Facing the Challenge of Democracy: Explorations in the Analysis of Public Opinion and Political Participation - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691151113 ISBN 13: 9780691151113

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2011

Synopsis

Citizens are political simpletons--that is only a modest exaggeration of a common characterization of voters. Certainly, there is no shortage of evidence of citizens' limited political knowledge, even about matters of the highest importance, along with inconsistencies in their thinking, some glaring by any standard. But this picture of citizens all too often approaches caricature.


Paul Sniderman and Benjamin Highton bring together leading political scientists who offer new insights into the political thinking of the public, the causes of party polarization, the motivations for political participation, and the paradoxical relationship between turnout and democratic representation. These studies propel a foundational argument about democracy. Voters can only do as well as the alternatives on offer. These alternatives are constrained by third players, in particular activists, interest groups, and financial contributors. The result: voters often appear to be shortsighted, extreme, and inconsistent because the alternatives they must choose between are shortsighted, extreme, and inconsistent.



Facing the Challenge of Democracy features contributions by John Aldrich, Stephen Ansolabehere, Edward Carmines, Jack Citrin, Susanna Dilliplane, Christopher Ellis, Michael Ensley, Melanie Freeze, Donald Green, Eitan Hersh, Simon Jackman, Gary Jacobson, Matthew Knee, Jonathan Krasno, Arthur Lupia, David Magleby, Eric McGhee, Diana Mutz, Candice Nelson, Benjamin Page, Kathryn Pearson, Eric Schickler, John Sides, James Stimson, Lynn Vavreck, Michael Wagner, Mark Westlye, and Tao Xie.

About this title

About the Author

Paul M. Sniderman is the Fairleigh S. Dickinson, Jr., Professor of Public Policy at Stanford University. Benjamin Highton is associate professor of political science at the University of California, Davis.

From the Back Cover

"Raymond Wolfinger taught me two things: be guided by common sense, even (and above all) when doing theory. And that, to understand how democracy works, we need first of all to pay attention to ordinary people and how they think and act. This volume exemplifies both these ideas and advances them further than I would have thought possible. This book greatly enlarges our understanding of American democracy."--John A. Ferejohn, New York University School of Law

"These remarkable essays by the profession's leading political scientists not only honor one of the great social scientists, teachers, and mentors of the twentieth century, but advance the long-standing debate about the quality of democracy in America. They are vintage Wolfinger in their approach--confronting sage theories and everyday notions of politics with hard facts."--Steven J. Rosenstone, chancellor, Minnesota State Colleges and Universities

"This lucid collection should give pause to skeptics about democracy. It offers a strong argument that the public is more engaged, consistent in its opinions, and rational in its voting than conventional wisdom holds."--Scott Keeter, Pew Research Center

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

FACING THE CHALLENGE OF DEMOCRACY

EXPLORATIONS IN THE ANALYSIS OF PUBLIC OPINION AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15111-3

Contents

Preface...................................................................................................................................................................................ixAcknowledgments...........................................................................................................................................................................xiList of Contributors......................................................................................................................................................................xiiiIntroduction: Facing the Challenge of Democracy Paul M. Sniderman and Benjamin Highton...................................................................................................1I. How Do Political Scientists Know What Citizens Want? An Essay on Theory and Measurement Arthur Lupia..................................................................................23II. Purposive Mass Belief Systems concerning Foreign Policy Benjamin I. Page and Tao Xie.................................................................................................47III. Cosmopolitanism Simon Jackman and Lynn Vavreck......................................................................................................................................70IV. Running to the Right: Effects of Campaign Strategy on Mass Opinion and Behavior Diana Mutz and Susanna Dilliplane....................................................................97V. Pathways to Conservative Identification: The Politics of Ideological Contradiction in the United States Christopher Ellis and James A. Stimson........................................120VI. Partisan Differences in Job Approval Ratings of George W. Bush and U.S. Senators in the States: An Exploration Gary C. Jacobson......................................................153VII. Political Participation, Polarization, and Public Opinion: Activism and the Merging of Partisan and Ideological Polarization John H. Aldrich and Melanie Freeze.....................185VIII. Political Parties in the Capital Economy of Modern Campaigns Jonathan Krasno.......................................................................................................207IX. Candidates and Parties in Congressional Elections: Revisiting Candidate-Centered Conclusions in a Partisan Era Eric McGhee and Kathryn Pearson.......................................224X. The Myth of the Independent Voter Revisited David B. Magleby, Candice J. Nelson, and Mark C. Westlye..................................................................................238XI. Who Really Votes? Stephen Ansolabehere and Eitan Hersh...............................................................................................................................267XII. Who Governs if Everyone Votes? John Sides, Eric Schickler, and Jack Citrin..........................................................................................................292XIII. The Effects of Registration Laws on Voter Turnout: An Updated Assessment Matthew R. Knee and Donald P. Green.......................................................................312XIV. Issue Preferences, Civic Engagement, and the Transformation of American Politics Edward G. Carmines, Michael J. Ensley, and Michael W. Wagner.......................................329References................................................................................................................................................................................355Index.....................................................................................................................................................................................379

