How can one examine the sources of people's beliefs, tastes, and preferences without falling into the self‐refuting determinism that has so often characterized the most systematic theory of preferences, Marxism? Cultural Theory's attempt to do so posits five anthropologically derived, competing “ways of life"— individualism, egalitarianism, hierarchism, fatalism, and withdrawal from social life—that are intended to apply to all forms of culture and, therefore, to provide a universal framework for explaining people's preferential biases. Richard Ellis's defense of Cultural Theory, however, (...) does not adequately address the concerns expressed in my critique of it. Ellis fails to instance a single case of a premodern culture containing the five ways of life; he does not show that exclusivist premodern versions of “individualism” and “egalitarianism” are more than superficially comparable to the inclusive modern variants of these alleged universals; and he adds new evidence to support my claim that in modern societies, people's preferences are largely unlinked to the particular social relations identified by Cultural Theory. While Ellis overtly denies that Cultural Theory is deterministic, his search for links between preferences and social relations shows that this denial cannot be sustained.Cultural Theory's reductionism stems from its neglect of historically contingent cultural traditions that thwart a priori attempts to predict culture. This ahistori‐cism transforms a myopic view of American politics as a battle of egalitarianism against individualism into a timeless truth, providing ideological self‐affirmation for “individualists” but diminishing the prospects for being able to explain or criticize individualism—or any other political preference. (shrink)

The Tulis thesis becomes even more powerful when the constitutional revolution he describes is put in its Progressive‐Era context. The public had long demanded social reforms designed to curb or replace laissez‐faire capitalism, which was seen as antithetical to the interests of ordinary working people. But popular demands for social reform went largely unmet until the 1910s. Democratizing political reforms, such as the rhetorical presidency, were designed to facilitate “change” by finally giving the public the power to enact social reforms. (...) The resulting political order has created systemic pressure for policy demagoguery in place of rational deliberation. Mass political mobilization seems to be better achieved by contests of grand principle that pit the well‐meaning supporters of obviously needed reforms against “villains and conspirators,” than by technical discussions of the possibly counterproductive effects of those reforms. (shrink)

Recent theories of the state often draw attention to states’ autonomy from social preferences. This paper suggests that the phenomenon of public ignorance is the primary mechanism responsible for state autonomy in democratic polities. Such theorists as Skocpol and Poulantzus, who do not take account of public ignorance, either underestimate the state's autonomy or stress causal mechanisms that are necessary but not sufficient conditions for its autonomy. Gram‐sci's concept of ideological hegemony is promising, even though it is far too insistent (...) on the penetration of ideology of any kind beyond relatively small numbers of political sophisticates. (shrink)

In Against Democracy, Jason Brennan argues that public ignorance undermines the legitimacy of democracy because, to the extent that ignorant voters make bad policy choices, they harm their own and one another’s interests. The solution, he thinks, is epistocracy, which would leave policy decisions largely in the hands of social-scientific experts or voters who pass tests of political knowledge. However, Brennan fails to explain why we should think that these putative experts are sufficiently knowledgeable to avoid making errors as damaging (...) as those made by voters. Given the strong link between political knowledge and ideological dogmatism, as well as the tendency of social scientists to disagree with one another, the case for epistocracy is deeply implausible, at best. Moreover, given that there are important non-instrumental justifications of democracy—justifications of which Brennan appears to be radically ignorant—the epistocratic alternative would be unnecessary even if it were viable. (shrink)

Two crucial distinctions regarding political competence must be made. First, the mere probability that you will make a morally right decision (reliability) is distinct from your ability to skillfully make a decision (competence). Empirical and normative accounts have focused primarily on reliability, but competence is more important if we take central normative commitments seriously. Second, the competence you have on your own (direct competence) is distinct from the competence you have in contributing to some collective enterprise (contributory competence). Direct competence (...) is likely to be extremely demanding in a democratic context, so we should move to a contributory account of competence. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAlthough Thomas Piketty is largely known for his recent empirical contributions to the study of inequality, his work on epistemology has been substantial. It remains relatively unreferenced in the political epistemology literature both because it has been overshadowed by his work on inequality and because it was written for an audience of economists rather than political scientists. Piketty’s work on these themes can be divided into analyses of political belief formation and analyses of the epistemic properties of democratic institutions. Capital (...) in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty’s recent book, also reflects his long-standing interest in epistemological questions. The major epistemic claim of that book is that political knowledge is an endogenous phenomenon: policy generates new knowledge over the course of its administration. One of the benefits of the primary policy proposal of Capital, the global wealth tax, is that it will generate new knowledge about wealth inequality. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Critics of Converse’s agenda‐setting 1964 essay underexplored the seemingly technical issue of measurement error. Down this road not taken lie serious questions about the evidence for both of Converse’s main theses. First, a thorough reexamination of the exact questions posed to a mass sample of the electorate and to an elite sample of congressional candidates suggests that the mass/elite difference in ideological constraint reported by Converse could be, in significant part, a measurement‐error artifact caused by differences in question form. (...) Furthermore, the vagueness and ambiguity of the questions not only calls into question the plausibility of Converse’s main thesis—lack of ideological constraint among the public—but of his subsidiary thesis: that, measured over time, members of the public had such unstable political opinions that they might best be considered “nonattitudes.”. (shrink)

