I think there’s truth in this, though impossible to know the minds of hundreds of millions of people. But I’m struggling to accept equating an entertainment event and what’s essential to be an informed citizen in a democracy (which relies on it).
Well, they’re not the same in many respects! The informed citizen model of democracy just kind of isn’t how representative democracy works, is the thing. Ppl just aren’t that engaged and never have been. It’s one of the reasons parties are useful; you don’t need to know a lot to understand which party is speaking to or for you.
Achen and Bartels book Democracy for Realists is a good book to read on these issues.
"This letter adopts a different approach. It demonstrates that democratic skeptics’ pessimistic conclusion—that democracy is unfixable—rests on a misleading and outdated account of the relevant psychological literature. Similarly, epistemic democrats often overestimate deliberation’s role in producing wise results or assume that aggregative models will operate at scale. We seek to avoid unwarranted skepticism and enthusiasm alike, instead providing microfoundations for a more empirically robust program investigating both the successes and mishaps of democracy, drawing on the experimental psychological literature on group problem solving (inter alia) to discover the conditions under which specific institutions perform well or fail in discovering solutions to collective problems.
...
Achen and Bartels’ (2016) “realist” account of democracy does not share the skeptics’ normative priors but provides a similarly bleak judgment. They too draw on Asch and “similar studies” for social psychological microfoundations that stress the force of group identity and conformity (Achen and Bartels 2016, 220).
...
To move away from general claims for democracy’s superiority, epistemic democrats need to understand not just when democracy works but also when it doesn’t. Neblo et al. (2017, 915) establish an important possibility claim by showing how “scholars have assembled strong evidence that deliberative institutions positively influence citizens.” Still, it is hard to build from such demonstrations to a properly scientific account that can explain both democratic success and failure without some externally grounded theory of human decision making. Similarly, there is no very straightforward way of moving from a demonstration that Habermasian claims for deliberation can be grounded in plausible psychological mechanisms (Minozzi and Neblo 2015) to a broader account of when these mechanisms will or will not operate.
Surprisingly, possible microfoundations for such an account can be found in the literature on group psychology and cognition that skeptics have deployed against democracy. As Landemore (2013, 143) says, the “argumentative theory of reasoning” allows us to predict where deliberation will and will not work well. This is a pivotally important claim: we need to know where deliberation will function well to empirically assess theories of institutional design and practical justifications of democracy.
The argumentative account of reasoning is grounded in a recent “interactionist” literature in psychology, which explores how individual bias may or may not be corrected through social interaction. It investigates how mechanisms of “epistemic vigilance” allow people to employ cues to evaluate communicated information including the expertise and benevolence of the source, the plausibility of the message, and the quality of the arguments (for an overview, see Mercier 2020; Sperber et al. 2010). Chambers (2018) has also identified both the interactionist approach and the empirical literature on deliberation as reasons to doubt skeptical claims based on group psychology."
Unfortunately, many intended targets of the campaign ads are not unaware of the competitors, but rather do not seek much in the way of fact-based information to make decisions as to who they will support. They support their team because it is their team.
The thing is that can work on it if Kay wants n a lot of instanc s if it’s the right team. Just voting blue will usually mean you’re voting for the better candidate. Getting tricky with it can lead you to worse outcomes.
Primaries are a different story…and there’s a lot of politics that isn’t just voting, where you need ppl who are engaged.
I think I mentioned this over lunch the other day when I said that when I started working for the Cubs, the only thing I knew about baseball was it was a nine inning game. So yeah, I get it.
This is an analogy I actually understand. I know a little about sports because it was shoved down my throat as a kid. I learned how fervently people identify with their time, beyond all logic or reason. They take that stuff personally.
Btw- it’s the Chiefs and the 49ers. I know from reading about the Tay conspiracies. People are really out there.
"And yet, I am here to tell you that, with little effort, you can come up on Super Bowl weekend without even knowing the teams who are playing."
raises hand defiantly
Many years ago in high school, a friend and I used to have a competition where we would try to NOT know who was playing in the superbowl the 'longest'...It involved a degree of honesty in that you couldn't pretend to NOT know the answer if you did...Usually the spoiler would come from overhearing a conversation at the next table...
Sigh, and here I thought a tight end is a cute butt.
I do think that the vast ignorance of the American public about the issues of the day is in part because the campaigns, particularly the Democratic, are just starting up. Biden has understandably been focusing on his job of being president, not candidate, but that will change as campaign season heats up--he is soon to have a legitimate second job as campaigner. In THAT guise he can make comments about things he has been keeping mum about to avoid injecting politics into issues like the trump indictments.
