Ilya Somin’s Democracy and Political Ignorance suffers from the fallacy of composition: It uses individual-level evidence about political behavior to draw inferences about the preferences and actions of the public as a whole. But collective public opinion is more stable, consistent, coherent, and responsive to the best available information, and more reflective of citizens’ underlying values and interests, than are the opinions of most individual citizens.
Those sentences, from Benjamin Page of the political science department of Northwestern University, were published in 2015. I don’t think that they hold up so well in 2016. I wonder how many of the critical participants in the symposium on Somin’s book (note: in several months, this link may lead somewhere else) would care to reconsider their views. As always with academics, I expect fewer to reconsider than should do so.
[Note: I wrote this post before Tyler also posted on the symposium, but I scheduled it for now.]
I think that a lot of conventional wisdom in political science is starting to look like pre-September 2008 conventional wisdom in macroeconomics. As Daniel Drezner put it,
the political science theories predicting that someone like Trump was highly unlikely to win a major-party nomination were so widely believed that they turned out to refute themselves.
The best evidence of public ignorance and irrationality concerning politics, long pre-dating the current Trump cult, is the support for the Democratic Party by people who believe that the Democrats will advance the interests of middle class and working class Americans generally.
Most Old Left democrats I know still think of politics in the Old Left way. They identify democrats with FDR and the New Deal.
The New Left identity politics is scary and weird to them, but they don’t particularly like Republicans anyway (who can blame them) and they aren’t ready to admit the political changes of the last few decades (this is easier to do if they are childless).
The Democrats rely on a wide-range of their voters not thinking about how the Democrats’ policies effect them and their children. The Democrats are also helped by the ease with which Republicans can be demonized (both because of the Left’s cultural dominance and because of Republican ineptitude in presenting themselves) and by the Republicans’ consistent lack of interest in highlighting how leftist policies impact ordinary Americans.
What did they think Occupy and the Tea Party was? Who did they think Obama was for that matter? Why did he beat Hillary? Sometimes the disaffected coalesce. Trump is an odd catalyst, but maybe as with stock market crashes it happens precisely when we think it can’t.
I’m really happy for what Trump is doing for the general appreciation of the American political process.
It seems very clear that the big-stakes participants have developed a particular skillset at getting votes that is so advanced that casual participants can’t even understand what they’re doing. When most of us look at Obama, Trump, or Sanders, we are like 10th kyu Go players trying to understand a 7th dan game. We don’t even understand what they’re thinking about.
The one part of the bright side is that they don’t seem to do anything like what they campaigned on. I really thought Obama would close down the torture camps and desist from bombing and invading everyone. Obama fans don’t seem to care, though. They just believe in him. Same with Trump, Sanders, and Clinton.
I don’t see how we can really know what any of these people will do as president.
When applied to markets, this is known as the wisdom of crowds. Should we therefore be skeptical of that as well?
Much less so. Market participants put their own real money on the line. Not so voters — the cost of an ill-considered vote to an individual voter is indistinguishable from zero.
I don’t think Page’s words have held up well for a long time. But even if I’m wrong and this election constitutes a new discrepancy, the question remains whether we are dealing with some one-time aberration or a new phenomena which we can expect to continue to characterize our politics for the foreseeable future.
A simple model could be, “It’s the economy, stupid!” That is, combine The Great Stagnation with Average Is Over – and what I’ve been talking about with regards to labor geographic centralization and Baumol productivity problems – and you get a situation of flat or declining real living standards for a growing portion of the population.
If we’ve transitioned out of the “rising tide lifts all boats” era, then circumstances are much more frustrating and zero-sum for more and more people, without the optimistic expectations that help to lubricate social frictions and generate ease and security which is turn allows people to put their guard down a little and creates more comity, magnanimity, and humane generosity even towards strangers.
Without growth, especially in the lower half of the distribution, something like lifeboat ethics will prevail as a general attitude. Your gain is my loss, and so forth.
And so long as those economic circumstances persist, it creates a large constituency – perhaps even a plurality – which will come to the perfectly rational conclusion that the only way to substantially increase their station and prospects in life is to seize the throne and have a politician radically redistribute wealth, jobs, and status in their direction and at the expense of competing groups.
That is, it’s possible we’ve entered the era of an endless sequence of ‘big change candidates’ who promise to really shake things up to produce the effects described above. And who, by definition, have to credibly position themselves as extreme, independent outsiders who are, for example, more likely to win games of political chicken, because ‘establishment moderates’ can’t be trusted to deviate from the standing political and economic compromise to the necessary degree, or to summon the will to really take things to very brink.
If such conditions persist, then there will be no magic ‘fallacy of composition’ smoothing out of individuals. That only works when the political distribution is normal, however, as we have been observing for a long time, it is becoming increasingly bifurcated and bi-modal.