From the Chronicle of Higher Education: Ballot Pox - It's time to stop pretending that there's such a thing as a rational voter

This supplements recent conversations we've been having about what drives people to vote.

It also suggests that Trump's success will not only have an impact on the parties, but on a key aspect of political science research.

Do we expect too much from voters?

- Click here for the article.

Perhaps it is finally time to stop pretending there is such a thing as a rational voter who seeks information to vote based on the issues alone, as decades of political-science research has assumed. Instead, Achen and Bartels argue, we can only progress by accepting that most voters are deeply uninformed and lack meaningful preferences, and even those who do know and care about politics are all just partisan loyalists. Can we acknowledge that social-group identities are the most important structuring force in politics, and politics is really at heart just identity politics? And can we build new theories around the undeniable evidence that politics is and always will be based on emotion and conflict, not logic and consensus?

It's time to make peace with a simple fact of political life: Rationality is a chimera.

For political science, this argument actually amounts to a rediscovery of old truths about group conflict being the center of politics. A half century ago, these were the mainstream views in the discipline. At that time, political science was also much more qualitative — for example, congressional scholars actually hung out in Washington and spent hours talking to people who worked there, instead of only staring at computers analyzing data — and sociological, in that scholars focused more on norms and cultures and folkways than they did on modeling individual incentives.

But sometime in the 1960s, political science took a turn away from groups and toward "rational individualism." Scholars began to treat both voters and politicians as utility-maximizing actors who had consistent and externally determined preferences along some unidimensional left-right spectrum. (Where these preferences came from, it was never clear.) And scholars also assumed these voters knew enough to adequately express these preferences meaningfully. Voters and officeholders and groups all existed in a "game" in which they tried to move policy to their "ideal point." Voters tried to hold politicians "accountable" for their performance, while politicians "maximized" their utility from office holding. Economics, not sociology, became the model discipline. Incentives replaced norms and cultures.

These assumptions were popular in the academy because they made both formal modeling and fancy statistical analysis more tractable, and therefore made political science more "scientific." Plus, there was plenty of easily accessible data on elections, roll-call votes, and public-opinion surveys to be tilled into publishable journal articles. "The result," Achen and Bartels write, "was a body of work that was simultaneously advanced in its methods and antiquated in its ideas."

They were also popular because they fit with the prevailing good-government idea, what Achen and Bartels dismissively call "the folk theory of democracy." Under the folk theory, "Democracy makes the people the rulers, and legitimacy derives from their consent." Elections should and can be meaningful events that truly empower the people. Therefore, if democracy has gone wrong, it’s merely because our voters are too uninformed, our candidates are too corrupt, our political discourse is too awash in lies. Like political science, good-government reformers pursued an idealized world of informed voters making meaningful independent choices that could give them actual power.

For Achen and Bartels, all this reformist moral exhortation is an exercise in futility. All the standard bromides of good-government reformers — more participation, better civic education, a more responsible media — represent mountains of wasted good intention that will never lead to more responsive government.

The most obvious flaw of the folk theory is that it expects far too much out of citizens: "Can ordinary people, busy with their lives and with no firsthand experience of policy making or public administration, do what the theory expects them to do?" Of course not. "Mostly," Achen and Bartels write, "they identify with ethnic, racial, occupation, religious or other sorts of groups, and often — whether through group ties or hereditary loyalties — with a political party."

From the Atlantic: Millennials' Political Views Don't Make Any Sense

Something to chew on in class today. Younger folks are full of paradoxes and conflicting viewpoints it seems. Aren't we all?

- Click here for the article.

Three major take-aways from the article:

1. Millennials are more liberal than the rest of the country, particularly on social issues, but they get more economically conservative when they make more money.

2. Millennials don't know what they're talking about when it comes to economics.

3. Far less important, but entertaining nonetheless: Millennials don't know what socialism is, but they think it sounds nice.

From TNR: Romney Has Historic Lead Among White Voters

Building off a post below, the New Republic looks at polling data detailing the racial gap in the electorate.

Will Voters Punish Republicans for Killing the Jobs Bill?

Probably not. Presidents get the blame for the economy.

From Andrew Gelman: Economic Divisions and Political Polarization in Red and Blue America

A brief study exploring the difference in voting behavior between the rich and the poor.

The Morality of Political Ignorance

A great post from the Volokh Conspiracy. Is political ignorance moral? Despite the fact that voters have only a small chance of ever making a decisive vote in an election, is this an excuse for not being informed?

Unfortunately, extensive evidence shows that most voters both know very little about public policy and do a poor job of evaluating the political information they do know. Elsewhere, I have argued that such ignorance and bias is actually rational. There is only an infinitesmal chance that any one vote will be decisive. So individual voters have strong incentives to remain ignorant. But not every form of rational behavior is morally defensible. Sometimes, rational individual behavior leads to terrible collective outcomes. Consider the case of air pollution, where individuals might rationally choose not to limit their emission of dangerous pollutants because any one person’s behavior has only a tiny effect on overall air quality in the area. Widespread voter ignorance is a kind of pollution of the political system.