Chapter One

How Do Political Scientists Know What Citizens Want?

AN ESSAY ON THEORY AND MEASUREMENT

Arthur Lupia

Democratic governance has many virtues. While scholars disagree about what these virtues are, there is a consensus that some virtues arise from the relationship between what governments do and what citizens want. It is no surprise, then, that many arguments about democratic governance's normative attributes are built upon claims about what citizens want.

The dependence of normative arguments on claims about citizen preferences is apparent in research on governmental responsiveness. A government's ability to achieve various normative goals depends on its knowledge of, and responsiveness to, citizen preferences. Valid preference measurements can help analysts defend claims about the extent to which governments are responsive. Of course, governmental responsiveness to what citizens want can also have detrimental consequences. Scholars who focus on such pathologies nevertheless recognize that governmental legitimacy and citizens' preferences are not independent. As Riker (1965) famously argued, "the essential democratic institution is the ballot box and all that goes with it." Hence, claims about what citizens want are relevant to a wide range of questions about what government does.

The dependence of normative arguments on claims about what citizens want is also apparent in citizen competence debates. While it is well known that many citizens are unable to answer factual questions that scholars and journalists find important, the normative implications of such inabilities are less well understood. Some pundits argue that citizens are so ignorant of basic political and economic concepts that governments should simply ignore what citizens want. More constructive researchers seek to clarify when and how citizens' inabilities to answer survey questions affect their preferences. Such research is conducted in different ways. Some scholars use surveys to solicit information about what citizens want. Others theorize about what citizens should want. Still others integrate both activities—they collect data on what citizens say they want and evaluate it with respect to assumptions about what citizens should want.

The range of examples described above shows how arguments about democracy's normative virtues depend on the validity of claims about what citizens want. As many scholarly claims about preferences come from survey data, many scholarly findings also depend on the accuracy of survey-based preference measurements. In this essay, I examine how many political scientists conceptualize and measure what citizens want. I then contend that we can improve our current conceptualization and measurement of citizen preferences.

Progress can come from paying greater attention to how two factors, institutions and cognition, affect preferences. Institutions matter because they moderate the relationship between citizens' thoughts and government's actions. In examining the effect of institutions, I argue that many scholarly claims about what citizens should want ignore the moderating effect of institutions. For example, when scholars estimate "the vote for U.S. president that a voter would have cast if more enlightened," they often base their assessment on the assumption that a voter should prefer the candidate whose policy preferences are closest to his or her own. I draw from a number of recent and emerging studies to show how such institution-free estimates can produce invalid claims about what citizens should want. For if a particular officeholder does not have dictatorial powers, then a citizen's optimal representative can be one whose preferences are quite different from his or her own. Understanding how institutional factors connect citizen preferences to governmental actions can help scholars defend more reliable claims about what citizens should want.

Greater attention to how citizens think can yield parallel improvements in preference measurement. Cognition matters because the frequency and content of a person's political thoughts influences how he or she comes to have, and express, particular preferences. Some scholars have fruitfully leveraged attention to cognition to clarify which survey-based measures of citizen preferences best reflect the preferences that people would have if they thought differently about politics. Parallel endeavors are also changing how surveys measure preferences. To demonstrate such effects, I focus on question wording changes contained in the 2008 American National Election Studies (ANES). The content of these changes follows from evolving theories of optimal questionnaire design that themselves are well-informed by research on how people think. I argue that asking questions in ways that better reflect how citizens think produces preference measures that better reflect what citizens want.

