This morning, Matt Stoller provided a “recap” of the Wisconsin recall election. A couple of key facts are that Walker won, and the Democrat whom he defeated, Tom Barrett, was a conservative/moderate Democrat. It works well as a transition from yesterday’s Part 1 about how the major parties work in a coordinated manner to advance elite-serving laws and policies, so here is an excerpt from Stoller’s piece:
“It should be obvious that if you foreclose on your voters, cut their pay, and legalize theft of their wealth by Wall Street oligarchs, they won’t be your voters anymore. Somehow, Democratic activists continue to operate as if policy doesn’t matter to voters, or that policy evaluation is a Chinese menu of different stuff, some of which you like and some of which you don’t, as in “Oh I’ll take a pro-choice moderate, with a bailout, and gay rights. And a Pepsi”. But that’s not how it works – voters’ lives get better, or they don’t. And under Obama, stuff has gotten worse. Obama’s economic policies have made economic inequality sharper than it was under Bush, due to his bailout of banks and concurrent elimination of the main source of wealth of most Americans, home equity. With these policy choices, Obama destroyed the Democratic Party and liberalism – under Obama’s first two years, the fastest growing demographic party label was “former Democrat.” Liberalism demands that people pay for a government, but why should anyone want to pay taxes for the terrible governance Obama has implemented?”
The Wisconsin election reminds me of the 2004 presidential election in that the Democratic candidate was simply too conservative to exploit the anger and energy behind the organized opposition to Walker’s policies, just as the Democratic Party, by selecting Kerry, repudiated the fervent anti-war sentiment that fed Dean’s popularity on the left. While that may not explain why Walker and Bush won those elections–obviously there are other factors–it does show that the Democrats, as a party, prefer conservative candidates even where a left candidate would seem to make more sense. Stoller suggests (and I would agree) that this contributes to both the electoral success of Republicans and the expansion of elitist policies.
This begs an important question: If both Democrats and Republicans have adopted “unpopular policies that make the lives of voters worse and show government to be an incompetent, corrupt handmaiden to big business” (to use Stoller’s words), why do people continue to see them as significantly different? As discussed yesterday, some voters prefer Republicans based on conservative values, but that certainly does not cover all voters, nor does it explain why electoral preferences shift back and forth between the parties on a national scale.
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Perhaps the explanation should begin with our political system. In a lecture entitled What is Democracy, Larry Diamond, author of The Spirit of Democracy and Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, said that the first “key element” of a democracy is that it creates “[a] political system for choosing and replacing the government through free and fair elections.” That is to say, democracy requires political choices. Of course, the choices must be meaningfully distinct, or else there would be no advantage in picking choice A over choices B, C, or D. This is basic stuff that we learn in grade school.
Most people would not dispute that the United States government is democratic, at least in the sense that we hold elections for many officials, including the highest office. Morever, the vast majority of Americans would undoubtedly prefer living in a democracy. Thus, whatever story we create to explain voter behavior, it should assume that most actors believe they are participating in a democracy (because it is based in fact and because people obtain an emotional benefit from holding that belief).
What would happen if a society believed that its own system of government was democratic, but each election the society also consistently faced two very similar choices? Here are a few possibilities (there may be many more).
1. Members of the society might start to view their democracy as malfunctioning, or perhaps non-existent.
2. The tension between (a) the belief in their democracy and knowledge that a democracy must offer political choices, and (b) the lack of meaningful choice might produce cognitive dissonance, and in turn an exaggeration of the differences between the available political choices to relieve the tension.
3. People, wanting to see political options that confirm their system of government as democratic, would seek variety between the candidates, exaggerating existing differences, and turning trivial distinctions into meaningful ones. This is distinguished from number 2 because it follows directly from a desire to see difference, rather than from a need to relieve internal tension.
Number 1 might lead to disengagement from our political system. It may account for the very low voter participation in the United States compared to other democracies. Even among voters, it may explain some voters’ ignorance regarding candidates and their policies. If you are choosing between red and blue m&ms, investigating the differences between them (chemical makeup of the dyes used?) will likely cost more (in terms of time and effort… and maybe money) than the value of what you learn.
Of course, many people are highly engaged in politics. If they fall under any of the above possibilities, it is probably one of the latter two, both of which produce unrealistic perceptions of the differences between candidates.
Is there evidence that people exaggerate the differences between political opponents? We have argued that people do. At the very least, one can safely say that a partisan supporter like Russ Feingold, one of President Obama’s national re-election campaign co-chairs, or Andrew Sullivan, both of whom argue that Obama’s clear superiority on foreign policy is reason to vote for him, is more likely to find to find greater disparities than actually exist than a non-partisan. These articles present strong cases for why we should expect Romney as President to behave very similarly to President Obama on foreign policy issues.
In this way, if people have unwavering faith in United States democracy, they might manufacture differences between the major parties who dominate our political system to harmonize their well-founded notions of democracy with reality.
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Another way that people manufacture distinctions between the Democrats and Republicans is by limiting themselves to only those two options. If a voter wants change, the other party provides it by default. Thus, if a voter has personally suffered under an administration, he or she may decide reject it first, and retrospectively find reasons to do so.
John Patty has found convincing evidence for a similar reaction in the “midterm effect.” The “midterm effect” describes the regularity in which the party of the President has lost seats in the House of Representatives “in all but 4 midterm elections since the civil war” (page 2). Drawing on prospect theory, Patty expounds,
“The precept of loss aversion is that individuals who feel that the policies of the government have led to outcomes exceeding their reference level are less motivated to vote in midterm elections than voters who view the current government’s policies as being responsible for outcomes falling below their reference level. As stated in the introduction, the basis for this supposition is that the President’s party is special in midterm elections insofar as it implicitly presents a national platform in the form of the current Administration’s performance. On the other hand, both parties offer national platforms in Presidential election years, making the role of an individual’s reference level more complicated. Asymmetry between presidential and midterm elections plays a role in the referendum style of explanations for the midterm effect.4 In midterm elections, it is easier for voters to construct credible images of the policy of the party controlling the president than it is for them to aggregate the possibly quite disparate platforms of the opposition party’s various candidates for congressional office.”
Under the framework described above assigning faith in American democracy to most voters, Patty’s work suggests that voters who have suffered under an administration would also more vote for the challenger’s party. The incumbent’s policies-as-actions that the voter feels has hurt his or her interests would be more concrete than the hypothetical flaws of the challenger. Combining that concrete harm with the potential for better results promised by the challenger and implicit in a “healthy democracy,” the voter may want to take his/her chances with a new leader. This is consistent with the impact of “structural factors”–such as the economy and unemployment–on elections. According to professor Brendan Nyhan, “While strategy certainly can matter on the margin in individual races, aggregate congressional and presidential election outcomes are largely driven by structural factors” (emphasis added).
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The above intends to delineate why we should be very skeptical of our own perception of politics – our perception stands a very good chance of conflicting with reality. We have to open our minds to that possibility to begin to analyze our choices clearly. The fact is, whether there is meaningful choice between the Republicans and Democrats in a presidential election for many voters is questionable. Choice is subjective, depending on an individual voter’s desires and the candidates’ views on particular issues. Given the diversity of the electorate, it should not surprise anyone that the two major parties do not represent millions of Americans. The trouble is getting Americans to see that for themselves, and then to do something about it.
UPDATE: How does Part 1 relate to Part 2? Part 1 concerns the movement of American policy toward an elitist regime. Part 2 concerns how people perceive the two major parties behind the Part 1 movement; and what differences between the parties that people perceive/manufacture that may distract them from more important realities. Both components are necessary to understand why our government is failing and why we have failed to repair it.
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