One of the best-selling political books of the 2008 election season has been Just How Stupid Are We? a report on “the truth about the American voter” by popular historian Rick Shenkman. Shenkman’s little book presents a familiar collection of bleak results from opinion surveys documenting some of the many things most Americans don’t know about politics, government, and American history. “Public ignorance,” he concludes, is “the most obvious cause” of “the foolishness that marks so much of American politics.”
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The political consequences of “public ignorance” must be demonstrated, not assumed. And that requires focusing not just on what voters don’t know, but on how what they don’t know actually affects how they vote. Do they manage to make sensible choices despite being hazy about the details of politics and government? (Okay, really hazy.) If they do, that’s not stupid—it’s efficient.
Obviously, what counts as a “sensible choice” is itself a matter of legitimate disagreement. Shenkman seems to think that since “foolishness . . . marks so much of American politics,” voters must be making stupid choices. However, most analysts have aspired to judge voters by less subjective standards—criteria grounded in specific notions of procedural rationality, or in voters’ own values and interests, or in comparisons with the behavior of better-informed voters who are similar in relevant ways. Moreover, such analysts have recognized that what really matters is not whether individual voters go astray, but whether entire electorates do. A lot of idiosyncratic behavior can be submerged in the collective verdict of 120 million voters.
According to Shenkman, “The consensus in the political science profession is that voters are rational.” Well, no. A half-century of scholarship provides plenty of grounds for pessimism about voters’ rationality.
When social scientists first started using detailed opinion surveys to study the attitudes and behavior of ordinary voters, they found some pretty sobering things. In the early 1950s, Paul Lazarsfeld and his colleagues at Columbia University concluded that electoral choices “are relatively invulnerable to direct argumentation” and “characterized more by faith than by conviction and by wishful expectation rather than careful prediction of consequences.” For example, voters consistently misperceived where candidates stood on the important issues of the day, seeing their favorite candidates’ stands as closer to their own and opposing candidates’ stands as more dissimilar than they actually were. They likewise exaggerated the extent of support for their favorite candidates among members of social groups they felt close to.
In 1960, a team of researchers from the University of Michigan published an even more influential study, The American Voter. They described “the general impoverishment of political thought in a large proportion of the electorate,” noting that “many people know the existence of few if any of the major issues of policy.” Shifts in election outcomes, they concluded, were largely attributable to defections from long-standing partisan loyalties by relatively unsophisticated voters with little grasp of issues or ideology. A recent replication of their work using surveys from 2000 and 2004 found that things haven’t changed much in the past half-century.
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Studies of this sort make it pretty clear that political ignorance matters—not only for individual votes, but also for election outcomes. Thus, this research undermines the notion that “information shortcuts” or sheer aggregation can compensate for voters’ shortcomings. Subsequent work has shed light on how some of the powerful political “heuristics” used by ordinary voters contribute to the problem. For example, a team of psychologists led by Alex Todorov established that candidates for governor, senator, or representative who are rated as “competent” by people judging them solely on the basis of photographs are considerably more likely to win real-world elections than those who look less competent. Brief exposure to the photographs—as little as one-tenth of a second—is sufficient to produce a significant correlation with actual election outcomes. A follow-up study showed that the electoral advantage of competent-looking candidates is strongest among less informed voters and those most heavily exposed to political advertising.
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These and other recent studies offer abundant evidence that election outcomes can be powerfully affected by factors unrelated to the competence and convictions of the candidates. But if voters are so whimsical, choosing the candidate with the most competent-looking face or the most recent television ad, how do they often manage to sound so sensible? Most people seem able to provide cogent-sounding reasons for voting the way they do. However, careful observation suggests that these “reasons” often are merely rationalizations constructed from readily available campaign rhetoric to justify preferences formed on other grounds.
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…voters’ perceptions may be seriously skewed by partisan biases. For example, in a 1988 survey a majority of respondents who described themselves as strong Democrats said that inflation had “gotten worse” over the eight years of the Reagan administration; in fact, it had fallen from 13.5 percent in 1980 to 4.1 percent in 1988. Conversely, a majority of Republicans in a 1996 survey said that the federal budget deficit had increased under Bill Clinton; in fact, the deficit had shrunk from $255 billion to $22 billion. Surprisingly, misperceptions of this sort are often most prevalent among people who should know better—those who are generally well informed about politics, at least as evidenced by their answers to factual questions about political figures, issues, and textbook civics. If close attention to elite political discourse mostly teaches people to believe what the partisan elites on “their” side would like to be true, the fundamental premise of books such as Rick Shenkman’s—that a more attentive, politically engaged electorate would make for a healthier democracy—may be groundless.
Even when voters do have an accurate sense of how things are going, they tend to be inordinately focused on the here and now. For example, studies of economy-driven voting almost invariably find that voters are strongly influenced by economic conditions during the election year, or even some fraction of it, but mostly ignore how the economy performed over the rest of the incumbent’s term.
That shortsightedness is not just a psychological quirk; it has significant political consequences. Over the past 60 years, there has been a marked partisan disparity in the timing of income growth, with Democratic presidents presiding over more overall growth (especially for middle-class and working poor people), but Republicans presiding over more growth (especially for affluent people) in presidential election years. Thus, voters’ economic myopia has produced a substantial Republican bias in presidential election results—a bias large enough to have been decisive in three of the nine Republican victories since World War II: in 1952, 1968, and 2000.
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Voters have great difficulty judging which aspects of their own and the country’s well-being are the responsibility of elected leaders and which are not.
Source: The Wilson Quarterly (Autumn2008)
Subjects: Articles & Links, Culture, Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy
