Amazing paper. Thanks so much for contributing this work. I work in civic tech and am very focused on trying to improve the gov system we have through technology. Are there any representatives you have seen recently that are doing a particularly good job gauging the pulse of their constituents? AND/OR is there an ideal scenario you have imagined that is left out of the paper?
As an aside, as someone who has started one company in the space of citizen engagement and been in product exec roles at two others, I wonder whether or not rep engagement with constituents is a problem that can be solved with technology or if it is cultural in nature and requires more individual leadership to right the ship. I have met with a large number of reps from city, state and federal levels in order to build an understanding of the strategic problems that are top of mind for them. I have found (generally) that much more effort is paid in "dealing" with inbound messages and heading off harsh judgement in the court of public opinion than procuring good data.
TL;DR tech is important but far from a panacea and something reps don't really think about.
There's two assumptions many in the civic tech space seem to share that I don't think are so obvious (not that I think they are wrong, just that I think they're not obvious):
A1: The world would be better if politicians paid more attention to public opinion or knew more about it. I don't think this is so clear. Citizens support many policies not in their interest, don't know everything that experts do, etc. Most democracies reflect a tradeoff between popular control on the one hand and expert judgment / elite control on the other. I don't think either extreme is the best, and don't know where we are on that continuum relative to the ideal. But for what it's worth, my sense is that citizens actually understand this to some extent and ofter defer to legislators' judgments: http://stanford.edu/~dbroock/papers/broockman_butler_legisla...
A2: In order to increase citizen engagement, we should focus on lowering the cost of acquiring information about politics, the cost of participation, or the cost of providing information to representatives. I think this misses the real challenge: increasing people's motivation to participate and the benefits to participation. It's never been easier to participate in myriad ways -- the cost is epsilon. But if people see the benefits as zero, which many seem to, they still won't engage. I don't think the cost side of the equation is where the action is.
I think it would be fascinating to look at the dynamic of how young people interact with an increasingly-old government today. Personally I don't know too many people who believe in the system/even care enough to show up to public meetings, write their representatives, or even vote for that matter. Have these dynamics have changed over the years?
Is your research group working on anything in this vein?
As one of those new fangled 'young people' I'd like to chime in here and say the problem lies with the reverse. Politicians are not too enthusiastic about engaging with young people, be it due to our more progressive stance on social issues, generally better understanding of the technologies they find so frightening, or just because most politicians are lying, cheating, manipulative people who took advantage of a good system then ruined it for future generations. I can only speak of Australian politics but in my case I've had representatives refuse meetings, not write back or totally ignore the sentiments of the younger population in favour of maintaining their existing support base. Its rather annoying.
Thanks for the paper, and for answering questions. There are a couple of hypotheses I wonder about:
1) Politicians don't care about constituent's current opinions, but about their future response to actions the politican might undertake. For example, recent articles indicate widespread support in the U.S. for gun control, but a politician might anticipate: If I support a gun control measure then the NRA will run ads in my district; that will change many opinions [1], spread other negative stories about me, and galvanize my opponents both in public discussion and when getting voters to the polls.
2) The large differences between different subgroups explain the difference: All constituents, all voters, primary voters, and the few who vote in state legislative elections. (I challenge HN readers to name your state representatives without looking them up.)
If these issues are covered in the paper, I apologize; I read what I could now and searched the paper for related terms, but won't have time to finish reading until much later.
----
[1] I don't know that ads have this effect. My impression is that most people's opinions are weakly held and that they follow the herd on most issues (whichever herd they feel they belong to).
On (1), the mental model I have is more like an understanding of who the super-intense supporters are. 90% of people might say they support background checks for gun purchases, but it's the 10% who support it who are voting on the basis of that issue, in part due to organizations like the NRA. I think our findings are consistent with that, in the sense that politicians seem to believe they don't need to learn what public opinion is in order to get re-elected; they can focus on other forms of information-gathering.
On (2), I suspect there is something there, but it's hard to make sense of Democrats from that angle, as Democratic primary voters, for example, are more liberal than the average person, yet Democratic politicians don't seem to see their districts as more liberal than they are. My guess is the key group is something more like "the people who choose to write in and go to meetings."
