A very interesting editorial from a University of Colorado professor. His argument is that voters are irrational and have no coherent belief system. For example, the editorial states a large proportion of people see no contradition between lower taxes and increased governement services.
Informed Voters? You Decide
There is no polite way to phrase this: When it comes to politics, the average person is an idiot. Depressing evidence for this claim can be found in a recent New Yorker essay by Louis Menand, which surveys the political-science literature regarding why people vote the way they do.
The conclusions from this literature include:
* Voters are remarkably bad at calculating their own self-interest, even when their self-interest and their political beliefs coincide. Bartels gives the following example. Only the richest 2 percent of Americans pay estate taxes. Yet among people who believe that the rich ought to pay more taxes, and who also believe that growing income inequality is a bad thing, two-thirds also favor repeal of the estate tax. Menand observes that this sort of data helps explain the otherwise puzzling fact "that the world's greatest democracy has an electorate that continually 'chooses' to transfer more and more wealth to a smaller and smaller fraction of itself."
I have been trying to rationalize this argument based on various other diary entrys along with what I have read. Part of it (in my opinion) is that voters believe there is so little difference between the two Parties that there is no real reason to pick one. So, they choose it by who they would like to have a beer with, or would invite over for a barbeque or some other innocuous reason.
* Perhaps a quarter of all voters vote on the basis of factors that have no "issue content" whatever. They vote for candidates who seem likable, or optimistic, or for those whose campaign posters are particularly eye-catching. According to Princeton political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, millions of voters in the 2000 presidential election based their votes on what the weather had been like lately.
And here is the real kicker, and why everyone should make sure to vote, no matter how safe their state is...
Now consider that the upcoming presidential election will almost certainly be decided by voters who have not yet decided for whom they are going to vote (in 2000, 18 percent of voters made their decision in the final two weeks of the campaign, and 5 percent -- far more than the decisive margin -- made their decision on Election Day itself). It's safe to say that almost everyone who has been paying the slightest bit of attention to national politics, and who has anything resembling coherent political beliefs, has already decided what he or she is going to do on Nov. 2, at least in regard to the presidential election.
But the cold fact is that tens of millions of Americans don't fit that description. They normally pay no attention to politics; whatever political beliefs they do have tend to be wildly inconsistent; and they base their votes on frankly irrational factors.
These are the crucial swing voters in the crucial swing states, who will decide who should occupy the world's most powerful political office for the next four years.
Is this pool of swing voters large enough to decide the election?
Is the democratic base and moderates who felt screwed in 2000 (as well as the past few years) large enough to overcome the Bush base that Rove is trying to draw out in large numbers?
Is the situation in Iraq enough to cause people to rethink who should be in charge of the War on Terror?