political ideology is just the tip of a large iceberg of political unawareness. Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter (1996) surveyed responses to hundreds of specific factual questions in U.S. opinion surveys over the preceding 50 years to provide an authoritative summary of What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters. In 1952, Delli Carpini and Keeter found, only 44% of Americans could name at least one branch of government. In 1972, only 22% knew something about Watergate. In 1985, only 59% knew whether their own state’s governor was a Democrat or a Republican. In 1986, only 49% knew which one nation in the world had used nuclear weapons (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996, 70, 81, 74, 84). Delli Carpini and Keeter (1996, 270) concluded from these and scores of similar findings that “large numbers of American citizens are woefully underinformed and that overall levels of knowledge are modest at best.” Rober Luskin (2002, 282) put the same conclusion rather more colorfully, observing that most people “know jaw-droppingly little about politics.”