Conservativism is born of ambiguity intolerance. One of the defining characteristics of ambiguity intolerance is a need for certainty.
As for why liberals expect to be ignored? I'd reckon that has more to do with history and a general sense of malaise and pessimism toward our intractable situation.
The malaise and pessimism might be what makes it intractable. Liberals in the prior generation made sweeping changes, in women's and minority rights, for example.
politicians also show systematic misperceptions, with liberal politicians and conservative politicians both overestimating support for conservative policy positions,
This might be an off topic question, but how do the results change (if at all) when accounting for the age of the people involved?
That is, how do politicians do at predicting the opinions of people +/- 5 years of their own age (which may be different than the total for the district)?
I've always been curious if politicians are just "behind the times" (due to an average age higher than the average age of constituents), leading to systemically conservative views.
Their age doesn't predict their accuracy. With that said, I like the idea of asking how they think various age groups think. Maybe they think their district is not as young as it is, maybe they think younger voters are more similar to older voters than they are, or maybe both.
I was actually asking about the case where the demographic they're predicting the opinion of is age restricted -- are they good at predicting the views of a particular age range, even if they're not good at predicting the overall opinion?
My question was just about restricting the age to be near theirs.
>Interestingly, the reason we uncover such striking misperceptions does not appear to be that politicians are reluctant to admit a belief that public opinion is not on their side – many do. Rather, it seems that the reality of where the public stands on these issues has such a weak influence on politicians’ perceptions of public opinion that two candidates coming to judgments about the same constituents largely fail to have much more in common than would two candidates picked entirely at random
Basically, it is not that politicians intentionally mis-believe what their constituents support (willful ignorance, etc), the problem is that politicians are a poor representation of their constituents in general.
I've long maintained congress would be much more representative if eligible citizens were randomly selected for 1 congressional term, like jurors are in juries.
I'm not too well educated on their gov'ts, but how effective was it? Any signs or indicators that it worked out for the better?
Call me intolerant or ignorant, but I personally fear seeing what the general populus would try to get passed in America if such a system were established. Perhaps a naive` worry, but a worry nonetheless.
Disclaimer, my knowledge on this subject consists of an undergraduate course on world history.
It worked relatively well. The role of government was considerably smaller than it is today. Also, during their term, serving on the council was a citizens full time job [0]. Additionally, their were still career politicians who advised the council; they just did not get a vote. Notably, among the politicians were generals, who were elected and did not have term limits. In addition to being influential with military and foreign policy, they tended to be influential for domestic matters as well.
[0] Rather, It was their full-time job for one month out of their one year term. For the rest of their term, they attended monthly meetings.
> I've long maintained congress would be much more representative if eligible citizens were randomly selected for 1 congressional term, like jurors are in juries.
And like jurors in juries, wouldn't we then be governed by people not smart enough to get out of their congressional term?
> > I've long maintained congress would be much more representative if eligible citizens were randomly selected for 1 congressional term, like jurors are in juries.
> And like jurors in juries, wouldn't we then be governed by people not smart enough to get out of their congressional term?
Now, I think that a by-lot Congress is a really bad idea for a variety of reasons, but that's a moderately stupid argument when it comes to juries (given that it assumes that everyone is actively seeking to avoid jury service, so the only people who actual serve are those who fail), and its even stupider applied to Congress -- its relatively common for people to want to have a say in the government of their country (to the point where already wealthy people will sometimes spend many times the salary a member of Congress earns per term on a campaign out of their own money), and shifting from an elected to a by-lot Congress would reduce the political power of voters as voters, increasing the delta represented by serving in Congress.
And that's even before considering that members of Congress are paid substantially more than most workers; changing nothing besides the selection method would make being selected for Congress not much different than winning the lottery for most citizens -- only those who are both already wealthy and politically disinterested would have rational, self-interested reason to avoid service.
> that's a moderately stupid argument when it comes to juries (given that it assumes that everyone is actively seeking to avoid jury service, so the only people who actual serve are those who fail)
Overall, the problem is that the system bends to accommodate the judges and lawyers, who get paid very well to be there, and abuses the jurors, who do not. Why do I have get up at 6:00 AM just to sit around for three days while you idiots figure out if you need me or not? This isn't rocket science, and you all already have scheduled dockets.