For example, a whole LOT of people are worried about immigration (mostly incorrectly and due to massive lies of right wing propaganda.) Most wouldn't have paid attention to the vote against border security reform by the GOP. But now it is a major cudgel, and I hope the Dems make the most of it.
It is clear from the media response to Hur's report that the media isn't itself going to do much correcting of issues. But campaigns involve ADS, that can be relentless and even placed on Fox. They need to be ATTACK ads, relentlessly.
I think this take ignores that a number of countries at our level of economic and political development have higher voter registration and voting levels. People I’ve met from other countries seem to understand the workings of their governments (and sometimes ours) better than most Americans I’ve encountered. Studies have shown that many of us can’t name a Supreme Court justice, let alone understand their philosophies. We accept the electoral college even though in terms of democracy it makes no sense. Most of all, we say we’ve been a democracy for 200+ years, but for more than half of this country’s existence, women and people of color were denied the right to vote. We’re taught and often refer to ourselves as the greatest democracy in the world, but when you look at the details of our history, it’s hard to make that case. We have structural and historical problems that we’ve never faced. And if we don’t find a way to engage with this collectively, I’m not optimistic about our future.
the US has low levels of voting not because people are less engaged here, but because *other countries make it easier for people who are completely unengaged to vote." The two step system (register and vote separately) is hugely demobilizing...and then we have tons of voter suppression, etc.
I think there is something of a circle; people would be more engaged if it were easier to vote. but I think it's pretty important to understand that the low levels of voting are a deliberate policy choice, not the result of Americans being less engaged. (because again, most people most places aren't super engaged.)
I agree with the part about the circular nature of engagement and ease of participation. But at some point in the past, the European democracies (and those in other parts of the world) faced the same hurdles. They mustered the political/social will to expand access and shift more power to voters. Since the 1980s, we seem to be moving in the opposition direction. So the question is why we haven’t made that shift to greater access? To me, your analysis indicates that, US voters being US voters, the prospects. So part of what I’m asking for is a reason not to just leave, which I consider regularly.
All of which reinforces my questions about staying here. There’s not much point in staying in a place where large portions of the population would rather have less for themselves so long as marginalized groups have even less.
Oh yeah. I definitely don’t expect to escape racism. What I do appreciate about other places, esp Europe, is less violence coupled with tax levels that mean people don’t have to worry about family dying because of doctor bills.
Nice piece, good points, very depressing. We're going to lose our democracy because voters care less about it than you care about the superbowl. Btw, the Superbowl this year was an amazing game, won in overtime by the team of Taylor Swift's boyfriend. I hadn't watched a superbowl in maybe 15 years and ended up watching this one because of a family event. Learning enough to follow the game from a 9 year old nephew in real time. Points out some of the differences between sport and politics: it genuinely takes less effort to understand what is going on in sports and understanding leads mostly to fun for a few hours and not to anxiety or stress. My brother and I ended up discussing how much better our lives might be if we followed sports instead of politics...
not knowing much about politics isn't always bad for democracy; in most situations just voting for the party you identify with works out okay. the problem is more that a lot of people identify with white supremacy, and it's not clear more attention to politics would really help with that...
Is that really _the_ problem. My guess is that it isn't more than a third of the population that identify with white supremacy. which in a two party system means the real problem is the people who vote on the same side as the white supremacists for reasons other than white supremacy. I do think that some of those folks wouldn't vote that way if they understood they were voting for white supremacy. and sure the white supremacy is still a problem even if it is only in power in locales where it is more concentrated, but even that could be managed if everyone who didn't like it voted to control and contain it.
I didn't know the names of the teams, or what what city they were playing in, but I do know Taylor's boyfriend's name, Travis Kelce. Somewhere I saw it remarked somewhere that he has a perfect country singer name, and her name could plausibly be a football player.
I agree with your premise, and that's why I think the Dems too cute maneuver of proposing a very restrictive immigration bill and the GOP voting it down after begging for it, is going to go over most people's heads, and not benefit Biden at all. I saw someone getting interviewed who didn't realize that the GOP was the party trying to outlaw abortion, she assumed it was the Dems because she heard Roe v. Wade was overturned, and Biden is in the WH, so...... I'm also guessing that the people who know nothing about politics don't know history either.
"If you don’t even know the players, are you likely to have deeply informed opinions about, say, Trump’s indictments, or the war in Gaza, or Hur’s report on Biden’s handling of classified documents?"
I think there’s truth in this, though impossible to know the minds of hundreds of millions of people. But I’m struggling to accept equating an entertainment event and what’s essential to be an informed citizen in a democracy (which relies on it).
Well, they’re not the same in many respects! The informed citizen model of democracy just kind of isn’t how representative democracy works, is the thing. Ppl just aren’t that engaged and never have been. It’s one of the reasons parties are useful; you don’t need to know a lot to understand which party is speaking to or for you.
