Does Ignorance Matter?

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IGNORANCE AS A STARTING POINT : FROM MODEST EPISTEMOLOGY TO REALISTIC POLITICAL THEORY | Jeffrey Friedman (link to pdf or html [see above])

DOES PUBLIC IGNORANCE MATTER| Robert S. Erikson (link to pdf or html [see above] )
ABSTRACT: Recent scholarship has attempted to restore the reputation of the American electorate, even though its level of political interest and information has not measurably increased. Scott Althaus's Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics challenges this revisionist optimism, arguing that opinion polls misrepresent the interests of a large segment of society, and that they therefore get too much attention as a guide to policy makers, because those being polled are so ill informed. But Althaus overestimates the degree to which respondent ignorance is responsible for the instability of survey responses; and he is perhaps too critical of polling as the vehicle for transmitting voter interests. His analysis of information effects on political attitudes, however, raises the important question of how public opinion would be different if it were well informed. The answer is, I believe: only minimally different.

IS PUBLIC OPINION AN ILLUSION | Benjamin I. Page (link to pdf or html [see above] )
ABSTRACT : George Bishop's The Illusion of Public Opinion does a superb job of showing how various errors and malfeasances in conducting and interpreting surveys have created illusions about public opinion. It thereby offers a very useful compendium on how to do, and especially how not to do, survey research. Nothing in the book, however, provides persuasive evidence for either of two more troubling "illusion" arguments: that collective public preferences on policy issues do not exist; or that surveys cannot measure them. Instead, Bishop's examples show that even in obscure, low-information situations, well-designed survey questions generally reveal meaningful collective policy preferences that are coherent, well differentiated, and reflective of citizens' basic interests and values.

CONSERVATIVES AND LIBERALS ON ECONOMICS: EXPECTED DIFFERENCES, SURPRISING SIMILARITIES | Stephen Miller (link to pdf or html [see above])
ABSTRACT : As might be expected, self-identified liberals (and to a lesser extent, self-identified Democrats) are more likely than conservatives to hold anti-free market views. Liberals are more likely to support wage and price controls and the nationalization of industries, and are generally more hostile to business and profits. Less expectedly, while conservatives hold free-market views relative to liberals, conservatives don't hold such views in any absolute sense. They often support the same economic measures as liberals, but by less decisive margins.

KUDOS FOR THE MINDLESS EXPERT | Sebastian Benthall (link to pdf or html [see above] )
ABSTRACT : Arguments for skepticism about political expertise abound. The skeptics believe that political matters are too unpredictable, experts too dogmatic, social science too imprecise, or the electorate too blind to justify hopefulness about the results of real-world democracy. Philip Tetlock's empirical research suggests, however, that there is some regularity to the political world, and that while most political experts have a poor grasp of it, some (Isaiah Berlin's "foxes") do better than others (his "hedgehogs"). And Tetlock's research suggests that our political judgments can be improved if we trust more in mechanical, statistical prediction, which outperforms even "fox-like" experts.

HAVE THE EXPERTS BEEN WEIGHED, MEASURED, AND FOUND WANTING? | Bryan Caplan (link to pdf or html [see above])
ABSTRACT : Tetlock's Expert Political Judgment is a creative, careful, and mostly convincing study of the predictive accuracy of political experts. My only major complaints are that Tetlock (1) understates the predictive accuracy of experts, and (2) does too little to discourage demagogues from misinterpreting his work as a vindication of the wisdom of the average citizen. Experts have much to learn from Tetlock's epistemological audit, but there is still ample evidence that, compared to laymen, experts are very good.

CHRISTIAN CITIZENS; THE PROMISE AND LIMITS OF DELIBERATION | Jon A. Shields (link to pdf or html [see above])
ABSTRACT : The media's attentive vigil over America's most militant and outrageous activists in the abortion wars has obscured a massive but quiet effort on the part of evangelicals to engage their opponents in exemplary deliberative discussions about bioethics. For a variety of reasons, activists in the pro-life movement are more committed to carving out civic spaces for such dialogue than are their pro-choice counterparts. This discrepancy invites investigation into the forces that promote and constrain political movements' interest in deliberation, as well as highlighting the undeniable limits to deliberative ideals.

SELF-INTEREST PROPERLY FELT: DEMOCRACY'S UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES AND TOCQUEVILLE'S SOLUTION | David Meskill (link to pdf or html [see above])
ABSTRACT : The need to cooperate in countless ways in a democracy raises the fundamental question posed by the prisoner's dilemma: How can self-interested individuals cooperate? Tocqueville recognized this problem and anticipated the most convincing solution to date: Robert Frank's conception of emotions as "commitment devices." Tocqueville's analysis of the miscalculations of modern "individualism," which lead people first into isolation and then into servitude, mirrors the failure of conscious rationality in the prisoner's dilemma. Conversely, Tocqueville emphasizes emotional "habits of the heart" as the key to resisting the blandishments of individualism.