- from Andrew Sullivan's Site

Voting Patterns by Income Category

From the Daily Dish, drawing from Andrew Gelman:


Based on exit poll data from the 2010 election.

How Will Vote This November?

From the Huffington Post:

Do Pollsters Know How to Correctly Determine Who the Likely Voters Are?

Maybe not.

Is Obama Losing White Voters?

Ronald Brownstein says yes.

Racial Voting Gap Closing

The times they are a-changing:

The long-standing gap between blacks and whites in voter participation evaporated in the presidential election last year, according to an analysis released Thursday. Black, Hispanic and Asian voters made up nearly a quarter of the electorate, setting a record.

Harris County Precint Level Analysis

Some interesting work by Charles Kuffner.

Obama and the Youth Vote

Apparently it made the difference in the election:

Had the Democratic 18-29 vote stayed the same as 2004's already impressive percentage, Obama would have won by about 2 points, and would not have won 73 electoral votes from Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, or Indiana.

So, to clarify here: Obama's youth margin = 73 electoral votes. Without the economic crisis, this would have been the difference.

Meet the Millenials

Why are the young so fresh? So different?

More on the Bradley Effect

In response to inquiries from certain special students--or student ;)--here is a Gallup Poll story related to their attempt to determine whether race will impede or augment Barack Obama's electability:

While 6% of voters say they are less likely to vote for Barack Obama because of his race, 9% say they are more likely to vote for him, making the impact of his race a neutral to slightly positive factor when all voters' self-reported attitudes are taken into account.

At the same time, 6% of voters say John McCain's race will make them less likely to vote for him, with 7% saying it makes them more likely to vote for him, leading to the same basic conclusion: McCain's race, like Obama's, is on balance neither a plus nor a minus.

But the point of the Bradley effect is that poll respondents do not always tell pollsters (a human on the other end of a conversation) the truth. I'm not sure how much credence I'd give it.

Here's another take at what might be going on: a Reverse Bradley Effect. Whites may not want to admit to supporting a Black candidate.

The Economy's Impact on the Election

In 2002 and 2004 it was fairly easy to call the elections for Republican candidates. All things equal, when security -- or foreign affairs in general -- is the dominant issue on people's mind independent voters tend to vote more Republican than Democrat. But when the economcy is the dominant issue, the same holds true for Democrats. From Slate's Today's Papers (10-5-08):

The New York Times leads with a look at how the beleaguered economy has shifted the electoral map in Barack Obama's favor. (The Washington Post stuffs a nearly identical story.) According to the Times, Obama has a "solid lead" or is "well positioned" in states that account for 260 electoral votes, while John McCain has the advantage in states representing 200 electoral votes. McCain's advisers are hoping that the issue of the economy recedes, but the Los Angeles Times lead story predicts sustained misery. "[A]lmost every major player in the economy...is now beating a hasty retreat," says the LAT. Europe, meanwhile, isn't faring much better and the Washington Post leads with the continent's four largest economic powers rejecting a joint strategy to shore up banks. The leaders of Britain, France, Germany and Italy did, however, call for a global summit to revamp the international monetary system set up under the Bretton Woods Agreements.

Only a month ago Barack Obama's strategy of competing aggressively on Republican turf was looking overly ambitious. But, as the NYT reports, the weakening economy and Obama's fundraising advantage have given new force to his efforts to win at least nine states that voted for George Bush in 2004. Not only does this give Obama more ways to reach the 270 electoral votes needed to win, it also forces John McCain to spend money defending once-reliable red states, while limiting his ability to compete elsewhere.

After pointing out Obama's substantial advantages, the Times covers itself by mentioning "how closely contested the campaign remains" and warning that "the field could...shift again in the final weeks." The McCain campaign certainly isn't throwing in the towel. "Senator Obama has more money than God, the most favorable political climate imaginable—a three-week Wall Street meltdown and financial crisis—and with all that, the most margin he can get is four points?" said Bill McInturff, a McCain pollster. Four points, really?

The Youth Vote

Will it really make a difference? Will young voters actually turn out in sufficient number (probably for Obama) and influence the election's outcome?

Slate thinks it might, and gives reasons why they may.

Did the Republicans Have an Impact on the Democratic Party Outcome?

The big question regarding the Democratic turnout and Clinton's win in Texas is whether it was due to crossover votes by Republicans. Limbaugh tried to persuade Republicans to cross over and vote for Clinton, but there is no guarantee that it actually happened in great numbers, or had an impact, or even if it did, the impact matters. Here is a post that makes the argument than it did matter.

Someone crunched the numbers and argues that the drop-off, the number of people who did not vote for races other than the president, was 700,000. Are we to believe that these were all Republicans who came in, voted for Hillary and left?

