{"id":5033,"date":"2008-10-27T02:44:44","date_gmt":"2008-10-27T10:04:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=5033"},"modified":"2008-10-27T02:44:44","modified_gmt":"2008-10-27T10:04:32","slug":"election-of-the-ambitious-by-the-ignorant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=5033","title":{"rendered":"Election of the Ambitious by the Ignorant"},"content":{"rendered":"

From an article by Larry M. Bartels in the Wilson Quarterly<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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 \u201care relatively invulnerable to direct argumentation\u201d and \u201ccharacterized more by faith than by conviction and by wishful expectation rather than careful prediction of consequences.\u201d […]<\/p>\n

In 1960, a team of researchers from the University of Michigan published an even more influential study, The American Voter. They described \u201cthe general impoverishment of political thought in a large proportion of the electorate,\u201d noting that \u201cmany people know the existence of few if any of the major issues of policy.\u201d 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\u2019t changed much in the past half-century.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elections-and-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5033\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}