Ah, but the caveat. It's about the conclusion, which Sides and Seth Masket both quote approvingly:
So political science is often accused of a sort of nihilism: Lobbyists don't much matter, it says. Speeches are ineffective. Voters are driven by the economy, and campaigns barely move the needle. Most of the stuff that obsesses us during election season has no effect on the eventual outcome.I just don't know. I missed a lot of reading over the holiday, but I did note an exchange between Karl Smith and Matt Yglesias about why democracy "works," in the sense that democracies tend to be rich and the people in them tend to be happy. Smith suggested that democracy works despite elections that depend on "the least knowledgeable and indeed least policy interested people in society – swing voters" because of some "invisible hand" effect, while Yglesias responds by speculating that the good things that seem to happen in democracies are probably the cause of democracy, not its effect.
But if politicians took these findings to heart, it would free them to do their jobs better. "The fact that much of what cable news is talking about on any given day is not important probably is empowering," Sides says. Particularly combined with the finding that what does matter, both for elections and for people's lives, is how well the country is doing. Worrying less about tomorrow's polls and news releases and more about the effect of today's policies could make for better bills -- and happier, more successful politicians.
Sensible points, but I think the more obvious explanation is a visible hand: politicians, who act as if they believe that their careers depend on pleasing all the people all the time, as if their every last constituent was a C-SPAN watching, Mike Allen-reading LWV-approved citizen who will flip his or her vote at the first hint of scandal, the first sign of Potomac Fever, the first indication that the Member of Congress isn't a slave to the district's every whim. To bring in a bit of political science research to the party, I'll refer you to the work of Richard Fenno (e.g. this one and this one), who uses an over-the-shoulder approach to learn what Members of Congress see when they see their districts. Reading Fenno (and I think this will sound familiar to anyone who has spent time in the home constituency of a Member of the House or a Senator), one enters a world in which politicians are constantly surrounded by people who are interested in them, who ask them for things, who criticize their actions. Of course, we know from survey research that the pol's world omits lots and lots of constituents who pay no attention at all to politics and at best might recognize the name of their representatives in Washington, but that's not what the pol sees when she's back in the district.
The problem is that to an alarming extent one gets the sense that if healthy representation is a two-way relationship, then good representation may almost depend on our politicians believing the fiction of the politically active constituency. That is, if representation is about pols making promises, interpreting those promises, acting in office with those promises in mind, and then explaining their actions in light of those promises, then the whole representational relationship really seems to depend on politicians believing that the relationship is real -- that the constituent end of it is real.
Ezra Klein, John Sides, and Seth Masket want to free politicians from obsessing about trivial nonsense that voters don't pay attention to anyway. I understand that impulse. I can't imagine much would be lost if Senators felt free to choose their primary residence without worrying about whether they'd be accused of "going Washington," or if Barack Obama could pick his vacation spot without worrying about its effect on public opinion polls. The problem is that I'm not sure you can separate this particular baby from this particular bathwater. A Member of the House who realizes that she can skip a few fundraisers because incumbent spending in elections is subject to severe diminishing returns might also realize that she can skip a bunch of committee meetings, because no one in the district really cares (especially since the local paper long since has closed its Washington bureau). A Senator who realizes that it doesn't matter much whether or not he gets time on the evening news back home might also realize that he can in most cases ignore the preferences of his district on issues of public policy. A president who understands that his ability to move public opinion is extremely limited might just not bother holding press conferences or otherwise giving any access to the press.
It really comes down to some basic questions about politics. If you believe there is such a thing as The Public Interest, and that free from corruption or distraction all people of good will would seek and find Correct Public Policy to meet that interest...well, you'll agree with Masket, Sides, and Klein. If, on the other hand, you believe that the public interest is mostly (if not entirely) made up of lots and lots of individual and group interests, and that there's often no "correct" answer to questions of public policy, only various possibilities that will make different sets of constituencies more or less happy, and that at any rate politicians have no special access to good choices other than through representation: in that case, you're going to be very reluctant to mess with the paranoia that Congress has about elections. Again, I'm certainly not saying that they're wrong -- just that I'm not always sure that I want Members of Congress to learn how much they can get (probably) get away with. And, yes, to be clear, I do think that a large chunk of politician obsession with ephemera is entirely malignant. I just don't know how you get them to separate the things that really matter a lot with respect to voting choices (which after all they often have little control over) from the things that matter only on the margins (which includes lots of things they can affect) from the things that don't matter at all and which worrying about is purely self-destructive.
As a political scientist, I'm all for spreading knowledge of how the political system works, regardless of consequences; if I didn't believe that, I wouldn't be blogging. I'm just not really sure in this case that the consequences would be nearly as positive as some think. Nevertheless, we're probably safe. Politicians by their nature are craven and cowardly (and remember -- I like pols!), and so no matter what we say they're apt to continue being paranoid about re-election. And I for one applaud their misguided paranoia.
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Either Klein's column lacks coherence, or I just don't get it. Term limits turn control over to lobbyists, but lobbyists don't have any power. Huh?