I'll point out that Texas' proportional representational system muted the impact that simply winning the election has on the national race. If it was all or nothing it matters, but that's not how Texas Democrats do it. Clinton won the state but did marginally better than Obama in the delegate totals. Neither was in a position to win outright no matter what happened in Texas, the race will continue to the convention, so I chalk this up to a publicity stunt by Limbaugh. And it worked.

How Voters Think

That's the title of a great column today by David Brooks.

It brings to the discussion of the current crazy primary season recent theories about decision making which suggest that though emotion plays a role in the decisions people make about candidates, emotional decisions are based on rational assessments of character. Each of the current candidates tap into something people react to within the two parties:

It is no accident that the major candidates in the Republican field are a pastor, a businessman and a war hero. These are the three most evocative Republican leadership models. Nor is it an accident that the Democratic race is a clash between a daughter of the feminist movement, a beneficiary of the civil rights movement and a self-styled proletarian. These are powerful Democratic categories.

Writers seem to increasingly see value in snap shot decisions, or at least not consider them completely irrational and the result of ignorance (think of the recent success of the book Blink). We may want to think this through when we consider Federalist objections to democracy.

Political Efficacy

An interesting dialogue between Jordan and Jan has kicked up and hope they both continue, with help from some of you. Jordan states the following:

The other day in class Mr. Jefferies stated, "You all don't vote do you?" Considering the circumstances, I understand why we don't vote. Our knowledge of historical and current government issues comes primarily from the Internet. Which we all know can contain sources which are not reputable. There are no personal links to government for the everyday citizen. Government is complicated, and it is made complicated so only rich egocentric will take part. I'll tell you the truth, I don't vote because how much difference am I really going to make. For example, if the majority of society votes for a presidential candidate, and he wins the popular vote. Shouldn't he be president? The government thinks otherwise. They appoint the Electoral College to make decisions for us. Why do we need the Electoral College? Money is the navigator of government, and guess what, I don't have much and neither does a large percentage of Americans. The middle class, of Americans, pay the largest percentage of taxes, but aren't being represented. People investing in special interest groups have become the focal point of government interest. I'm tired of being just a percentage of the popular vote. Give us back our true representative democracy. Then I'll vote.

There's alot to this comment, but at root it sounds like a "consent" problem, and he speaks for many others--perhaps many of you. Clearly he feels detached (alienated) from the process, the actions of government feel remote, and he feels that people in power do not care about people like him. Government is not legitimate (which violates the intent of democracy) so why consent to the laws unless forced to? The wide open internet compounds the problem because in addition to not trusting elected leaders to represent your interests you can't trust the validity of the information you receive. Jordan, feel free to correct me if I'm getting something wrong.

Political scientists have developed two terms to describe this process: internal political efficacy (the belief that one can understand and influence policy) and external political efficacy (the belief that the government will respond to one's demands). Clearly Jordan lacks the latter, but the reason that you are required to take these classes is to increase the former which could increase your ability to ensure that government will respond to your demands, or gain a greater understanding of why it might not. Remember that the American political system is designed to make it difficult to pass laws and alter public policy.

Jan responds by stating: Jordan, to dispute your decision for voting, you need to vote, because each vote from a U.S. citizen makes a difference, whether it be you, me, or the john doe waiting in line behind you. But you are right, most young adults get their information from the internet, which sometimes, may not be a valid source, but nonetheless, it should not stop a person from voting at all, its simple, people vote for the candidate that fits the NEED that the voter wants.

Underlying Jan's comment, it seems to me, is the idea that the very act of voting begins a process that creates good citizens. But this doesn't satisfy Jordan: Jan, you say that every vote as a US citizen makes a difference. How? If you, John Doe, 60% of US Citizens and I all vote for the same candidate. That doesn't mean that candidate is going to win. And even if he does win, am I really being represented?

So let's unpack all this. Maybe we can begin by discussing the factual points Jordan makes.

- Does the internet make people more remote from politics? (Surprisingly this study suggests that it might)
- Is government made complicated in order to restrict participation by non-elites?
- Does the fact that a popular vote winner for the presidency might lose the electoral vote alienate people from politics?
- Do the middle class really feel alienated from the political system?
- What is a "true representative democracy" anyway and how would we know one if we had one? What is our proof that we don't have one now? Is it enough to say that "I" am not getting what I want or do we have to look at society as a whole?

There's more, but these are all hypothesis that can be tested. Reliable polls exist that make data available for interested parties. (see the American National Election Study).

Finally, is this attitude a cop out? Should one wait for "true representative democracy" to be established before one decides to vote or does the act of voting necessarily precede the establishment of a "true representative democracy?"

This is good stuff. I feel better about the classes now, slightly better anyway. I want to know what the rest of you think? Do you feel the same way as Jordan?