Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is an excellent book, but a couple of caveats are probably warranted. The main one is that despite its down-to-earth title, this isn’t really a book for general readers. The authors (hereafter A&B) mention in their preface that they hope the book will be useful for “colleagues and students” — present and future professional political scientists — and that is the audience who will benefit most from reading it. Although the book isn’t equation-heavy, its expository passages are nonetheless very dense in discussing fine points of quantitative social science techniques. Despite not being a political scientist, I do have a pretty decent appetite for quantitative arguments — yet even I found myself rushing through some passages. An even stronger indicator that the book is directed to experts, though, is that the first big target of the argument, the so-called “folk theory” of popular sovereignty, is something whose usual embodiment is so stupendously implausible on its face that only professional training in rational choice theory could make it seem formidable. Broadly speaking, the folk theory is that elections are based on “issue voting,” i.e., they can “reveal” the “preferences” — code words revealing the influence of neoclassical economics — of a majority of voters on a set of issues. Its usual folkloric form among the tribe of political scientists is something called the “spatial model” (@24-25). This involves a belief in a one-dimensional political spectrum in which feasible policies are arrayed from left to right, and in which each political party is represented by a platform reflecting the policy it will enact if elected. (How platforms are reduced to a one-dimensional policies isn’t explained in the book, but then again A&B aren’t defenders of this theory.) Each voter is represented by an “ideal point” along the dimension, reflecting the policy she or he prefers to all others. Individual voters then try to “maximize their ideological satisfaction with the election outcome” by voting for the party closest to them on the ideological dimension. Later versions of the theory add more dimensions, but retain the assumption of an aggregative rational maximization process. A&B blow up this theory with evidence that most voters are woefully ignorant about issues and about parties’ stances on them. While most of the book focuses on the US, some attention is also paid to major European countries, and it’s in that context that A&E offer the factoid that depressed me most in the book: half of German voters couldn’t tell whether the party “Die Linke” was on the political right or left. (@35; hint: the party’s name means “The Left.” In German.) Rather than choosing a party to support based on their individual point of view, it seems more that voters decide what party or candidate they want to support and then adopt his, her or its views as their own: as A&B put it, persuasion plays a bigger role than policy-oriented evaluation. The “folk theory” is dispatched quite early in the book. A long train of other victims follow, including such notions as that political primaries take power from politicians and give it to the people; that initiatives and referenda give voice to the wisdom of crowds; that elections give voters the power to evaluate politicians’ performance retrospectively; that voters favor Presidential candidates who will improve the economy; and that a voter’s ideological self-knowledge precedes her or his choice of which party to support. Each of A&B’s arguments is supported by statistical data, including election returns, economic statistics, and survey data. Here’s another caveat, though: some of A&B’s assertions can’t be understood without a great deal of quantitative sophistication — and sometimes even sophistication won’t lead the reader to the correct understanding. The example I have in mind is the assertion that voters respond more to changes in real disposible income per capita (RDIpc) than to GDP per capita: a higher RDIpc will mean a higher probability of a vote swing favoring an incumbent President (e.g. @184). I was skeptical about this for a couple of reasons. First, A&B also say that voters can’t “respond” to something they can’t first “discern” (@164) —- and you have to go out of your way to find RDI statistics, while GDP is constantly in the news. Second, if people didn’t respond to RDIpc by reading about it, then the only other plausible way was if they felt it in their own wallets. But RDIpc is a mean (average) quantity, so it can go up even though most peoples’ income stays flat or declines. Intuitively I figured that at least a majority of people would have to feel a higher income in their wallet in order to have an effect on an election — and that this was very unlikely for most elections in the past 30 years, since US median income has been static or declining in most of that period. So I wrote to the authors about this issue. Each of them showed me I was wrong - but each in a different way. The first author who responded claimed he wasn’t the expert on the issue, but showed me with a very simple example that even if 1/3 of the voters don’t have any increase in RDI, 1/3 experience a -3% change in RDI, and 1/3 experience a +6% increase, then based on A&B’s findings you would still expect +2% vote swing favoring the incumbent. (This still assumes that the income increase is shared fairly evenly within that top 1/3, but at least it shows that my knee-jerk majority assumption was fallacious.) The