From an article by Larry M. Bartels in the Wilson Quarterly:
When social scientists first started using detailed opinion surveys to study the attitudes and behavior of ordinary voters, they found some pretty sobering things. In the early 1950s, Paul Lazarsfeld and his colleagues at Columbia University concluded that electoral choices “are relatively invulnerable to direct argumentation” and “characterized more by faith than by conviction and by wishful expectation rather than careful prediction of consequences.” […]
In 1960, a team of researchers from the University of Michigan published an even more influential study, The American Voter. They described “the general impoverishment of political thought in a large proportion of the electorate,” noting that “many people know the existence of few if any of the major issues of policy.” Shifts in election outcomes, they concluded, were largely attributable to defections from long-standing partisan loyalties by relatively unsophisticated voters with little grasp of issues or ideology. A recent replication of their work using surveys from 2000 and 2004 found that things haven’t changed much in the past half-century.
The good news, if you can call it that, is that apparently the ability to buy lots and lots of ads in the last week before the election can make a big difference. Advantage for Barack “moneybags” Obama.
The bad news is, there’s probably no hope of an intelligent political discourse, ever. “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” –Winston Churchill ((Churchill’s more famous quote about democracy also applies, of course.)) Even those of us who are “informed” are hopelessly biased; one study quoted found that high-information voters nonetheless got facts wrong in ways that systematically served their political bias.
I’ve become increasingly unsure that there is any point to political discourse and debate. Trying to be rational about policy, or the vote, belies the fact that rationality has nothing to do with who is elected or what policies get enacted. It’s kind of depressing, frankly.
I vote for the guy I can have a beer with and/or who addresses the chem trail conspiracy to control our minds.
I see your concerns Amp.
It’s one of the things that has started to drive me into political cynicism.
Well, that and Churchill’s suggested “five-minute conversation with the average voter.” I’ve had a couple of those and they are, to say the least, not very reassuring.
I think that maybe selecting a good government, or even a government that reflects the voters’ interests, is not the function of a democracy. The function of a democracy, at least as we practice it, is solely to prevent tyranny: some monarchies and feudal soceities have had better governments than we do now, but at least if a real tyrant tries to come to power we can vote them out.
Though maybe not; tyranny is subtler than it used to be, and anyway, it didn’t work so well in the 1930s.