Fools, or badly fooled?

[khaosworks]

Worth a read, especially the last page or so where he discusses Rick Shenkman's Just How Stupid Are We?.

In Search of Rational Voters
Do such creatures exist? How can we mint more of them?
Alan Ehrenhalt
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: 12:28 PM ET Sep 10, 2008

"The people have spoken—the bastards!" It can be an effective line, especially when candidates employ it jokingly to lighten the somber mood of their supporters after a deflating loss at the polls. But it's also a dangerous thing to say: If there's one thing any aspirant for any office is reluctant to do, it's insult the electorate. He may need them again in two years.

Still, every once in a while a losing candidate has the guts and irreverence to try some variant of this jibe. The political gadfly Dick Tuck, defeated in a state Senate campaign in California in the 1950s, seems to have introduced it to modern campaigning. The equally witty Morris Udall used it on the night he lost the Wisconsin presidential primary to Jimmy Carter in 1976.

I don't know where the line originated, and I don't particularly care. What interests me is that this is about as far as any losing candidate is ever willing to go in taking on the voters. It's barely acceptable, on rare occasions, to make a joking reference to them as hostile ingrates. What you can't do is question their mental capacity. No candidate has ever begun a concession speech by saying, "The voters have spoken—the fools!"

That's in large part because it would be received almost universally as a gesture of tasteless arrogance. But there's another reason politicians carefully avoid questioning the intelligence of the electorate. They avoid it because they want desperately to believe that the American voters, whatever mistakes they may make, are at bottom rational and competent.

It's not just candidates and office-holders who feel need to believe this. Scholars who study voting behavior feel it, too. V. O. Key Jr., perhaps the most eminent American political scientist of the mid-20th century, wrote a book in the early 1960s called "The Responsible Electorate" and stated in the very beginning that its purpose was to convince readers that "voters are not fools." Thirty years later, another respected scholar, Samuel Popkin, made similar arguments at greater length in a book he chose to call "The Reasoning Voter."

Journalists generally concur. Cynical as they tend to be about candidates and office-holders, they rarely blame the failures of American democracy on deficiencies in the electorate. I wish I had a dollar for every time I have read an op-ed column by a political analyst declaring that, on one important issue or another, "the people are way ahead of the politicians." Often, what this means is that the voters happen to agree with the writer on that issue.

In the end, though, the practice of closing ranks in defense of the electorate is far more than a case of journalistic vanity or political self-protection. The American democratic system is rooted in the assumption of sensible political choices made by reasonable and fair-minded citizens. Challenge this assumption, and many, if not most, of the logical pillars of the system begin to show serious cracks. I understand all this, and I don't feel any more comfortable than most writers do blaming "the people" for the flaws in American government.

But in the closing weeks of a tumultuous national election year, it's worth spending a bit of time trying to figure out what it means to say that "the voters are not fools." When Key wrote those words, he was not claiming that the typical American was deeply familiar with candidates for a wide range of offices and well versed on the positions each candidate espoused. He couldn't claim that, because by the 1960s it had been documented in study after study that the vast majority of voters go to the polls with only the haziest of notions about what the candidates plan to do, and that the further down the ballot one went, the less likely they were to know much of anything.

What Key meant was that voters cast rational votes "retrospectively"—that is, they make judgments about how well things seem to be going for them, and then either reward or punish the party in power based on their conclusions. So when Ronald Reagan asked his audience in the 1980 presidential debates whether they were better off under President Jimmy Carter than they had been four years earlier, he was asking for a judgment that Key would have considered entirely proper and appropriate to democratic politics. Most people decided they were worse off, and Carter lost the election.

In a similar way, Popkin doesn't base his theory of the "reasoning voter" on claims that we go to the polls primed with information about the choices on the ballot. He says we practice "low-information rationality," piecing together scraps of knowledge gleaned from personal experience, historical events, media coverage and other sources to pull the lever based on what amounts to gut reasoning. But he believes that it works most of the time.

An electorate, in other words, is something like a jury. It's a panel of ordinary people, limited in their knowledge and training, who combine to produce a judgment of greater wisdom than any of them could make alone. The crowd, in some mysterious way, is wiser than the individual. The average voter may be no genius, but the electorate as a group is no fool. So the theory goes. It is a theory that allows candidates, scholars and journalists to get through the day without having to question the fundamental tenets of American government.

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Comments

Couldn't resist...

[marmota.livejournal.com]

"Who's the more foolish: The fool, or the fool who follows him?"

Re: Couldn't resist...

[batyatoon]

"...Or me, for not leaving you both."

[madfilkentist]

Voters are rational from a cost-benefit standpoint. Their actual marginal impact on the outcome of an election is zero in virtually all cases. Hence it makes no sense to invest time or effort in informing oneself or making a reasoned judgment.

The result is that voters make their choices based on their emotions, or on the advice of others, or on a whim. The product is demagogues, looters, and crooks.

[patoadam]

Thanks, I just got the Shenkman book for my Kindle.

He says that while 22% of Americans can name the five members of the cartoon Simpson family, only 0.1% can name the five rights guaranteed in the First Amendment.

And 49% of Americans believe that the President can suspend the Constitution. Well, in a sense, he does, but I don't think that is what they meant.