Archive for the ‘Democracy’ Category

How occupation has damaged Israel’s democracy – Washington Post

By Gershom Gorenberg By Gershom Gorenberg June 4 at 8:02 PM

It all happened so unexpectedly 50 years ago: the crisis between Egypt and Israel, the war that began on June 5, 1967, and expanded from one front to three, the silence of the guns after just six days, and the cease-fire lines that marked Israels conquests of the West Bank, the Golan Heights, the Sinai and the Gaza Strip.

Suddenly, Israel was occupying land beyond its sovereign territory and ruling over the people who lived there. An official euphemism was born that summer the newly conquered land would be called administered territory. In the autumn, official maps stopped showing the pre-war lines. The new maps were also a euphemism, in pictorial form. The reality of occupation remained.

Much has changed, including the amount of occupied territory. But 50 years later we by which I mean we Israelis still have an occupation.

Or rather, the occupation has us. It has a hold on us. It is the addiction that Israel cannot shake. Much has been written on how the occupation affects the Palestinians living under Israeli rule, how it constrains their freedom of movement, their political rights and their dreams. To that, Id like to add whats less obvious: The occupation is what keeps Israel from being what it could be. It drags us down.

The occupation conceivably could have been less oppressive and might have lasted less time but for something else that happened in 1967: Israel began settling its citizens in occupied territory.

Back then Israeli strategists believed settlements would add to Israeli security. It was an anachronistic concept based on how kibbutzim had stood against relatively weak invading Arab armies in 1948. The 1973 Yom Kippur War should have buried this idea. The Israeli army had to evacuate Golan settlers in the midst of fighting Syrias powerful armored divisions.

By today its clear that the settlements have turned into an ever-larger military burden. Israeli army units deployed in the West Bank have to protect them. Soldiers, some highly trained for essential tasks, are rotated out of other units for guard duty at settlements, including outposts with a handful of families. Because of secrecy, no one know quite how much this military boondoggle costs.

Actually, no one knows exactly how much the settlement project as a whole costs. The incentives and subsidies that encourage Israelis to move to settlements are scattered throughout the budget. As just one example, a report issued last week by the Adva Center, a Tel Aviv social policy institute, detailed how over the years settlements have enjoyed more generous funding from the national government for municipal budgets than other Israeli communities.

But the total outlay is well hidden. Its like the money that a heavy drinker spends on his liquor without ever adding it up, because that would mean facing his problem. All we know is that without this outlay, Israel would have more money to reduce a child poverty rate thats among the worst in the developed world, to add academic jobs that would prevent brain drain, to add hours to the school day and reduce class sizes. As a country, were doing less with our potential than we could without our addiction.

The worst damage that the occupation does, though, may be to Israels democracy. Across a border not marked on maps, our government rules over millions of people who cannot vote. With this mortal aberration accepted as normal, it was easier to pass an election law in 2014 that aimed (unsuccessfully) at keeping parties backed by Israels Arab citizens out of parliament.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies regularly try to muzzle Breaking the Silence, an organization of veterans that publishes soldiers testimony about service in the occupied territories. They may as well say out loud that they prefer the occupation to Israels tradition of free, fierce political debate.

Back to 1967: One day that summer, French philosopher and journalist Raymond Aron interviewed Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. I found a transcript, or part of one, in Eshkols office files. Eshkol said that if Israel couldnt reach a peace agreement on its conditions with Jordan, Well stay where we are. Aron asked if he didnt fear a popular uprising. No, Eshkol replied, This isnt Algeria.

Eshkols answer showed he knew his interviewer. A decade before, Aron had scandalized his conservative political colleagues with his essay, The Algerian Tragedy. Hed argued that for Frances own sake, it had to give up its colony. Holding Algeria by force violated liberal values, he wrote, whereas, The loss of Algeria is not the end of France.

In sundry ways, the West Bank isnt Algeria. Still, Eshkol was mistaken, and Arons point holds true for Israel and the occupation. The loss of the occupied territories wont be the end of Israel. Holding on to them might be.

Originally posted here:
How occupation has damaged Israel's democracy - Washington Post

Cambodian Democracy Makes Its Last Gasps – Foreign Policy (blog)


Foreign Policy (blog)
Cambodian Democracy Makes Its Last Gasps
Foreign Policy (blog)
It could also be the final push for Hun Sen to discard the remaining substance of Cambodian democracy. This reflects the broader retreat of democratic principles in Southeast Asia, a region that has seen serious reverses in Thailand, where a coup ...

and more »

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Cambodian Democracy Makes Its Last Gasps - Foreign Policy (blog)

Noam Chomsky: Neoliberalism Is Destroying Our Democracy – The Nation.

