Democracy Despite Itself: Why a System That Shouldn't Work at All Works So Well

Democracy Despite Itself

Democracy Despite Itself

Why a System That Shouldn't Work at All Works So Well

Danny Oppenheimer and Mike Edwards

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2012 Daniel M. Oppenheimer and Michael A. Edwards

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Oppenheimer, Danny.

Democracy despite itself: why a system that shouldn’t work at all works so well / Danny Oppenheimer and Mike Edwards.

   p.  cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-262-01723-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-262-30095-7 (retail e-book)

1. Democracy—Psychological aspects. 2. Voting—Psychological aspects.

I. Edwards, Mike, 1978–. II. Title

JC423.O67 2012

321.8—dc23

2011024312

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

d_r1

To our parents

Phil and Teri Oppenheimer

Bob and Karen Edwards

Like democracy, you’re totally crazy.

But like democracy, you’re the best.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

I     Democracy Is Crazy 1

1     Don’t Know Much About . . . Well, Anything, Really 9

2     We the People Are Irrational 39

3     Electoral Madness 61

4     Too Many Voices 97

II     Restoring Some Sanity 119

5     Procedure, Process, and Prophecy 133

6     Letting Off Steam 151

7     Overcoming Our Weaknesses 177

8     Throwing the Bums Out 203

Conclusion: The Means Justify the Ends 223

Index 235

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, we would like to thank Sarah Edwards. She gave helpful feedback on every version of every chapter, and kept us organized, motivated, and on task. Without her, this book would still be just an idea that we wistfully chat about while playing video games.

Our editor, Phil Laughlin, could not have been more fantastic. Thank you for giving us the freedom to tell our story, and the guidance to tell it right. Thanks also to everyone else at the MIT Press who helped make this book a reality.

Thanks to our agents, Jim Levine, Kerry Sparks, and the entire Levine/Greenberg team. There were times that it seemed like the project was headed toward a dead end, and your support was essential in keeping us on the right track.

We are grateful to all the people who read parts or all of the manuscript and gave us constructive criticism. In particular, thanks to Liv Coleman, Alaine Fay Coppin, Delores Edwards, Karen Edwards, Robert Edwards, Sara Etchison, Rachel Mackenzie, Rebekah O’Donnell, Teri Oppenheimer, Andy Rotering, Maren Stone, Pam Strickland, and Richard Strickland. Thanks also to Chas Ballew and Stephen Morrow for their feedback on how to frame our arguments back when the book was just a proposal.

A number of people lent us their expertise on various topics covered in the book. Our appreciation goes to Sara Etchison, John Darley, Debbie Prentice, Donna Shestowsky, David Schkade, and Ido Leviatan. And thank you to the Opplab, and particularly to research assistants David Mackenzie and Ani Momjian, for all the grunt work that goes on behind the scenes.

And last, but not least, thanks to ice cream, the ultimate motivator.

I

Democracy Is Crazy

The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object.

—Thomas Jefferson

Merlin’s Beard

Democracy is rife with stories of inept, corrupt, unqualified, or just plain bizarre politicians. One of our favorites is the story of State Senator Duncan Scott of Albuquerque, New Mexico. In 1995, Scott introduced the following bill for consideration by the New Mexico State Senate:

When a psychologist or psychiatrist testifies during a defendant’s competency hearing, the psychologist or psychiatrist shall wear a cone-shaped hat that is not less than two feet tall. The surface of the hat shall be imprinted with stars and lightning bolts.

Additionally, a psychologist or psychiatrist shall be required to don a white beard that is not less than 18 inches in length, and shall punctuate crucial elements of his testimony by stabbing the air with a wand. Whenever a psychologist or psychiatrist provides expert testimony regarding a defendant’s competency, the bailiff shall contemporaneously dim the courtroom lights and administer two strikes to a Chinese gong.

This bill actually passed the New Mexico State Senate, although fortunately for New Mexico’s psychiatric community it never became law. But our favorite part about this example, other than the question of how vigorously the psychiatrist must stab the air when making a crucial point, is this: Only two New Mexico state senators were voted out of office in the following election. It would seem that the people of New Mexico thought so much of the representatives who passed this bill that they reelected them.

