If You Voted in the Primary, You Probably Did Something Irrational
May 8 was primary election day in West Virginia and several other states. Typically, a primary election picks the candidate who will bear one party’s standard in the November general election against the other party’s candidate. The expectation is that the candidate with the more attractive qualities or the better policy views will be able to persuade a majority of voters in the general election. Perhaps this winning candidate will even be able to attract a substantial number of voters from the other party. Of course, this is the storybook version of democracy. It is based on the fiction that voters behave in a rational way, voting for a candidate only after thoughtful evaluation of the contenders. This is simply not what happens.
The Founders of our nation did not anticipate political parties and made no plans to deal with them in the Constitution. But intense party factionalism developed almost immediately. The 1800 election between John Adams (Federalist) and Thomas Jefferson (Republican) was probably the nastiest on record. While there have been some periods of relative cooperation between the parties during which we accomplished a lot at the national level, there have also been long periods when partisan behavior has been an intense, zero-sum contest designed to crush the other party. This is where we are today.
How many times have you heard someone say that West Virginians voted against their own interest when they voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump? It would certainly be easy to detail the various ways that Trump’s policies disfavor middle-income and poor citizens. Clearly, something besides a thoughtful evaluation of the pros and cons of Trump’s policies was at work before the 2016 election.
There are two main theories that seek to explain why voters behave “irrationally,” by which I mean they willingly support a policy or vote for a candidate who will actually harm their interests. The first of these is called the public choice theory. This theory is much beloved by right wing academics and believers that markets are more efficient than government at solving problems. Although the public choice theory began in the field of economics, it is now being used to explain political outcomes.
The public choice argument goes like this. Voters are “rationally ignorant” because their one vote has so little effect. What’s more, voters are lazy and evaluating candidates and issues is hard work. Not only will voters fail to do their homework before an election, they will fail to keep up with events later and hold their elected officials accountable. This creates a sort of vacuum in which elected officials operate.
Public choice proponents also argue that politicians are self-interested actors who will do whatever is required to get themselves elected and re-elected. They know that winning elections requires lots of money, which they now mostly get from special interests – the NRA, the Chamber of Commerce, and the like. It is in the self-interest of elected officials to satisfy the policy goals of these special interest groups, even though the result may actually harm you and me. The failure of Congress to pass meaningful gun legislation seems a perfect example of the public choice theory at work.
Basically, the public choice theory argues that we allow bad candidates and bad government to happen to us. But in my view, the theory is too cynical about the motivation of politicians and too dismissive of the general public’s willingness to vote in their own interest, however they perceive it. I think elected officials will mostly seek to satisfy the public’s policy desires, even when these are emotional or ill-informed. So when we elected Donald Trump, we as a nation got the candidate we wanted. In this sense, democracy worked but it produced a terrible president who is pursuing “irrational” policies. The question is why did we want this? The public choice theory doesn’t answer this question.
Many believe that the answer is lack of information. They argue that too little information — about climate change, or taxes, or the budget deficit — is what causes us to vote for demagogues and support wacky, harmful policies. If only the citizenry were more informed, the thinking goes, then there would be agreement on the way forward. This causes us to devote enormous amounts of energy and money trying to persuade each other that we, not they, have the “right” answer to our problems.
But recent research strongly suggests that the “too little information” explanation is wrong. The real explanation is hyper-partisanship and how it affects our use of information. It suggests that there are some kinds of debates where people don’t want to find the right answer, they just want to win the argument. Truth isn’t as important as advancing the success of one’s tribe, or conforming to the norms of the tribe. Providing more information to partisans just means they are better equipped to argue for their own side.
Most people are able to use reason and knowledge to sort through evidence of some kinds and reach a rational conclusion – that there are other galaxies in the universe or that antibiotics are helpful. But we suspend this ability and even use information in perverse ways when the answers could otherwise threaten our tribe or our social standing within the tribe.
In a 2014 article published in the online journal Vox, Ezra Klein describes how the social pressure to conform to the tribe’s orthodoxy would work:
Imagine what would happen to, say, Sean Hannity if he decided tomorrow that climate change was the central threat facing the planet. Initially, his viewers would think he was joking. But soon, they’d begin calling in furiously. Some would organize boycotts of his program. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of professional climate skeptics would begin angrily refuting Hannity’s new crusade. Many of Hannity’s friends in the conservative media world would back away from him, and some would seek advantage by denouncing him. Some of the politicians he respects would be furious at his betrayal of the cause. He would lose friendships, viewers, and money. He could ultimately lose his job.
Some might argue this point, but I think there are “facts,” things that are unassailably true. Facts can’t be weakened or changed by subjectivity or perception. For example, it is a fact that the Earth revolves around the sun. Propositions like this eventually become “facts” because they are repeatedly supported by observable evidence. But today questions of science have become questions of identity. The willingness of partisans to acknowledge the probity of evidence, and even facts themselves, seems to depend on the source of the information. I had a good friend who would not accept anything as true that was uttered by The Washington Post. I have to admit feeling the same way about Fox News.
In her 2016 book Strangers In Their Own Land, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild sought to understand our political divide by living in working class areas of Louisiana for several months. Her purpose was to scale the “empathy wall” between our right and left political tribes. She wanted to understand how Louisianans continued to support politicians and policies that were objectively bad for them:
Across the country, red states are poorer and have more teen mothers, more divorce, worse health, more obesity, more trauma-related deaths, more low-birth-weight babies, and lower school enrollment. On average, people in red states die five years earlier than people in blue states.
The sympathetic people Hochschild described were living in neighborhoods literally drowning in pollution from petrochemical plants. Given all of this, the “rational” person would be mad as hell. Yet it was difficult for her to find anyone who would criticize the responsible oil and chemical companies. Many were Tea Party adherents who were opposed to any intervention by the federal EPA. They also readily believed that the more industry there was, however dirty, the more prosperity there would be and the less they would have to rely on government at any level. Very few people had the courage to point out the harm residing in this approach.
Sound familiar? Not many people in McDowell County, West Virginia are likely to complain about the coal industry, much less the environmental degradation and boom-bust economy that comes from coal. Perhaps this is an extreme example of policy irrationality, but we all exhibit this kind of thing to some extent.
It is hard to see a way out of this problem. Ezra Klein suggests that a solution might be to improve science communication, but this improved information would have to come from sources not identified with either political party. What would these be? He also points out that policy is made centrally but its effects are felt locally. If policy is really harmful, even though we irrationally voted for it, we will eventually come to our senses and vote the bastards out. But what appeals to me is reducing hyper-partisanship by making our tribes more inclusive. We are always going to be tribal, but what if we admitted more people into our tribe so that their concerns and ideas began to make better sense? Maybe the thing to do is have a beer with our political opposite number and, as Hochschild says, try to scale the empathy wall.
