Truck and Barter: Those Stupid Voters...

August 25, 2004

Those Stupid Voters...

By Ian

Election cycles bring out a few certainties: campaign ads that call the other side names for having used negative campaigning, incessant prophesying about 'electoral math', and journalists (re-?)discovering the oddities and issues inherent in the simple act of voting, among many others.

This last category, however, tends to grate on me the most since it inspires articles such as this one: Do Americans know enough to vote intelligently?

I tend to think the people who write this kind of thing must have had a particularly bad day when they hit on the topic. Someone cut them off in traffic, someone in front of them carried 11 items into the 10-items-or-less line, or they had to be at the DMV that morning. I wonder this because I tend to think that only people with a burning sense of self-satisfaction and superiority could sit down and write an article that basically asks: why should we let people that seem pretty stupid to me, vote? The article is a breathless ping-ponging from "people don't know what they're talking about when they vote" to "people can't get information" to "people are too dumb to sort good information from bad when they finally do get it".

Well, gee. It's amazing we all get up in the morning and put our pants on the right way, isn't it?

For the life of me, I've never understood what the problem is with partially informed people. I don't see the direct line from "more informed" to "a better democracy." In fact, this sense that people should be more active in their civic duties, lest we all fall into a den of iniquity strikes me as the opposite of what we're all on about here. It's a push back to the Platonic philosopher-king, where we hope like hell the really really smart people also happen to be benevolent, since only they get to make decisions. (No, I know this isn't entirely what Plato's getting at in The Republic, but the point is that the character is drawn in this way to get at the larger attempt to elaborate on "justice".)

If we believe that people, of their own accord, will invest their own time and resources into those things that return the greatest value to them (monetarily and emotionally), then perhaps its simply that getting overly involved in politics isn't what drives most folks. Why is this a bad thing? To me it indicates that the ultimate choices made at, in this case, the federal level don't hold massive sway over the lives of the individual. If every four years these people had to figure out if we all are going to be able to travel freely or be registered like cattle, be able to start families or have reproduction limited by law, pay 20 or 75% of our salaries in taxes, then perhaps work to seek out information would grow. Isn't this why the economy turns out to be the most important issue in almost every election? Despite the presidency being one of the least effective institutions for affecting the overall economy, people view the outcome as directly impacting their lives in significant ways. Is this a sign of ignorance or stupidity? Only if we value knowing certain facts as being "intelligent".

Honestly, what good is it to be able to name the Secretary of State? Did we vote for him or her? If we don't like the job the person is doing, can we vote them out? Even if you can rattle off the names of every cabinet member in the last 5 administrations, does this make you somehow more worthy to vote?

One of the many benefits of the kind of aggregation system that we have, both in terms of voting and the market, is that it necessarily evacuates the need for any one individual to be fully informed on every subject. It simply can't happen. But articles like the one linked to above function as a sort of elitist wringing of the hands about just how poorly informed everyone seems to be. Witness the ridiculous idea offered by the Stanford prof: getting people together to discuss topics for an afternoon by paying them money. Clearly, the 364 other days of the year people are too busy picking their noses to pay attention to what the prof thinks really matters.

Again, I don't see the causal line between more information and a better outcome. (By the way, that seems an implied statement in the article: how can we all do better, since the only way the US could have gotten to where it is now is through collective stupidity?) More choice can be a highly confusing thing, after all. The ability to meaningfully discern differences between each political position falls as the number grows. Even the learned press can't tell the difference between tax burden and tax rate. Same thing with increasing voter participation. What's the functional difference between a 54 and 59% turnout? If it's a sample of the population, both of them are more than sufficient.

Anyway. I'll stop the ranting now, and get back to work. That is, if I can figure out how to use the funny metal box on my desk with the TV thingy attached to it.

Posted at August 25, 2004 10:56 AM

Comments

In NYT's Ray Fair Interview, Ms. Solomon commented on Prof. Fair's use of the economy to predict elections.

It saddens me that you teach this to students at Yale, who could be thinking about society in complex and meaningful ways.

Ms. Solomon and Mr. Schwartz both seem to be missing the same point, and that is that there are aggregators of information available to us.

In the case of The Fair Model, it is hypothesized that certain indicators of the economy are reflective of seemingly unrelated phenomena. For example, the more upset people are about a war, perhaps the more time and money they will spend on war protesting, which is time and money not spent on economically productive tasks, like working an extra 10 hours a week in order to afford a nicer car. Therefore, even though the economy and war may seem unrelated, the economy can reflect the country's feeling on the war. If the same can be assumed for a whole number of political issues, then the economy becomes a fantastic predictor of the electorate's feelings on the incumbent. It is not because people only vote based upon the economy, but rather the economy can reflect the electorate's mood.

In the case of the under informed voter who typically has a choice between the incumbent party and "the other guy," the decision isn't necessarily based upon an analysis of the policies, but rather a feeling of how her world is going. If a woman feels confident in her job, her mortgage and her prospects for the future, then she will vote for the incumbent. If she doesn't feel confident, then she will vote for the challenger. These feelings perhaps are reflective of a vast number of complex issues that are not fully understood by the voter herself. I am not suggesting that individuals don't have personal planks that influence their voting, but rather that in addition to those planks, there are indicators in people's lives that help them make a decision without in-depth policy analysis.

Comment by Rob at August 26, 2004 05:23 PM | Permalink

As the previous poster notes, the voter does not have to know all the issues in detail to make a decision. Proxies such as their change in utility over the last administration can work well.

The problem, then, is not being uninformed per se, but rather being misinformed and thus opne to manipulation. Just as the uninformed buyer of car repair services can be mislead by persuasive marketing and sales techniques ... so too can the uninformed voter. Voter Beware!

The "elitist" has some basis to be concerned, however. How you vote does effect him more than how much you pay for car repairs.

Comment by Ken at September 1, 2004 12:22 PM | Permalink