Political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels tell in Democracy for Realists,
in service of a sobering thesis: Voters don’t have anything like
coherent preferences. Most people pay little attention to politics; when
they vote, if they vote at all, they do so irrationally and for
contradictory reasons.
The book lays waste to a reassuring theory about
democracy that goes something like this: Ordinary citizens have
preferences about what the government ought to do; they elect leaders
who will carry out those preferences and vote against those who will
not; in the end, we’re left with a government that more or less serves
the majority.
Even voters who pay close attention to politics are prone
— in fact, more prone — to biased or blinkered decision-making. The
reason is simple: Most people make political decisions on the basis of
social identities and partisan loyalties, not an honest examination of
reality. “Election outcomes,” Achen and Bartels conclude, “turn
out to be largely random events from the viewpoint of democratic
theory.”
If Achen and Bartels are right, democracy is a faulty
form of politics, and direct democracy is far worse than that. It
virtually guarantees that at some point, you’ll end up with a grossly
unfit leader.
And that, of course, is what we now have.
Voter behavior is erratic and incoherent
Sean Illing
What actually drives voter behavior?
Christopher Achen
I think people are doing the best they can. They just
don't have a lot of information, and so they substitute guesses and
views of the world that make them feel comfortable. I think people are
looking for ways to make sense of what is a very complicated reality out
there. It's hard for those of us who get paid to think about it all the
time to make sense of it, and it's very hard for people with a lot of
other demands in their lives.
So they're doing the best they can but, as we said in the
book, we think that we need institutional structures that would get
them some help and do what the Federalist Papers suggest should be done,
which is to have a popular voice in government but to supplement it
with the opinions of people with more expertise and more experience.
Larry Bartels
One of the more important building blocks for our work
was [Austrian-born economist and political scientist who wrote mostly in
the early 20th century] Joseph Schumpeter’s
work on democracy. As an economist, he emphasized more clearly than
people had previously the significance of the distinction between
economic life, where people make choices that directly affect their own
well-being (i.e., you stop buying products that you don’t like) and the
political world, where the connection between individual behavior and
the outcomes that I experience is so indirect that it almost makes no
sense for me to try to perceive instrumentally.
It turns out, when it comes to political outcomes, most
people are not making rational decisions based on the real-world impact
they will have on their life, in part because they just don’t know.
So much of politics, not surprisingly, turns out to be
about expressive behavior rather than instrumental behavior — in other
words, people making decisions based on momentary feeling and not on
some sound understanding of how those decisions will improve or hurt
their life. And so if you think about people using the democratic levers
that they have available to them to express themselves, rather than to
make instrumental choices, you're probably more often than not going to
be closer to the actual psychology of what they're up to.
Sean Illing
Does the average voter even have what we might call policy preferences?
Christopher Achen
Well, they do adopt some. They take in some information.
So with the Trump phenomenon, for example, people clearly recognize that
for certain identities, he was a vocal spokesman for those identities,
and they did learn that. And the combination of that and his
familiarity from reality TV and so on made him successful in their minds
at being the kind of leader they were looking for. And I think people
are pretty good at that, actually. They're pretty good at picking out
who's on their side.
Sean Illing
To be clear, they’re good at picking people who appear to be on their side, who play the right rhetorical game.
Christopher Achen
Good point. Now, what they're much less good at is
thinking about whether it makes any sense to build a wall across the
southern border with Mexico. Is that going to solve the problem? How
much is that going to cost? Is that how I would want to spend my money?
Voters tend not to think about these sorts of questions very well, and
their incoherent and shifting positions suggest as much.
Sean Illing
In graduate school, I read a book called The Macro Polity,
which was published in 2002 by political scientists Robert Erikson,
Michael Mackuen, and James Stimson. The thesis was something like:
voters as a collective aggregate tend to act with purpose and
predictability, even though most individual voters do not.
So
the idea was that the vast majority of voters are capricious and
uninformed, but in the end they tend to cancel each other out. What
pushes elections in an intelligible direction is the minority of
educated and engaged voters. But your book claims that elections are
basically a “coin toss.”