second author got back from a business trip a few days later and told me that actually an improved RDIpc could influence the voter even if it *never* hit her own wallet: a couple of studies have found that “voters, regardless of their own income levels, respond much more to income gains at the top of the distribution (95th percentile) than to income gains for their own income class,” suggesting that “the mechanism by which aggregate income gains get translated into increases in political support is not a simple ‘pocketbook’ response, but a more complicated sociological phenomenon.” That’s fascinating and a little scary -- will more people vote to reelect Pres. Trump or Clinton if he or she makes the rich get richer? -- but not what a typical reader would be able to divine from the book. (BTW, both authors were incredibly nice in their responses to my questions. But I suspect they’d prefer that only a very small fraction of their thousands of readers have the chutzpah to pepper them with questions as I did. So I hope they put both explanations into a subsequent edition.) A key claim of the book is that partisanship isn’t driven by ideology, much less by issues or retrospective performance evaluation. Rather, party choice is strongly influenced by parents’ preferences, by symbols, and especially by emotionally-grounded feelings of group identification. As much as I like to think of myself as sophisticated about issues, I have to admit that my own pattern as a US voter could be guessed pretty accurately on this basis, too (though I owe it to post-1980 figures like Elliott Abrams, Eric Cantor and Sheldon Edelstein to bringing me back more to issues and away from the ethnic solidarity that induced me once to vote for a Republican, in a 1974 Senate race). So does this mean that democracy is a waste of time? Not at all, in A&B’s view. Elections still provide “authoritative, widely accepted agreement about who should rule” (@317). In a well-functioning system, they also provide party turnover, which is good for health and stability of the society. They also provide some incentives for a ruler to tolerate opposition — though A&B point out that the notion that one can oppose incumbent rulers while still being loyal to the nation is one that only developed gradually in the US and UK during the 19th Century, and not earlier. (Japan is about 150 years behind the times, in this regard.) A&B seem to be saying that what should change, based on their observations, isn’t how democracy is valued, but how it’s studied. Group identification and power differentials need to be given more consideration. In contrast, the folk theory treats every voter as equal in power, and aggregates preferences in a Benthamite utilitarian fashion. (Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, denied that there was anything special about groups, and claimed that a community was nothing more than an aggregate of individuals.) In doing so, the folk theory “props up elite rule” (@327), because it turns a blind eye to the unequal distribution of power. Based on this new point of view, the prerequisite for a “more effective democracy” would be “a greater degree of economic and social equality” (@325) — universal suffrage isn’t sufficient. A&E are at a bit of a loss, though, to describe how to bring this about, as have been many generations of well-meaning people before them. I don’t disagree with A&B, but I came away from the book thinking how very American it is. At least from the standpoint of political philosophy (as distinguished from political science), the notion that democracy is based on struggle between more and less powerful groups of people is already common in Europe and elsewhere. Leaving aside dyed-in-the-wool Marxists, the writings of Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, Jacques Rancière, Christoph Möllers and many others make this point often; even the blurb on a French childrens’ book entitled « Les démocraties » that I picked up a few years ago notes that « la démocratie est toujours un combat ». To be fair, in a late chapter A&B do describe how US political science used to be more group-oriented before getting hijacked by the economists’ view of the world; but they leave out some modern work that continues this tradition, such as John P. McCormick’s excellent “Machiavellian Democracy” (CUP 2011). As for A&B’s linkage between democracy and truer equality of power, the liberal Italian political philosopher Norberto Bobbio anticipated them somewhat in his « Destra e sinistra » (1994) (later translated as “Left and Right” [sic], but now out of print in English): he pointed out that the key distinction between left and right is that the “pole star” of the left is greater equality. His meaning clearly is like the sort of equality of power that A&B describe — not just equality under the law, which is the sort of equality represented by the folk theory, and which Bobbio attributes to the center-right. While it would have been nice if some of these philosophers had been considered in the present book, their absence is forgivable: the book’s purpose is to convince American political scientists to stop drinking the Kool-Aid of economistic electoral theories that their profession has served up for many decades already. To an outsider, A&B make a convincing case. But will they change the minds of insiders? After all, macroeconomists stayed faithful to their theories despite the 2008 global financial crash. Expecting change from a mere book might be too ambitious a hope for realists.