Democracy relies on ordinary people—people like you and us—regularly voting in meaningful elections for politicians who are supposed to follow our will. That’s a scary thought. As you will see in the pages that follow, ordinary people don’t know the first thing about most of the laws that govern their daily lives. Ordinary people stick to their first impressions well after they have plenty of evidence that those first impressions are wrong. Ordinary people are driven to make important decisions based on completely meaningless factors. Moreover, the ignorance and irrationality of ordinary people is only part of the problem. The elections that we use to determine our leaders are riddled with biases and opportunities for error. And, of course, once those leaders do get into office, it is extremely difficult for them to accurately interpret what the people truly want, even if they are trying to pay attention.

As a result, we elect officials who want to put psychiatrists in wizard’s hats.

It’s not as though the problem here is a simple lack of voter education. After all, in the United States there exist thousands of small, reasonably well-educated communities that hold frequent elections for their leadership positions. These communities have at most a couple thousand people and everyone knows basically everyone else. Most of them have 100 percent literacy rates. People are active and engaged; they participate in sports, the arts, and various social clubs. These are communities where virtually everyone has read Shakespeare, taken algebra, and studied the causes of the American Civil War. But do these communities yield particularly good elected officials—leaders who engage in lively issues-driven debates that result in policies that make those societies substantially better places?

Well, our high school elections were certainly nothing like that.

Winning elections in high school isn’t about having the best policies; it’s about being liked by the most people. Find the kid in the popular clique who gets along well with the geeks, goths, and jocks, and chances are you’ve just identified the class president, irrespective of his or her ideas—that is, unless someone else can come along and give a particularly funny speech on Election Day.

Real elections aren’t that much different. Sure, presidential elections are much larger, more diverse, and more complicated than choosing a student council—but the more things change, the more they stay the same. Just like in high school, presidents win elections by building broad coalitions of voters—only this time, those coalitions might be made up of churchgoers, small business owners, and suburban housewives, instead of geeks, goths, and jocks. Just like in high school, being broadly liked by those groups is much more important than having the best ideas.

A Tale of Two Citizens

Danny Oppenheimer is a psychologist at Princeton University. He has devoted his career to studying how people make decisions, and the results typically aren’t pretty. In one study, Oppenheimer and his colleagues biased people’s estimates of the length of the Mississippi River by nearly 500 miles just by having them draw three short lines before making their guess. In another study, the font on the survey influenced people’s decisions about whether or not to disclose personal and embarrassing information to a stranger. We the People—the folks who get to decide who our leaders are and what direction our country goes in—regularly make bad decisions for bad reasons. When Oppenheimer talks about his findings, listeners often come away worried that democracy must be hopeless.

But Mike Edwards has a different take on things. Edwards has studied political science extensively and knows that democracy isn’t doomed—quite the opposite, in fact. Relative to people in other countries, the citizens of democracies live longer, are better educated, have more freedom, and have better access to basic public services. By almost any measure, democracy is a tremendously successful form of government. When Edwards thinks about democracy, he thinks about a form of government that is uniquely suited to guaranteeing the lives, liberty, and prosperity of its citizens.

These two contrasting perspectives lead to a riddle: Given that voters make irrational and biased choices, how can democracies produce such well-functioning societies? We call this the paradox of democracy: Democracy shouldn’t work—but it does.

This book is structured around that basic dilemma. In Part I, we will address exactly why democracy is so flawed. Voters are ignorant of even the most basic knowledge about political candidates and issues. All voters, no matter how educated or politically astute, are prone to make snap judgments about candidates based on superficial factors and to then irrationally hold on to those beliefs. Elections will always favor certain candidates over others, for reasons that have nothing to do with which candidate has the best ideas or is the best leader. And even well-meaning political leaders usually cannot understand what the true will of the people is, even if they are trying to follow it.

In Part II, we will explore why democracy works so well anyway. Democracy works because mass participation in contested elections creates psychological pressures for individuals to be better citizens and for politicians to be better leaders. It works because regularly alternating power between different factions helps to avoid political instability. It works because of the many ways that individuals and crowds can overcome their ignorance and make informed decisions. And it works because people will occasionally punish politicians, thereby helping to curb the worst abuses of the public trust.

Part I is about the craziness inherent in any democracy; Part II is about the sanity that makes democracy the greatest form of government humankind has ever devised.

