Neuro-Politics

I now turn to some underlying traits of the human mind that make elections and mass-participation plebiscitary direct democracy untenable. This chapter will present many of the reasons that our brains are not well-suited for elections, and the next chapters will focus on why elected officials are not well-suited for policymaking. These factors disqualify elections as the basic tool of democracy, regardless of voting method or other election reforms. Some of these factors have only come to light since recent advancements in the science of psychology, but many of them have been recognized for eons.

It is also important to recognize that there is a distinction between being a political leader and a political representative. However, in electoral systems these two roles are generally intertwined. Evolutionary development of leadership and followership in small-scale societies in which humans and their proto-human ancestors have spent most of their existence creates a mismatch with the role and selection of leadership in modern large-scale societies (von Rueden and van Vugt 2015).

Rational Ignorance

We’ll start by examining a serious problem, if not an “Achilles’ Heel” of mass elections—ignorance. To be clear, I am not deriding the intelligence of ordinary people, simply acknowledging that we all know a lot about some things, but little or nothing about most other things. Elections may be appropriate in small settings where everybody knows everybody else personally, but they become problematic in large communities. Here I will focus on governmental elections, but much of the analysis that follows is also applicable to large organizations that seek to function democratically.

Most people would agree that for elections to work well, voters should have knowledge about their choices. This is true whether we are speaking about a referendum or electing public officials. I will focus on the election of representatives, as the most common election scenario. To make an informed decision, voters should know the policy proposals, performance record, and true character of the incumbent, as well as the opponents. This should not be based on passing impressions from 30-second TV spots or targeted social media ads designed to manipulate. Most Americans agree that voters go to the polls without being well-informed. The Rasmussen polling firm regularly asks voters whether they believe they are well-informed about policies and candidates before they vote, and also whether they believe other Americans are well-informed when they vote. Interestingly, although most voters believe they themselves are well-informed, only around 15 percent believe that American voters overall are well-informed. This has ranged between 9 percent and 21 percent in recent years (Rasmussen Poll 2019). So, do respondents tend to overestimate their own level of knowledge, while fairly assessing everybody else?

A hint might come from surveys that regularly indicate that a huge majority of people believe they are better than average automobile drivers. (Note that it is mathematically impossible for this to be correct.) It is likely that both I—the author—and you—the reader—of this book believe we are better informed about politics than most people. Yet, many of the people we think we know more than likely think they know more than us. It is natural to believe that our beliefs are true—that is what makes them beliefs. True intellectual humility is a rare commodity, but we should acknowledge that we may be the ones who are mistaken.

Hardly any voters are actually well-informed about all of the candidates, or even the “major” candidates. They may know a lot about one or two candidates in one or two races, but certainly not all of the offices up for election (in the US, we generally elect far more offices than in most other nations). In a party-based system of proportional representation, such detailed candidate information is not as important since the candidates are bound to support the party platform. But here as well, there is a dearth of actual knowledge among voters about party platforms, let alone the actual ramifications of a party’s proposed policies, nor what coalition compromises will be struck following the election.

Since candidate-based elections also have policy implications, voters should know about the policy directions of the various candidates or parties. But more—they should have an understanding of the implications of those policies, rather than merely a superficial opinion (often derived from slogans or partisan tribal loyalty). Further, there are innumerable policy areas, such that no voter’s individual knowledge can encompass very many of them.

In his book The Phantom Public, Walter Lippmann observed that

The individual man does not have opinions on all public affairs. He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen … and there is not the least reason for thinking, as mystical Democrats have thought, that the compounding of individual ignorances in masses of people can produce a continuous directing force in public affairs. (Lippmann [1925] 1993, 29)

But this is not a condemnation of people’s intelligence or competence. It is a recognition of the fact that humans have limited attention (what Jeremy Bentham called “active aptitude”) and other things to do, combined with the reality that one person’s vote in a mass election has almost no chance of actually changing an outcome (it would need to break or create a tie). However, if a small representative sample of citizens were presented with a policy choice, given resources, information, and time, and knew that their decision would be consequential, this dismissive story becomes very different.

