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August 24, 2004

WEATHERING THE SHORTCUTS?

Let's be grateful that Louis Menand did not become a brain surgeon. If he had, he probably would never have found the time to apply his scalpel to intellectual history, as he did in his spellbinding best-seller, "The Metaphyical Club," or as he does in "The Unpolitical Animal," his dissection of how voters think, in the current New Yorker.

To get a true sense of Menand's surgical skills, you have to read the New Yorker piece in its entirety. It's short anyway, and a mere summary won't do. But just to whet your appetite, here -- chosen at random -- are some of the things he notes as he reviews various political theories based on "Winning Elections: Political Campaign Management, Strategy & Tactics" by Ron Faucheux and Ronald A. Faucheux; a 1964 article by political scientist Bruce M. Sabin on "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics"; as well as a 2004 paper written by Princeton political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels; a theory of shortcuts, particularly the ideas of M.I.T. professor Samuel Popkin; and "Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America" by Stanford's Morris Fiornia and others:

+ An estimated "2.8 million people voted against Al Gore in 2000 because their states were too dry or two wet" as a consequence of that year's weather patterns. Achen and Bartels think that these voters cost Gore seven states, any one of which would have given him the election.

+ In election years from 1952 to 2000, when people were asked whether they cared who won the Presidential election, between twenty-two and forty-four per cent answered "don't care" or "don't know." In 2000, eighteen per cent said that they decided which Presidential candidate to vote for only in the last two weeks of the campaign; five per cent, enough to swing most elections, decided the day they voted.

+ The most widely known fact about George H.W. Bush in the 1992 election was that he hated broccoli. Eighty-six percent of likely voters in that election knew that the Bushes's dog's name was Millie; only 15 percent knew that Bush and Clinton both favored the death penalty.

+ Three theories have arisen. The first is that electoral outcomes, as far as "the will of the people" is concerned, are essentially arbitrary. The fraction of the electorate that responds to substantive political arguments is hugely outweighed by the fraction that responds to slogans, misinformation, "fire alarms" (sensational news), "October surprises" (last-minute sensational news), random personal associations, and "gotchas."

+ A second theory is that although people may not be working with a full deck of information and beliefs, their preferences are dictated by something, and that something is �lite opinion. Therefore, democracies are really oligarchies with a populist face.

+ The third theory of democratic politics is the theory that the cues to which most voters respond are, in fact, adequate bases on which to form political preferences. People use shortcuts -- the social-scientific term is "heuristics" -- to reach judgments about political candidates, and, on the whole, these shortcuts are as good as the long and winding road of reading party platforms, listening to candidate debates, and all the other elements of civic duty. The will of the people may not be terribly articulate, but it comes out in the wash.

Or in knowing how to eat a tamale. (You have to read the article.)

Finally, there is no culture war among Americans at large, despite polls indicating that the public is polarized into a "red state-blue state" paradigm. Opinions on most hot-button issues do not differ significantly between voters in red states and voters in blue states. "What has become polarized, Fiornia argues, is the �lite."

Menand's piece would be hilarious, if it weren't so scary.

Posted by at August 24, 2004 12:56 PM

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