POLITICAL CULTURE VS. CULTURAL STUDIES: REPLY TO FENSTER | Chris Wisniewski (link to pdf or html [see above])
ABSTRACT : A review of two of the strands of cultural studies that Mark Fenster contends are superior to Murray Edelman's analysis of mass public opinion - Gramsci's theory of hegemony, and Bourdieu's sociology - and a more general look at work in the field of cultural studies suggests that all of these alternatives suffer from severe theoretical and methodological limitations. Future studies of culture and politics need to pose questions similar to the ones that preoccupied Edelman, but they must move beyond the political and interpretive biases that have dominated cultural studies (some of which Edelman shared), as well as the questionable view of "ideology" as a matter of elite domination of the masses, rather than as a mediating, constitutive force in the process of individual opinion formation.

ON IDIOCRATIC THEORY: REJOINDER TO WISNIEWSKI | Mark Fenster (link to pdf or html [see above])
ABSTRACT: One of Murray Edelman's most important insights was that understanding public ignorance about politics and policy requires an analysis of how symbolic communication and popular culture shape public knowledge and opinion. Approaches that simply dismiss the public as ignorant or idiotic make a similar error as those that simply embrace the modern public as capable of engaging in the work of a competent demos, insofar as both simplify complex social and cultural processes of meaning-making and comprehension. The problem for those who wish to take Edelman's insight seriously - a problem that Edelman failed to resolve - is precisely how to study and theorize the public as something less than deliberative and knowledgeable, but more than simply ignorant.

THE LEANING TOWER OF "PISA": PUBLIC IGNORANCE, ISSUE PUBLICS, AND STATE AUTONOMY: REPLY TO DECANIO | Daniel Carpenter (link to pdf or html [see above])
ABSTRACT: In the pages of this journal, Samuel DeCanio and colleagues have advanced the proposition that public ignorance (PI) can lead to state autonomy (SA), inasmuch as the public cannot constrain state actions of which it is unaware. The pisa framework, while original and deserving of further research, needs to take account of complicating factors on both the public ignorance and the state autonomy sides of the equation. "Knowledge," and thus "ignorance," is a matter of diverse interpretations, so what seems like ignorance may actually be a form of fragmented knowledge that buttresses state autonomy. Conversely, public ignorance of state actions that would be popular if they were widely known might diminish state autonomy, by undermining the legitimacy of the state bureaucracy in question.

AUTONOMY AND DUPLICITY: REPLY TO DECANIO | Benjamin Ginsberg (link to pdf or html [see above])
ABSTRACT : While Samuel DeCanio is correct to maintain that the state has considerable autonomy due to the public's vast ignorance of the government's affairs, he neglects to consider that the public's ignorance also stems from the deceptions of the politically powerful, who withhold and distort information in a variety of ways. This can take the form of outright lies; anonymous leaks; press and video releases that don't mention the originating group or its interests; giving reporters access to otherwise inaccessible information, so that they will report favorably on a certain program or event; publicity stunts from groups as far afield as nasa and the Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority; or the financing of periodicals that are sympathetic towards one's cause. State autonomy induced by public ignorance may thus be generated by the state itself.

STATE AUTONOMY AND POPULAR PARTICIPATION | Martin Shefter (link to pdf or html [see above])
ABSTRACT : The argument that the modern democratic state is fairly autonomous, because mass publics have limited knowledge of government and limited interest in politics, ignores the full range of possibilities. The character of a nation's parties and other political institutions greatly affects the extent of political participation among even citizens who are well informed and concerned about public affairs. And under appropriate conditions, the mobilization and enthusiastic engagement of the public will actually increase state power.

THE AUTONOMY OF THE DEMOCRATIC STATE: REJOINDER TO CARPENTER, GINSBERG, AND SHEFTER | Samuel DeCanio (link to pdf or html [see above])
ABSTRACT : While democratic states may manipulate public opinion and mobilize society to serve their interests, a focus on such active efforts may distract us from the passive, default condition of ignorance-based state autonomy. The electorate's ignorance ensures that most of what modern states do is unknown to "society," and thus need not even acquire social approval, whether manipulated or spontaneous. Similarly, suggestions that democratic states may be "captured" by societal groups must take cognizance of the factors that enable elites to serve the interests of specific societal groups at the expense of the larger society. Bringing studies of voter ignorance into the analysis of state's autonomy from society provides a novel approach to the study of democratic states' autonomy, while also serving to explain how societal "capture" of state policies is possible.