(Or, Good News for Idealists!)

My sister is one of a handful of regular readers on this site. I think my brother is the other. (I have kind of small hands.) When I talk about political science with her, she usually walks away with two things: a better understanding of a concept and a sense of creeping, inescapable doom. The former is a point of pride; unlike some of my colleagues, I actively enjoy talking about politics with the intelligent laity. It’s like teaching, but people ask interesting questions and challenge me. Frankly, I get a better understanding of whatever I’m trying to explain along the way, which is also pretty helpful. The latter point (the doom thing) has to do with my worldview. I can come off as a pretty strong believer in the findings/views of Philip Converse. In short, the average person doesn’t know a lot about politics, nor does he/she particularly care. The people with the most information, for better or worse, are also typically the ones with the most money. If you’re feeling depressed at this point, you’re not alone. Sometimes I wonder why my sister bothers to call me at all.

There is, however, hope. Part of this is a paper that I’m working up, so I’ll save the hopefully-groundbreaking stuff, but here’s what the existing literature supports. I’m making a few connections that aren’t in the original works, so you don’t want to use this as your Cliff’s Notes for public opinion class, but here goes. We know that public policy is at least reasonably responsive to shifts in public opinion. There are anomalies. Policy reacts to preferences of the rich better (more quickly and accurately) than the preferences of the public at large. The correlation is only really strong when issues are salient (when people are thinking and talking about them). To sum up, the responsiveness of our representative democracy is not perfect, but it’s there.

From the previous paragraph, you should take two things. First, policy tends to move at least loosely with public opinion. Second, public opinion moves. You may have read those two points and wondered why I felt the need to reiterate. Well, the simple fact is that although public opinion moves, the opinions of high-information (usually but not always high-income, high education, white, male, and all the other things Glen Beck and Cynthia McKinney don’t have in common) individuals are relatively stable. There are a number of processes at work here, but they tend to follow along one vein. I’m a liberal who occasionally switches from NPR to Fox News when on an afternoon drive. When I hear Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity, etc., making an assertion, I almost immediately have a retort. Some of them are pretty straightforward (“No, Mr. Beck, I don’t want to sneak into your house and kill your grandmother; I just want mine to be able to afford to live to see my graduation.”). Others are more complex (“That amendment is unlikely to get through conference, Mr. Hannity.”). However, my responses are always at the ready, even when I’m not trying that hard. Even though I’d like to think otherwise, it’s pretty unlikely that anyone on Fox News is going to persuade me to abandon my views. I’ve already thought my way through most issues, considered most of the points, and weighed the pros and cons. Similarly, my conservative friends don’t get as into MSNBC, presumably for the same reasons. (My friends are typically pretty high-information folk. It’s one of the benefits of spending your days in the ivory tower.)

OK, so if public opinion moves, and my opinion isn’t moving it, what is? If it’s not the elites, it logically has to be everyone else (or a subset of everyone else, but I’m keeping my ball of academic survey research awesomeness to myself for the moment. Also note that I’m using a very broad notion of “elite” here. Basically, if you care enough about politics to seek out this blog, you’re probably not the one moving public opinion, either. Also, I really should figure out how to do footnotes in Wordpress.) That may seem a little scary. Those of you who don’t spend your days in the ivory tower may think that the average American doesn’t know a lot about politics, and as I’ve mentioned earlier, you’re largely correct, at the individual level. However, the average American has some information, enough to be right on a yes/no question more than 50% of the time, especially if a “don’t know” option is available. If a large number of people is asked to give a “correct” answer, and are successful 51% of the time, the aggregate success rate asymptotically approaches 100% as the group size increases. The probability of a correct answer for a large group of uninformed individuals can easily eclipse the probability of a correct answer from a lone “expert.” In other words, Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones got it wrong. People are smart; a person is stupid.

So what does this all mean? Well, in a nation of over 300 million, public opinion in the aggregate is going to be pretty intelligent, and can be used to inform good policy. The trick is that “magic” number. Individuals have to be able to get the right answer more than 50% of the time. That means good information is important, and quality trumps quantity. Even if information is not plentiful, it should be factually accurate. Those who over-simplify complex issues aren’t doing nearly as much harm as those who label liberals as socialists and conservatives as fascists. It also means that we should talk with intelligent people with whom we disagree. That’s a pretty tall order. I know a couple of staunch conservatives in my department, and try to talk politics with them on occasion. I’ve come to understand the views with which I disagree much more fully. I still think they’re wrong, but I understand their rationales, and am able to remind myself that not every conservative is a blustering windbag rage-a-holic. Similarly, I hope my conservative friends are able to remind themselves that not every liberal is an ineffectual elitist lodged in an ivory tower, incapable of ordering coffee with a word instead of a paragraph. Maybe it would help if we quit getting together at Starbucks….