Larry Bartels
Well, that argument, which goes back to the 18th century,
works pretty well so long as the errors and political choices are
distributed equally on both sides of whatever the option is. But in many
cases, that's unlikely to be true. But we don't want to say that
politics is essentially random. There are lots of elements, certainly of
presidential elections, that are quite predictable. We have this little
picture in Chapter 6 of the book about the relationship between
economic conditions and how long the incumbent party has been in office
and the election outcome. That suggests a good deal of predictability:
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But the point is that if the underlying conditions
suggest that the election is likely to be close, as has been the case
for most recent presidential elections, then the small factors that
determine the outcome at the margin are likely to be random and in any
case aren't the kinds of things that democratic theory focuses on. Like,
for example, people's preferences with respect to policy issues.
Christopher Achen
The points that Larry just made about the correlated
errors are the root of the problem. Those theorems don't go through if
people all tend to make the same kind of mistakes at a given time. And
there's plenty of that, right? If you look at shares of the two-party
vote in the 20th century, the presidential candidate who got the biggest
two-party share was Warren Harding, now widely regarded as the worst
president in American history. But people thought he was charming. And
they all made the same mistake at the same time. And that's the kind of
thing that's just fatal to that particular argument you find in The Macro Polity.
Sean Illing
I take your broader points about voter behavior, but let
me push back just a little bit. Plenty of people will say: Okay, the
average voter is misguided in all the ways you note, but there are still
heuristics or cognitive shortcuts that voters use to make sense of the
political world. For example, they choose the candidate who most aligns
with their ideological worldview or they rely on signals from party
leaders or trusted authorities. It’s not perfect, but it does allow
voters to make more or less reasonable decisions.
Larry Bartels
When that kind of argument has been operationalized, it
usually takes as given the basis on which people are choosing what
heuristics to rely on. And that itself is quite problematic. If people
knew where to go to get the informative cues about questions they need
to answer, they probably would do better. But most of the empirical
evidence we have suggests that it's only the more interested,
better-informed people who have enough context to be able to interpret
those cues appropriately and to use them sensibly.
Voters don’t understand cause and effect
Sean Illing
There’s a model in contemporary political science called
the “retrospective theory of voting,” which basically says that
elections aren’t really about ideas or policy preferences, but voters
are nonetheless able to accurately judge the performance of incumbent
administrations. What’s wrong with this model?
Christopher Achen
Well, as an empirical matter, we think it works pretty
well, and that's why political scientists have increasingly fastened on
it as an alternative to the more idealistic notion of an issue-voting
populace decision-making. The downside is that in their enthusiasm to
fasten on it, they've attributed a kind of normative sheen to it that we
don't think is warranted by the quality of the decisions that result.
Sean Illing
Can you clarify what you mean there?
Christopher Achen
Well, people aren't very good at attributing the
implications of the decisions that are made by policymakers to those
policymakers. In order to do this efficiently, they'd have to have a
pretty canny understanding of how the behavior of any particular elected
official or party contributes to the good or bad outcomes they
experience. And they're not very good at that. They'd have to take a
long view of the effects of policy, and they're not very good at that.
So they make these retrospective judgments, but in a kind of haphazard
way that doesn't seem to promote accountability in the way that
political scientists would like to think it does.
Sean Illing
So you found no evidence to suggest that voters understand cause and effect in any coherent way?
Christopher Achen
Again, we're saying, yeah, the world is immensely
complicated, so to say that one has a good understanding of cause and
effect in this domain would really be asking quite a lot of people.
Certainly, economists don't agree about the impact of economic policies
on the well-being of individuals or groups. And so what we do in the
book in order to try and get around those difficulties is to focus on
some cases where it seems pretty clear that the incumbent politicians
ought not to be paying for people's bad fortunes and find that even
those cases, there seems to be a pretty systematic pattern of
punishment.
Even in the aggregate, voters aren’t rational
Sean Illing
One of the many assumptions your book undercuts is this
idea that large groups of voters can deliberate reasonably — that if you
give people the appropriate information and allow them to exercise
judgment, they will do so more or less intelligently. Or at the very
least, they won’t steer the country into an abyss.
Larry Bartels
I think it's hard to see how the public as a whole would
steer the country in any particular direction. Usually when we think
about public input, we think about public input in response to
particular kinds of choices that have been framed by political elites of
one kind or the other, whether they're party leaders or elected
officials. And whether people come to the right conclusions about the
choices that are offered to them, I think this is most of what is
interesting and consequential, which is how the choices get framed in
the circumstances under which people are allowed to have input into
deciding what path to take.