With the de minimis impact of a single vote in a mass election (being essentially inconsequential), people have little rational incentive to exert much effort to become well-informed. Joseph Schumpeter believed that the typical citizen “drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests” (Schumpeter 1942, 262).

The larger the group, the less each individual feels obliged to pull his own weight. This is literally true in experiments measuring how hard individuals pull in a game of tug of war, comparing just a few on a side to a game with dozens on each side. As Schumpeter put it, voters in a mass election have “a reduced sense of responsibility, a lower level of energy of thought and greater sensitiveness to non-logical influence” (Schumpeter 1942, 257). The larger the group, the more likely each individual is to engage in informational free-riding. The reliance on social cues, or trusted “opinion leaders”, rather than expending the necessary energy to make independent assessments, is natural and typical behavior for most participating voters in any mass election. In order to be a well-informed voter, it would take many, many days of serious research. The key observation is that most people are unwilling to expend a great deal of energy on an activity that is not intrinsically enjoyable when their effort results in no actual or perceived benefit.

The term rational ignorance was coined by economist Anthony Downs, an economist at the Brookings Institution, in his seminal work, An Economic Theory of Democracy, in 1957 (Downs [1957] 2003). He noted that since there is vanishingly little chance that one’s single vote will actually make any difference in the outcome of a large-scale election (as noted above, a vote would need to either break or make a tie for that vote to actually change the outcome), there is no rational grounds for investing any time or effort in becoming informed about candidates or issues. Economists are fond of doing cost/benefit analysis, assuming humans act rationally. Voting is an example of a collective action “public goods problem”. The “marginal per capita return” on contributions to the public good is so tiny that there is essentially no reason to participate. In the realm of voting, economists expect a person to assess how much effort and time it would take to become well-informed about all of the candidates and issues in order to cast an informed vote. The person should also honestly assess the likelihood that their one vote will genuinely make a difference to the election outcome. A fair cost/benefit analysis would show that it is irrational to commit any effort in overcoming ignorance in this situation. The rational thing to do is to put in little or no effort to overcome your ignorance. The benefit (return) on the voter’s investment of time is always essentially zero. Indeed, even taking the time to vote at all (even without spending time educating oneself) isn’t rational from this perspective. Downs referred to the fact that anybody bothers to vote as “the paradox of voting”. If people were rational, they wouldn’t waste even that much time.

Single-issue voters may have accurate knowledge about how all of the candidates stand on their key issue, but this is hardly a counter to the ignorance at the base of electoral “democracy”, since the elected officials will be dealing with hundreds of other issues as well. Within a multi-party proportional representation voting system, the ignorance question is more about knowledge of the various party manifestos (platforms) than of individual candidates. In a two-party winner-take-all system, such as in the US, information needs are reduced by usually having only two, or often only one, choice on the ballot.

Many voters believe that any Democrat is better than any Republican, or conversely, that any Republican is better than any Democrat, so any effort learning about the candidates is unnecessary. But voters with objectively identical interests often hold the opposite belief about the better party, and assert that their counterpart supporting the other party is the one who is ill-informed. Also, this party label shortcut disappears in the most consequential elections— primary elections within each party. These are the most consequential, because most electoral districts in the US, whether due to gerrymandering or cultural tradition, regularly elect candidates from a particular party, so that the general election is a mere formality.

If each person’s single vote is but a drop in a large body of water, why do so many people vote anyway? It is rational to spend your limited time doing something that you enjoy, or has a probable payback, rather than becoming politically informed or voting. Although it is standard rhetoric for encouraging voter turnout to insist that “your vote matters”, this is an article of faith rather than a mathematically true statement. Many non-voters (including some highly prestigious economists) simply don’t buy into that myth and choose to abstain. The rational thing to do is not to waste time with voting. And indeed, most Americans do not vote in most elections.¹

However, many people enjoy or feel good about voting. Following campaigns and political news is akin to following a sports team. Being a voter or being a sports fan provides psychological satisfaction and partisan or team camaraderie, rather than exercising any significant power over the outcome of the election or the game. Voting can be thought of instead as an expressive act, or an act of group solidarity. Voting fulfills a felt duty of “doing one’s part in a democracy” (or for one’s self-identified sup-group). The analogy of feeling good about “doing one’s part” by taking a few extra steps to put a plastic container in a recycling bin, rather than the trash, comes to mind.