Economists tend to view ignorance as ?rational,? neglecting the possibility that ignorance is unintentional. This oversight is reflected in economists? model of ?information search,? which can be fruitfully contrasted with ?information browsing.? Information searches are designed to discover unknown knowns, whose value is calculable ex ante, such that this value justifies the cost of the search. In this model of human information acquisition, there is no primal or ?radical? ignorance that might prevent people from knowing which information to look for, (...) lacking omniscience. Unlike ignorance that is rationally chosen on the basis of an accurate cost/benefit calculation, radical ignorance can explain human error. An account of error as grounded in radical ignorance bypasses the need to appeal to irrationality in order to explain economic (and other) mistakes. (shrink)

ABSTRACT One of Murray Edelman’s most important insights was that understanding public ignorance about politics and policy requires an analysis of how symbolic communication and popular culture shape public knowledge and opinion. Approaches that simply dismiss the public as ignorant or idiotic make a similar error as those that simply embrace the modern public as capable of engaging in the work of a competent demos, insofar as both simplify complex social and cultural processes of meaning‐making and comprehension. The problem for (...) those who wish to take Edelman’s insight seriously—a problem that Edelman failed to resolve—is precisely how to study and theorize the public as something less than deliberative and knowledgeable, but more than simply ignorant. (shrink)

The partisan and ideological polarization of American politics since the 1970s appears to have affected pubic opinion in striking ways. The American public has become increasingly partisan and ideological along liberal-conservative lines on a wide range of issues, including even foreign policy. This has raised questions about how rational the public is, in the broad sense of the public's responsiveness to objective conditions. Widespread partisan disagreements over what those conditions arei.e., disagreements about the factssuggest that large proportions of the public (...) may be perceiving the facts incorrectly. The facts in question are important enough that these partisan disagreements may translate into sub-optimal policy preferences and electoral decisions. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy is a noble project: an attempt to make citizens philosophize. Critics of deliberative democracy usually claim either that the proposed deliberation threatens an existing moral consensus or, instead, that deliberation is impossible amid power imbalances that oppress the weak. But another problem is that combining democracy and deliberation is inherently an attempt to engage publicly in a private activity—where sensitivity to each interlocutor may require a special form of address. Can this be done? Yes, in some contexts. The (...) tradition of esoteric writing has demonstrated that it is possible to layer one's discourse in such a way that all citizens can partake at a level that suits them. But writing for a public is not really deliberation among equals; it is leadership by the writer of the readers. Genuine dialogue among equals that takes account of their differences is, in contrast, inherently a private affair. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Both classical and modern liberals tend to treat freedom of choice as if it is intrinsically valuable—regardless of what is chosen. They fear that treating freedom as, instead, instrumental only to good choices might open the door to paternalism if a polity were to decide that people were making bad choices. A middle course would be to treat freedom as independently valuable. On the one hand, the independent value of freedom does not treat all choices as good as long (...) as they are freely made. On the other hand, it does not reduce the value of freedom to the known, or predictable, good ends to which a free action may be conducive. Following from Hayek’s acknowledgement that we are often ignorant of what the future may hold, freedom may have value because it will allow us to make decisions whose positive consequences cannot now be predicted. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The illusion of explanatory depth, which has been identified by cognitive psychologists, may play a prominent role in encouraging regulatory action. This special type of overconfidence would logically lead regulators to believe that they are aware of the relevant causes and consequences of the activities they might regulate, and of the unintended side effects of the regulatory actions they are contemplating. So, as with other cognitive biases, the illusion of explanatory depth is likely to lead to mistakes. And unlike (...) the biases that have been the focus of so much behavioral economics, the illusion of explanatory depth is uniquely resistant to correction by those who are aware of it as a general problem and rigorously attempt to keep it under control. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The media's attentive vigil over America's most militant and outrageous activists in the abortion wars has obscured a massive but quiet effort on the part of evangelicals to engage their opponents in exemplary deliberative discussions about bioethics. For a variety of reasons, activists in the pro‐life movement are more committed to carving out civic spaces for such dialogue than are their pro‐choice counterparts. This discrepancy invites investigation into the forces that promote and constrain political movements' interest in deliberation, as (...) well as highlighting the undeniable limits to deliberative ideals. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In Hearing the Other Side, Diana Mutz poses a conundrum: The more one is exposed to political disagreement, the more likely one is to withdraw from political engagement. This behavior may result in part from the political polarization of recent decades, but it may also be due to the traditional media, which tend to magnify political competition and portray it as a bitter conflict. The rise of the Internet and social media offered hope that people might more readily encounter (...) the arguments of the other side. Recent research suggests, however, that people thus far tend to consume political information online just as they do offline: selectively. (shrink)

