Democracy for Realists, Part 6 of 19
Most of the time, the political elites teach voters what they should think about an issue, not the other way around.
Achen & Bartels offer strong evidence that most voters get most of their opinions by looking at what other people, who they identify with, are thinking on those political issues. We can simplify this by saying “The party decides its position on an issue, then the people who identify with that party adopt that party position.” But I think for this to be true one would have to adapt a very broad definition of “the party.” That would have to include prominent journalists and public pundits, who are associated with a given side of the political spectrum.
In the USA right now, there are those on the right who learn their opinions from Fox News, and there are some who are mildly left-of-center and who learn their opinions by watching MSNBC. It’s also true that the political parties have been weakened over the last 70 years, especially with the introduction, in the 1960s, of direct primaries, and so it might be obsolete to refer to “the party” when cable news pundits and YouTube influencers are also having a large impact on how people learn their views about the issues. But it remains true that the creation of viewpoints tends to be broadcast from the center, rather than building up from the grassroots.
This might sound cynical, but most of us have to learn most of what we know from specialists who focus on a particular topic, such as science, the arts, or politics. For instance, I will never be a professional biologist, but I read Scientific American and Discover magazine, therefore, I do not form my own opinions about the current progress of cancer research, rather, this is something I simply accept from specialists who are doing the actual work and who will always know more than I do.
Likewise, in politics, I cannot possibly learn about the hundreds of issues that go into a party platform, most of the time I simply have to accept whatever the party says. I give my loyalty to political parties mostly on the basis of the 4 or 5 issues that I actually care about, and for the rest, I simply accept, knowing that in a big coalition no one ever gets everything that they want. Life is all about bumping along with a diverse humanity whose experiences are different from mine.
From the book:
Democracy for Realists, 2016
Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government
By Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels
Page 44-45
In the 2000 presidential campaign, for example, candidate George W. Bush advocated allowing individual citizens to invest Social Security funds in the stock market, thereby catapulting a previously obscure policy proposal into the political limelight. Much of the news coverage and advertising in the final month of the campaign focused on the candidates’ contrasting stands on the issue: in a typical “battleground” media market, the two candidates together ran about 200 ads touching on Social Security privatization just in the final week before Election Day (Johnston, Hagen, and Jamieson 2004, 153-159). And, sure enough, the statistical relationship between voters’ views on Social Security privatization and their preferences for Bush or Al Gore (holding constant party identification) more than doubled over the course of the campaign.
This is exactly the sort of shift we might expect if voters were attending to the political debate, weighing the competing candidates’ policy platforms, and formulating their vote intentions accordingly. However, Lenz’s more detailed analysis employing repeated interviews with the same people demonstrated that this substantial increase in the apparent electoral impact of views about Social Security privatization was almost entirely illusory - due not to changes in vote intentions, but to Bush and Gore supporters learning their preferred candidate’s position on the issue and then adopting it as their own. As Lenz (2012, 59) put it, “the increase in media and campaign attention to this issue did almost nothing to make people whose position was the same as Bush’s more likely to vote for Bush than they already were.”
On issue after issue – ranging from support for public works in 1976 and defense spending in 1980 to European integration in Britain to nuclear power in the Netherlands in the wake of the Chernobyl reactor meltdown - Lenz’s analyses provide substantial evidence of vote-driven changes in issue positions but little to no evidence of issue-drivenchanges in candidate or party preferences. As John Zaller (2012, 617) put it, “Partisan voters take the positions they are expected as partisans to take, but do not seem to care about them.” Lenz (2012, 235) characterized these findings as “disappointing” for “scholars who see democracy as fundamentally about voters expressing their views on policy,” noting that the “inverted” relationship between issue positions and votes seemed to leave politicians with “considerable freedom in the policies they choose.”
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Page 50
Unfortunately, as we have seen, this populist ideal in both its scientific and popular incarnations suffers from grave logical and practical problems. Both the remarkable theoretical insights of Arrow (1951) and his successors and the seminal empirical research of Converse (1964) and many others punched significant holes in the romantic populist notion of democracy. Although a great deal of subsequent scholarly effort has been devoted to recasting, circumscribing, or rejecting their claims, repeated attempts to sidestep the theoretical and empirical deficiencies of the populist ideal have failed, leaving the “strong challenge to democratic hopes” (Kinder 2003, 15) posed by modern social science fundamentally intact.
These scientific findings have had little effect on practical politics. Joseph Schumpeter (1942, 250) argued - perhaps wishfully - that “today it is difficult to find any student of social processes who has a good word for” the simplistic notions of the folk theory. Nevertheless, he added, “action continued to be taken on that theory all the time it was being blown to pieces. The more untenable it was being proved to be, the more completely it dominated official phraseology and the rhetoric of the politician” (Schumpeter 1942, 249). More than seven additional decades of demolition work have done little to alter that picture.
Also:
Page 268-269
A party constructs a conceptual viewpoint by which its voters can make sense of the political world. Sympathetic newspapers, magazines, websites, and television channels convey the framework to partisans. That framework identifies friends and enemies, it supplies talking points, and it tells people how to think and what to believe. Thus, unlike particular social identities tied to the special interests of groups, the reach of partisanship is very broad. For the voters who identify with a party, partisanship pulls together conceptually nearly every aspect of electoral politics.
Once inside the conceptual framework, the voter finds herself inhabiting a relatively coherent universe. Her preferred candidates, her political opinions, and even her view of the facts will all tend to go together nicely. The arguments of the “other side,” if they get any attention at all, will seem obviously dismissible. The fact that none of the opinions propping up her party loyalty are really hers will be quite invisible to her. It will feel like she’s thinking.
Even among unusually well-informed and politically engaged people, the political preferences and judgments that look and feel like the bases of partisanship and voting behavior are, in reality, often consequences of party and group loyalties. In fact, the more information the voter has, often the better able she is to bolster her identities with rational-sounding reasons. All the appropriate partisan chimes will be rung, and the voter may sound quite impressive. Converse (1964) might put her at the top of his informational pyramid and anoint her as an “ideologue.” But she may be just as impervious to evidence as anyone else, as the everyday connotation of the word “ideologue” suggests.
This fundamental disjuncture between our subjective experience of thinking about the political world and the reality of group and party influences on us is a testament to the remarkable ability of human beings to misconstrue the bases of our own attitudes and behavior. As Wendy Rahn, Jon Krosnick, and Marijke Breuning (1994, 592) wrote, summarizing the voluminous psychological literature on this point, “when asked to explain their preferences, people are biased toward mentioning reasons that sound rational and systematic and that emphasize the object being evaluated, while overlooking more emotional reasons and factors other than the object’s qualities.” In other words, “people rationalize their pre-existing preferences.”