Greater attention to institutions and cognition can help scholars improve what they know about what citizens want. Today, it is common for scholars to treat preferences as "institution-free traits," where by "trait," I mean a habitual pattern of thought that is stable across time. I argue, however, that many of the most-scrutinized citizen preferences are neither institution-free nor measured well by badly worded questions. Greater attention to institutions and cognition can help scholars base arguments about democracy's normative virtues on increasingly reliable and credible claims about what citizens want.

Institutions and Which Candidates Citizens Should Prefer

Normative arguments about democracy often build from claims about what citizens should want. Because many social issues are complex, and because ample evidence suggests that many citizens spend little time thinking about such issues, it is widely presumed that what many citizens say they want is different from what they should want. The idea is that if citizens were to think more deeply about politics, they would have different preferences. Such claims are often made by persons who themselves spend significant time thinking about particular issues and are typically followed by a pronouncement or estimate of what preferences citizens ought to have.

Such pronouncements are often defended by comparing a manifestation of citizen preferences, such as voting behavior or survey evidence, to some arguably objective standard of what these citizens should want. Poor voters who vote republican, for example, are thought to be voting contrary to their own interests by writers who believe that Democratic legislators are better for the poor. More generally, it is widely presumed that citizens should prefer to elect politicians whose preferences are closest to their own and that citizens who do not do so are mistaken.

I contend that many such views are naïve when stated as institution-free generalities. To make this argument compactly will require a few simplifying assumptions. The first simplification is that we accept as potentially valuable the idea that there is normative virtue in decision-making processes that cause convergence between citizen preferences and the consequences of governmental actions. The second simplifying assumption is that, for the moment, we can dispense with concerns about utility aggregation (i.e., how policies that benefit one person may harm others). I make these assumptions in order to start my argument by evaluating a scenario where we can compare the preferences of one arbitrarily selected citizen to the consequences of the governmental actions that affect her. I use this exercise to provide an initial answer to the question, "Under what conditions should this citizen prefer to elect a candidate for office whose policy preferences are as close as possible to her own?" At the end of this section, I will show that relaxing these assumptions only further decreases the validity of claims that citizens should always prefer politicians whose policy preferences are closest to their own.

To make matters concrete, let's start with the case of a lone voter who is given the opportunity to cast a single vote that determines which of two political parties will have complete control over all aspects of government for the rest of time. For simplicity, let's assume that it is common knowledge that everyone in society agrees that when evaluating the actions of government, only the lone voter's well-being matters. So, as indicated in our discussion of simplifications earlier, the voter need not concern herself with how her choice affects anyone except herself. Suppose, moreover, that one of the two parties is actually better for the voter because its actions will enhance her well-being more than the other. We call this party "the correct party" and call the other "the incorrect party." in this case, what the voter should want is easy to determine. She should prefer the correct party. This scenario supports the claim that citizens should always prefer to elect politicians whose preferences are closest to their own.

Is this claim true generally? To see why it is not, let us now focus on institutional factors that connect a lone voter's decision with the governmental actions that affect her. A government consists of many elected and appointed offices. Political institutions are structured to induce delegation and coalition building among these actors. Such efforts affect the correspondence between what any single voter prefers and the actions of government that ultimately affect the voter's well-being.

To begin to incorporate such institutional factors into the previous example, suppose that instead of casting a single vote that determines which of two political parties will have complete control over all aspects of government for the rest of time, the lone voter will now simply determine the identity of a single member of a large legislative assembly. Even though the lone voter can determine her representative's identity, her choice does not determine the actions of government. Instead, the relationship between the voter's expressed preference and the governmental actions that affect her will depend on how her representative works with other members of the legislature.

The representative will make two important decisions: with whom to coalesce and to whom to delegate. Political science has examined these topics extensively. A common lesson in these literatures is that the institutional context affects who coalesces with whom, who delegates to whom, and the consequences of such endeavors. In what follows, I briefly describe relevant coalition and delegation dynamics. I then use these lessons to clarify how scholars can use such dynamics to make more reliable claims about what citizens, such as the lone voter, should want.