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, I guess all the billions of dollars spent on the sprawling lobbying industry's efforts is so much wasted capital, by a bunch of damned fools, then.
I usually read Karl Smith, but I missed that entry until you pointed it out. It's the most poorly thought-through thing I've ever seen from him. Is the idea that policy doesn't matter even worthy of mention? And he makes the classic economist's mistake of thinking that complex, chaotic systems can be simply modeled.
It looks like he's reduced election choices to the prisoner's problem.
The "invisible hand" idea - so central to classical economics - is just so much magical thinking.
And conflating swing voters with low information voters seems totally off base.
Oh, well - Happy Monday!
JzB
If, on the other hand, you believe that the public interest is mostly (if not entirely) made up of lots and lots of individual and group interests
ReplyDeleteYeah. I'm in this camp, which is why I believe democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
Excellent counterpoint to Klein's column, and I think there's something deeper you're objecting to--or at least that I am!--without being totally explicit about it. I agree that the findings are indeed worth knowing, but grouping them all together and presenting them as Klein does carries with it a whiff of anti-democratic beliefs. Regular people should not run for Congress because they'll just be corrupted, and we shouldn't worry too much about lobbyists because they are not that successful (I second Jazzbumpa in seeing a bit of a contradiction there). I'm certain Klein does not mean that to come off sounding anti-democratic (small d obviously), but to me it does.
ReplyDeleteAs someone who does history and is particularly interested in politics in the U.S., I find some of the findings of political scientists quite interesting (and some political scientists have written excellent history books, e.g. Elizabeth Sanders' Roots of Reform). But the overall argument from some of the polisci blogs strikes me as far too mechanistic at times--either the economy is good or bad and either the people like what you do or they don't and that's all there is to it. It actually reminds me, in certain respects, of the more vulgar, reductionist forms of Marxian theory that were predominant in social history going back to the 60s and 70s (and I think there's been a lot of good Marxian theory, but much of it took the base vs. superstructure distinction to absurd extremes, but that's a side topic).
Complex social phenomena cannot be reduced solely to class or economic performance or anything else, and to do so suggests that humans don't actually have much influence and agency in the world. Obviously there's some real truth to that, but I think political scientists (and some of their denizens) can overstate that argument, and there are some possibly anti-democratic implications to the argument that I find troubling. Very smart bloggers like Klein and Matt Yglesias seem to be picking up on that strain somewhat and I think it's important to point that out.
I'm definitely in the "there exists a Public Interest" camp, and not particularly high on the likelihood that adding up preferences aggregated through districts and states leads us to people who would have that at heart. All the incentives they face are local.
ReplyDeleteNow, I don't mind freeing some members from their misperceptions. If they DO get too much into "the public interest" and not into their own, they end up losing: I like Al Ullman as an example here. But, he's also an example for my larger point: he moved into making national policy as he saw fit. Eventually, his national policies hurt him in his district, and he lost. But, not only did that check exist, but he also had to contend with others: some of whom were also pushing their national visions, and others of whom had local visions that either conflicted or supported his.
Relentless competing parochialisms don't allow us to ever see the big picture. We NEVER deal with global warming, going to space, or even wars. Sure, some localities are going to value their opinions on these questions that are really bigger than their district. And perhaps most politics should be local. But, I think informing politicians of the actual lay of the land is better than not. Allow politicians to make their own Burkean choice (trustee vs delegate) with full information. And if they make a choice that their district can't live with, they don't come back.
Unsurprisingly, I have a few objections, which I've posted here. Here's a quote from that post:
ReplyDeleteI take issue with Jon's contention that we can't separate the good kind of ephemera from the bad. To go off one of his examples, I really doubt that most members of Congress attend committee meetings because they're concerned that voters are watching the hearings on C-SPAN and taking roll. They attend because they know it's part of the job, because they're socialized into it, because they'll catch grief from their colleagues if they don't attend, because their party might get rolled on an important vote if they don't show up, and because their colleagues might not be there for them the next time around if they aren't there for their colleagues. I also doubt that exposing politicians to political science would cause them to shirk their districts. After all, there are a number of solid studies showing that members of Congress who don't vote their districts have a harder time getting reelected, even if no one individual roll call vote particularly matters. Members would still know this, and if they didn't, they'd eventually be replaced by people who did.
I recognize we're in the realm of political science fantasy here, but I believe that elected officials would still have plenty of motivation to actually represent their constituents and do their jobs even if they didn't go on audience-less Sunday talk shows or poll-test their vacation destinations. I'm not sure how we get to that point, but I think Ezra's column is a start.
I replied over there, but I recommend that everyone check out Seth's full post, linked in his comment above.
ReplyDeleteMatt,
ReplyDeleteI don't think anyone disagrees about there being some issues that present tricky problems such as future vs. present, or issues that pit small but real interests of most of the nation against intense interests of a small slice of the country. But at least in my reading that's not what people such as Rousseau or Woodrow Wilson are talking about. That's what I don't think really exists.