In it he came fully to terms with the inadequacy of traditional democratic theory." This volume is part of a continuing series on the major works of Walter Lippmann.

Rationalization is the adjustment of one's beliefs about politically relevant information, the better to fit one's political behavior or one's political attitudes. This reverses the usual causal order, in which it is assumed that people start with values, add what little factual information they have, and produce policy, partisan, or ideological “attitudes” as a result. If people actually work backwards from their political behavior to their attitudes, and from their attitudes to their beliefs about “the facts,” there are obvious and (...) troubling implications for democratic legitimacy, as well as for the academic study of democratic competence. I confine myself here to exploring some of the empirical evidence for rationalization, and to thinking about how to solve the resulting research problems, bracketing the normative issues. (shrink)

We propose a model of motivated skepticism that helps explain when and why citizens are biased information processors. Two experimental studies explore how citizens evaluate arguments about affirmative action and gun control, finding strong evidence of a prior attitude effect such that attitudinally congruent arguments are evaluated as stronger than attitudinally incongruent arguments. When reading pro and con arguments, participants (Ps) counterargue the contrary arguments and uncritically accept supporting arguments, evidence of a disconfirmation bias. We also find a confirmation bias—the (...) seeking out of confirmatory evidence—when Ps are free to self-select the source of the arguments they read. Both the confirmation and disconfirmation biases lead to attitude polarization—the strengthening of t2 over t1 attitudes—especially among those with the strongest priors and highest levels of political sophistication. We conclude with a discussion of the normative implications of these findings for rational behavior in a democracy. (shrink)

Abstract If voters do not understand the programs of rival candidates or their likely consequences, they cannot rationally exercise control over government. An ignorant electorate cannot achieve true democratic control over public policy. The immense size and scope of modern government makes it virtually impossible for voters to acquire sufficient knowledge to exercise such control. The problem is exacerbated by voters? strong incentive to be ?rationally ignorant? of politics. This danger to democracy cannot readily be circumvented through ?shortcut? methods of (...) economizing on voter knowledge costs. A truly democratic government must, therefore, be strictly limited in scope. (shrink)

For decades, scholars have recognized that most citizens have little or no political knowledge, and that it is in fact rational for the average voter to make little or no effort to acquire political information. Rational ignorance is fully compatible with the so‐called “paradox of voting” because it will often be rational for citizens to vote, but irrational for them to become well informed. Furthermore, rational ignorance leads not only to inadequate acquisition of political information, but also to ineffective use (...) of the information that citizens do possess. The combination of these two problems has fundamental implications for a variety of issues in public policy and international affairs. (shrink)

Abstract Building on Philip Converse's understanding of public opinion, John Zaller sees the evidence for the public's ?nonattitudes? as reflecting individuals? ambivalence concerning political issues. Because neither individuals nor the public collectively have what Zaller would call real attitudes, he concludes that the effectiveness of democracy rests on competition among intellectual and political elites. In truth, however, the public has many real attitudes that depend heavily on elite leadership, in ways that Converse did not initially emphasize but that are consistent (...) with both his observations and Zaller's model of mass opinion. The quality of the public's attitudes are, however, a point of serious contention. (shrink)

A form of elitism undermines much uniting on voter competence. The elitist move occurs when an author uses a self‐serving worldview as the basis for evaluating voters. Such elitism is apparent in widely cited measures of “political knowledge” and in common claims about what voters should know. The elitist move typically limits the credibility and practical relevance of the analysis by leading writers to draw unreliable conclusions about voter competence. I propose a more constructive way of thinking about what voters (...) know. Its chief virtue is its consistency with basic facts about the relationship between information and choice. (shrink)

My purpose is to offer an assessment of the scientific legacy of Converse's “Belief Systems” by reviewing five productive lines of research stimulated by his authoritative analysis and unsettling conclusions. First I recount the later life history of Converse's notion of “nonattitudes,” and suggest that as important as nonattitudes are, we should be paying at least as much attention to their opposite: attitudes held with conviction. Second, I argue that the problem of insufficient information that resides at the center of (...) Converse's analysis has not gone away, and that newly fashioned models of information processing offer only partial remedies. Third, I suggest that the concept of the “average voter” is a malicious fiction, as it blinds us to the enormous variation in political attention, interest, and knowledge that characterizes mass publics, in Converse's time as in our own. Fourth, I develop an affirmative aspect of Converse's analysis that has mostly been overlooked: namely, that if ideological reasoning is beyond most citizens’ capacity and interest, they might fall back on a simple and reasonable alternative, which I will call “group‐centrism.” And fifth, I consider the possibility that while the majority of individual citizens falls short of democratic standards, the public as a whole might do rather well. (shrink)

In contrast to logical criteria of rationality, which can be assessed entirely by reference to the system of preferences, substantive criteria of rational choice refer to an independent evaluation of the outcomes of decisions. One of these substantive criteria is the experienced hedonic utility of outcomes. Research indicates that people are myopic in their decisions, may lack skill in predicting their future tastes, and can be led to erroneous choices by fallible memory and incorrect evaluation of past experiences. Theoretical and (...) practical implications of these challenges to the assumption of economic rationality are discussed. (shrink)