Foundations of Government

If democracy works so well, what is the point of including Part I at all? Why talk about all the problems, if we’re just going to turn right around and conclude that democracy is actually quite successful?

Well, in order to really understand something, you have to know about its strengths and its weaknesses. For instance, before you buy a house, the property will usually have to undergo a thorough inspection. The inspection will detail all of a house’s flaws, from leaky pipes to cracked foundations. Of course, many fundamentally sound houses have water leaks. But just because you are buying a good, well-built house doesn’t mean that you can ignore the leak. Nor can you fix a leak without first understanding where the water is coming from.

This book is like an inspection report for democracy. Like a well-built house, democracy is a strong and structurally sound system of government. But it also has its flaws. The purpose of Part I is to pinpoint the weaknesses of democracy so that we can fix them; the purpose of Part II is to identify the strengths of democracy so that we can bolster them.

Of course, before we can analyze the strengths and weaknesses of democracy, we first have to know what democracy means. Unfortunately, democracy is a surprisingly difficult concept to define, but for the purposes of this book, we will consider a country to be democratic if it regularly holds free, fair, and meaningful elections. There’s not a word in the previous sentence that isn’t controversial or hard to define, but let’s give it a go, anyway.

Elections are free if there are few restrictions on who can run for election and who can vote in those elections. In France, all citizens are automatically registered to vote when they turn 18, and any citizen over the age of 23 is eligible to run for office so long as they have fulfilled their required military obligations. By contrast, in South Africa under apartheid the vast majority of adults were forbidden from participating in national elections because they were black.

Elections are fair if they are untainted by bribery, intimidation, or corruption, and if the outcome is not predetermined by the leadership. In Great Britain, Parliamentary elections are regularly held with little or no controversy, and small political parties frequently claim unexpected victories in various districts. In Cuba, the Castro regime has regularly been reelected every couple of years, but those elections have always been rigged so that it was impossible for there to be any other outcome than a landslide victory for Castro.

Elections are meaningful if the winners of those elections are put into positions of real power and authority. In Japan, the winners of the parliamentary elections become legislators, capable of creating the laws of the land. By contrast, in Iran the president is elected democratically, but once in power all of his decisions can be vetoed by an unelected council of religious leaders.

This definition of democracy is not without its faults. In particular, it is purposefully vague. For instance, we never say exactly what percentage of the population needs to be eligible to vote in order for a country to be a democracy. In the early days of American government, only white men who owned property were allowed to vote. While the property restrictions were lifted over the next sixty years or so, African Americans were, for the most part, not legally allowed to vote until after the Civil War, and restrictions existed for most black voters until the 1960s. Women were not guaranteed the right to vote until 1919, 18-year-olds were not allowed to vote until 1971, and many convicted felons are barred from voting even today. So when did the United States become a democracy?

Similar debates can be had about many countries, but they are not especially relevant for this book. We can quibble over the details of how free, fair, or meaningful a given election is, but some countries are clearly more democratic than others. When we talk about democracy, we are mainly referring to the set of least controversial democracies in the world, places like the United States, Brazil, Germany, South Korea, and Botswana. By nondemocracies, we mean countries with transparent violations of the above criteria, such as Syria, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Belarus, and Vietnam.

The paradox of democracy applies to all democracies. All people are irrational and uninformed, and all electoral systems are flawed. Yet democracy is an extraordinarily successful form of government, and has proven successful in almost every region of the globe, despite whatever local forms of craziness plague any given country. That being said, we have chosen to focus our attention on the particular brand of American craziness for the sake of simplicity and familiarity.

One last caveat before we begin: Throughout this book we will talk about how crazy or irrational people are. If you were to call your friend crazy, it would mean he’s not all there or he’s acting emotionally. But in the social sciences, irrational refers to people making inconsistent or imperfect decisions. We all do this; so, according to social scientists, we are all irrational. So when we say that the voters are crazy, we don’t mean that voters are insane—certainly not in a talking to trees or eating your neighbors sort of way. We simply mean that voters are human.

So we implore you not to take any of this personally. At times during this book, it’s going to seem like voters are ignorant and foolish pawns of a political system they don’t understand. To be honest, that’s actually a fairly accurate description: Voters often are ignorant and foolish pawns of a system they don’t understand. But we would include ourselves in that category too. Our purpose is to inform, not to insult.

