Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels’s Democracy for Realists (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016) confirms what I already believed about democracy, which is another way of saying it’s a great book.
Their basic insight is this: People are busy. They don’t have time for politics. Unless you’re strange, it wouldn’t make sense to spend time on politics. It takes too much time to inform yourself, and it doesn’t do you or the country much good if you do.
Achen and Bartels put it this way:
The folk theory of democracy celebrates the wisdom of popular judgments by informed and engaged citizens. The reality is quite different. Human beings are busy with their lives. Most have school or a job consuming many hours of the day. They also have meals to prepare, homes to clean, and bills to pay. They may have children to raise or elderly parents to care for. They may also be coping with unemployment, business reverses, illness, addictions, divorce, or other personal and family troubles. For most, leisure time is at a premium. Sorting out which presidential candidate has the right foreign policy toward Asia is not a high priority for them. Without shirking more immediate and more important obligations, people cannot engage in much well-informed, thoughtful political deliberation, nor should they.
Getting involved in politics only makes sense if you find it intrinsically rewarding, which is another way of saying it doesn’t make sense unless you’re strange. We all know the kinds of people for whom politics is expressive, or constitutive of their identity. They’re exhausting.
For ordinary Americans, democracy is good. They believe in democracy. They believe in their civic duties. But they’re sensible, too. Whatever they might say on the Fourth of July, they know that what they do doesn’t matter. And so they do the only rational thing: They shirk.
Because their personal participation isn’t important, they don’t participate. And they don’t do much else either. They don’t vote. They don’t learn about the candidates. They don’t learn about the issues.
It isn’t even fair to say they ‘shirk’, which might suggest that important work wouldn’t get done if they didn’t participate. And that just isn’t true. They aren’t doing any important work if they vote, and the work would get done without them anyways. It would probably be better if most of them didn’t participate in politics.
Unfortunately, many of them still do.
Achen and Bartels find that ordinary people don’t have especially informed ideas about politics. Many cannot correctly identify whether their governor was a Republican or a Democrat. It might not do them much good if they could.
In the 1976 American National Election Survey, less than 40% of the respondents knew the liberal and conservative positions on the issues. Another 40% of the sample didn’t even guess. “At long last,” wrote Richard Luskin, “there now seems to be near-consensus that by anything approaching elite standards most citizens think and know jaw-droppingly little about politics.”
Across American presidential elections from 1972 to 2000, Richard Lau and David Redlawsk found that voters only made the correct decision – the decision consistent with their values and beliefs – about 72% of the time. “Is 70% correct enough?” they asked.
The largest section of Democracy for Realists deals with retrospective voting. This theory does not presume consistent connections between a voter’s values and beliefs and their candidate selection, but something simpler: That they vote out candidates and parties for poor performance.
This is a less demanding account of voter behavior. It’s consistent with democratic ‘shirking’. It does not take an informed or responsible public to answer the question Ronald Reagan put to the American people, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
Achen and Bartels don’t challenge that theory, but its rationality. After all, the answer to Reagan’s question was “Yes.” To use the simplest and most common measure, GDP per capita was about $26,400 when Carter was inaugurated, and $28,000 when Reagan asked the audience his question. For Carter, however, that was not the problem.
The problem is that voters pay little attention to off-year GDP growth. For Carter, it would not have mattered if he had 5% or 10% growth. If it had all happened in 1977, it would not have been enough. He needed growth in the second and third quarters of the election year, because that was all voters would pay attention to.
When you separate out those two quarters of growth – Q14 and Q15 – from growth in the rest of the term – Q3 through Q13 – the sign on the rest of the term is negative. It would have been better for Carter if he had inherited a recession.
That irrationality extends even to questions of great importance, like the Great Depression.
If you listen to Americans tell the story, the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt was a mandate for economic interventionism. After the crash, Americans lost their faith in the laissez faire of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover and embraced Roosevelt’s progressivism.
If you look elsewhere, the story is less clear. In the United Kingdom, the electorate repudiated the Labour Party, and embraced a National Government dominated by Conservatives. In Australia, they repudiated the Labor Party and embraced the conservative United Australia Party. I hope I don’t have to tell you what happened in Germany.
This isn’t quite fair. The American Republican Party might have been partially responsible for the Great Depression, but the Australian Labor Party certainly wasn’t, and neither were the Irish or Canadian parties that were dumped in the elections of the early 1930s.
The fundamental irresponsibility of the public comes forth most clearly in the account of Alberta. The province had the United Farmers of Alberta, and you couldn’t imagine a better fit for the story Americans like to tell: They were an agrarian populist party, backed by the farmer-labor socialists in the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. If the farmers wanted a progressive solution, they could have had no better option.
Unfortunately, the United Farmers happened to be in power when the Great Depression hit. Although they certainly weren’t responsible for the Great Depression in Alberta, and although they protested that they had “brought Alberta through the greatest depression in the world’s history to better advantage than any other government anywhere”, the ordinary Albertan was unmoved. They voted for the untried alternative instead.
At his final campaign rally, the United Farmer premier remarked that he overheard a young man say, “to nobody in particular, ‘Well, I guess Social Credit’s no darn good, but who’s there to vote for anyway—I guess I’ll vote for Social Credit anyway’”. Which was what they did.
The more consistent story is that the Republicans were unlucky, just as Labour was unlucky in Britain and Australia. The American public did not make an informed decision to embrace the new liberalism, any more than they made an informed decision to repudiate it in 1938, when Republicans swept the midterms after a sharp recession.
If voters were rational, they would reward governments that did better than expected. They would reward the United Farmers for doing better for Albertans than the governments in Saskatchewan and Manitoba did for them. But not many voters are that rational. They have a simpler heuristic: They throw out the party that’s in power when bad things happen.
The point of all this is that all that shirking isn’t costless.
If voters don’t choose candidates that share their views, they won’t elect governments that represent their preferences. If voters punish governments for things that they aren’t responsible for, then they can’t be held accountable for the things they are responsible for.
If we want to shape responsible institutions, we must understand the limits of democratic theory, and embrace more limited arguments for democratic institutions: Elections encourage peaceful transfers of power. They encourage the alternation of power between rival coalitions. They promote an active civil culture. At some level, they encourage accountability, at least where the political responsibility is clear.
The answer to democratic dysfunction isn’t authoritarianism, but it certainly isn’t more democracy. We just don’t have the time for it. Giving it to the public amounts to, as E. E. Schattschneider put it, “whip[ping] the public into doing things it does not want to do, is unable to do, and has too much sense to do.”
We’re not good at it. And it wouldn’t do us much good, either.
