ECONOMY

stephen ansolabehere 43
4 Learning and Communication
.............................................................................
Non-participation presents a conundrum because the logic leads to a prediction that
is evidently false. About half of the American voting age population turns out for
national elections even when the election is not close.
Rational ignorance has a somewhat different flavor. The logic leads to an apparently
correct prediction: most people don’t know much about politics and public
policies, even policies that affect them directly. Indeed, the first public opinion researchers
in the United States concluded that the public comes nowhere near the view
of the ideal citizen assumed in most theorizing about democracy. However, if this is
true, then democracy seems like something of an impossibility.
There are, in fact, two conundrums. First, if people know little, then their vote
choices may be virtually random. As a result, elections may have little meaning and
not be good mechanisms for controlling politicians and the government. Second,
voters may be fooled. If people are not attentive, they may not know enough to judge
the veracity of campaign advertising and may be swayed easily by false promises.
Again, the electorate may choose politicians who will not serve as good agents.
It should be noted that the informedness of the electorate represents another
notion of rationality and rational choice. Democratic theories begin with the notion
that people are informed about the policies their government has implemented and
about the state of the world. That information is assumed to be correct. People do not
act out of irrational or incorrect beliefs about the world that they have been fooled
into holding. Such a statement is a normative conjecture. Hence, V. O. Key begins his
book The Responsible Electorate with the simple assertion that “voters are not fools.”
This is a hotly contested assertion, especially because of the enormous survey research
literature showing that people don’t know many basic facts about government or the
candidates.
Yet, somehow people are able to form opinions and make autonomous decisions,
and it is generally thought that public policy drives public opinion. Individuallevel,
in-depth studies of voter learning find that people are not readily deceived.
Experiments involving campaign advertising that I conducted with Shanto Iyengar in
1994 show that voters are most responsive to messages that touch on issues of highest
concern to them, such as the economy, that voters on the whole have strong and (on
average) correct prior beliefs about the ideological positions of candidates, and that
voters do not change their opinions in response to messages on which candidates
do not have credible positions. Indeed, this sort of finding is well established in
survey research dating back to the 1940s. Political communications generally reinforce
individuals’ predispositions rather than converting them to new ways of thinking.
Studies of aggregate public opinion, most notably Robert Erikson, Michael
MacKuen, and James Stimson, The Macro Polity, and Ben Page and Robert Shapiro,
The Rational Public, show that policy is responsive to public opinion. These studies
document that over a forty-year period aggregate public opinion is not highly volatile,
as one would expect if people randomly answered questions, and that, on issues where