Is Democratic Competence Possible?

DEMOCRATIC COMPETENCE IN NORMATIVE AND POSITIVE THEORY: NEGLECTED IMPLICATIONS OF “THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS” | Jeffrey Friedman (.pdf of article)

ABSTRACT: “The Nature of Belief Systems” sets forth a Hobson’s choice between
rule by the politically ignorant masses and rule by the ideologically constrained—
which is to say, the doctrinaire—elites. On the one hand, lacking
comprehensive cognitive structures, such as ideological “belief systems,” with
which to understand politics, most people learn distressingly little about it. On
the other hand, a spiral of conviction seems to make it difficult for the highly
informed few to see any aspects of politics but those that confirm the cognitive
structures that organize their political perceptions.This is a troubling situation
for any consequentialist democratic political theory, according to which what is
crucial is the electorate’s (and subsidiary decision makers’) ability to make informed
policy judgments, not their possession of willful but uninformed political
“attitudes.” Any political theorist who does not take democracy to be an
end in itself (regardless of its consequences) should be concerned about Converse’s
findings.

THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS (1964)| Philip E. Converse

FALSE STARTS, DEAD ENDS, AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES IN PUBLIC OPINION
RESEARCH| Scott Althaus
ABSTRACT: Empirical research on public opinion has tended to misjudge the
normative rationales for modern democracy. Although it is often presumed
that citizens’ policy preferences are the opinions of interest to democratic theorists,
and that democracy requires a highly informed citizenry, neither of
these premises represents a dominant position in mainstream democratic theory.
Besides incorrect assumptions about major tenets of democratic theory,
empirical research on civic engagement is running into dead ends that will
require normative analysis to overcome. Bringing political philosophy back in
to the study of public opinion can not only remedy shortcomings in the empirical
literature, but can also underscore how relevant that literature is for a
wide range of problems in democratic practice.

DEMOCRATIC COMPETENCE, BEFORE CONVERSE AND AFTER | Stephen Earl Bennett
ABSTRACT: The topic of the democratic public’s limited competence has preoccupied students of democracy for centuries. Anecdotal concerns about the problem reached their peak of sophistication in the writings of Walter Lippmann
and Joseph Schumpeter. Not until Philip E. Converse’s “The Nature of Belief
Systems in Mass Publics” did statistical research overwhelmingly confirm
the worst fears of such democratic skeptics. Subsequent work has tended to confirm Converse’s picture of a tiny stratum of well-informed ideological elites
whose passionate political debates find little echo, or even awareness, in the
mass public.While a great deal of attention has been devoted to “saving” democratic
legitimacy from such findings, the Converse-inspired work of John
Zaller (1992) shows how fruitful Converse’s basic ideas can be not only in analyzing
real-world political events, but in pulling together and stimulating new
lines of research into what moves the “creative synthesizers” of belief systems;
into the factors that affect the small numbers of people who grasp such systems
and attempt to transmit them to the public; and into the long-term psychological
or cultural sources of the predispositions with which members of the mass
public confront the resulting political messages.

MASS OPINION AND AMERICAN POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT | Samuel DeCanio
ABSTRACT: Despite its origins in explorations of the political and institutional
history that had become unfashionable in History departments, the Political
Science subfield of American Political Development (APD) has drifted
toward the “history-from-below” view against which it was originally a reaction.
Perhaps this is a normal tendency in democratic cultures that ground
their legitimacy on the will of the people. But it may also be due to a failure of
APD scholars to appreciate that even in a (nominally) democratic country
such as the United States, the state may acquire autonomy from the public
will because of the vast scope of state activity, and the restricted ability of the
people to monitor, understand, and control that activity. Philip E. Converse’s
signal contribution to the public-opinion literature can thus be the starting
point for a revision of American political history with an eye to the autonomy
that political elites may gain from public ignorance of their actions.

BEYOND POLLING ALONE: THE QUEST FOR AN INFORMED PUBLIC | James S. Fishkin
ABSTRACT: Converse’s seminal 1964 article explored three crucial limitations
of public opinion as it is revealed in conventional polls: information levels, belief
systems, and nonattitudes.These limitations are significant from the standpoint
of democratic theory, but it is possible to design forms of public consultation
and of social-science research that will reveal what public opinion might
be like if these limitations were somehow overcome. Deliberative Polling is an
effort to explore the contours of such a counterfactual public opinion—one that
is more informed and engaged than is the mass public. Doing so requires going
beyond “polling alone.”

GOVERNMENT BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE—TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY STYLE | Doris A. Graber
ABSTRACT: Citizens’ competence for democratic self-government must be
judged by their ability to perform the typical functions of modern citizenship,
rather than by their scores on surveys of political information—which are
flawed in a variety of important respects.The role requirements for effective citizenship have changed throughout American history because government has
grown vastly in size, complexity, and the range of functions that it performs.
Effective use of citizens’ political talents therefore requires limiting public surveillance and advice to broad overview aspects, rather than to micro-management. Citizens perform these more limited functions adequately, demonstrating that government by the people remains viable under modern conditions.