The bigger problem with jury selection is that everything is trying to screen out people who bring in outside knowledge. This actively screens for the ignorant. I don't know if this is a good or bad thing, though. I suspect that it's a good thing overall as the number of times you get someone smart who recognizes a fault is probably far exceeded by the ignorant who think they know something false.
"Why do I have get up at 6:00 AM just to sit around for three days while you idiots figure out if you need me or not?"
My wife was called for jury duty a couple years back. It was a drunk driving case. During the preceding 12 months, she'd lost family in one accident involving a drunk driver, and a close friend of hers was hit (thankfully, not terribly injured) by a drunk driver in a separate accident. There was no way they were going to let her on that jury - they were dismissing people for far less. And she had to go back three days.
Neither she nor I try to get out of jury duty - we view it as important and want to do our part - but yeah it can get abusive in pretty stupid ways.
Agree that it's a pretty naive argument. There's probably a lot more to be said about how it would give even more influence to lobbyists and staffers that would stick around in DC for years and be far more knowledgeable about how to get things done.
Easy potential fix: make the pay reasonably attractive (say 150% of median wage), and allow people to buy themselves out of it by paying their replacement's salary (and if the first 100 people picked all opt out to pay, then that's about 99x pure government profit).
This is my personal favorite interpretation of our results -- they could know if they cared to know, and so the fact that they don't know suggests that they don't care. With that said, this paper is at odds with that: https://www3.nd.edu/~dnickers/files/papers/Butler_Nickerson....
>I've long maintained congress would be much more representative if eligible citizens were randomly selected for 1 congressional term, like jurors are in juries.
I think electing unqualified, easily-persuaded people into office is not a good idea. Jurors are the weakest part of our judicial system -- why do we pay professionals to convince unpaid non-professionals about the law? Wouldn't it be more efficient to just pay professionals to argue about it?
Step 1 - From the district lists randomly select a small number of electors.
Step 2 - Sequester the electors.
Step 3 - The candidates present their proposals, background, arguments, counter arguments.
Step 4 - Electors listen, meditate and cast a secret vote.
Step 5 - Eliminate the candidate with the lowest number of votes.
Step 6 - Repeat from Step 3 until one candidate has more than 51%.
Step 7 - Dismiss the electors.
Some advantages:
- No need for expensive campaigns. Takes money out of politics.
- The "Trial" can be televised. People would get involved on what is going on.
- It reduces the need for tactical voting. Electors can vote for their first-choice candidate without fear of wasting their vote.
- Lesser-known candidates would have better odds of winning.
Slightly better, and works well in practice[0],
replace step 6 with "Repeat from step 3 until one candidate has more than 2/3 the votes, and possibly chage step 5 to cut candidate list down more quickly (imagine how long it would take to eliminate 1 at a time with 100 candidates). If after 2 candidates remain neither gets more than 2/3 the vote, flip a coin.
"both liberals and conservatives tend to overestimate how conservative their constituents are, conservatives’ perceptions in this regard are exceptionally strong – conservative politicians typically overestimate the conservatism of their constituencies by more than 20 percentage points on these issues. This difference is so large that nearly half of conservative politicians appear to believe that they represent a district that is as or more conservative on these issues than are the most conservative districts in the entire country."
I heard a quote years ago that "reality has a liberal bias." Based on the data...that appears true.
It's kind of fascinating that the liberal assessments seem to reflect reality much more closely.
Why?
Conservative politicians don't have a good reason to be wrong. In fact, it's quite the opposite, the better at estimating who your constituents you are, the more likely you are to be reelected.
I'd guess probably error bias. As a conservative, if you overestimate the conservatism of your district, you're not likely to lose many votes (especially in a gerrymandered district). Whereas, if you overestimate the liberalism of your districts, the conservative element will punish you horribly.
Whereas, as a liberal, you have to be more in tune to a broad spectrum of issues in both directions or a challenger can carve off a chunk of your votes.