Noam Chomsky. (Illustration by Susan Coyne)

For 50 years, Noam Chomsky, has been Americas Socrates, our public pest with questions that sting. He speaks not to the city square of Athens but a vast global village in pain and now, it seems, in danger.

The world in trouble today still beats a path to Noam Chomskys door, if only because hes been forthright for so long about a whirlwind coming. Not that the world quite knows what do with Noam Chomskys warnings of disaster in the making. Remember the famous faltering of the patrician TV host William F. Buckley Jr., meeting Chomskys icy anger about the war in Vietnam, in 1969.

Its a strange thing about Noam Chomsky: The New York Times calls him arguably the most important public thinker alive, though the paper seldom quotes him, or argues with him, and giant pop-media stars on network television almost never do. And yet the man is universally famous and revered in his 89th year: Hes the scientist who taught us to think of human language as something embedded in our biology, not a social acquisition; hes the humanist who railed against the Vietnam War and other projections of American power, on moral grounds first, ahead of practical considerations. He remains a rock star on college campuses, here and abroad, and hes become a sort of North Star for the post-Occupy generation that today refuses to feel the Bern-out.

He remains, unfortunately, a figure alien in the places where policy gets made. But on his home ground at MIT, he is a notably accessible old professor who answers his e-mail and receives visitors like us with a twinkle.

Last week, we visited Chomsky with an open-ended mission in mind: We were looking for a nonstandard account of our recent history from a man known for telling the truth. Wed written him that we wanted to hear not what he thinks but how. Hed written back that hard work and an open mind have a lot to do with it, also, in his words, a Socratic-style willingness to ask whether conventional doctrines are justified.

Christopher Lydon: All we want you to do is to explain where in the world we are at a time

Noam Chomsky: Thats easy.

CL: [Laughs]When so many people were on the edge of something, something historic. Is there a Chomsky summary?

CL: Yeah.

NC: Well, a brief summary I think is if you take a look at recent history since the Second World War, something really remarkable has happened. First, human intelligence created two huge sledgehammers capable of terminating our existenceor at least organized existenceboth from the Second World War. One of them is familiar. In fact, both are by now familiar. The Second World War ended with the use of nuclear weapons. It was immediately obvious on August 6, 1945, a day that I remember very well. It was obvious that soon technology would develop to the point where it would lead to terminal disaster. Scientists certainly understood this.

In 1947 the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists inaugurated its famous Doomsday Clock. You know, how close the minute hand was to midnight? And it started seven minutes to midnight. By 1953 it had moved to two minutes to midnight. That was the year when the United States and Soviet Union exploded hydrogen bombs. But it turns out we now understand that at the end of the Second World War the world also entered into a new geological epic. Its called the Anthropocene, the epic in which humans have a severe, in fact maybe disastrous impact on the environment. It moved again in 2015, again in 2016. Immediately after the Trump election late January this year, the clock was moved again to two and a half minutes to midnight, the closest its been since 53.

So theres the two existential threats that weve createdwhich might in the case of nuclear war maybe wipe us out; in the case of environmental catastrophe, create a severe impactand then some.

A third thing happened. Beginning around the 70s, human intelligence dedicated itself to eliminating, or at least weakening, the main barrier against these threats. Its called neoliberalism. There was a transition at that time from the period of what some people call regimented capitalism, the 50s and 60s, the great growth period, egalitarian growth, a lot of advances in social justice and so on

CL: Social democracy

NC: Social democracy, yeah. Thats sometimes called the golden age of modern capitalism. That changed in the 70s with the onset of the neoliberal era that weve been living in since. And if you ask yourself what this era is, its crucial principle is undermining mechanisms of social solidarity and mutual support and popular engagement in determining policy.

Its not called that. What its called is freedom, but freedom means a subordination to the decisions of concentrated, unaccountable, private power. Thats what it means. The institutions of governanceor other kinds of association that could allow people to participate in decision makingthose are systematically weakened. Margaret Thatcher said it rather nicely in her aphorism about there is no society, only individuals.

Since the Second World War, we have created two means of destruction. Since the neoliberal era, we have dismantled the way of handling them.