In short, people may be irrational but democracies are quite sane. The sum is greater than its chaotic parts. The late columnist Molly Ivins once said that democracy requires a certain relish for confusion. In other words: Democracy is crazy—but maybe that’s not so bad.

References

Quotes

Ivins, M. N.d. Great-Quotes.com. Retrieved March 23, 2011, from http://www .great-quotes.com/quote/1429619.

Jefferson, Thomas. 1801. Letter to Benjamin Watson. Retrieved March 23, 2011, from http://www.famguardian.org/Subjects/Politics/ThomasJefferson/jeff0500.htm.

Wizard Hats

Albuquerque Journal. 1996. Pg. C2. Retrieved April 16, 2011, from Lexus-Nexus.

Oswald, M. 1995. Polls show legislators don’t have many fans. The Santa Fe New Mexican, March 6, p. B1.

Wizard of id. 1995. Harper’s Magazine 291 (1742), p. 16.

Definition of Democracy

Don’t expect reforms, Khatami says. Boston Globe, March 18, 2004. Reprinted from the Associated Press. Retrieved April 17, 2011, from http://articles.boston.com/2004-03-18/news/29207277_1_guardian-council-hard-liners-liberal-publications.

EdGate.com. 2000. Copernicus election watch: History of the vote. USA Today. Retrieved April 17, 2011, from http://www.edgate.com/elections/inactive/history _of_the_vote/.

FOX News. January 20, 2008. Cuban elections could shed light on Castro’s future. Reprinted from the Associated Press. Retrieved April 17, 2011, from http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,324147,00.html.

Ministère des Affaires étrangères. 2007. French Presidential Election. French Embassy to the United Kingdom. Retrieved April 16, 2011, from http://www.ambafrance-uk .org/The-presidential-election.html.

Overcoming Apartheid. N.d. Unit 2 colonialism and segregation: The origins of apartheid. In association with Michigan State University. Retrieved April 17, 2011, from http://overcomingapartheid.msu.edu/unit.php?id=12&page=1.

Parliament.UK. 2011. Current state of the parties. Retrieved April 17, 2011, from http://www.parliament.uk/mps-lords-and-offices/mps/state-of-the-parties/.

Saeki, Y. 2008. Japan’s parliament okays extra budget for econ steps. Forbes.com, October 16, reprinted from Thompson Financial News. Retrieved April 17, 2011, from http://www.forbes.com/feeds/afx/2008/10/16/afx5561867.html.

1

Don’t Know Much About . . . Well, Anything, Really

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

—Winston Churchill

Here’s a fun experiment you can try out on a friend before the next election. First, ask your friend what the most important issue will be in that election. Then find out which candidate your friend is supporting. Next, ask your friend how well he understands his candidate’s position on the aforementioned issue. Your friend will undoubtedly tell you that he understands it quite well—it is, after all, what he considers the most important issue.

Now ask your friend to explain his candidate’s stance on that issue. Depending on how much you enjoy poking fun at your friends, the results will either be humorous or disturbing. (Just make sure that you actually know the answers, otherwise you will only embarrass yourself.)

No, we don’t think that the readers of this book have remarkably ignorant friends; ignorance is the rule rather than the exception. New York University Business School professor Adam Alter and his colleagues ran this study on a group of New Jersey voters in the week following the 2008 presidential primaries. At the time, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were in a heated contest for the Democratic nomination, and John McCain, Mike Huckabee, and Mitt Romney were fighting for the Republican nomination. Passions were running high and partisans were fervent in their beliefs that their favored candidate was the best for the position. However, when asked to describe their candidates’ positions on their self-described most important issue, people were dumbfounded.

Although most people could give at least cursory answers (e.g., she wants to improve health care), very few could explain anything substantive about the specifics of the candidate’s plans. And despite strong differences in opinion about who would be the best candidate, almost nobody could explain how the candidates differed on any issue. In fact, after attempting to describe a candidate’s policy position, the vast majority of people in this study acknowledged that they didn’t know as much as they had initially believed. This pattern held true of both Republicans and Democrats across all issues. It was even true for people who claimed that the primary factor influencing their choice of whom to support was the candidate’s policy positions. In other words, while people believe that they understand the policy positions of their candidates, this belief is not supported by their actual knowledge.