Sean Illing
How do choices get framed? How do opinions get formed?
Larry Bartels
A lot of it is people simply taking cues from political
figures, from public figures, that they've identified themselves with
one way or the other, whether they're party leaders or the leaders of
social groups or interest groups that they feel some attachment to. If,
for example, you look at the change in views about Russia that we've
observed after Trump made admiring comments about Vladimir Putin, you
might think, given the history of the US and Russia over the past
century, that people would have pretty ingrained views about what they
think of the Russian system. But that turned out not to be the case.
People's
views shifted pretty quickly and pretty dramatically in the wake of
fairly casual elite cues they were receiving. But from somebody who they
trusted and whose cue they were happy to take about something that they
hadn't really thought much about. The relationship between Russia and
the US is a pretty important thing, but the ordinary American hasn't
spent a lot of time thinking about how they should think about that.
Indeed, they don’t spend much time really thinking about political
issues of consequence. This idea that people have fixed or informed
views about central issues doesn’t square with most of the data we have.
Sean Illing
Can you give me some examples of the data you used or
case studies you analyzed? What are you basing these claims about voting
behavior on?
Larry Bartels
A substantial scholarly literature on electoral politics
and public opinion has accumulated over the past several decades, and we
relied on it heavily. But we also added original statistical analyses
designed to test our arguments in particularly illuminating times and
places.
For example, the notion that voters blindly reward or
punish incumbent presidents for good or bad times led us to the
presidential election of 1936; political scientists have portrayed that
election as a historic ideological mandate for Franklin Roosevelt’s New
Deal, but we found that Roosevelt’s support hinged crucially on how much
incomes grew in each state in the year leading up to the election.
The same logic led us to the Jersey Shore in 1916, where a
dramatic series of shark attacks — hardly something a president can
control — turned out to produce a significant dent in the vote for
Woodrow Wilson.
To disentangle the effects of policy preferences and
social identities, we examined support for John Kennedy in 1960 — an
unusually pure case of religious affinity (and animosity) with little or
no real policy content. Our analysis in that case was bolstered by the
fact that repeated interviews with the same people allowed us to relate
voting behavior in 1960 to measures of the strength of voters’ Catholic
identities from 1958, before Kennedy emerged as a candidate.
In the same spirit, our analysis of the impact of
partisanship on views about abortion employed a decades-long study of
changing political attitudes to show that more than half of Democratic
men who expressed pro-life views in 1982 were pro-choice by 1997; the
corresponding rate of change among Republican men was less than 30
percent. Political attitudes and behavior are enormously complex, and so
we are shameless opportunists, delighted to exploit clear glimpses of
underlying patterns and processes wherever we can find them.
Strong parties won’t solve the problem of democratic control
Sean Illing
The parties — in the United States, at least — seem to
have lost much of their control over the process. At the same time,
we’ve seen a spike in partisanship. Do you think a stronger or different
party system can correct some of the fundamental problems you’ve
identified?
Larry Bartels
I wouldn’t say a “spike” in partisanship — we’ve had a
long, gradual increase in the intensity of partisan loyalties over the
past 35 or 40 years. As with many aspects of the contemporary political
system, that’s probably a sort of “return to normalcy” following the
unusual period in the middle of the 20th century which saw the breakdown
of the New Deal party system, a loosening of partisan attachments, and
electoral landslides in both directions.
I
wouldn’t say that we’ve had “a decline in the power of the parties,”
either. The parties in Congress are immensely powerful. All of President
Obama’s big legislative accomplishments — the stimulus bill, the
Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank — were passed with few or no Republican
votes. Conversely, President Trump has so far relied entirely on the
Republican Party for support, despite his railing during the campaign
against the political establishment on both sides of the aisle. When it
comes to fundraising and candidate recruitment, the party committees and
their allied networks of interest groups have a national reach and
ideological cohesion that 19th-century party boss Mark Hanna would have
envied.
What we don’t (and never did) have is a way to manage the
parties “democratically.” We’ve tried to give as much power as possible
to ordinary citizens voting in primaries, but the task is too complex —
too many candidates and issues, too little information, too much
strategic uncertainty — for that to work reliably. We saw that in 2016.
