VOTER RATIONALITY AND RATIONALIZATION

Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2016) (This book may help explain why, regardless of who you are voting for or against in November, and no matter who ends up winning/losing, you will probably have buyers' remorse. Why? Because you were not being realistic about the democratic process. "Our view is that conventional thinking about democracy has collapsed in the face of modern social-scientific research." Id. at 12. "In chapter 3 we turn our attention form electoral representation to 'direct democracy,' a medley of institutional reforms intended to enhance the role of ordinary citizens (and minimize the role of professional politicians) in processes of democratic decision-making. Reforms of this sort have been a common response to the perceived failings of existing democratic procedures in the United States and elsewhere--a simplistic reflection of the Progressive faith that 'the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.' However, in light of our portrait of ordinary citizens in chapter 2, it should not be surprising that naive efforts to let them directly manage the machinery of democracy often go badly astray. People are just too busy with there own lives to measure up to the standards that conventional democratic theory sets for them." Id. at 14. VOTER RATIONALITY AND RATIONALIZATION:  "In interviews, citizens often sound more ideological and conventionally 'rational' than our description of them suggest. The fact has led some scholars, particularly those who do field work with extensive personal interviews, to suppose that somehow all the other scientific evidence is misleading. People make good sense: just listen to them!" "Alas, as we showed . . . , the apparent rationality is itself often misleading--a byproduct rather than the foundation of group politics. Citizens tend to adopt the views of the parties and group they favor. If they are usually highly engaged in politics, they may even develop ideological frameworks rationalizing their group loyalties and denigrating those of their political opponents. Sometimes they even construct 'facts' to help support their group loyalties. The reasoned explanations they provide for their own beliefs and behavior are often just post hoc justifications of their social or partisan loyalties. Well-informed citizens are likely to have more elaborate and internally consistent worldview than inattentive people do  but that just reflects the fact that their rationalizations are better rehearsed. For example, a we saw in the case of budget deficits, the political belies of more attentive, knowledgeable citizens are often more subject to partisan bias than those of their less attentive neighbors. For most people most of the time, social identities and partisan loyalties color political perceptions as will as political opinions." "The role of political 'sophistication' in analyses of this sort underlines the fact that the task of being a good citizens by the standards of conventional democratic theory is too hard for everyone. Attentive readers will already have surmised our view of intellectuals in politics, but for clarity, we spell it out here. The historical record leave little doubt that the educated, including the highly educated, have gone astray in their moral and political judgments as often as anyone else. In the antebellum era, prominent southern professors and university administrators often defended slavery. Brilliant 19th-century German professors helped give shape to German nationalism and the racial identity theories that led to Nazism, and German university students in the 1930s were often enthusiastic supporters of Hitler. Protestant and secular professors backed Otto von Bismarck's campaign to suppress the civil liberties of Catholics in 19th-century Germany. Crude prejudice against Catholics, Jews, and others was common among American intellectuals until recent decades, too." "More recently, 20th-century communism attracted many highly educated people around the world. Numerous French intellectuals supported Russian communism all after its crimes had been exposed. Radical Chinese intellectuals backed Mao Zedong's campaign to establish his regime and keep it in power--a regime that vitally became, not just a relentless oppressor of intellectuals, but the most murderous government in the history of the world. in the United States, prominent political science professors became advisers to the American government during the disastrous Vietnam War, while other naively favored Ho Chi Minh in his ultimately successful effort to establish a repressive communist state in that country." 'Of course, a great many other people in each of these countries made the same or other equally appealing judgments. The point is simply that, as Gustave Le Bon put it more than a century ago, 'It does not follow that because an individual knows Greek or mathematics, is an architect, a veterinary surgeon, a doctor, or a barrister, that he is endowed with a special intelligence of social questions. . . . Were the electorate solely composed of person stuffed with sciences their votes would be no better than those emitted at present.' Gifted in their own spheres, artists, and intellectuals have no special expertise in politics, In our political judgment and actions,we all make mistakes, someone even morally indefensible errors, Thus, when we say that voters routinely err, we mean all voters. This is not a book about the political misjudgments of people with modest educations. It is a book about the conceptual limitations of human beings--including the authors of this book and its readers." Id. at 309-311 (citations omitted). By the way, why do so many voters believe that business people will do a good job of managing political matter and the country? There is no hard evidence to support such a belief.).