Highlights from Democracy For Realists by Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels Last read on August 19, 2021
Highlights from this book
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Democracy constitutes a folk theory -- a set of accessible, appealing ideas assuring people that they live under an ethically defensible form of government that has their interests at heart.
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Individuals are prisoners of their own time and place, shaped in concious and unconcious ways by the things they know.
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(Walter Lippman) Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a prickled balloon - the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.
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Well informed citizens, too, have come in for their share of criticism, since their well organized "ideological" thinking often turns out to be just a rather mechanical reflection of what their favorite group and party leaders have instructed them to think.
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Often, their attempts to bolster the tattered theoretical status quo bring them back to Winston Churchill's claim that "democracy is the worst form of government except all those others that have been tried from time to time". But that is a distinctly un-idealistic defense of democracy - and no defense at all of the folk theory of democracy.
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We survey a substantial body of scholarly work demonstrating that most democratic citizens are uninterested in politics, poorly informed, and unwilling or unable to convey coherent policy preferences through "issue voting". How, then, are elections supposed to ensure ideological responsiveness to the popular will? In our view, they do not. The populist ideal of electoral democracy, for all its elegance and attractiveness, is largely irrelevant in practice, leaving elected officials mostly free to pursue their own notions of the public good or to respond to party and interest group pressures.
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The adoption of initiative and referendum processes in many states has mostly empowered millionaires and interest groups that use their wealth to achieve their own policy goals.
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We find that voters punish incumbent politicians for changes in their welfare that are clearly acts of god or nature. That suggests that their ability (or their inclination) to make sensible judgements regarding credit and blame is highly circumscribed. In that case, retrospection will be blind, and political accountability will be greatly attenuated.
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We conclude that group and partisan loyalties, not policy preferences or ideologies, are fundamental in democratic politics. Thus, a realistic theory of democracy must be built, not on the French enlightenment, on British liberalism, or on American Progressivism, with their devotion to human rationality and monadic individualism, but instead on the insights of the critics of these traditions, who recognized that human life is group life.