Citizens' competence for democratic self‐government must be judged by their ability to perform the typical functions of modern citizenship, rather than by their scores on surveys of political information—which are flawed in a variety of important respects. The role requirements for effective citizenship have changed throughout American history because government has grown vastly in size, complexity, and the range of functions that it performs. Effective use of citizens’ political talents therefore requires limiting public surveillance and advice to broad overview aspects, (...) rather than to micro‐management. Citizens perform these more limited functions adequately, demonstrating that government by the people remains viable under modern conditions. (shrink)

In “Popper, Weber, and Hayek,” I claimed that the economic and political world governed by social democracy is too complex to offer hope for rational social‐democratic policy making. I extrapolated this conclusion from the claim, made by Austrian‐school economists in the 1920s and 30s, that central economic planning would face insurmountable “knowledge problems.” Israel Kirzner's Reply indicates the need to keep the Austrians’ cognitivist argument conceptually distinct from more familiar incentives arguments, which can tacitly reintroduce the assumption of omniscience against (...) which the Austrian economists rebelled. Callahan's Reply illustrates the need to keep in mind the hypothetical, conditional nature of economic arguments. Notturno's Reply changes the subject by asserting the intrinsic value of social‐democratic participation, regardless of its outcomes—even while, like Talisse's Reply, ignoring the evidence that public ignorance and elite dogmatism probably can't be mitigated by more information or by appeals to be open minded. And Hill focuses on the very real imperfections of market and other private‐sphere decision making, without weighing the shortcomings of the political alternatives. Markets and other private‐sphere decision arenas don't have to be perfect for them to improve upon public‐sector processes. In the latter, cognitive demands tend to be much greater, because of the divergence of modern social problems from the conditions that would have faced the hunter‐gatherers whose cognitive apparatus we have inherited. (shrink)

Karl Popper's methodology highlights our scientific ignorance: hence the need to institutionalize open‐mindedness through controlled experiments that may falsify our fallible theories about the world. In his endorsement of “piecemeal social engineering,” Popper assumes that the social‐democratic state and its citizens are capable of detecting social problems, and of assessing the results of policies aimed at solving them, through a process of experimentation analogous to that of natural science. But we are not only scientifically but politically ignorant: ignorant of the (...) facts that underpin political debate, which are brought to our attention by theories that, as Max Weber emphasized, can be tested only through counterfactual thought experiments. Public‐opinion and political‐psychology research suggest that human beings are far too unaware, illogical, and doctrinaire to conduct the rigorous theorizing that would be necessary to make piecemeal social engineering work. F.A. Hayek realized that the public could not engage, specifically, in piecemeal economic regulation but failed to draw the conclusion that this was due to a specific type of political ignorance: ignorance of economic theory. (shrink)

“The Nature of Belief Systems” sets forth a Hobson's choice between rule by the politically ignorant masses and rule by the ideologically constrained—which is to say, the doctrinaire—elites. On the one hand, lacking comprehensive cognitive structures, such as ideological “belief systems,” with which to understand politics, most people learn distressingly little about it. On the other hand, a spiral of conviction seems to make it difficult for the highly informed few to see any aspects of politics but those that confirm (...) the cognitive structures that organize their political perceptions. This is a troubling situation for any consequentialist democratic political theory, according to which what is crucial is the electorate's (and subsidiary decision makers') ability to make informed policy judgments, not their possession of willful but uninformed political “attitudes.” Any political theorist who does not take democracy to be an end in itself (regardless of its consequences) should be concerned about Converse's findings. (shrink)

Converse's seminal 1964 article explored three crucial limitations of public opinion as it is revealed in conventional polls: information levels, belief systems, and nonattitudes. These limitations are significant from the standpoint of democratic theory, but it is possible to design forms of public consultation and of social‐science research that will reveal what public opinion might be like if these limitations were somehow overcome. Deliberative Polling is an effort to explore the contours of such a counterfactual public opinion—one that is more (...) informed and engaged than is the mass public. Doing so requires going beyond “polling alone.”. (shrink)

This is a compelling if sober set of questions from America's foremost legal scholar."--Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University.

The thirty-five chapters in this book describe various judgmental heuristics and the biases they produce, not only in laboratory experiments but in important...

Many political scientists and policymakers argue that unmediated events - the successes and failures on the battlefield - determine whether the mass public will support military excursions. The public supports war, the story goes, if the benefits of action outweigh the costs of conflict. Other scholars contend that the balance of elite discourse influences public support for war. I draw upon survey evidence from World War II and the current war in Iraq to come to a common conclusion regarding public (...) support for international interventions. I find little evidence that citizens make complex cost/benefit calculations when evaluating military action. Instead, I find that patterns of elite conflict shape opinion concerning war. When political elites disagree as to the wisdom of intervention, the public divides as well. But when elites come to a common interpretation of a political reality, the public gives them great latitude to wage war. (shrink)