Just noticed this interesting thread about an interesting paper. But I have to say, its not the voters that are stupid but what's stupid is anyone who thinks that this shark incident implies that any voter blamed the president for the shark attacks or even his response to them. The way I read it, the shark attacks created an atmosphere of fear, pessimism and economic hardship in the afflicted towns and those feelings had an impact on the thinking of a small portion (at most, 10%) of the voters there. Why is that surprising, or particularly distressing, or imply that "voters understand little beyond their own and their community's pain and pleasure"?
Choosing a presidential candidate is not like solving a math problem -- it is an open-ended inquiry. And its naive that thinks that anyone but a tiny minority (of sociopaths perhaps) makes a choice like that based solely on their individual economic self-interest -- voting is a symbolic act.
And no matter how analytical, learned, dispassionate, and introspective you are, your feelings -- how optimistic or pessmistic you're feeling, how angry you are, etc. -- are going to affect a personal inquiry like this.
> >The romantic vision of thoughtful democratic participation in the common
> >life is largely mythical. Democracy must be defended some other way,
> >if it is to be defended at all.
> >
> >Our work also strikes a blow at the customary fallback position for
> >contemporary defenders of democracy, namely the view that the voters
> >may know very little, but they can recognize good and bad government
> >performances when they see them. Hence they can choose
> >retrospectively in a defensible way. In most recent scholarly
> >accounts, retrospection is a natural and rational feature of
> >democratic politics. In our view it is natural but not so obviously
> >rational. Voters operating on the basis of a valid, detailed
> >understanding of cause and effect in the realm of public policy
> >could reward good performance while ridding themselves of leaders
> >who are malevolent or incompetent. But real voters often have only a
> >vague, more or less primitive understanding of the connections (if
> >any) between incumbent politicians' actions and their own pain or
> >pleasure. As a result, rational retrospective voting is harder than
> >it seems, and blind retrospection sometimes produces consistently
> >misguided patterns of electoral rewards and punishments.
In general I don't disagree much with this conclusion except that I would dare say that also *rational* "retrospection sometimes produces consistently misguided patterns of electoral rewards and punishments." The bottom line is that democracy works because people in pain have an opportunity to exert some political power, they may do that unwisely but nonetheless it forces politicians to respond to their pain.
-- adam
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