She was actually, unconsciously no doubt, paraphrasing Marx, who in his condemnation of the repression in France said, The repression is turning society into a sack of potatoes, just individuals, an amorphous mass cant act together. That was a condemnation. For Thatcher, its an idealand thats neoliberalism. We destroy or at least undermine the governing mechanisms by which people at least in principle can participate to the extent that societys democratic. So weaken them, undermine unions, other forms of association, leave a sack of potatoes and meanwhile transfer decisions to unaccountable private power all in the rhetoric of freedom.

Well, what does that do? The one barrier to the threat of destruction is an engaged public, an informed, engaged public acting together to develop means to confront the threat and respond to it. Thats been systematically weakened, consciously. I mean, back to the 1970s weve probably talked about this. There was a lot of elite discussion across the spectrum about the danger of too much democracy and the need to have what was called more moderation in democracy, for people to become more passive and apathetic and not to disturb things too much, and thats what the neoliberal programs do. So put it all together and what do you have? A perfect storm.

CL: What everybody notices is all the headline things, including Brexit and Donald Trump and Hindu nationalism and nationalism everywhere and Le Pen all kicking in more or less together and suggesting some real world phenomenon.

NC: its very clear, and it was predictable. You didnt know exactly when, but when you impose socioeconomic policies that lead to stagnation or decline for the majority of the population, undermine democracy, remove decision-making out of popular hands, youre going to get anger, discontent, fear take all kinds of forms. And thats the phenomenon thats misleadingly called populism.

CL: I dont know what you think of Pankaj Mishra, but I enjoy his book Age of Anger, and he begins with an anonymous letter to a newspaper from somebody who says, We should admit that we are not only horrified but baffled. Nothing since the triumph of vandals in Rome and North Africa has seemed so suddenly incomprehensible and difficult to reverse.

NC: Well, thats the fault of the information system, because its very comprehensible and very obvious and very simple. Take, say the United States, which actually suffered less from these policies than many other countries. Take the year 2007, a crucial year right before the crash.

(Illustration by Susan Coyne)

What was the wondrous economy that was then being praised? It was one in which the wages, the real wages of American workers, were actually lower than they were in 1979 when the neoliberal period began. Thats historically unprecedented except for trauma or war or something like that. Here is a long period in which real wages had literally declined, while there was some wealth created but in very few pockets. It was also a period in which new institutions developed, financial institutions. You go back to the 50s and 60s, a so-called Golden Age, banks were connected to the real economy. That was their function. There were also no crashes because there were New Deal regulations.

Starting in the early 70s there was a sharp change. First of all, financial institutions exploded in scale. By 2007 they actually had 40 percent of corporate profits. Furthermore, they werent connected to the real economy anymore.

In Europe the way democracy is undermined is very direct. Decisions are placed in the hands of an unelected troika: the European Commission, which is unelected; the IMF, of course unelected; and the European Central Bank. They make the decisions. So people are very angry, theyre losing control of their lives. The economic policies are mostly harming them, and the result is anger, disillusion, and so on.

Noam Chomsky: What Did Adam Smith Really Mean by The Invisible Hand?

We just saw it two weeks ago in the last French election. The two candidates were both outside the establishment. Centrist political parties have collapsed. We saw it in the American election last November. There were two candidates who mobilized the base: one of them a billionaire hated by the establishment, the Republican candidate who won the nominationbut notice that once hes in power its the old establishment thats running things. You can rail against Goldman Sachs on the campaign trail, but you make sure that they run the economy once youre in.

CL: So, the question is, at a moment when people are almost ready when theyre ready to act and almost ready to recognize that this game is not working, this social system, do we have the endowment as a species to act on it, to move into that zone of puzzlement and then action?

NC: I think the fate of the species depends on it because, remember, its not just inequality, stagnation. Its terminal disaster. We have constructed a perfect storm. That should be the screaming headlines every day. Since the Second World War, we have created two means of destruction. Since the neoliberal era, we have dismantled the way of handling them. Thats our pincers. Thats what we face, and if that problem isnt solved were done with.

CL: I want to go back Pankaj Mishra and the Age of Anger for a moment

NC: Its not the Age of Anger. Its the Age of Resentment against socioeconomic policies which have harmed the majority of the population for a generation and have consciously and in principle undermined democratic participation. Why shouldnt there be anger?

CL: Pankaj Mishra calls itits a Nietzschean wordressentiment, meaning this kind of explosive rage. But he says, Its the defining feature of a world where the modern promise of equality collides with massive disparities of power, education, status and

NC: Which was designed that way, which was designed that way. Go back to the 1970s. Across the spectrum, elite spectrum, there was deep concern about the activism of the 60s. Its called the time of troubles. It civilized the country, which is dangerous. What happened is that large parts of the populationwhich had been passive, apathetic, obedienttried to enter the political arena in one or another way to press their interests and concerns. Theyre called special interests. That means minorities, young people, old people, farmers, workers, women. In other words: the population. The population are special interests, and their task is to just watch quietly. And that was explicit.

