Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton Studies in Political Behavior, 1) Hardcover – April 19, 2016

This is an excellent book, but a couple of caveats are probably warranted. The main one is that despite its down-to-earth title, this isn’t really a book for general readers. The authors (hereafter A&B) mention in their preface that they hope the book will be useful for “colleagues and students” — present and future professional political scientists — and that is the audience who will benefit most from reading it.Although the book isn’t equation-heavy, its expository passages are nonetheless very dense in discussing fine points of quantitative social science techniques. Despite not being a political scientist, I do have a pretty decent appetite for quantitative arguments — yet even I found myself rushing through some passages. An even stronger indicator that the book is directed to experts, though, is that the first big target of the argument, the so-called “folk theory” of popular sovereignty, is something whose usual embodiment is so stupendously implausible on its face that only professional training in rational choice theory could make it seem formidable.Broadly speaking, the folk theory is that elections are based on “issue voting,” i.e., they can “reveal” the “preferences” — code words revealing the influence of neoclassical economics — of a majority of voters on a set of issues. Its usual folkloric form among the tribe of political scientists is something called the “spatial model” (@24-25). This involves a belief in a one-dimensional political spectrum in which feasible policies are arrayed from left to right, and in which each political party is represented by a platform reflecting the policy it will enact if elected. (How platforms are reduced to a one-dimensional policies isn’t explained in the book, but then again A&B aren’t defenders of this theory.) Each voter is represented by an “ideal point” along the dimension, reflecting the policy she or he prefers to all others. Individual voters then try to “maximize their ideological satisfaction with the election outcome” by voting for the party closest to them on the ideological dimension. Later versions of the theory add more dimensions, but retain the assumption of an aggregative rational maximization process.A&B blow up this theory with evidence that most voters are woefully ignorant about issues and about parties’ stances on them. While most of the book focuses on the US, some attention is also paid to major European countries, and it’s in that context that A&E offer the factoid that depressed me most in the book: half of German voters couldn’t tell whether the party “Die Linke” was on the political right or left. (@35; hint: the party’s name means “The Left.” In German.) Rather than choosing a party to support based on their individual point of view, it seems more that voters decide what party or candidate they want to support and then adopt his, her or its views as their own: as A&B put it, persuasion plays a bigger role than policy-oriented evaluation.The “folk theory” is dispatched quite early in the book. A long train of other victims follow, including such notions as that political primaries take power from politicians and give it to the people; that initiatives and referenda give voice to the wisdom of crowds; that elections give voters the power to evaluate politicians’ performance retrospectively; that voters favor Presidential candidates who will improve the economy; and that a voter’s ideological self-knowledge precedes her or his choice of which party to support. Each of A&B’s arguments is supported by statistical data, including election returns, economic statistics, and survey data.Here’s another caveat, though: some of A&B’s assertions can’t be understood without a great deal of quantitative sophistication — and sometimes even sophistication won’t lead the reader to the correct understanding. The example I have in mind is the assertion that voters respond more to changes in real disposible income per capita (RDIpc) than to GDP per capita: a higher RDIpc will mean a higher probability of a vote swing favoring an incumbent President (e.g. @184). I was skeptical about this for a couple of reasons. First, A&B also say that voters can’t “respond” to something they can’t first “discern” (@164) —- and you have to go out of your way to find RDI statistics, while GDP is constantly in the news. Second, if people didn’t respond to RDIpc by reading about it, then the only other plausible way was if they felt it in their own wallets. But RDIpc is a mean (average) quantity, so it can go up even though most peoples’ income stays flat or declines. Intuitively I figured that at least a majority of people would have to feel a higher income in their wallet in order to have an effect on an election — and that this was very unlikely for most elections in the past 30 years, since US median income has been static or declining in most of that period.So I wrote to the authors about this issue. Each of them showed me I was wrong - but each in a different way. The first author who responded claimed he wasn’t the expert on the issue, but showed me with a very simple example that even if 1/3 of the voters don’t have any increase in RDI, 1/3 experience a -3% change in RDI, and 1/3 experience a +6% increase, then based on A&B’s findings you would still expect +2% vote swing favoring the incumbent. (This still assumes that the income increase is shared fairly evenly within that top 1/3, but at least it shows that my knee-jerk majority assumption was fallacious.) The second author got back from a business trip a few days later and told me that actually an improved RDIpc could influence the voter even if it *never* hit her own wallet: a couple of studies have found that “voters, regardless of their own income levels, respond much more to income gains at the top of the distribution (95th percentile) than to income gains for their own income class,” suggesting that “the mechanism by which aggregate income gains get translated into increases in political support is not a simple ‘pocketbook’ response, but a more complicated sociological phenomenon.” That’s fascinating and a little scary -- will more people vote to reelect Pres. Trump or Clinton if he or she makes the rich get richer? -- but not what a typical reader would be able to divine from the book. (BTW, both authors were incredibly nice in their responses to my questions. But I suspect they’d prefer that only a very small fraction of their thousands of readers have the chutzpah to pepper them with questions as I did. So I hope they put both explanations into a subsequent edition.)A key claim of the book is that partisanship isn’t driven by ideology, much less by issues or retrospective performance evaluation. Rather, party choice is strongly influenced by parents’ preferences, by symbols, and especially by emotionally-grounded feelings of group identification. As much as I like to think of myself as sophisticated about issues, I have to admit that my own pattern as a US voter could be guessed pretty accurately on this basis, too (though I owe it to post-1980 figures like Elliott Abrams, Eric Cantor and Sheldon Edelstein to bringing me back more to issues and away from the ethnic solidarity that induced me once to vote for a Republican, in a 1974 Senate race).So does this mean that democracy is a waste of time? Not at all, in A&B’s view. Elections still provide “authoritative, widely accepted agreement about who should rule” (@317). In a well-functioning system, they also provide party turnover, which is good for health and stability of the society. They also provide some incentives for a ruler to tolerate opposition — though A&B point out that the notion that one can oppose incumbent rulers while still being loyal to the nation is one that only developed gradually in the US and UK during the 19th Century, and not earlier. (Japan is about 150 years behind the times, in this regard.)A&B seem to be saying that what should change, based on their observations, isn’t how democracy is valued, but how it’s studied. Group identification and power differentials need to be given more consideration. In contrast, the folk theory treats every voter as equal in power, and aggregates preferences in a Benthamite utilitarian fashion. (Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, denied that there was anything special about groups, and claimed that a community was nothing more than an aggregate of individuals.) In doing so, the folk theory “props up elite rule” (@327), because it turns a blind eye to the unequal distribution of power. Based on this new point of view, the prerequisite for a “more effective democracy” would be “a greater degree of economic and social equality” (@325) — universal suffrage isn’t sufficient. A&E are at a bit of a loss, though, to describe how to bring this about, as have been many generations of well-meaning people before them.I don’t disagree with A&B, but I came away from the book thinking how very American it is. At least from the standpoint of political philosophy (as distinguished from political science), the notion that democracy is based on struggle between more and less powerful groups of people is already common in Europe and elsewhere. Leaving aside dyed-in-the-wool Marxists, the writings of Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, Jacques Rancière, Christoph Möllers and many others make this point often; even the blurb on a French childrens’ book entitled « Les démocraties » that I picked up a few years ago notes that « la démocratie est toujours un combat ». To be fair, in a late chapter A&B do describe how US political science used to be more group-oriented before getting hijacked by the economists’ view of the world; but they leave out some modern work that continues this tradition, such as John P. McCormick’s excellent “Machiavellian Democracy” (CUP 2011). As for A&B’s linkage between democracy and truer equality of power, the liberal Italian political philosopher Norberto Bobbio anticipated them somewhat in his « Destra e sinistra » (1994) (later translated as “Left and Right” [sic], but now out of print in English): he pointed out that the key distinction between left and right is that the “pole star” of the left is greater equality. His meaning clearly is like the sort of equality of power that A&B describe — not just equality under the law, which is the sort of equality represented by the folk theory, and which Bobbio attributes to the center-right.While it would have been nice if some of these philosophers had been considered in the present book, their absence is forgivable: the book’s purpose is to convince American political scientists to stop drinking the Kool-Aid of economistic electoral theories that their profession has served up for many decades already. To an outsider, A&B make a convincing case. But will they change the minds of insiders? After all, macroeconomists stayed faithful to their theories despite the 2008 global financial crash. Expecting change from a mere book might be too ambitious a hope for realists.