Where Taber and Lodge view belief polarization to indicate a “partisan motivation,” Lord et al. (1979) believed it to be consistent with a desire for accuracy: A “weak” study articulating an opposing viewpoint might simply sharpen participants' initial belief of the wisdom of their prior beliefs. This polarization, Taber and Lodge show, correlates with political sophistication: The more partisan a participant, the more time spent reading the opinions of the other side—in order to critically refute them. Taber and Lodge attribute (...) such findings to people's personal identification with their beliefs. However, participants may have spent so much time reading opinions of the other side because the arguments are unfamiliar. Further, Lord et al. (1984) were able to induce people to act with “skepticism” toward their own views by simply suggesting that they “consider the other side.”. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy is unrealistic, but so are rational-choice models of democracy. The elements of reality that rationalistic theories of democracy leave out are the very elements that deliberative democrats would need to subtract if their theory were to be applied to reality. The key problem is not, however, the altruistic orientation that deliberative democrats require; opinion researchers know that voters are already sociotropic, not self-interested. Rather, as Schumpeter saw, the problems lie in understanding politics, government, and economics under modern—and postmodern—conditions. (...) Modernity entails levels of complexity that stymie voters' attempts to be well informed about which political promises will actually solve social problems. Postmodernity adds to complexity an overabundance of fragmented information experienced impatiently and fleetingly by citizens who confuse entertainment with knowledge, and whose political demands are as unrealistic as their personal desire for a unique identity. These factors can be added, one by one, to the minimalist rational-choice model of politics, with each step leading us farther away from deliberative democracy. (shrink)

Parties are back, and many are cheering. Party polarization has voters seeing stark differences between Democrats and Republicans and demonstrating more ideological constraint than previous generations. But these signs of a more “responsible” electorate are an illusion, because the public is no more knowledgeable than ever about the type of “information” it needs if it is to exercise effective control over the public‐policy outcomes it cares the most about. Indeed, polarization has produced a political environment where both voters and policy (...) makers may be less likely to learn about the potential consequences of their governing choices. The result is that holding elected politicians to account for policies treated as divisive ends in themselves has become easier—but that holding them accountable for policies intended as means to the achievement of consensual ends has become harder. (shrink)

American democracy is not unconstrained or autonomous, but instead achieves what could be termed value representation. Rather than affording representation on policy issues, elections transmit priorities among competing normative ends, while elite politics address the more complex matching of ends and means within the value boundaries established by voters. This results in neither policy representation nor state autonomy, but instead in a specific and limited form of democratic representation.

ABSTRACT Jeffrey Friedman’s Power Without Knowledge builds a critical epistemology of technocracy, rather than a democratic argument against it. For its democratic critics, technocracy is illegitimate because it amounts to the rule of cognitive elites, violating principles of mutual respect and collective self-determination. For its proponents, technocracy’s legitimacy depends on its ability to use reliable knowledge to solve social and economic problems. But Friedman demonstrates that to meet the proponents' “internal,” epistemic standard of legitimacy, technocrats would have to reckon with (...) the heterogeneity of people’s ideas, which he presents as one of two aspects of a political anthropology of ideational beings. The other aspect is ideational determinism: the shaping of our conscious actions by our interpretations, and of our interpretations by “ideational exposures”. For the most part, our symposiasts agree with this anthropology or leave it uncontested, but they fall back on democratic theory to point toward alternatives to technocracy. This raises the question, which Friedman does not ask, of whether his political anthropology undermines a certain brand of democratic theory: the liberal brand that attaches respect to people’s opinions as products of “free reflection,” i.e., as underdetermined. (shrink)