Two documents came out right in the mid-70s, which are quite important. They came from opposite ends of the political spectrum, both influential, and both reached the same conclusions. One of them, at the left end, was by the Trilateral Commissionliberal internationalists, three major industrial countries, basically the Carter administration, thats where they come from. That is the more interesting one [The Crisis of Democracy, a Trilateral Commission report]. The American rapporteur Samuel Huntington of Harvard, he looked back with nostalgia to the days when, as he put it, Truman was able to run the country with the cooperation of a few Wall Street lawyers and executives. Then everything was fine. Democracy was perfect.

But in the 60s they all agreed it became problematic because the special interests started trying to get into the act, and that causes too much pressure and the state cant handle that.

CL: I remember that book well.

NC: We have to have more moderation in democracy.

CL: Not only that, he turned Al Smiths line around. Al Smith said, The cure for democracy is more democracy. He said, No, the cure for this democracy is less democracy.

NC: It wasnt him. It was the liberal establishment. He was speaking for them. This is a consensus view of the liberal internationalists and the three industrial democracies. Theyin their consensusthey concluded that a major problem is what they called, their words, the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young. The schools, the universities, churches, theyre not doing their job. Theyre not indoctrinating the young properly. The young have to be returned to passivity and obedience, and then democracy will be fine. Thats the left end.

Now what do you have at the right end? A very influential document: The Powell Memorandum, came out the same time. Lewis Powell, a corporate lawyer, later Supreme Court justice, he produced a confidential memorandum for the US Chamber of Commerce, which has been extremely influential. It more or less set off the modern so-called conservative movement. The rhetoric is kind of crazy. We dont go through it, but the basic picture is that this rampaging left has taken over everything. We have to use the resources that we have to beat back this rampaging new left which is undermining freedom and democracy.

Connected with this was something else. As a result of the activism of the 60s and the militancy of labor, there was a falling rate of profit. Thats not acceptable. So we have to reverse the falling rate of profit, we have to undermine democratic participation, what comes? Neoliberalism, which has exactly those effects.

Listen to the full conversation with Noam Chomsky on Radio Open Source.

See the original post:
Noam Chomsky: Neoliberalism Is Destroying Our Democracy - The Nation.

The problem with democracy: it relies on voters – Vox – Vox

Consider the curious case of New Jersey in 1916: That summer, there was a string of deadly shark attacks along the Jersey Shore. As a result, Woodrow Wilson lost his home state in the presidential election.

Why, you ask? Because the beachfront towns (which rely on tourism) were negatively impacted by the attacks. Though Wilson wasnt responsible for the hungry sharks, he was the incumbent, and people vote against incumbents when things are bad.

This is a story political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels tell in Democracy for Realists, in service of a sobering thesis: Voters dont have anything like coherent preferences. Most people pay little attention to politics; when they vote, if they vote at all, they do so irrationally and for contradictory reasons.

The book lays waste to a reassuring theory about democracy that goes something like this: Ordinary citizens have preferences about what the government ought to do; they elect leaders who will carry out those preferences and vote against those who will not; in the end, were left with a government that more or less serves the majority.

Even voters who pay close attention to politics are prone in fact, more prone to biased or blinkered decision-making. The reason is simple: Most people make political decisions on the basis of social identities and partisan loyalties, not an honest examination of reality.

Election outcomes, Achen and Bartels conclude, turn out to be largely random events from the viewpoint of democratic theory.

If Achen and Bartels are right, democracy is a faulty form of politics, and direct democracy is far worse than that. It virtually guarantees that at some point, youll end up with a grossly unfit leader.

And that, of course, is what we now have.

I sat down with Achen and Bartels a few weeks ago to talk about their critique of democracy, and how it might explain our current political predicament.

A warning: This is a long and sweeping discussion, touching on a number of thorny issues. I offer pushback when and where I can. But to be perfectly honest, I found many of their criticisms of democracy compelling. Which is not at all what I had hoped.

I want to believe in those comforting myths about democracy, mostly because the alternatives are worse. But even if democracy is the least bad form of government, we still ought to know how it works and, more importantly, how it doesnt.

What actually drives voter behavior?