Coalescence

The lone voter's representative is but one member of a legislative body with dozens or hundreds of other members. In legislatures around the world, legislators are usually required to obtain majority or supermajority support for an idea to become a law. Hence, to legislate, individual members of a legislature have to forge agreements with one another. But if there is sufficient preference diversity within a legislature, many of these agreements will require compromise. To achieve a desired objective a, the lone voter's representative may have to give up something he wants (i.e., desired objective B) to achieve a result that, while not exactly B, is also desirable. The agreements forged from these negotiations will turn not only on the policy preferences of the lone voter or her representative, but also on the allocation of bargaining skills and powers among legislators.

Bargaining skill and power allocations within a legislature derive from several sources. One source is other legislators' preferences. If the lone voter's representative prefers X to y and if all other legislators prefer y to X, the deck will be stacked against the lone voter's preference affecting government actions. In contrast, if all but one of the other legislators agree that X is preferred to y, then government action is more likely to be consistent with the lone voter's preferences.

Another factor is legislators' abilities to articulate certain types of arguments at certain times—as well as their abilities to express patience or indignation at appropriate moments. Patience is particularly important. a legislator who needs a particular decision to be made now (perhaps because he is in a tight election) may be more willing to compromise than a legislator who is unaffected by the lack of a speedy decision. In bargaining, patience is often power.

The distribution of bargaining power within a legislature is not simply a product of the life histories and DNAs of individual legislators. Power distributions are also affected by institutional rules. Rules that affect how many votes are needed to reach a decision, what happens if a decision cannot be reached, and so on will affect legislators' relative bargaining power. These rules can also affect who has the ability to be patient, which, as suggested earlier, can affect the allocation of bargaining power.

Hence, attributes of other legislators and institutional factors over which the lone voter has no control are likely to sway legislative decisions in ways that affect the relationship between the candidate she chooses on election Day and the policy consequences of that act. Such bargaining dynamics can limit, or even eliminate, any influence that the lone voter's representative may have in the legislature. So to draw a conclusion about the type of candidate that the lone voter should prefer, we need to consider the relationship between the options in front of her and their correspondence to policy outcomes.

But there is more to this relationship that we have not yet discussed.

At the time of an election, even the most learned legislative expert will be uncertain about what issues will come up during the legislative session and how the legislature will resolve such issues. Although many experts can name bills or issues that will definitely be raised, they cannot anticipate all of the crises that will unexpectedly arise. These new problems need not cut across traditional partisan or ideological lines. They may split the parties or unify former adversaries. These new schisms or alliances may have spillover effects—they may make it more difficult, or easier, respectively, for legislators to coalesce on formerly simple issues. Hence, the evolution of legislative alliances can further affect the relationship between the lone voter's choice and the actions of government.

Understanding this much about the coalitional nature of legislative decision making is sufficient to demonstrate why the lone voter should not always prefer the candidate whose policy preferences are closest to her own. To clarify conditions under which a voter would not want to prefer the closest candidate, suppose that the lone voter holds a moderate position on the one policy issue about which she cares most. If this issue is sufficiently important to her, it might seem reasonable to conclude that the voter would best be represented by a moderate who shares her views. If, however, moderates compromise in ways that extremists do not, then being represented by a moderate may lead to a suboptimal outcome for the voter.

Specifically, suppose that the lone voter most prefers policy outcome S. To the extent that a policy other than S will be passed, she prefers that the policy be as close to S as possible. Let ~S denote a different policy outcome that some other voters desire.

Assume that bargaining power is distributed among the legislators in a manner that leads them to conclude that the best outcome they can achieve is one that splits the difference between the preferred policy position of the lone voter's representative and ~S. If a moderate represents the lone voter in this case, splitting the difference will lead to a policy outcome halfway between S and ~S. If, however, the lone voter were to choose someone whose preferences are more extreme than her own in a particular direction (i.e., suppose that there exists a legislator whose most preferred outcome is Z and that Z is such that S is halfway between ~S and Z), and if such a representative agreed to split the difference with supporters of outcome ~S, then the lone voter ought to prefer to be represented by the extremist.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691151113
• ISBN 13: 9780691151113
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416
• Editor: Sniderman Paul M., Highton Benjamin