I think you make an interesting claim in your comment - that right wing voters are more likely than left wing voters to vote against (ie, punish) someone. I agree with you, since in my experience right wingers are more reactionary than left wingers, but I wonder if there's any data on that.
It's not that right-wingers are innately more reactive than left-wing voters. It's that left-wing voters are only now getting genuinely angry about being told, for the past four decades, to just shut up and take whatever the Establishment gives us.
Consider the current two Presidential primaries. Among the Republican Party, there's a contest to see who's the most conservative, and candidates are competing to come up with a platform that appeals to the party base. Among the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton is presumed to be the obvious, inevitable, entitled winner, and so there's a deliberate attempt to suppress actual competition for the nomination, most especially competition from the insurgent left-populist Bernie Sanders.
I do think that right wing voters are more reactive. They tend to see/hear something, and that something becomes the most important thing. That's why Rep. McCarthy's statement on the Benghazi hearing resulted in him losing his opportunity to become speaker. If that had happened 6 months ago, it wouldn't have been a problem because the right wingers would have moved on to something else.
Left wing voters more often are in it for the long haul. They cringe when someone says something stupid, but they don't react with pitchforks and torches.
That's why there's never been a left wing Rush. It just doesn't work.
This paper appears to use the term conservative to mean right wing. That's incorrect. You can be left wing and be a conservative; in fact, it's rather common in American today.
Looking the three perception statements on page 11, agreement means you agree to some rather radical change. A true conservative would disagree with all three questions due to that. Compared to the true conservative, a conservative right winger would be more likely to agree with the last, and a conservative left winger would be more likely to agree with the first two; however, they might not support any of them because they might be too radical. For example, I know many left wingers that support health care reform but don't support socialized medicine, so they'd likely disagree with "Implement a universal healthcare program to guarantee coverage to all Americans, regardless of income".
That leads to issues with the results. If a conservative left winger says no to the first two, s/he appears more right wing than s/he is.
On the other hand, if they are using conservative correctly, then it appears they are using liberal incorrectly. Liberal isn't the opposite of conservative. Radical is the opposite of conservative. There are radical right wingers that support same sex marriage who come to that idea from libertarianism.
The charts on specific questions are great, because they remove the terminology issue I'm raising, but when they identify the politician as liberal or conservative, it comes right back.
I'm sure the authors know this stuff better than I do, so I suspect I'm misunderstanding their work.
I know one of the authors posted here; I'd appreciate if he'd or someone else could clarify what I've got wrong.
46 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 87.9 ms ] threadFWIW, we have data from 2014 across many more issues and the basic story is the same. Haven't finished writing that up.
As an aside, as someone who has started one company in the space of citizen engagement and been in product exec roles at two others, I wonder whether or not rep engagement with constituents is a problem that can be solved with technology or if it is cultural in nature and requires more individual leadership to right the ship. I have met with a large number of reps from city, state and federal levels in order to build an understanding of the strategic problems that are top of mind for them. I have found (generally) that much more effort is paid in "dealing" with inbound messages and heading off harsh judgement in the court of public opinion than procuring good data.
TL;DR tech is important but far from a panacea and something reps don't really think about.
A1: The world would be better if politicians paid more attention to public opinion or knew more about it. I don't think this is so clear. Citizens support many policies not in their interest, don't know everything that experts do, etc. Most democracies reflect a tradeoff between popular control on the one hand and expert judgment / elite control on the other. I don't think either extreme is the best, and don't know where we are on that continuum relative to the ideal. But for what it's worth, my sense is that citizens actually understand this to some extent and ofter defer to legislators' judgments: http://stanford.edu/~dbroock/papers/broockman_butler_legisla...
A2: In order to increase citizen engagement, we should focus on lowering the cost of acquiring information about politics, the cost of participation, or the cost of providing information to representatives. I think this misses the real challenge: increasing people's motivation to participate and the benefits to participation. It's never been easier to participate in myriad ways -- the cost is epsilon. But if people see the benefits as zero, which many seem to, they still won't engage. I don't think the cost side of the equation is where the action is.
So even if the populace is apathetic, at least they can't be taken advantaged of.
Is your research group working on anything in this vein?
Interesting. Is government, by which I assume you mean elected officials, really aging?