I think people are doing the best they can. They just don't have a lot of information, and so they substitute guesses and views of the world that make them feel comfortable. I think people are looking for ways to make sense of what is a very complicated reality out there. It's hard for those of us who get paid to think about it all the time to make sense of it, and it's very hard for people with a lot of other demands in their lives.

So they're doing the best they can but, as we said in the book, we think that we need institutional structures that would get them some help and do what the Federalist Papers suggest should be done, which is to have a popular voice in government but to supplement it with the opinions of people with more expertise and more experience.

One of the more important building blocks for our work was [Austrian-born economist and political scientist who wrote mostly in the early 20th century] Joseph Schumpeters work on democracy. As an economist, he emphasized more clearly than people had previously the significance of the distinction between economic life, where people make choices that directly affect their own well-being (i.e., you stop buying products that you dont like) and the political world, where the connection between individual behavior and the outcomes that I experience is so indirect that it almost makes no sense for me to try to perceive instrumentally.

It turns out, when it comes to political outcomes, most people are not making rational decisions based on the real-world impact they will have on their life, in part because they just dont know.

So much of politics, not surprisingly, turns out to be about expressive behavior rather than instrumental behavior in other words, people making decisions based on momentary feeling and not on some sound understanding of how those decisions will improve or hurt their life. And so if you think about people using the democratic levers that they have available to them to express themselves, rather than to make instrumental choices, you're probably more often than not going to be closer to the actual psychology of what they're up to.

Does the average voter even have what we might call policy preferences?

Well, they do adopt some. They take in some information. So with the Trump phenomenon, for example, people clearly recognize that for certain identities, he was a vocal spokesman for those identities, and they did learn that. And the combination of that and his familiarity from reality TV and so on made him successful in their minds at being the kind of leader they were looking for. And I think people are pretty good at that, actually. They're pretty good at picking out who's on their side.

To be clear, theyre good at picking people who appear to be on their side, who play the right rhetorical game.

Good point. Now, what they're much less good at is thinking about whether it makes any sense to build a wall across the southern border with Mexico. Is that going to solve the problem? How much is that going to cost? Is that how I would want to spend my money? Voters tend not to think about these sorts of questions very well, and their incoherent and shifting positions suggest as much.

In graduate school, I read a book called The Macro Polity, which was published in 2002 by political scientists Robert Erikson, Michael Mackuen, and James Stimson. The thesis was something like: voters as a collective aggregate tend to act with purpose and predictability, even though most individual voters do not.

So the idea was that the vast majority of voters are capricious and uninformed, but in the end they tend to cancel each other out. What pushes elections in an intelligible direction is the minority of educated and engaged voters. But your book claims that elections are basically a coin toss.

Well, that argument, which goes back to the 18th century, works pretty well so long as the errors and political choices are distributed equally on both sides of whatever the option is. But in many cases, that's unlikely to be true. But we don't want to say that politics is essentially random. There are lots of elements, certainly of presidential elections, that are quite predictable. We have this little picture in Chapter 6 of the book about the relationship between economic conditions and how long the incumbent party has been in office and the election outcome. That suggests a good deal of predictability:

But the point is that if the underlying conditions suggest that the election is likely to be close, as has been the case for most recent presidential elections, then the small factors that determine the outcome at the margin are likely to be random and in any case aren't the kinds of things that democratic theory focuses on. Like, for example, people's preferences with respect to policy issues.

The points that Larry just made about the correlated errors are the root of the problem. Those theorems don't go through if people all tend to make the same kind of mistakes at a given time. And there's plenty of that, right? If you look at shares of the two-party vote in the 20th century, the presidential candidate who got the biggest two-party share was Warren Harding, now widely regarded as the worst president in American history. But people thought he was charming. And they all made the same mistake at the same time. And that's the kind of thing that's just fatal to that particular argument you find in The Macro Polity.

I take your broader points about voter behavior, but let me push back just a little bit. Plenty of people will say: Okay, the average voter is misguided in all the ways you note, but there are still heuristics or cognitive shortcuts that voters use to make sense of the political world. For example, they choose the candidate who most aligns with their ideological worldview or they rely on signals from party leaders or trusted authorities. Its not perfect, but it does allow voters to make more or less reasonable decisions.

When that kind of argument has been operationalized, it usually takes as given the basis on which people are choosing what heuristics to rely on. And that itself is quite problematic. If people knew where to go to get the informative cues about questions they need to answer, they probably would do better. But most of the empirical evidence we have suggests that it's only the more interested, better-informed people who have enough context to be able to interpret those cues appropriately and to use them sensibly.