Achen and Bartels book Democracy for Realists is a good book to read on these issues.
Somewhat tangential, I find this an interesting and intentionally provocative argument related to the "informed citizen model of Democracy": https://crookedtimber.org/2023/04/04/no-bullshit-democracy/
---------------------------------------
"This letter adopts a different approach. It demonstrates that democratic skeptics’ pessimistic conclusion—that democracy is unfixable—rests on a misleading and outdated account of the relevant psychological literature. Similarly, epistemic democrats often overestimate deliberation’s role in producing wise results or assume that aggregative models will operate at scale. We seek to avoid unwarranted skepticism and enthusiasm alike, instead providing microfoundations for a more empirically robust program investigating both the successes and mishaps of democracy, drawing on the experimental psychological literature on group problem solving (inter alia) to discover the conditions under which specific institutions perform well or fail in discovering solutions to collective problems.
...
Achen and Bartels’ (2016) “realist” account of democracy does not share the skeptics’ normative priors but provides a similarly bleak judgment. They too draw on Asch and “similar studies” for social psychological microfoundations that stress the force of group identity and conformity (Achen and Bartels 2016, 220).
...
To move away from general claims for democracy’s superiority, epistemic democrats need to understand not just when democracy works but also when it doesn’t. Neblo et al. (2017, 915) establish an important possibility claim by showing how “scholars have assembled strong evidence that deliberative institutions positively influence citizens.” Still, it is hard to build from such demonstrations to a properly scientific account that can explain both democratic success and failure without some externally grounded theory of human decision making. Similarly, there is no very straightforward way of moving from a demonstration that Habermasian claims for deliberation can be grounded in plausible psychological mechanisms (Minozzi and Neblo 2015) to a broader account of when these mechanisms will or will not operate.
Surprisingly, possible microfoundations for such an account can be found in the literature on group psychology and cognition that skeptics have deployed against democracy. As Landemore (2013, 143) says, the “argumentative theory of reasoning” allows us to predict where deliberation will and will not work well. This is a pivotally important claim: we need to know where deliberation will function well to empirically assess theories of institutional design and practical justifications of democracy.
The argumentative account of reasoning is grounded in a recent “interactionist” literature in psychology, which explores how individual bias may or may not be corrected through social interaction. It investigates how mechanisms of “epistemic vigilance” allow people to employ cues to evaluate communicated information including the expertise and benevolence of the source, the plausibility of the message, and the quality of the arguments (for an overview, see Mercier 2020; Sperber et al. 2010). Chambers (2018) has also identified both the interactionist approach and the empirical literature on deliberation as reasons to doubt skeptical claims based on group psychology."
Unfortunately, many intended targets of the campaign ads are not unaware of the competitors, but rather do not seek much in the way of fact-based information to make decisions as to who they will support. They support their team because it is their team.
The thing is that can work on it if Kay wants n a lot of instanc s if it’s the right team. Just voting blue will usually mean you’re voting for the better candidate. Getting tricky with it can lead you to worse outcomes.
Primaries are a different story…and there’s a lot of politics that isn’t just voting, where you need ppl who are engaged.
I think I mentioned this over lunch the other day when I said that when I started working for the Cubs, the only thing I knew about baseball was it was a nine inning game. So yeah, I get it.
This is an analogy I actually understand. I know a little about sports because it was shoved down my throat as a kid. I learned how fervently people identify with their time, beyond all logic or reason. They take that stuff personally.
Btw- it’s the Chiefs and the 49ers. I know from reading about the Tay conspiracies. People are really out there.
*Time= team.
There is also the similar, "Ariana Grande Theory of Politics" : https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/04/the-ariana-grande-theory-of-politics
It's a good point
"And yet, I am here to tell you that, with little effort, you can come up on Super Bowl weekend without even knowing the teams who are playing."
raises hand defiantly
Many years ago in high school, a friend and I used to have a competition where we would try to NOT know who was playing in the superbowl the 'longest'...It involved a degree of honesty in that you couldn't pretend to NOT know the answer if you did...Usually the spoiler would come from overhearing a conversation at the next table...
Sigh, and here I thought a tight end is a cute butt.
I do think that the vast ignorance of the American public about the issues of the day is in part because the campaigns, particularly the Democratic, are just starting up. Biden has understandably been focusing on his job of being president, not candidate, but that will change as campaign season heats up--he is soon to have a legitimate second job as campaigner. In THAT guise he can make comments about things he has been keeping mum about to avoid injecting politics into issues like the trump indictments.
