Irrational Voters

Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore, has an op-ed in today's Times on the psychology of voters. I'm a big fan of Schwartz - The Paradox of Choice is a fantastic book, and will explain why those expensive jeans you're wearing are less satisfying than your old pair of Levis - but I'm not convinced by his editorial:

When you go into the voting booth, you're trying to decide whom to accept or whom to reject. Are you judging who the good candidate is or who the less bad candidate is?

The effort by each side to coat the opposition in slime has made many of us cynical, giving us the sense that our task is to reject the worst, not select the best. Nobody's any good, we think, but some are worse than others. Let's keep those candidates out of office. Our job becomes one of denying, not awarding, office.

What that means is that if you want to win an election, you need to find candidates like Parent A, who give us no reason to say no, rather than Parent B, who present a complex set of features, some attractive and some problematic.

The end result, Schwartz argues, is that politicians become increasingly bland and boring. We get technocrats, not firebrands. If Schwartz is right, then our democracy is suffering from too many political "ciphers" who are unwilling to take a stand on anything, lest they alienate someone else.

I certainly wish Schwartz was right. But I think our democracy is suffering from the exact opposite syndrome. Mr. Bland isn't going to Washington. Instead, we have two polarized extremes both trying to drum up support from their base. It's the old Rove magic trick, and it seems to work. Why? Because voters don't like Mr. Bland. They like Mr. Gay Marriage. They like politicans that push hot-button issues, and get them viscerally excited. Just look at the most successful politicians in recent history. Pols like Hillary and Bush succeed because they are divisive, because they are the anti-bland candidates.

Why does this strategy work? I think the answer can be found in an old Louis Menand article:

Only around ten per cent of the public has what can be called, even generously, a political belief system. He named these people "ideologues," by which he meant not that they are fanatics but that they have a reasonable grasp of "what goes with what"--of how a set of opinions adds up to a coherent political philosophy. Non-ideologues may use terms like "liberal" and "conservative," but Converse thought that they basically don't know what they're talking about, and that their beliefs are characterized by what he termed a lack of "constraint": they can't see how one opinion (that taxes should be lower, for example) logically ought to rule out other opinions (such as the belief that there should be more government programs). About forty-two per cent of voters, according to Converse's interpretation of surveys of the 1956 electorate, vote on the basis not of ideology but of perceived self-interest. The rest form political preferences either from their sense of whether times are good or bad (about twenty-five per cent) or from factors that have no discernible "issue content" whatever. Converse put twenty-two per cent of the electorate in this last category. In other words, about twice as many people have no political views as have a coherent political belief system.

But if most voters don't have a coherent set of beliefs, then how do they decide who to vote for? Menand argues that our votes reflect our social identity. We vote for the candidate who seems most like us. This also means that pols can win by demonstrating that their opponent is not like us (i.e. John Kerry is a windsurfing elitist).

Man may not be a political animal, but he is certainly a social animal. Voters do respond to the cues of commentators and campaigners, but only when they can match those cues up with the buzz of their own social group. Individual voters are not rational calculators of self-interest (nobody truly is), and may not be very consistent users of heuristic shortcuts, either. But they are not just random particles bouncing off the walls of the voting booth. Voters go into the booth carrying the imprint of the hopes and fears, the prejudices and assumptions of their family, their friends, and their neighbors. For most people, voting may be more meaningful and more understandable as a social act than as a political act.

As usual, Menand says it better than I ever could.