Theres a model in contemporary political science called the retrospective theory of voting, which basically says that elections arent really about ideas or policy preferences, but voters are nonetheless able to accurately judge the performance of incumbent administrations. Whats wrong with this model?

Well, as an empirical matter, we think it works pretty well, and that's why political scientists have increasingly fastened on it as an alternative to the more idealistic notion of an issue-voting populace decision-making. The downside is that in their enthusiasm to fasten on it, they've attributed a kind of normative sheen to it that we don't think is warranted by the quality of the decisions that result.

Can you clarify what you mean there?

Well, people aren't very good at attributing the implications of the decisions that are made by policymakers to those policymakers. In order to do this efficiently, they'd have to have a pretty canny understanding of how the behavior of any particular elected official or party contributes to the good or bad outcomes they experience. And they're not very good at that. They'd have to take a long view of the effects of policy, and they're not very good at that. So they make these retrospective judgments, but in a kind of haphazard way that doesn't seem to promote accountability in the way that political scientists would like to think it does.

So you found no evidence to suggest that voters understand cause and effect in any coherent way?

Again, we're saying, yeah, the world is immensely complicated, so to say that one has a good understanding of cause and effect in this domain would really be asking quite a lot of people. Certainly, economists don't agree about the impact of economic policies on the well-being of individuals or groups. And so what we do in the book in order to try and get around those difficulties is to focus on some cases where it seems pretty clear that the incumbent politicians ought not to be paying for people's bad fortunes and find that even those cases, there seems to be a pretty systematic pattern of punishment.

One of the many assumptions your book undercuts is this idea that large groups of voters can deliberate reasonably that if you give people the appropriate information and allow them to exercise judgment, they will do so more or less intelligently. Or at the very least, they wont steer the country into an abyss.

I think it's hard to see how the public as a whole would steer the country in any particular direction. Usually when we think about public input, we think about public input in response to particular kinds of choices that have been framed by political elites of one kind or the other, whether they're party leaders or elected officials. And whether people come to the right conclusions about the choices that are offered to them, I think this is most of what is interesting and consequential, which is how the choices get framed in the circumstances under which people are allowed to have input into deciding what path to take.

How do choices get framed? How do opinions get formed?

A lot of it is people simply taking cues from political figures, from public figures, that they've identified themselves with one way or the other, whether they're party leaders or the leaders of social groups or interest groups that they feel some attachment to. If, for example, you look at the change in views about Russia that we've observed after Trump made admiring comments about Vladimir Putin, you might think, given the history of the US and Russia over the past century, that people would have pretty ingrained views about what they think of the Russian system. But that turned out not to be the case.

People's views shifted pretty quickly and pretty dramatically in the wake of fairly casual elite cues they were receiving. But from somebody who they trusted and whose cue they were happy to take about something that they hadn't really thought much about. The relationship between Russia and the US is a pretty important thing, but the ordinary American hasn't spent a lot of time thinking about how they should think about that. Indeed, they dont spend much time really thinking about political issues of consequence. This idea that people have fixed or informed views about central issues doesnt square with most of the data we have.

Can you give me some examples of the data you used or case studies you analyzed? What are you basing these claims about voting behavior on?

A substantial scholarly literature on electoral politics and public opinion has accumulated over the past several decades, and we relied on it heavily. But we also added original statistical analyses designed to test our arguments in particularly illuminating times and places.

For example, the notion that voters blindly reward or punish incumbent presidents for good or bad times led us to the presidential election of 1936; political scientists have portrayed that election as a historic ideological mandate for Franklin Roosevelts New Deal, but we found that Roosevelts support hinged crucially on how much incomes grew in each state in the year leading up to the election.

The same logic led us to the Jersey Shore in 1916, where a dramatic series of shark attacks hardly something a president can control turned out to produce a significant dent in the vote for Woodrow Wilson.

To disentangle the effects of policy preferences and social identities, we examined support for John Kennedy in 1960 an unusually pure case of religious affinity (and animosity) with little or no real policy content. Our analysis in that case was bolstered by the fact that repeated interviews with the same people allowed us to relate voting behavior in 1960 to measures of the strength of voters Catholic identities from 1958, before Kennedy emerged as a candidate.

In the same spirit, our analysis of the impact of partisanship on views about abortion employed a decades-long study of changing political attitudes to show that more than half of Democratic men who expressed pro-life views in 1982 were pro-choice by 1997; the corresponding rate of change among Republican men was less than 30 percent. Political attitudes and behavior are enormously complex, and so we are shameless opportunists, delighted to exploit clear glimpses of underlying patterns and processes wherever we can find them.