For example, a whole LOT of people are worried about immigration (mostly incorrectly and due to massive lies of right wing propaganda.) Most wouldn't have paid attention to the vote against border security reform by the GOP. But now it is a major cudgel, and I hope the Dems make the most of it.
It is clear from the media response to Hur's report that the media isn't itself going to do much correcting of issues. But campaigns involve ADS, that can be relentless and even placed on Fox. They need to be ATTACK ads, relentlessly.
You express the reality of the situation.
I think this take ignores that a number of countries at our level of economic and political development have higher voter registration and voting levels. People I’ve met from other countries seem to understand the workings of their governments (and sometimes ours) better than most Americans I’ve encountered. Studies have shown that many of us can’t name a Supreme Court justice, let alone understand their philosophies. We accept the electoral college even though in terms of democracy it makes no sense. Most of all, we say we’ve been a democracy for 200+ years, but for more than half of this country’s existence, women and people of color were denied the right to vote. We’re taught and often refer to ourselves as the greatest democracy in the world, but when you look at the details of our history, it’s hard to make that case. We have structural and historical problems that we’ve never faced. And if we don’t find a way to engage with this collectively, I’m not optimistic about our future.
the US has low levels of voting not because people are less engaged here, but because *other countries make it easier for people who are completely unengaged to vote." The two step system (register and vote separately) is hugely demobilizing...and then we have tons of voter suppression, etc.
I think there is something of a circle; people would be more engaged if it were easier to vote. but I think it's pretty important to understand that the low levels of voting are a deliberate policy choice, not the result of Americans being less engaged. (because again, most people most places aren't super engaged.)
I agree with the part about the circular nature of engagement and ease of participation. But at some point in the past, the European democracies (and those in other parts of the world) faced the same hurdles. They mustered the political/social will to expand access and shift more power to voters. Since the 1980s, we seem to be moving in the opposition direction. So the question is why we haven’t made that shift to greater access? To me, your analysis indicates that, US voters being US voters, the prospects. So part of what I’m asking for is a reason not to just leave, which I consider regularly.
well, the US has long been committed to disenfranchising Black people, and that has a major effect on our political institutions.
All of which reinforces my questions about staying here. There’s not much point in staying in a place where large portions of the population would rather have less for themselves so long as marginalized groups have even less.
other places often suck in different ways, is the thing...idk. Not telling you to say! Just, I often think about James Baldwin's "Equal in Paris."
Oh yeah. I definitely don’t expect to escape racism. What I do appreciate about other places, esp Europe, is less violence coupled with tax levels that mean people don’t have to worry about family dying because of doctor bills.
“The prospects aren’t good” I meant to say.
Nice piece, good points, very depressing. We're going to lose our democracy because voters care less about it than you care about the superbowl. Btw, the Superbowl this year was an amazing game, won in overtime by the team of Taylor Swift's boyfriend. I hadn't watched a superbowl in maybe 15 years and ended up watching this one because of a family event. Learning enough to follow the game from a 9 year old nephew in real time. Points out some of the differences between sport and politics: it genuinely takes less effort to understand what is going on in sports and understanding leads mostly to fun for a few hours and not to anxiety or stress. My brother and I ended up discussing how much better our lives might be if we followed sports instead of politics...
not knowing much about politics isn't always bad for democracy; in most situations just voting for the party you identify with works out okay. the problem is more that a lot of people identify with white supremacy, and it's not clear more attention to politics would really help with that...
Is that really _the_ problem. My guess is that it isn't more than a third of the population that identify with white supremacy. which in a two party system means the real problem is the people who vote on the same side as the white supremacists for reasons other than white supremacy. I do think that some of those folks wouldn't vote that way if they understood they were voting for white supremacy. and sure the white supremacy is still a problem even if it is only in power in locales where it is more concentrated, but even that could be managed if everyone who didn't like it voted to control and contain it.
I didn't know the names of the teams, or what what city they were playing in, but I do know Taylor's boyfriend's name, Travis Kelce. Somewhere I saw it remarked somewhere that he has a perfect country singer name, and her name could plausibly be a football player.
I agree with your premise, and that's why I think the Dems too cute maneuver of proposing a very restrictive immigration bill and the GOP voting it down after begging for it, is going to go over most people's heads, and not benefit Biden at all. I saw someone getting interviewed who didn't realize that the GOP was the party trying to outlaw abortion, she assumed it was the Dems because she heard Roe v. Wade was overturned, and Biden is in the WH, so...... I'm also guessing that the people who know nothing about politics don't know history either.
"If you don’t even know the players, are you likely to have deeply informed opinions about, say, Trump’s indictments, or the war in Gaza, or Hur’s report on Biden’s handling of classified documents?"
if you are a republican then yes