In Search of Rational Voters

In the end, though, the practice of closing ranks in defense of the electorate is far more than a case of journalistic vanity or political self-protection. The American democratic system is rooted in the assumption of sensible political choices made by reasonable and fair-minded citizens. Challenge this assumption, and many, if not most, of the logical pillars of the system begin to show serious cracks. I understand all this, and I don't feel any more comfortable than most writers do blaming "the people" for the flaws in American government.

But in the closing weeks of a tumultuous national election year, it's worth spending a bit of time trying to figure out what it means to say that "the voters are not fools." When Key wrote those words, he was not claiming that the typical American was deeply familiar with candidates for a wide range of offices and well versed on the positions each candidate espoused.  He couldn't claim that, because by the 1960s it had been documented in study after study that the vast majority of voters go to the polls with only the haziest of notions about what the candidates plan to do, and that the further down the ballot one went, the less likely they were to know much of anything.

What Key meant was that voters cast rational votes "retrospectively"—that is, they make judgments about how well things seem to be going for them, and then either reward or punish the party in power based on their conclusions. So when Ronald Reagan asked his audience in the 1980 presidential debates whether they were better off under President Jimmy Carter than they had been four years earlier, he was asking for a judgment that Key would have considered entirely proper and appropriate to democratic politics. Most people decided they were worse off, and Carter lost the election.

In a similar way, Popkin doesn't base his theory of the "reasoning voter" on claims that we go to the polls primed with information about the choices on the ballot. He says we practice "low-information rationality," piecing together scraps of knowledge gleaned from personal experience, historical events, media coverage and other sources to pull the lever based on what amounts to gut reasoning. But he believes that it works most of the time.

An electorate, in other words, is something like a jury. It's a panel of ordinary people, limited in their knowledge and training, who combine to produce a judgment of greater wisdom than any of them could make alone. The crowd, in some mysterious way, is wiser than the individual. The average voter may be no genius, but the electorate as a group is no fool. So the theory goes. It is a theory that allows candidates, scholars and journalists to get through the day without having to question the fundamental tenets of American government.

I don't contend that the theory is groundless. There is something in the wisdom of crowds. What seems to me inescapable is that the past few years have not been kind to those who accept the rational voter idea as an article of faith.