AS THE “96 ELECTION SEASON HEATS UPpolicy elites of both parties are wondering out loud about the intelligence of the electorate, whether voters can tell a Clinton from a Dole, and how much average folks know about “the issues.”
In a recent Washington Post column, for example, Richard Cohen called America “the dumbest nation on earth,” a country “peopled by dolts who bellow at their government” but can’t even name their senators. Most Americans think Washington spends more on foreign aid than it does on Medicare, sniffed Cohen. “Such blathering ignorance ought to be condemned.” Still, “The good news is that the more a person knows, the more he’s likely to vote.” Those who are not informed and don’t vote but still “crab, bitch, and kvetch” about government Cohen advises to “just shut up.”
Others, however, don’t want the voters to shut up. They want them to wise up, and they’re willing to teach.
In his 1991 book Democracy and Deliberation, Prof. James Fishkin of the University of Texas at Austin concluded that the untutored voice of the American people is not “a voice worth listening to.” A remedy Fishkin has championed is the “deliberative poll,” designed to “sample public opinion toward specific issues both before and after people have had the opportunity to learn about and discuss those issues.” Unlike an old-fashioned opinion survey, referendum, or election, a deliberative poll “overcomes the conditions that foster rational ignorance,” Fishkin writes. Such a poll could allow a country, “acting through an engaged microcosm, to offer itself advice at a moment when it can make a real difference — before a primary, referendum or general election.”
In January, Fishkin — backed by distinguished bipartisan advisers, diverse funders, and PBS — held a National Issues Convention in Austin. Some 459 randomly selected citizens accepted an invitation to “grapple with key issues by engaging in serious dialogue with each other and with presidential candidates.” Spared the “steady drumbeat of sound bites and paid advertising,” they were offered instead three days of all-expenses-paid “deliberation” about “the economy, the state of the family, and America’s role in a post- cold war world.”
After intensive briefings, many participants changed their views. Sure enough, support for the flat tax among Fishkin’s “truly representative sample of the American people” fell from 43.5 percent to 29.8 percent; support for the proposition that the average worker is not fairly paid increased from 26. 6 percent to 40.4 percent; opposition to cutting foreign aid rose from 9.3 percent to 20.6 percent; and support for increasing foreign aid rose from 36. 1 percent to 50.7 percent.
Crime was not on the Austin agenda, but Fishkin has written glowingly of a 1994 British deliberative poll that saw support for fighting crime through incarceration drop from 57 percent to 37 percent. And there is a second crime connection. Briefing materials for the Austin conference were prepared in part by Public Agenda, a Manhattan research organization. In 1988, Public Agenda conducted a deliberative poll of 422 Alabama residents that pushed support for incarcerating armed robbers and shooters down 12 points, for incarcerating burglars down 49 points. By the end, most participants did not want most criminals locked up for most crimes.
In my view, however, the American people do not deserve to be either bashed by pundits or reeducated by issues experts.
In his 1966 classic The Responsible Electorate, the late Harvard political scientist V.O. Key concluded, “Voters are not fools.” Key analyzed voters who switched parties from one presidential election to another and found that most of them switched in a direction perfectly consistent with their own beliefs and interests. His pioneering research painted “an image of an electorate moved by concern about central and relevant questions of public policy, of governmental performance, and of executive personality.”
Key’s responsible electorate was no mirage. In the three decades since he wrote, the best empirical studies of political participation in the United States have found that average Americans are quite capable of figuring out their own values and needs in relation to electoral politics and policy choices. Virtually all of the evidence shows that the American people are not easily duped by high-paid media spin doctors or political consultants.
Most citizen-voters can filter out bogus information and smell a rat in candidate’s clothing. According to a recent textbook by political scientists Edward S. Greenberg and Benjamin I. Page, “recent research has indicated that Americans” collective policy preferences react rather sensibly to events, to changing circumstances, to new information, so that we can speak of a ‘rational public.'”
Indeed we can. For starters, you don’t need to know the names of your senators or how much gets spent on what to participate well and vote rationally. Inside-the-Beltway pundits, political activists, and people whose ideology governs their voting decisions need to know all that and more, because they tend to vote prospectively. They examine the rival candidates’ views on the issues of the day and then cast their ballots (or file their columns) accordingly.
But most folks are not political junkies or party activists. Average citizens vote retrospectively. We the people look at how things have gone in the recent past and then vote for the incumbent if we like what has happened, against the incumbent if we don’t. In his 1981 book Retrospective Voting, Harvard political scientist Morris Fiorina echoed Key’s insight that the electorate could learn a good deal of what it needed to reach an informed decision simply by monitoring the performance of those in power. Ronald Reagan encouraged voters to do this in 1980, when he asked them whether they were better off than they had been four years earlier. He was appealing to them for a retrospective vote.
To be sure, media mavens and policy wonks make a living debating “the issues.” But there are at least two types of issue that matter in a representative democracy. First, there are parties” and candidates” real or perceived positions on policy questions — extend affrmative action or end it, protect life or the right to abortion, increase foreign aid or cut it, balance the budget now, later, or never. These “position” issues are what political journalists, think tankers, and strategists eat, sleep, and scold the voters for not knowing or caring enough about.
But there are other issues that do not pose either-or policy choices and do not divide the electorate along partisan or ideological lines. These include resolute leadership, political corruption, a robust economy, and good character. There is no constituency for economic distress, unpatriotic beliefs, or using public office for private gain. Voters universally disapprove of all these, just as they universally approve of rising standards of living, love of country, and honesty in office. Political scientists call these “valence” issues, and increasingly electoral victory turns on them. Rival candidates and parties try to get voters to think of the other side in negative valence terms and of themselves in positive valence terms.
A central message of the empirical literature on national elections is that most citizens — whether they are moved by position issues, valence issues, or both — make political choices that coherently reflect their personal views and interests.
Thus, in 1992 some Americans may have voted prospectively and in position issue terms for Clinton because they had read up on his middle-class tax-cut plan and liked it better than Bush’s alternative. Others may have voted retrospectively for Clinton, about whom they knew nothing, because they were hurting economically and Bush hadn’t helped them. Still others may have voted in valence terms, for Clinton (new blood!) or against him (bad character!). Meanwhile, the country’s few remaining yellow dog Democrats were voting for Clinton because he was a Democrat, and the thickening ranks of rock-ribbed Republicans were voting against him because he was not a Republican. Which of these voters should be counted as unreasonable, irrational, or uninformed? I say, none.
Still, aren’t the American people misled by eight-second sound bites and super-negative ads? Not really. First, recall that the American tradition of attacking one’s political opponents is at least as old as the Federalist attack on the defenders of the Articles of Confederation as “Anti-Federalists. ” It’s as old as the charge that Thomas Jefferson was a “howling atheist” and that Grover Cleveland had fathered a child out of wedlock (he had).
A study just published by political scientists Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar, based on experiments involving 3,500 potential voters, confirms that the main effect of “going negative” is not to change voters” minds or weaken partisan loyalties but to make voters more likely to sit out an election. Whether induced by negative ads or other things, the decision not to vote can be as much a rational act of political self-expression and self-interest as the decision to vote.
Still, it remains true that voters are not Wise Men, and whatever the issue, the tyranny of the majority is always a threat. That’s why James Madison and company gave us a representative democracy designed so that leaders mediate, not mirror, public views. That’s why we have constitutional machinery built to restrain and refine the will of temporary voting majorities but empower the will of majorities that persist through staggered legislative elections, presidential contests, and judicial appointments. Warts and all, the system works because the people play their part.
So it’s not the economy, stupid. It’s that the voters aren’t stupid, stupid.
