The Knowledge of the American Voting Public

Source: "Another Peek Inside the Brain of the Electorate," by Libby Copeland, The Washington Post, July 24, 2008.

The American Voter Revisited, was released last month, inspired by 1960's The American Voter. "Four years ago, Lewis-Beck and Jacoby and two other political scientists decided to take on "The American Voter" once more. They used the same methods to crunch the data and even organized the book the same way."

One thing that's certain is that Americans are consistent. They've had difficulty articulating their opinions in ways that satisfy political scientists for decades. ...... "The American Voter" was thick with statistical tables and a wonky theory called the "funnel of causality," all revealing that Americans have what William G. Jacoby of Michigan State University calls "incoherent, inconsistent, disorganized positions on issues."

However:

Some academics criticized "The American Voter" for depicting voters as "fools," while others suggested the voters were not so much fools as, uh, "cognitive misers."

So what does "Revised" say:

"The American Voter Revisited" is chock-full of depressing conclusions, couched in academic understatement. In-depth interviews conducted with 1,500 people during the two most recent presidential elections revealed that the "majority of people don't have many issues in mind" when they discuss voting, Lewis-Beck says. Sometimes they say they're attracted to a candidate because "I just don't think we should change parties right now." They tend to inherit their party allegiance from their parents, and those beliefs tend to stay fixed throughout their lives, he says.

"For many people," the authors of "Revisited" write, "dealing with political issues is too much of a bother."

And what do the counter-critics say now:

Many Americans vote primarily because of one or two or three issues, she says. They might care a whole lot about health care or prayer in schools and not at all about foreign policy, and maybe that leaves them sounding dumb when they're asked about Iraq. But they know enough about the issues they care about, and that's what they vote on.

And how do they gather what they know? Popkin, whose own studies suggest that Americans' awareness of issues has been growing for decades, argues that voters use shortcuts to make judgments about the candidates, relying on things like endorsements, the advice of friends, and the candidate's party. So what if they forget much of what they've learned, so long as they absorb the lessons?

Comment: Of course a very large number of Americans don't vote, and even more don't always vote. Still with some 300,000,000 people we should get a very accurate view of public opinion from those who do vote in an election.

The question I guess is how well does decision making via our voting system work. How many experts do you need to pay attention to the issues to provide the leadership that the voting public needs. How well do the social processes that result in voting behavior transform expert opinion into votes at the pole? Most important, can we find better systems to get the right answers for the election of our politicians?

Of course, the system does not depend on votes on issues, but rather on the votes of their representatives on the issues, and on the leadership of their elected branch officials on those issues. So the question is, does the system result in an effective political selection of representatives.

There are clearly lots of bad selections. They are the ones who make the front pages. But the system allows for a few bad apples by electing lots of politicians and having majority voting rules and checks and balances between the branches of government. Is this enough? Could it be better?

The issues in designing knowledge systems that work both to lead to good decisions and to make decision makers responsible to the public are very complex! JAD