Modern democratic theory is based on the notion that people vote in line with their interests and principles. To be able to do this, people need to understand the key issues, the important facts relevant to those issues, and the positions of the candidates on those issues. However, voters are rarely so well informed. What we know about the issues is often biased, incomplete, lacking, or downright false. We lack the information and expertise needed to make good decisions about issues and candidates, we have trouble finding that information, and we can’t even remember it once we’ve found it. There’s an old saying that knowledge is power; but in democracies, the people have the power, but are largely missing the knowledge.

Facts of the Matter

Pop quiz: For every 1 million babies born in the United States, how many legal abortions are there? Stop and think about it for a second. How high would that number have to be to surprise you? How low would it have to be to surprise you? When University of California, Berkeley, professor Michael Ranney and his colleagues asked this question of college students, the average estimate was 10,000. Does that seem high to you? Low? About right? The correct answer is 335,000, more than 30 times larger than the average estimate.

Ranney and his colleagues have been running estimation surveys for over a decade. They’ve looked at such diverse issues as immigration, education, crime, and the environment. They’ve taken surveys from a broad range of people: liberals and conservatives, students, the general population, and even professional journalists who cover these issues. Across it all, estimates are typically woefully inaccurate. (See table 1.1.)

These aren’t just gotcha questions about useless trivia. People need this information to make informed policy decisions. A person who thinks the immigration rate is 150 times the true rate is going to have uninformed opinions on immigration policy. Somebody who thinks there are 65 times more people in jail than are actually incarcerated is likely to support different policies on crime and punishment than if he had accurate information. And indeed, there is evidence that people are strongly influenced by their incorrect beliefs about the facts.

For example, over 60 percent of Americans believe that the United States spends too much on foreign aid. The average voter believes that we spend 20 percent of the federal budget on foreign aid and that we should only be spending half that much—about 10 percent. But in reality, less than 1 percent of the U.S. budget goes to foreign aid! If the U.S. government were to spend as much as the average American seems to desire, then that would be a tremendous increase in spending on foreign aid. Yet most Americans want to dramatically decrease the foreign aid budget. It isn’t necessarily the case that increased foreign aid is the correct policy. The important point is that when We the People do not evaluate policies with correct information, our desires and our policy preferences may not match up.

Table 1.1

Examples of estimates of policy-relevant facts.

The data in this table are consolidated from a series of studies done by Michael Ranney and colleagues between 2003 and 2005. See reference list for full citations. Note that the specific numbers might fluctuate over time.

Similarly, our ignorance of the truth can have a dramatic impact on Election Day. In October 2004, a month before the U.S. presidential elections, the Program on International Policy Attitudes surveyed the electorate about their knowledge of issues, policies, and candidates. The results were disturbing. For example, even though there was no credible evidence that Iraq provided significant support to Al Qaeda, nearly 40 percent of voters believed that clear evidence of support had been found. Importantly, this (false) belief was highly related to people’s political attitudes. Nearly two-thirds of Bush supporters believed that a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda had been found, but only 15 percent of Kerry supporters held this belief. Similarly, a majority of Bush supporters believed that Iraq did actually have weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), when in reality both the Senate Intelligence Committee and Chief Weapons Inspector Charles Duelfer had concluded the exact opposite. Voters who correctly believed that no WMDs had been found were much more likely to support Kerry. It may very well be that Bush was the better candidate in this election—there were certainly other valid reasons one could have had to vote for him. But voters who based their votes on the mistaken impression that WMDs had been found were not expressing their true preferences.

Democracy is supposed to work because voters will choose the candidates with the best ideas. But how can we vote for the candidate with the best ideas if we don’t have the information necessary to evaluate those ideas?

The Devil Is in the Details

Regardless of your political affiliation, you probably believe that having nuclear missiles landing on your house is a bad thing and would prefer government policies that reduce the odds of such an occurrence. Of course, you can’t support those policies unless you know what those policies are.

So, in an effort to help you be more informed, we humbly ask that you do your best to understand the following policy analysis from John Pendleton, the Director of Defense Capabilities and Management, in his report to the Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the House Committee on Armed Services