Vol.12 No.4 ---- Fall 1998
Contents
Public Ignorance
Ilya Somin | Voter Ignorance and the Democratic Ideal
If voters do not understand the programs of rival candidates
or their likely consequences, they cannot rationally exercise control over govern-
ment. An ignorant electorate cannot achieve true democratic control over public
policy. The immense size and scope of modern government makes it virtually
impossible for voters to acquire sufficient knowledge to exercise such control.
The problem is exacerbated by voters' strong incentive to be "rationally igno-
rant" of politics. This danger to democracy cannot readily be circumvented
through "shortcut" methods of economizing on voter knowledge costs. A truly
democratic government must, therefore, be strictly limited in size.
Tom Hoffman | Rationality Reconceived: The Mass
Electorate and Democratic Theory
Early voting behavior research confronted liberal democratic
theory with the average American citizen's ability to think politically.
Since then, several lines of analysis have tried to vindicate the mass electorate.
Most recently, some researchers have attempted to reconceptualize the political
reasoning process by viewing it in the aggregate, while others describe
individuals as effective--albeit inarticulate--employers of cognitive shortcuts. While
mass publics may, in these ways, be described as "rational," they still fail to
meet the basic requirements of democratic theory.
Richard D. Anderson, Jr. | The Place of the Media
in Popular Democracy
Does media coverage of politics undermine democratic deliberation?
By covering the "horse race" instead of the issues, the media encourage
people to believe that politicians place self-interest above the public interest.
The media also affect which issues people consider important, and negative
advertisements discourage political participation. People learn from the media
only because they know so little about politics. Were democracy deliberative,
these media effects would undermine it. But democracy is not a deliberation
but a contest that relies on the ability of the media to shape public opinion.
The evidence for media effects is strong, but the media cannot be undermining
a form of democracy that does not and cannot exist, and they do sustain the
form that does.
Robert Y. Shapiro | Public Opinion, Elites, and Democracy
Building on Philip Converse's understanding of public opinion,
John Zaller sees the evidence for the public's "nonattitudes" as reflecting
individuals' ambivalence concerning political issues. Because neither individuals
nor the public collectively have what Zaller would call real attitudes, he
concludes that the effectiveness of democracy rests on competition among intellectual
and political elites. In truth, however, the public has many real attitudes
that depend heavily on elite leadership, in ways that Converse did not initially
emphasize but that are consistent with both his observations and Zaller's
model of mass opinion. The quality of the public's attitudes are, however, a
point of serious contention.
Timur Kuran | Insincere Deliberation
and Democratic Failure
And enduring challenge of democracy is to give citizens an effective
say in collective decision making by ensuring broad participation in political
discourse. Deliberative opinion polling aims to meet this challenge by
providing new opportunities for ordinary citizens to form educated opinions. This
approach to broadening deliberation does not aim to control substantive outcomes,
unlike conceptions of deliberative democracy that promote improved
dialogue while also restricting the possible outcomes. But both classes of reform
overlook the prevalence of democratic failures stemming from social pressures
that discourage open and honest communication. New avenues for dialogue
will remain clogged unless supported by political institutions that protect
dissenters, and by a political ethic that rewards candor.
Philip E. Tetlock | The Ever-Shifting Psychological
Foundations of Democratic Theory:
Do Citizens Have the Right Stuff?
Timur Kuran's Private Truths, Public Lies makes a compelling
case that people often misrepresent their private preferences in response
to real or imagined social pressures, that the relative power of competing
interest groups to punish opinion deviance and reward conformity determines the
patterns and pervasiveness of preference falsification, and that preference falsifi-
cation helps explain such diverse outcomes as the persistence and sudden
collapse of communism and the precarious persistence of racial preferences in the
United States and of the caste system in India. Although preference
falsification is important and raises questions about the legitimacy of the opinions
expressed in opinion polls and elections, it does not seem widespread enough to
warrant the conclusion that ordinary people lack the courage necessary to make
democracy work.
James Q. Wilson | Idealizing Politics
Donald A. Wittman's Myth of Democratic Failureattempts
to show that government is more rational than is often believed. For instance,
Wittman argues that voters are tolerably well informed and that politicians are
responsive to voters' will. Unfortunately, Wittman's argument proceeds at
the level of economic theory, which is often contradicted by empirical reality
(and by non-economic theories that take account of political reality). It is no
better to defend democracy on a priori grounds, as Wittman does, than to
attack it on those grounds, as other economists who turn to the analysis of
politics tend to do.
Rogan Kersh | Anti-Democratic Demos:
The Dubious Basis of
Congressional Approval
In representing a fragmented pluralist polity, the U.S. Congress
inevitably exhibits high levels of conflict and disagreement. Increasingly, the
American public finds such conflict--the ordinary procedures of legislative
democracy--distasteful. As members of Congress pay closer attention to
approval ratings and other poll measures, their natural inclination may be to
avoid legislating, especially on controversial issues. This response to the
preference of the demos has profoundly antidemocratic implications.
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