Do people tend to disagree over political issues because of conflicting values? Or do they disagree about which policies will most effectively promote shared values? In a previous article, I argued that the issues most people think are most important tend to fall into the latter category. On the issues of greatest importance to the mass public, most citizens agree about the ends that are desirable, but disagree about which policy means would best effectuate those ends. Consequently, disputes about facts—disputes (...) about the actual effects of proposed public policies—lie at the heart of the most important divisions in contemporary American public opinion. However, people do not necessarily interpret their political disagreements this way. If they fail to recognize that facts that they see as self-evident are disputed by their opponents, they may see their opponents as having different values, since there could be few other explanations for their opponents' disagreement with them. However, evidence that disagreements about facts are really driving public opinion can be found by using conditional surveys, which ask respondents if they would support a given policy if they believed that it would cause specific negative consequences. (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)

In the ongoing debate about the impact that studies of public ignorance should have on the study of culture, Mark Fenster and Bret Chandler assume that wider political participation must be our goal, because, to them, political ignorance is a culturally imposed, and therefore removable, obstacle—as if, without the baleful influence of culture, political participants would be well informed. Culture is indeed a primary influence on people's political opinions, so political scientists should indeed study the role it plays in the (...) formation of political beliefs. But such studies should begin with ignorance as people's default position, and should refrain from assuming that the source of ignorance is cultural domination or manipulation. (shrink)

Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter treats several immensely important and understudied topics—public ignorance of economics, political ideology, and their connection to policy error—from an orthodox economic perspective whose applicability to these topics is overwhelmingly disproven by the available evidence. Moreover, Caplan adds to the traditional and largely irrelevant orthodox economic notion of rational public ignorance the claim that when voters favor counterproductive economic policies, they do so deliberately, i.e., knowingly. This leads him to assume (without any evidence) (...) that “emotion or ideology” explain mass economic error. Straightforward, unchosen mass ignorance of economic principles—neither “rational” nor “irrational,” but simply mistaken—is a more coherent explanation for economic error, and it is backed up by the vast body of public‐opinion research. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Ethical and political attitudes are not randomly distributed in a population. Attitudes of family members, for example, tend to be more similar than those of a random sample of the same size. In the fields of social psychology and political science, the historically standard explanation for these attitude distribution patterns was that social and political attitudes are a function of environmental factors like parental socialization and prevailing social norms. This received view is, however, complicated by more recent work in (...) behavioral genetics, which consistently and repeatedly demonstrates that certain ethical and political attitudes dealing with issues like censorship, abortion, capital punishment, and immigration policy have a significant heritability coefficient, to wit, a substantial percentage of attitude variance in a population can be attributed to genetic variance, independent of environmental factors. In this paper, I argue that the genetic influence on our ethical and political attitudes is mediated by what we can agree to be irrelevant and distorting factors that can lead moral reasoning astray. Further, I argue that we should significantly lower our credences in ethical and political attitudes that fall within the domains of belief that involve significant genetic influence. (shrink)

Taber and Lodge's 2006 paper provides powerful evidence that one's prior beliefs shape one's reception of new evidence in a manner that can best be described as “inadvertently dogmatic.” This is especially true for people who are well informed, which dovetails with findings going back to Converse (1964) showing political beliefs to be ideologically constrained (rigid) among the relatively well informed. What may explain the coincidence of dogmatism and knowledgeability is the very process of learning about politics, which must use (...) theories, schemas, ideologies, or Lippmannesque “stereotypes” to target certain political information as germane by putting it into an interpretive framework. This interpretive process is likely to create for each of us a growing database of information that is congruent with our extant convictions but that excludes incongruent information: in light of the data we have already processed, incongruent information seems increasingly implausible (if not incomprehensible), and is therefore rationally ignored or dismissed. But this does not necessarily mean, as Taber and Lodge follow Robert Abelson in suggesting, that people are “motivated” to be dogmatic rather than being unintentionally closed minded as a result of the plausibility they involuntarily accord to their priors. Recognizing the inadvertent (unmotivated) nature of dogmatism is essential if political science is to take seriously political actors' beliefs—and to assess the gravity of the problem posed by dogmatism. (shrink)

Zaller's model of public-opinion formation portrays the average citizen as an automaton who responds unthinkingly to elite cues. That is, once people have received information from political elites, they tend to abide by whatever their respective cue-givers dictate, since rejecting information is more cognitively costly than simply accepting it. Empirical research in psychology on priming supports this view of the citizen as a passive receiver of information. For example, people are likely to be unconsciously influenced by subtle cues and they (...) tend to base their opinions on the accessibility of information in memory. However, some citizens, under certain conditions, may be ?active processors? of information: actively interpreting it, elaborating on its implications, and negotiating its meaning. Whether or not Zaller's model is an accurate representation of the process of public-opinion formation depends substantially upon the inclusiveness of the researcher's views about what constitutes public opinion and how to study its determinants. (shrink)

Any workable ideal of deliberative democracy that includes elections will need modern democracy's ever-present ally, parties. Since the primary function of parties is to win office rather than to reflect on public questions, parties are potential problems for the deliberative enterprise. They are more at home in aggregative models of democracy than in deliberative models. While deliberative democracy will need its moments of aggregation—and therefore, must have parties—partisans as they actually arise in the political world possess traits that undermine the (...) deliberative ideal. If partisans of partisanship are to be unembarrassed by (or are to correct) these defects, even workable ideals of deliberative democracy need to stand at some distance from the partisan imperative. (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)

This article argues that the concept of deliberation is construed too narrowly in political corporate social responsibility (CSR) and that a concept of deliberation for political CSR should err toward useful speech acts rather than reciprocity and charity. It draws from the political philosophy, labor relations, and business ethics literatures to outline a framework for an extended notion of deliberative engagement. The characters of deliberative behavior and deliberative environment are held to generate four modes of engagement: strategic deliberation, unitarist deliberation, (...) pluralist deliberation, and deliberative activism. The article concludes by arguing that political CSR will be better positioned to realize its potential by moving away from primarily consensus-centered objectives to a more responsive range of deliberative goals and practice. (shrink)