But we also saw a breakdown of the alternative theory of democratic
control, in which general election voters keep the parties on a tight
leash by refusing to support them if they happen to nominate someone who
is too “extreme” or uninformed or unstable.
History clearly demonstrates that democracies need
parties to organize and simplify the political world. But parties don’t
make the fundamental problems of democratic control disappear; they just
submerge them more or less successfully. When professional politicians
are reasonably enlightened and skillful and the rules and political
culture let them do their job, democracy will usually work pretty well.
When not, not.
Christopher Achen
I would add only that I do favor stronger parties in one
sense — that they should have more control over their nominations, both
presidential and other. New Jersey does this well, actually, with the
"party endorsement" being quite crucial in winning primaries here. We
also make it hard to put an initiative on the ballot, and we have
traditionally had a strong, competent state supreme court.
The result is good schools, no measles and mumps
outbreaks because of low vaccination rates, and much else by way of good
government because it's harder for the voters to harm themselves here
than in other states where interest groups and nutty ideas have more
control through unrestricted primaries and initiatives. Of course, New
Jersey has lots of problems, but a bad state governmental structure
isn't among them.
All politics is identity politics
Sean Illing
I want to ask you both about identity politics, which is a
big part of your book. As you know, there’s a debate right now about
the role and utility of identity politics. Your book argues, somewhat
controversially, that in democracy all politics is identity politics,
and that it’s foolish to pretend otherwise. Is that a fair reading of
your thesis?
Christopher Achen
We do think that identities are fundamental. Now, in
politics, no one framework is everything, and of course there are some
other things going on. But we do think that identity is fundamental. The
old left argument is that it's about class and that race and gender are
side effects primarily of class issues. But class identification,
working-class consciousness, and all of that framework, those are
identities as well. So from our point of view, the proposal is to
substitute one set of identities for another. That's a plausible
argument, but the idea that you can propose policy, economic policy
proscriptions, in a social vacuum with no attention to the other
identities that are at work, that is something we just don't believe.
Sean Illing
So democratic elections, on your view, are essentially
just a competition to see who can activate the most identities among the
voters?
Christopher Achen
I would say there's a variety of identities people have
that are more or less salient and can be made more or less salient
politically. For many people, the principles become part of the identity
and are important moving parts of the way they think about politics.
But our claim is that the identities are more fundamental, the
principles come later rather than the other way around.
Too much democracy or too little?
Sean Illing
There have been two broad reactions to the Brexit vote
and to Donald Trump’s election. On the one hand, some believe we have
too much democracy, too few barriers between popular will and the
application of power; on the other hand, some argue that we have too
little democracy, that we’re witnessing a righteous backlash against an
anti-democratic and rigged system. Where do you come down?
Larry Bartels
The notion that the last election cycle somehow brought
out a different kind of person or a different aspect of people's
political character is misleading from our point of view. We didn't have
Trump in our sights at all as we were working on this book over the
course of 15 years, but I think the spirit of the book very much
suggests that these kinds of things are likely to happen in democratic
systems from time to time because of the way they work and the
limitations they face all the time.
But
what really triggers the kind of problems that people were concerned
about in 2016 are mostly of elite-level actions, how the parties behave
and what kind of messages they present to people and what kinds of
alternatives they present to people. And so the idea that the American
people are somehow different than they were five years ago or nine years
ago I think is kind of mistaken. But the interaction between the elites
and the masses is where the issues are, and I think much of political
writing is not very well-suited to dealing with those kinds of
interactions because the role of elites isn't very integrated into the
overall way of thinking about what's going on. They are almost by
necessity a kind of illegitimate piece of the system in a lot of popular
thinking about the way politics works.
Sean Illing
You mention the problem of elites, and that really is a
key dilemma in your analysis. It’s not so much about greater mass
participation, which doesn’t necessarily make things better, as it is
about getting elites to not rig the system in their favor.
Larry Bartels
Absolutely. If you think about democracy in the terms we
prefer, you might say the biggest limitation at the moment is that we
don't know how to incorporate the role of political elites in a
constructive way into the governing process or to somehow make it
possible to ensure that they're working on behalf of the interests of
ordinary people.
How to make democracy work better
Sean Illing
The book calls for a return to something like a group
theory of democracy, which amounts to a reluctant embrace of identity
politics. What, exactly, are you advocating here, and why is it a
smarter alternative to the folk or populist theory of democracy?