IGNORANT DEMOCRACY | Russell Hardin
ABSTRACT: The paradox of mass voting is not, generally speaking, matched
by a paradoxical mass attempt to be politically well informed. As Converse
underscored, most people are grossly politically ignorant—just as they would
be if, as rational-ignorance theory holds, they realized that their votes don’t
matter.Yet many millions of them contradict the theory by voting.This contradiction,
and the illogical reasons people offer for voting, suggest that the logic of
collective action does not come naturally to people (as teachers of the theory
know well).To equate public ignorance with “rational ignorance,” then, attributes
too much theoretical self-consciousness to people. Even if their ignorance is
not based on a grasp of the collective-action problem, however, people’s political
ignorance is “rational”: but it is less a matter of calculating the low benefit
likely to flow from one vote in a sea of millions, than of encountering the
much higher cost of being well informed as compared to voting. As the high
cost of becoming well informed appears likely to grow, it may be advisable to
move off of the political agenda issues that have no clear continuum toward
which a mostly ignorant median voter may gravitate.

BELIEF SYSTEMS TODAY | Donald Kinder
ABSTRACT: My purpose is to offer an assessment of the scientific legacy of
Converse’s “Belief Systems” by reviewing five productive lines of research
stimulated by his authoritative analysis and unsettling conclusions. First I recount
the later life history of Converse’s notion of “nonattitudes,” and suggest
that as important as nonattitudes are, we should be paying at least as much
attention to their opposite: attitudes held with conviction. Second, I argue that
the problem of insufficient information that resides at the center of Converse’s
analysis has not gone away, and that newly fashioned models of information
processing offer only partial remedies. Third, I suggest that the concept of the
“average voter” is a malicious fiction, as it blinds us to the enormous variation
in political attention, interest, and knowledge that characterizes mass publics,
in Converse’s time as in our own. Fourth, I develop an affirmative aspect of
Converse’s analysis that has mostly been overlooked: namely, that if ideological
reasoning is beyond most citizens’ capacity and interest, they might fall back
on a simple and reasonable alternative, which I will call “group-centrism.”
And fifth, I consider the possibility that while the majority of individual citizens
falls short of democratic standards, the public as a whole might do rather
well.

HOW ELITISM UNDERMINES THE STUDY OF VOTER COMPETENCE | Arthur Lupia
ABSTRACT: A form of elitism undermines much writing on voter competence.
The elitist move occurs when an author uses a self-serving worldview as the
basis for evaluating voters. Such elitism is apparent in widely cited measures of
“political knowledge” and in common claims about what voters should know.
The elitist move typically limits the credibility and practical relevance of the
analysis by leading writers to draw unreliable conclusions about voter competence.
I propose a more constructive way of thinking about what voters know.
Its chief virtue is its consistency with basic facts about the relationship between
information and choice.

THE FACTUAL BASIS OF "BELIEF SYSTEMS": A REASSESSMENT | Samuel L. Popkin
ABSTRACT: Converse contended that the ideological disorganization, attitudinal
inconsistency, and limited information of American voters make them a
politically disengaged mass, not a responsible electorate. I illustrate the shortcomings of Converse’s line of reasoning by showing that he misread his two
most prominent examples of the electoral consequences of his theory: voting on
the Vietnam War in the 1968 New Hampshire primary, and public opinion
about the 1948 Taft-Hartley Act. In both cases, voters were better able to sort
candidates and policies than Converse reported, despite their lack of ideological
sophistication or their knowledge of specific legislation. Converse’s interpretive
errors here stem from mistaken assumptions about information processing and
recall, and from questionable normative standards about what constitute meaningful
and competent political orientation. His criteria underestimate the public’s
ability to make responsible choices, and the effect of campaigns on the
choosing process.

KNOWLEDGE ABOUT IGNORANCE: NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE STUDY OF POLITICAL INFORMATION | Ilya Somin
ABSTRACT: For decades, scholars have recognized that most citizens have little
or no political knowledge, and that it is in fact rational for the average voter to make little or no effort to acquire political information. Rational ignorance is fully compatible with the so-called “paradox of voting” because it will often be rational for citizens to vote, but irrational for them to become well informed. Furthermore, rational ignorance leads not only to inadequate acquisition of political information, but also to ineffective use of the information that citizens do possess.The combination of these two problems has fundamental implications for a variety of issues in public policy and international affairs.

THE RATIONALIZING PUBLIC? | Gregory J. Wawro
ABSTRACT: Rationalization is the adjustment of one’s beliefs about politically
relevant information, the better to fit one’s political behavior or one’s political attitudes.This reverses the usual causal order, in which it is assumed that people start with values, add what little factual information they have, and produce policy, partisan, or ideological “attitudes” as a result. If people actually work backwards from their political behavior to their attitudes, and from their attitudes to their beliefs about “the facts,” there are obvious and troubling implications for democratic legitimacy, as well as for the academic study of democratic competence. I confine myself here to exploring some of the empirical evidence for rationalization, and to thinking about how to solve the resulting research problems, bracketing the normative issues.

REPLY: DEMOCRATIC THEORY AND ELECTORAL REALITY | Philip E. Converse
ABSTRACT: In response to the dozen essays published here, which relate my
1964 paper on “The Nature of Belief Systems in the Mass Publics” to normative
requirements of democratic theory, I note, inter alia, a major misinterpretation
of my old argument, as well as needed revisions of that argument in
the light of intervening data.Then I address the degree to which there may be
some long-term secular change in the parameters that I originally laid out. In
the final section, I provide a case study of public understanding of factual
trends in federal tax policy in recent decades which seems commendably veridical
on average. The preferences of the public thereon add up to a remarkably
clear popular mandate. But this mandate seems to disappear rather magically
in the voting booth, probably due to a combination of limited contextual information
on the public side, and considerable skill on the elite side in manipulating
apparent political realities.