The parties in the United States, at least seem to have lost much of their control over the process. At the same time, weve seen a spike in partisanship. Do you think a stronger or different party system can correct some of the fundamental problems youve identified?

I wouldnt say a spike in partisanship weve had a long, gradual increase in the intensity of partisan loyalties over the past 35 or 40 years. As with many aspects of the contemporary political system, thats probably a sort of return to normalcy following the unusual period in the middle of the 20th century which saw the breakdown of the New Deal party system, a loosening of partisan attachments, and electoral landslides in both directions.

I wouldnt say that weve had a decline in the power of the parties, either. The parties in Congress are immensely powerful. All of President Obamas big legislative accomplishments the stimulus bill, the Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank were passed with few or no Republican votes. Conversely, President Trump has so far relied entirely on the Republican Party for support, despite his railing during the campaign against the political establishment on both sides of the aisle. When it comes to fundraising and candidate recruitment, the party committees and their allied networks of interest groups have a national reach and ideological cohesion that 19th-century party boss Mark Hanna would have envied.

What we dont (and never did) have is a way to manage the parties democratically. Weve tried to give as much power as possible to ordinary citizens voting in primaries, but the task is too complex too many candidates and issues, too little information, too much strategic uncertainty for that to work reliably. We saw that in 2016. But we also saw a breakdown of the alternative theory of democratic control, in which general election voters keep the parties on a tight leash by refusing to support them if they happen to nominate someone who is too extreme or uninformed or unstable.

History clearly demonstrates that democracies need parties to organize and simplify the political world. But parties dont make the fundamental problems of democratic control disappear; they just submerge them more or less successfully. When professional politicians are reasonably enlightened and skillful and the rules and political culture let them do their job, democracy will usually work pretty well. When not, not.

I would add only that I do favor stronger parties in one sense that they should have more control over their nominations, both presidential and other. New Jersey does this well, actually, with the "party endorsement" being quite crucial in winning primaries here. We also make it hard to put an initiative on the ballot, and we have traditionally had a strong, competent state supreme court.

The result is good schools, no measles and mumps outbreaks because of low vaccination rates, and much else by way of good government because it's harder for the voters to harm themselves here than in other states where interest groups and nutty ideas have more control through unrestricted primaries and initiatives. Of course, New Jersey has lots of problems, but a bad state governmental structure isn't among them.

I want to ask you both about identity politics, which is a big part of your book. As you know, theres a debate right now about the role and utility of identity politics. Your book argues, somewhat controversially, that in democracy all politics is identity politics, and that its foolish to pretend otherwise. Is that a fair reading of your thesis?

We do think that identities are fundamental. Now, in politics, no one framework is everything, and of course there are some other things going on. But we do think that identity is fundamental. The old left argument is that it's about class and that race and gender are side effects primarily of class issues. But class identification, working-class consciousness, and all of that framework, those are identities as well. So from our point of view, the proposal is to substitute one set of identities for another. That's a plausible argument, but the idea that you can propose policy, economic policy proscriptions, in a social vacuum with no attention to the other identities that are at work, that is something we just don't believe.

So democratic elections, on your view, are essentially just a competition to see who can activate the most identities among the voters?

I would say there's a variety of identities people have that are more or less salient and can be made more or less salient politically. For many people, the principles become part of the identity and are important moving parts of the way they think about politics. But our claim is that the identities are more fundamental, the principles come later rather than the other way around.

There have been two broad reactions to the Brexit vote and to Donald Trumps election. On the one hand, some believe we have too much democracy, too few barriers between popular will and the application of power; on the other hand, some argue that we have too little democracy, that were witnessing a righteous backlash against an anti-democratic and rigged system. Where do you come down?

The notion that the last election cycle somehow brought out a different kind of person or a different aspect of people's political character is misleading from our point of view. We didn't have Trump in our sights at all as we were working on this book over the course of 15 years, but I think the spirit of the book very much suggests that these kinds of things are likely to happen in democratic systems from time to time because of the way they work and the limitations they face all the time.

But what really triggers the kind of problems that people were concerned about in 2016 are mostly of elite-level actions, how the parties behave and what kind of messages they present to people and what kinds of alternatives they present to people. And so the idea that the American people are somehow different than they were five years ago or nine years ago I think is kind of mistaken. But the interaction between the elites and the masses is where the issues are, and I think much of political writing is not very well-suited to dealing with those kinds of interactions because the role of elites isn't very integrated into the overall way of thinking about what's going on. They are almost by necessity a kind of illegitimate piece of the system in a lot of popular thinking about the way politics works.

