The Rational Public

"The Rational Public was written by two political scientists, Ben Page and Bob Shapiro. Bob Shapiro has the office next to mine in the political science department here at Columbia. The book came out in 1992 and they found something in public opinion that my colleagues and I had already noticed in elections, which is something we call “uniform partisan swing”. I don’t know how it is in other countries, but the basic idea is that Americans are spread out on some left-right scale, and we are, of course, quite diverse in our opinions. But when there is a change in opinion it tends to move everybody together. Not always, but generally. For example, gay rights are more popular than they used to be, amongst pretty much all groups. Or attitudes about economic issues – Americans are more economically conservative and more socially liberal than they used to be. Things tend to move at a national level. Normally, when you have an election, it’s the same. Barack Obama is expected to get 4% to 5% less of the vote this election than last time. It’s roughly the same amount less in every state. Page and Shapiro looked at a whole bunch of issues and found that people were moving together. They also found that people’s attitudes were rational, they made some sense. There have been findings in public opinion literature about something called “non-attitudes”, which is that sometimes you ask people a question and you come back and ask them later and they seem to have a completely different answer. But on issues that people have thought about, people have fairly sensible views. Often people have reasonable views that are not always conveyed that well, because they contradict a larger story. For example, voters tend to be consistently willing to cut certain aspects of the budget, including the military. But cutting the military is never very popular in Congress. That’s something you don’t always hear about. Americans support the military but they don’t support such a high military budget. It’s a very impressive book. They go through every issue and it’s quantitative – they have a lot of graphs – but they look at every issue seriously on its own terms. That’s what they say. The public can be manipulated, but generally they feel that people have fairly consistent views. The ideological playing field is already laid out, so it varies. Sometimes an issue will become politicised. Take, for example, attitudes about climate change. That became very politicised – Democrats and Republicans moved in different directions. Most issues are already politicised. Once the politicisation has happened, once the issue has gone through that phase, then everybody tends to move together. You can even think about it in terms of attitudes to Obama. When he was elected, Democrats were very excited about him, and Republicans were sceptical. Independents wanted to give him a chance. Then, after some bad economic years, we have Republicans really detesting him, Independents not liking him – and Democrats not really liking him much either. The interesting thing is that a lot of Democrats say they don’t like Obama because they feel he’s not so liberal, he’s selling out, whereas a lot of Republicans don’t like Obama because they feel he’s an ideologue. I don’t buy either of those claims. What I think is happening is that fundamentally people aren’t liking Obama because they don’t think he’s performing well. They just have different storylines. The Republican storyline for someone who is a Democrat who they don’t like is that he’s an extreme liberal. The Democratic storyline for someone they don’t like is that he’s a weak sell-out. Even though it seems like they’re having opposite reactions, in reality it’s just the same reaction that’s being rationalised. It’s not that people are being irrational, it’s that the reason they give for their attitudes doesn’t always hold up. But the actual attitude is reasonable. Even if people get a lot of the facts wrong – and you can certainly do survey after survey, where you see people getting the facts wrong, and misunderstanding things – it is reasonable to say you’re less supportive of the president after some bad economic times. What’s rational in voting is not about your own personal economic interests. The main outcome of the election is not what affects you, it’s what affects the entire country. So there’s a lot of evidence that people vote for what they think is good for the country. Of course, if you’re personally unemployed and know a lot of unemployed people, then it makes sense that you will feel that unemployment is a big issue. On the other hand, if you have money in the bank, people are still somehow concerned about inflation. What you consider important problems are certainly impacted by your experiences. But, no, I don’t think it’s a matter of your direct economic interests. I would say it’s indirect. By the way, Bob Shapiro wrote an interesting paper in 2009 right after the last election where he talked about all the problems Obama would have passing healthcare reform. He was right. Everybody thought it would be easy, but he recognised from looking at the survey data, that things in 2009 with Obama were very similar to what they were in 1993 with Bill Clinton. He’s a very clear-eyed observer. He should be the guy on the TV they ask about public opinion, not all these other bozos. It’s hard to get from point A to point B. It would probably be hard to find many people who would argue that the American healthcare system is better than the French healthcare system, or even the Taiwanese healthcare system. What’s not obvious is how to get there. There are so many interests involved, so much money, so many companies. If they could somehow switch out the US system and switch in this other system – like they have in Taiwan or France – I think that would be wonderful. But it doesn’t seem that that’s considered an option. There are too many people who are doing fine from the current system. The argument made by the opponents of healthcare reform is that it would just be worse if you tried to get to that point from what we already have – we’d have the worst of both worlds. I don’t know if that’s true, but that’s my answer. I don’t have a good answer to that. People sometimes say it has to do with geographical divisions. In the United States the lower-income parts of the country tend to be more politically conservative. This happens in other countries too. The idea is that the richer places within a country – or even within a continent like Europe – tend to be more cosmopolitan, more socially liberal and lower-income places tend to be more traditional. Look at a country like Finland – it used to be one of the poorest places in Europe and now it’s one of the richest places. Being richer is associated with more of an open, liberal social attitude. Economics is more complicated. Traditionally, lower-income areas support more economic redistribution. In Europe, for example, the Greeks are lower income and more supportive of redistribution, and the Germans are in the opposite position. In the US that was traditionally the case as well. But now the lower-income areas are less supportive of redistribution. This is one of the issues we explore in our book. We don’t have a complete story. Part of it is to do with racial politics. The South changed to the Republican Party, and there were changes that happened in the South – legal changes in the 1960s, where there was redistricting – and rural parts of the South got less representation and the cities and the suburbs got more representation. People from the cities and the suburbs tend to be more conservative on economic issues, and may be a better fit for the national Republican Party. Another thing is that the Democratic Party is very reliant on various groups of rich people. Even to the extent that they’re liberal rich people, they’re not extremely liberal economically. They’re very much supportive of free markets. A Silicon Valley millionaire who supports Obama is looking for a Bill Clinton-style economic boom – he’s not looking for some sort of traditional socialist party."