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...
1) Politicians don't care about constituent's current opinions, but about their future response to actions the politican might undertake. For example, recent articles indicate widespread support in the U.S. for gun control, but a politician might anticipate: If I support a gun control measure then the NRA will run ads in my district; that will change many opinions [1], spread other negative stories about me, and galvanize my opponents both in public discussion and when getting voters to the polls.
2) The large differences between different subgroups explain the difference: All constituents, all voters, primary voters, and the few who vote in state legislative elections. (I challenge HN readers to name your state representatives without looking them up.)
If these issues are covered in the paper, I apologize; I read what I could now and searched the paper for related terms, but won't have time to finish reading until much later.
----
[1] I don't know that ads have this effect. My impression is that most people's opinions are weakly held and that they follow the herd on most issues (whichever herd they feel they belong to).
On (1), the mental model I have is more like an understanding of who the super-intense supporters are. 90% of people might say they support background checks for gun purchases, but it's the 10% who support it who are voting on the basis of that issue, in part due to organizations like the NRA. I think our findings are consistent with that, in the sense that politicians seem to believe they don't need to learn what public opinion is in order to get re-elected; they can focus on other forms of information-gathering.
On (2), I suspect there is something there, but it's hard to make sense of Democrats from that angle, as Democratic primary voters, for example, are more liberal than the average person, yet Democratic politicians don't seem to see their districts as more liberal than they are. My guess is the key group is something more like "the people who choose to write in and go to meetings."
Thanks for your insights, and for taking the time to answer!
I laugh my ass off because God's gonna fuck you so hard.
As for why liberals expect to be ignored? I'd reckon that has more to do with history and a general sense of malaise and pessimism toward our intractable situation.
I'd say social conservatism is more rooted in apprehension of rushing headlong into things than ambiguity intolerance.
politicians also show systematic misperceptions, with liberal politicians and conservative politicians both overestimating support for conservative policy positions,
That is, how do politicians do at predicting the opinions of people +/- 5 years of their own age (which may be different than the total for the district)?
I've always been curious if politicians are just "behind the times" (due to an average age higher than the average age of constituents), leading to systemically conservative views.
I was actually asking about the case where the demographic they're predicting the opinion of is age restricted -- are they good at predicting the views of a particular age range, even if they're not good at predicting the overall opinion?
My question was just about restricting the age to be near theirs.
>Interestingly, the reason we uncover such striking misperceptions does not appear to be that politicians are reluctant to admit a belief that public opinion is not on their side – many do. Rather, it seems that the reality of where the public stands on these issues has such a weak influence on politicians’ perceptions of public opinion that two candidates coming to judgments about the same constituents largely fail to have much more in common than would two candidates picked entirely at random
Basically, it is not that politicians intentionally mis-believe what their constituents support (willful ignorance, etc), the problem is that politicians are a poor representation of their constituents in general.
I've long maintained congress would be much more representative if eligible citizens were randomly selected for 1 congressional term, like jurors are in juries.
This is the way government worked in ancient Greece (or rather, Athens, but other Greece city-states copied the model).
Call me intolerant or ignorant, but I personally fear seeing what the general populus would try to get passed in America if such a system were established. Perhaps a naive` worry, but a worry nonetheless.
It worked relatively well. The role of government was considerably smaller than it is today. Also, during their term, serving on the council was a citizens full time job [0]. Additionally, their were still career politicians who advised the council; they just did not get a vote. Notably, among the politicians were generals, who were elected and did not have term limits. In addition to being influential with military and foreign policy, they tended to be influential for domestic matters as well.
[0] Rather, It was their full-time job for one month out of their one year term. For the rest of their term, they attended monthly meetings.
And like jurors in juries, wouldn't we then be governed by people not smart enough to get out of their congressional term?
> And like jurors in juries, wouldn't we then be governed by people not smart enough to get out of their congressional term?