If you are interested in learning how democracy really works, you owe it to yourself to read this book. Before describing the book, however, I need to say what this book is not. It is not a polemic regarding the present election. Both liberals and conservatives will be distressed by its conclusion but it does not offer an analysis that would favor one party or another. Secondly, it is not a light read. It is replete with charts and statistical analysis. I believe that the target audience is the professional political science community. On the other hand, if you are willing to slog through Democracy for Realists, you will be rewarded with a better understanding of why politics seems so dysfunctional. When I opened this book I rather expected to find the usual critique of democratic politics, i.e., that most voters are abysmally ignorant, e.g., unable to name their Congressional representatives or to describe the provisions of new legislation, let alone assess the arguments pro or con for such legislation. This ignorance is well known and well documented. It is usually argued that in spite of the fact that few voters have sufficient understanding of their political choices to make an informed decision, voters are able to utilize various intellectual short-cuts to generate the policies that they prefer. Democracy for Realists challenges this view. The authors first demolish the belief that a popular will even exists. The popular majority cannot be determined by opinion polling because public opinion is too sensitive to how question are phrased. Even if great care is taken is phrasing questions, public opinion is shot through with logical conflicts. The authors then investigate whether or not retrospective accountability can give the voters control of their government.Presumably if the voters punish those political choices which they find disagreeable and reward those they find desirable, they can influence policy choices retrospectively. The authors find that voters are poor judges of their leaders, punishing leaders for recent unpleasant events (including events that are unrelated to political matters) and ignoring their leaders overall performance throughout their terms of office. Such presumed revolutions as the popularity of the Democratic Party following the New Deal come to be seen as simply a run of good luck by Democratic candidates in having a propitious advent to their election seasons.The authors conclude that voters usually remain attached to one party because of peer group identification rather than a commitment to the party's principles. Rather than having a vision of the political regime they desire, they adjust their opinions regarding the issues according to the prevailing opinions expressed in their peer groups. Thus there is an unwillingness to accept even the most compelling arguments for views unpopular in the voters' in-crowd. They argue that a realistic reform of the political process would focus on how to create dialogues among identity groups rather then to empower individual voters. Understanding how interest groups work should be the goal of political reformers. In particular, it is necessary to counter the tendency of interest groups to maximize their demands in order to energize their followers. In addressing the problem of extremist demands the authors say, "At its best, the process of interest aggregation in majoritarian systems may involve shearing off the more self-interested or damaging or wicked demands of component groups, resulting in a stronger and more coherent electoral consensus." Unfortunately they have only one specific recommendation as to how improve our electoral process and that is to limit the power of wealthy donors to influence political outcomes through their donations.

