Democracy for realists
Achen and Bartels argue that democratic theory needs to be founded on identity groups and political parties, not on the preferences of individual voters. Democracy for Realists provides a powerful challenge to conventional thinking, pointing the way toward a fundamentally different understanding of the realities and potential of democratic government. --Publisher.
Stats for nerds
8recommend
32mentions
10people
2016–2025years
47% recommend53% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Sorry, I was contributing the painfully-well-backed scientific perspective. If we're doing public-politics kayfabe here, too, then yes that was a faux pas. I'm not trying to campaign though, I'm trying to inform.
If one mistakes the kayfabe for genuine, an awful lot of observed behavior and outcomes remain confusing... the science is there if anyone wants it (reading lists for relevant courses are widely available, journals are not that hard to come by, or just grab Democracy for Realists and follow up with reading criticism of it and checking its sources) and at least the basic fact that very few voters think or behave remotely like anyone hoping for a well-informed, rational, and empathetic electorate might hope, is depressingly solid.
This is understood by everybody operating at a level of importance in media and politics, so a bunch of what they do (and its efficacy) will also be confusing if one disregards it. Even when they talk about how they believe in the voters, and blah blah—that's part of the kayfabe, that's a marketing message, they 100% don't believe that because not only is it definitely not true, you also lose elections (or viewership, or whatever) more often if you act like (not say—act like) it's true. It's not a lie they can afford to hold on to past the lowest levels of their professions, as they'll be concretely punished for the gap between their belief and reality and replaced by others who get it.
- I recently started reading a great book called "Democracy for Realists". Voters may believe that they are electing someone who will represent their principles, but that is not how it works.
This is a good summary of the book: https://sppe.lse.ac.uk/articles/52
- Have you read Democracy for Realists?
TIL Most voters don't have well defined policy preferences. Nor can they correctly associate political parties with their stated policy positions.
- There's something here that I feel is pretty deep, though offensive for some minds: What is the actual consequence of being wrong? Of not getting right the base reality of a situation?
Usually, stasis is the enemy that is much great than false information. If people with 90% truth can take a step forward in the world, even if they mistakenly think they have 100% truth, what does it matter? They're learning more and acting more for that step taken. If the mistaken ground truth is false and importantly enough false, they'll learn it bc their experience is grounded in the reality the navigate anyhow. If they don't learn it, it's of no consequence.
This is on my mind because I work in democratic reform, and I am acutely aware (from books like "Democracy for Realists", that eviscerate common assumptions about "how democracy works") that it often doesn't matter if we understand how democracy is working, so long as we feel like we do, enough to take steps forward and keep trying and learning. We literally don't even know how democracy works, and yet we've been living under it for centuries, to decent enough ends.
I think often about the research of Donald Hoffman. His lab runs evolutionary simulations, putting "creatures" that see "reality" (of the simulation) against creatures that see only "fitness" (the abstraction, but also the lie, that is more about seeing what gets the creature living to the next click of the engine, whether that's truth or falsehood about the reality). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYp5XuGYqqY
Basically, creatures that see only fitness (that see only the lie), they drive to extinction every creature that insists on seeing "reality as it is".
I take this to mean truth is in no way, shape, or form favoured in the universe. This is just a convinient lie we tell ourselves, to motivate our current cultural work and preferences.
So tl;dr -- better to move forward and feel high agency with imperfect information, than to wait for a full truthful solution that might never come, or might be such high cost as to arrive too late. Those moving forward rapidly with imperfect information will perhaps drive to extinction those methods that insist on full grounding in reality.
Maybe this is always the way the world has worked... I mean, does any mammal before us have any idea how any of reality worked? No, they just used their senses to detect the gist of reality (often heuristics and lies), and operated in the world as such. Maybe the human sphere of language and thought will settle on similar ruthlessness.
- >State level policy depends on public support or opposition.
Arguable - I'd say even unlikely in most real world situations. The US has recently had a wildly unpopular president who showed remarkable indifference to said public opposition. And relying on the media to gauge public support, or inform the populace in objective terms about the actions of their representatives, is inadvisable. It is not difficult to find instances of the same media organizations arguing both in favor and against public policies depending on the elected official enacting them[0][1]. In that regard, mainstream media seems more akin to a tool of propaganda, shaping opinion and manufacturing consent after the fact, than a useful organ of democratic governance.
The issue is that the control the population realistically has over their representatives in a democratic republic like every (?) modern democracy is by necessity of the size of said governments extremely limited. You can't have a referendum on every issue, so for the most part all the public gets to decide is if someone did a good job over the last X years. I recommend reading Democracy for Realists for a more in-depth look, but suffice to say that that level of interaction is far too coarse to guide public policy on immediate, subtle, and complex issues like Ukraine, COVID, or Chinese foreign policy. If something is not a core issue (i.e. something that the parties have split and staked their identities on, like women's rights, access to guns, immigration, etc) or is so universally desirable that everyone just wants more of it (i.e. visible short-term economic growth - note that long-term economic growth is generally not rewarded by the electorate), policymakers have essentially no incentive to actually care, because their voters won't care enough about those issues when it matters to sway their vote one way or another.
To your last question; the public's opinion of a decision doesn't influence whether a policymaker will make the decision. The point of the media is not to inform the public on what their representatives are doing, it is to shape the narrative of politics in the country. The actual decisions, the policy positions, are for the most part incidental to that. The causal arrow goes the other way. See also: [2][3][4]
[0]: https://mobile.twitter.com/BaldingsWorld/status/153358567932...
[1]: https://www.racket.news/p/the-sovietization-of-the-american (search "Khashoggi")
[2]: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/01/marc-edwards-...
[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/chomsky/comments/c1fk5l/newsweek_in...
- To my mind, the most interesting question is the other way around. We have an abundance of data about the public, we have relatively little data about how the elites operate. As I've gone up in my career, and begun to reach elite levels, I've been fascinated to learn about some of the upper levels of the economy, some of the odd rituals that it has.
I have taken an almost sociological interest in some of the minor social codes of elite life, such as who is allowed to use curse words, and what they are actually communicating when they allow themselves to use curse words. But also the opposite: who never uses curse words, and why?
But my point is, if I want to learn how coal miners in West Virginia use curse words, I can easily learn about that. I own several good books about working class life in Appalachia, I've read half of them. But good books about the use of curse words among the elites? That is much more rare, and the situation tends to evolve at a faster rate.
Also, I'll point out, this form of journalism is fairly common. Over the last year I've seen several good essays that suggested various elite groups were misunderstanding the mood of the public. What is somewhat more rare is to read a book about how the public misreads the elites. Into this category I would, arguably, suggest that Democracy For Realists is the best:
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Realists-Elections-Responsi...
I read this at the end of last year, and posted a few excerpts here:
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...
The public also seems to misunderstand how much any political system, but especially democratic systems, depend on certain elites, and in particular political parties, to allow the system to continue to function. Consider the Panama Exception:
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/the-panama-exception
Occasionally someone is born into wealth and they turn out to be a great novelist, so they can write a novel that gives us some sense of growing up in the upper class. Interesting stuff. But in general, if I want to learn how poverty persists in Appalachia, I have many more books to read than books that teach me how the upper class transmits its status to its children. Some of the details of that operation are hidden, and difficult to learn about, save when we make friends with people who had that upbringing, and even then, we are only seeing a narrow slice of the overall process.
And obviously, the life of the wealthy frequently shows up on television and movies, but not in a realistic way. Such shows amount to a kind of obfuscation of elite reality.