ABSTRACTJack Knight and James Johnson argue in The Priority of Democracy that democracy should be theorized and justified pragmatically: Democratic deliberations should be given a central coordinating role in society not because they realize any particular abstract ideal, but because they would elicit the information needed to solve real-world problems. However, Knight and Johnson rely on a naïve economic understanding of knowledge that assumes implausibly that individuals know what they need to know and need only aggregate thier separate beliefs. It (...) is precisely because we may not know what we need to know that we need to continually test our ideas. Contra Knight and Johnson, moreover, we ought to accept that our ability to interpret social experiments properly is questionable. A pragmatic approach to social inquiry, therefore, ought to investigate what beliefs political actors actually bring to collective decisions rather than how theoretically perfect beliefs ought to be elicited and aggregated. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The financial crisis was caused by the complex, constantly growing web of regulations designed to constrain and redirect modern capitalism. This complexity made investors, bankers, and perhaps regulators themselves ignorant of regulations promulgated across decades and in different “fields” of regulation. These regulations interacted with each other to foster the issuance and securitization of subprime mortgages; their rating as AA or AAA; and previously their concentration on the balance sheets (and off the balance sheets) of many commercial and investment (...) banks. As a practical matter, it was impossible to predict the disastrous outcome of these interacting regulations. This fact calls into question the feasibility of the century‐old attempt to create a hybrid capitalism in which regulations are supposed to remedy economic problems as they arise. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Twenty years ago Leif Lewin made the case that altruistic motives are more common than selfish motives among voters, politicians, and bureaucrats. We propose that motives and beliefs emerge as reactions to immediate feedback from technical-causal, material-economic, and moral-social aspects of the political task environment. In the absence of certain kinds of technical-causal and material-economic feedback, moral-social feedback leads individuals to the altruism Lewin documents, but also to righteousness (moralized regard for the in-group and disregard for the out-group) and (...) myopia (disregard for distant consequences). The mix of altruism, righteousness, and myopia increases the focus on winning the next high-stakes election rather than on discovering or enforcing socially productive institutions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Social‐scientific data, such as those found in Philip E. Converse's 1964 essay, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” have led some to question whether basic assumptions about democratic legitimacy are unfounded. However, by another set of criteria, we have the “democracy” that was intended by the Framers—namely, a liberal representative system that avoids strong civic engagement by the citizenry. At its deepest level, the American system has been designed to ensure elite influence over the main ambitions of (...) American policy: the expansion of public and private power. When social scientists accumulate findings of civic disengagement and ignorance, it is wrongly supposed to be an indictment of the citizenry; rather, those findings should be understood as the expected result of a certain set of commitments throughout American political history, of which civic apathy and ignorance are the desired outcomes. (shrink)

Early modern theorists linked the idea of sovereign power to a conception of absolute power developed during the medieval period. Ockham had reframed the already extant distinction between God's absolute and ordained powers in order to argue that God was free of moral constraint in ordaining natural law for human beings. Thus, the natural law could command the opposite of what God had ordained if He wished to make it so. Bodin extended Ockham's argument to earthly sovereigns, who do not (...) (he argued) have to obey civil law. However, Bodin undermined his absolutism by maintaining that civil law has to be consistent with natural and divine law. Hobbes more consistently argued that while mortal sovereigns are accountable to God, the power of sovereigns to command is not subject to moral constraints. Underlying Ockham's view of God's sovereignty, and Bodin's and Hobbes's view of earthly sovereigns, is a notion of the will's unconstrained power. But this notion is self-referentially incoherent. This incoherence, in turn, infects the very notion of sovereignty. (shrink)

In his remarkably meticulous and even-handed 2005 book, Expert Political Judgment, Philip E. Tetlock establishes that the only thing we can count on in the political experts' predictions is that they will underperform-in some cases significantly-the predictions made by mechanical statistical procedures, including random chance. Experts have many uses and Tetlock does not claim that they have no value. However, Tetlock zeroes in on experts' important political role-as prognosticators. Tetlock does not attempt the impossible by trying to judge experts on (...) their ability to prognosticate the effects of public policies; this would require that Tetlock himself could know what those effects were, and even in retrospect, it isn't that simple. Experts' failure to predict much simpler matters, however, such as GDP growth within a broad range, strongly suggests that technocracy is worse than putting dart-throwing chimps in charge of public policy. (shrink)

Hayek argued that the central question of economics is the coordination problem: How does the spontaneous interaction of many purposeful individuals, each having dispersed bits of subjective knowledge, generate an order in which the actors' subjective data are coordinated in a way that enables them to dovetail their plans and activities successfully? In attempting to solve this problem, Hayek outlined an approach to economic theorizing that takes seriously the limited, subjective nature of human knowledge. Despite purporting to have appropriated Hayek's (...) thought by acknowledging the information-transmitting role of prices, mainstream economists have missed Hayek's point. The predominant tool of formal economics—equilibrium analysis—begins by assuming the data held by actors to have been pre-reconciled, and so evades the problem to be solved. Even the more advanced tools for modeling knowledge in economic analysis, such as the economics of information, assume away either the subjectivism of knowledge and expectations (rendering the coordination of beliefs and plans a trivial matter) or the frictions and “imperfections” of reality (rendering the coordination problem indeterminate). (shrink)