You mention the problem of elites, and that really is a key dilemma in your analysis. Its not so much about greater mass participation, which doesnt necessarily make things better, as it is about getting elites to not rig the system in their favor.

Absolutely. If you think about democracy in the terms we prefer, you might say the biggest limitation at the moment is that we don't know how to incorporate the role of political elites in a constructive way into the governing process or to somehow make it possible to ensure that they're working on behalf of the interests of ordinary people.

The book calls for a return to something like a group theory of democracy, which amounts to a reluctant embrace of identity politics. What, exactly, are you advocating here, and why is it a smarter alternative to the folk or populist theory of democracy?

Partly what we want to do is to think about a variety of reform proposals that are out there and floating around from this framework. So, for example, making the presidential nomination process more "democratic" by getting rid of superdelegates is exactly the kind of blunder that we're criticizing.

Having the conservative majority on the Supreme Court say that there's a marketplace of ideas here, that there can't possibly be anything wrong with people publicizing their own ideas about policy proposals and candidates and so forth, and so therefore limitations on campaign spending are a violation of free speech. That, too, is the kind of blunder that we're criticizing.

Okay, but where does that leave us?

We have to get out of this overly simplistic framework and create more sensible policy proposals. It seems clear to us that a lot of the actual ways in which people of ordinary education or ordinary means or just not much power, the ways in which they are disadvantaged are often occurring at the level of policymaking rather than at the level of elections themselves. The financial sector, for instance, is having a lot of policy success in Washington, in ways that ordinary people, if they really understood what was happening, would not approve. But they dont follow it closely enough, they dont understand, and the policy process is tilted toward moneyed interests that ordinary people have no chance.

So focusing reform on the places where the real problem is occurring as opposed to making fanciful proposals that ask us to do what none of us is really able to do. That's the kind of emphasis that we want to direct people's attention to.

Yes, but how do we get there? Again, the book latches onto this group theory of democracy as a more intelligent means of channeling popular passions, yet its not clear to me what this vision of democracy looks like or how its very different from what we now have.

Well, in some ways it doesn't look so different from how politics works now. The policymaking president is heavily influenced by groups of all kinds. And some of those are identity groups, like African-American groups or Hispanic groups or LGBT groups. Others are occupational groups and religious groups and vocational groups, like the National Rifle Association. And so on. And so we already have a policy process driven by groups. And the idea is more than 100 years old. It's certainly not original with us. So I think our view is to not pretend that there's a magic wand that can make people uninterested in the groups to which they belong, but instead to direct reform proposals to instead making the balance among these groups fairer than it is now.

So its your view that we ought to accept the fact that we think, act, and judge in terms of group affiliations of one sort or another, that were tribal creatures, and that our political system has to account for this structurally?

I think thats very well put except for the term tribal, which implies that people are members of only one tribe at any given point. I think people's identities are complex and the way they bring them to bear in politics is complex, and that's part of what needs to be understood by us as analysts and also built into any idea of how one might use these groups attachments constructively in improving the political process.

I reacted exactly the same way Larry did. One would not say to African Americans, for example, that the experience of their lives in a heavily white society and the way in which that shapes the things that they want from politics, that that's a tribal attachment and that they should get over that and just think about economics, right? It kind of misses the point.

Oh, I agree, Im just trying to nail down your thesis.

Of course. To be clear, these group attachments are not some bad thing we do instead of being rational, well-informed creatures. They constitute who we are. You know, evangelical Christians don't regard themselves as a tribe. They have a way of thinking about their lives that makes sense. And secular people have a parallel set of views that makes sense of their lives. And so we all do this. We construct an interpretation of our lives, and we're loyal to that and we find other people with similar views. That's what human beings are like, and recognizing that seems to us a big step forward from the way we tend to think about politics now.

So someone shouldnt walk away from this book thinking democracy is too idealistic for high primates like us?

Well, democracy is happening; it's just not the kind of democracy that we hear about in Fourth of July speeches. So our complaint is not so much about democracy as it is about our misleading understanding of democracy and the bad implications it has for how we proceed democratically.

I think our reply to someone who walks away with that impression would be: What is it about the ideas of the American founders that you disagree with? Because that is the position that's being taken here. And as we say in the book, the response is often, well, a lot of them were slaveholders, and we don't have to take their ideas seriously. OK, yes, they were. But to not read them at all is a recipe for ignorance and not the one that we believe.

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Scientists, your mission is to save US democracy. Do you accept? - Quartz