Sehr gutes Buch auf Basis von Studien und wissenschaftlichen Erkentnissen zu dem Thema Demokratie.

Sulla base di innumerevoli studi di scienze politiche costituiti da indagini sul terreno sui comportamenti dell'elettorato, gli autori, autorevoli professori universitari, dimostrano la verità impopolare che chi vota è in genere disinformato, agisce per pregiudizi e partito preso, spesso non capisce cosa sta scegliendo ed è influenzabile nella decisione dal modo in cui vengono presentati i problemi. Si astengono solo dal dire a chiare lettere che l'abissale ignoranza e il basso quoziente d'intelligenza della maggior parte della popolazione rendono la democrazia una mera nozione folkloristica il cui esito non può che essere il populismo.

As described, quick delivery

This book explores voter behaviour in the US and seems to demonstrate beyond doubt that some theories of democracy don't work.So voters have their lives to lead and don't have the time or the inclination to get to grips with complex issues or 'who's who' really in terms of what they stand for, in primary elections. Most people know 'jaw-droppingly little' about politics. This doesn't stop them voting, of course - in referendums voting for 'something for nothing' if they can (reducing the costs of fire prevention - to see their fire insurance go up; or voting for a 20% reduction in car insurance rates, which proved to be unimplementable).When the authors look at what impact past experience has on voting, they find that voters blame US Presidents for events that are clearly outside their control - so shark attacks off the New Jersey shore cost Woodrow Wilson votes and droughts cost US Presidents votes at any time. Voters do take their own economic prosperity into account too - but they look just at the last 12 months, and not over the four-year term that US Presidents serve.So what does drive voting? The authors believe it's largely group affiliation, often a group affiliation we are born into which explains 'how do people like me vote?' This tends to be a generational effect and changes are slow (as when the US South ceased to feel naturally Democrat and came to feel naturally Republican.) it can change on a temporary basis - observant Catholics feeling that 'people like me vote for Kennedy' more than 'I'm a Republican and people like me vote for Nixon'. And it can change permanently - some women have forsaken the Republican party over their pro-life stance.A positive theory of democracy is not well formed in the book though the authors turn to this in the final chapter. The authors refer to Plato at one point, but not to Karl Popper whose work on Plato may offer the best way forward and which underlies in one part of their case for democracy. Perhaps the critical element is that democracy enables peaceful transitions of power (like the refutations of a scientific theory in the world view of Popper). So we avoid our rulers becoming corrupted by power. The obverse side of this is that we have to expect no special expertise among those who rule us - we are not looking for philosopher kings in our politicians. (If you believe the authors of this book, we need people skilled in brokering compromises between interest groups - and that may not be so far from the truth.)The book is written as an academic treatise and is quite hard going as a reading experience for the general reader. The points it makes, however, are of compelling interest.

I was very disappointed with this book. It is one of the very few that I stopped reading. It was boring, very unreadable, and never really got to the point. I was excited when I got the book as the title and description was very appealing. Went downhill after page 1. I have no problem with academic books with statistics to back-up the premise; but it has to be well presentedInterestingly the authors spent a whole chapter on shark attacks and how that affected W. Wilson’s election. It made me reflect on our recent COVID-19 pandemic and the low influence it had on many votes. The authors may wish to rethink their model based on this new data!My suggestion is to avoid this book.