The familiar image of rational electoral choice has voters weighing the competing candidates' strengths and weaknesses, calculating comparative distances in issue space, and assessing the president's management of foreign affairs and the national economy. Indeed, once or twice in a lifetime, a national or personal crisis does induce political thought. But most of the time, the voters adopt issue positions, adjust their candidate perceptions, and invent facts to rationalize decisions they have already made. The implications of this distinction between genuine thinking and its day-to-day counterfeit strike at the roots of both positive and normative theories of electoral democracy.
At first blush, this strikes as something I once called Creeping Dear Leader Syndrome online, to describe a phenomenon where people back a candidate and then either change their issue positions to match the candidate, or use contorted, hermeneutical reading of candidate positions to turn those positions into something they are not. It something you see in the comments of blog posts on the 2008 Democratic nomination campaign all the time. Even though it is not an "issue position," exactly, one of the most gratuitous examples is how Gore supporters seems to be able to consistently read Gore's statements that he has no intention of running as actually meaning that he is, after all, certain to run. People invent narratives and facts surrounding the candidates they support, in order to convince themselves that their beliefs and their chosen candidate's beliefs are identical. Unless I am mistaken, in political science circles this is a phenomenon known as "projection."
Yglesias focuses on one aspect of the paper as an example of its central thesis: a chart showing that there is nothing even close to correlation between how many new governmental social programs an individual supports, and how closely an individual identifies with their chosen political party. In the extended entry, I have reproduced the chart for this post, which Ygeslias describes as follows:
The horizontal axis plots people's self-report about where they stand on the left-right spectrum on spending issues. The vertical axis plots people's self-report about where they stand relative to the Republican Party on the left-right spectrum on spending issues. The chart separates the answers out into one line for Democrats and one line for Republicans. Partisanship, however, is logically irrelevant to this question. Two people who self-identify as having the same view on spending ought to be the same distance from the Republican Party, even if one person is a Democrat and one is a Republican. But, as the authors observe, "they are markedly divergent, especially for people whose own positions do not happen to fall at the midpoint of the 7-point scale."
The Democrats who most strongly identify with their chosen party actually hold opposite positions on new social programs vs. reduced government spending. The strongest Democratic identifiers are found both among those who mostly strongly support new social programs, and among those Democrats who most strongly would like to see government spending reduced.
Under the theory that people make up their minds about issue positions, and then choose to support the candidate and / or political party that holds those positions, this chart does not make any sense. Instead, it shows quite the opposite: people support parties or candidates, and then convince themselves that said candidate or party holds that position as well.
The implications of this finding for concepts often tossed around in the blogosphere, such as branding the Democratic Party, marketing the core values of the Democratic Party, or even just following a partisan line are interesting. If people decide which candidate or party they are going to support before understanding the positions of that candidate or party, then the primary means toward electoral victory should be understood as character and personality based first, and policy and issue based second. They would be finding a candidate that people just like, and then making that said candidate has the ability to convince people to join his or her cause, or at least believe they are joining his or her cause. It may not be a particularly heartening implication, especially for its potential impact on electoral democracy, but if it is accurate it is worth heeding. It also calls into question the entire foundation of the single-issue advocacy group structure, which is predicated entirely on the notion that people support positions and ideas first, and choose candidates based on those ideas. That simply does not appear to be the case, at least from the data presented in this paper.