Christopher Achen
Partly what we want to do is to think about a variety of
reform proposals that are out there and floating around from this
framework. So, for example, making the presidential nomination process
more "democratic" by getting rid of superdelegates is exactly the kind
of blunder that we're criticizing.
Having the conservative majority on the Supreme Court say
that there's a marketplace of ideas here, that there can't possibly be
anything wrong with people publicizing their own ideas about policy
proposals and candidates and so forth, and so therefore limitations on
campaign spending are a violation of free speech. That, too, is the kind
of blunder that we're criticizing.
Sean Illing
Okay, but where does that leave us?
Larry Bartels
We have to get out of this overly simplistic framework
and create more sensible policy proposals. It seems clear to us that a
lot of the actual ways in which people of ordinary education or
ordinary means or just not much power, the ways in which they are
disadvantaged are often occurring at the level of policy-making rather
than at the level of elections themselves. The financial sector, for
instance, is having a lot of policy success in Washington, in ways that
ordinary people, if they really understood what was happening, would not
approve. But they don’t follow it closely enough, they don’t
understand, and the policy process is tilted toward moneyed interests
that ordinary people have no chance.
So
focusing reform on the places where the real problem is occurring as
opposed to making fanciful proposals that ask us to do what none of us
is really able to do. That's the kind of emphasis that we want to direct
people's attention to.
Sean Illing
Yes, but how do we get there? Again, the book latches
onto this group theory of democracy as a more intelligent means of
channeling popular passions, yet it’s not clear to me what this vision
of democracy looks like or how it’s very different from what we now
have.
Christopher Achen
Well, in some ways it doesn't look so different from how
politics works now. The policy-making president is heavily influenced by
groups of all kinds. And some of those are identity groups, like
African-American groups or Hispanic groups or LGBT groups. Others are
occupational groups and religious groups and vocational groups, like the
National Rifle Association. And so on. And so we already have a policy
process driven by groups. And the idea is more than 100 years old. It's
certainly not original with us. So I think our view is to not pretend
that there's a magic wand that can make people uninterested in the
groups to which they belong, but instead to direct reform proposals to
instead making the balance among these groups fairer than it is now.
Sean Illing
So it’s your view that we ought to accept the fact that
we think, act, and judge in terms of group affiliations of one sort or
another, that we’re tribal creatures, and that our political system has
to account for this structurally?
Larry Bartels
I think that’s very well put except for the term
“tribal,” which implies that people are members of only one tribe at any
given point. I think people's identities are complex and the way they
bring them to bear in politics is complex, and that's part of what needs
to be understood by us as analysts and also built into any idea of how
one might use these groups attachments constructively in improving the
political process.
Christopher Achen
I reacted exactly the same way Larry did. One would not
say to African Americans, for example, that the experience of their
lives in a heavily white society and the way in which that shapes the
things that they want from politics, that that's a tribal attachment and
that they should get over that and just think about economics, right?
It kind of misses the point.
Sean Illing
Oh, I agree, I’m just trying to nail down your thesis.
Christopher Achen
Of course. To be clear, these group attachments are not
some bad thing we do instead of being rational, well-informed creatures.
They constitute who we are. You know, evangelical Christians don't
regard themselves as a tribe. They have a way of thinking about their
lives that makes sense. And secular people have a parallel set of views
that makes sense of their lives. And so we all do this. We construct an
interpretation of our lives, and we're loyal to that and we find other
people with similar views. That's what human beings are like, and
recognizing that seems to us a big step forward from the way we tend to
think about politics now.
Sean Illing
So someone shouldn’t walk away from this book thinking democracy is too idealistic for high primates like us?
Larry Bartels
Well, democracy is happening; it's just not the kind of
democracy that we hear about in Fourth of July speeches. So our
complaint is not so much about democracy as it is about our misleading
understanding of democracy and the bad implications it has for how we
proceed democratically.
Christopher Achen
I think our reply to someone who walks away with that
impression would be: What is it about the ideas of the American founders
that you disagree with? Because that is the position that's being taken
here. And as we say in the book, the response is often, well, a lot of
them were slaveholders, and we don't have to take their ideas seriously.
OK, yes, they were. But to not read them at all is a recipe for
ignorance and not the one that we believe.