Now, I think that a by-lot Congress is a really bad idea for a variety of reasons, but that's a moderately stupid argument when it comes to juries (given that it assumes that everyone is actively seeking to avoid jury service, so the only people who actual serve are those who fail), and its even stupider applied to Congress -- its relatively common for people to want to have a say in the government of their country (to the point where already wealthy people will sometimes spend many times the salary a member of Congress earns per term on a campaign out of their own money), and shifting from an elected to a by-lot Congress would reduce the political power of voters as voters, increasing the delta represented by serving in Congress.
And that's even before considering that members of Congress are paid substantially more than most workers; changing nothing besides the selection method would make being selected for Congress not much different than winning the lottery for most citizens -- only those who are both already wealthy and politically disinterested would have rational, self-interested reason to avoid service.
Overall, the problem is that the system bends to accommodate the judges and lawyers, who get paid very well to be there, and abuses the jurors, who do not. Why do I have get up at 6:00 AM just to sit around for three days while you idiots figure out if you need me or not? This isn't rocket science, and you all already have scheduled dockets.
The bigger problem with jury selection is that everything is trying to screen out people who bring in outside knowledge. This actively screens for the ignorant. I don't know if this is a good or bad thing, though. I suspect that it's a good thing overall as the number of times you get someone smart who recognizes a fault is probably far exceeded by the ignorant who think they know something false.
My wife was called for jury duty a couple years back. It was a drunk driving case. During the preceding 12 months, she'd lost family in one accident involving a drunk driver, and a close friend of hers was hit (thankfully, not terribly injured) by a drunk driver in a separate accident. There was no way they were going to let her on that jury - they were dismissing people for far less. And she had to go back three days.
Neither she nor I try to get out of jury duty - we view it as important and want to do our part - but yeah it can get abusive in pretty stupid ways.
Most don't serve us anymore- they serve the people that put them there.
I think electing unqualified, easily-persuaded people into office is not a good idea. Jurors are the weakest part of our judicial system -- why do we pay professionals to convince unpaid non-professionals about the law? Wouldn't it be more efficient to just pay professionals to argue about it?
[0] Search "AA 3d Legacy Election"
I heard a quote years ago that "reality has a liberal bias." Based on the data...that appears true.
Why?
Conservative politicians don't have a good reason to be wrong. In fact, it's quite the opposite, the better at estimating who your constituents you are, the more likely you are to be reelected.
I'd guess probably error bias. As a conservative, if you overestimate the conservatism of your district, you're not likely to lose many votes (especially in a gerrymandered district). Whereas, if you overestimate the liberalism of your districts, the conservative element will punish you horribly.
Whereas, as a liberal, you have to be more in tune to a broad spectrum of issues in both directions or a challenger can carve off a chunk of your votes.
Consider the current two Presidential primaries. Among the Republican Party, there's a contest to see who's the most conservative, and candidates are competing to come up with a platform that appeals to the party base. Among the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton is presumed to be the obvious, inevitable, entitled winner, and so there's a deliberate attempt to suppress actual competition for the nomination, most especially competition from the insurgent left-populist Bernie Sanders.
Left wing voters more often are in it for the long haul. They cringe when someone says something stupid, but they don't react with pitchforks and torches.
That's why there's never been a left wing Rush. It just doesn't work.
Looking the three perception statements on page 11, agreement means you agree to some rather radical change. A true conservative would disagree with all three questions due to that. Compared to the true conservative, a conservative right winger would be more likely to agree with the last, and a conservative left winger would be more likely to agree with the first two; however, they might not support any of them because they might be too radical. For example, I know many left wingers that support health care reform but don't support socialized medicine, so they'd likely disagree with "Implement a universal healthcare program to guarantee coverage to all Americans, regardless of income".
That leads to issues with the results. If a conservative left winger says no to the first two, s/he appears more right wing than s/he is.
On the other hand, if they are using conservative correctly, then it appears they are using liberal incorrectly. Liberal isn't the opposite of conservative. Radical is the opposite of conservative. There are radical right wingers that support same sex marriage who come to that idea from libertarianism.
The charts on specific questions are great, because they remove the terminology issue I'm raising, but when they identify the politician as liberal or conservative, it comes right back.
I'm sure the authors know this stuff better than I do, so I suspect I'm misunderstanding their work.
I know one of the authors posted here; I'd appreciate if he'd or someone else could clarify what I've got wrong.