The history of plastic “recycling” as a public relations distraction by oil companies and plastics manufacturers to avoid the risk of government regulation, and the fact that most plastics placed in such bins are never actually recycled, are unfamiliar to most people (Sullivan 2020). But even if voting has an expressive value for voters, as Hélène Landemore notes, you still do not have a compelling reason to vote in a genuinely informed manner. So, as Downs observed back in 1957, “A large percentage of citizens—including voters—do not become informed to any significant degree on the issues involved in elections, even if they believe the outcome to be important” (Downs [1957] 2003, 298).

Humans are not reliable at making rational cost/benefit analyses. An activity might “feel good” even if the utility is hard to calculate or express. This “feeling good” may itself be the only utility. In a 2016 paper titled “Voting to Tell Others”, by behavioral economists from UC Berkeley, the University of Chicago and Harvard University, the researchers concluded that a major factor for why many people vote is because it is seen as normatively good and they wish to avoid feeling shamed or having the discomfort of telling a lie about having voted if asked whether they voted in the recent election (Della Vigna, et al. 2016). Voting can be considered an act of symbolic group solidarity, duty, or an expression of community interest, and as evidence confirming one’s self-identity as a “responsible person”, rather than as democratically instrumental.

This psychological aspect of voting was verified by social psychologist Christopher Bryan and his colleagues at Stanford University (Bryan et al. 2011) In several experiments, he sent surveys to people on the voter list and asked one randomly selected group whether they agreed that it was “important to vote”, and asked the other group if it was “important to be a voter”. He found that merely changing this wording had a significant impact on responses and actual turnout among the two groups of participants in the following election.

Among 133 young Californians surveyed, 82 percent of those who got the “vote” (task) version of the question actually voted in the 2008 presidential election, while 96 percent of those getting the “voter” (personal character) variant of the question did. In a confirming replication experiment in New Jersey, 244 people were surveyed, and 79 percent of those receiving the question whether it was important to “vote” ended up voting in the governor’s election, while 90 percent of those who were asked if it was important to be a “voter” actually voted. Being a voter is akin to being a responsible citizen, a valued character trait, whereas “voting” is merely a task, like folding the laundry.

But the fact remains that the overwhelming bulk of citizens who do participate by casting ballots do so without significant research into all the candidates and issues (which cannot be uncovered merely by watching the news or reading the newspaper, since they focus on the horse race aspect of the campaign). Deep down, they know that their one vote almost certainly won’t make a difference, even if they publicly assert that “every vote counts”. This also means that voters are guided by superficial understandings and unconscious biases, which they might have sought to verify or overcome if they knew their votes actually had any likelihood of being decisive.

Every election cycle, we hear news stories about how ill-informed voters (and non-voters) are. This constantly reinforces the view put forth by Lippmann (and many others since) that the “average man” is simply not competent in the realm of politics. On the other hand, it can be argued that it is those who devote energy to constantly staying abreast of the latest political news who are revealing a lack of genuine appreciation of the reality and basic mathematics of elections. Thus, non-voters who tell a pollster that they just don’t think they know enough about the candidates to vote appear to have a more accurate understanding of the reality of the situation than most voters. As noted above, staying informed about policies and electoral politics is akin to staying informed about one’s favorite sports team. It is a fine hobby, if one enjoys it, but it doesn’t contribute to real democracy or self-government, any more than a fan who memorizes team statistics helps that team win.

Economist Bryan Caplan in The Myth of the Rational Voter has gone so far as to suggest the term “rational irrationality” to describe the dynamic where voters who have a world view or underlying set of biases that might lead to harmful policies, may gain some psychological pleasure from voting in accordance with their biases, even if the policies are in fact contrary to their demonstrably genuine interests (Caplan 2008). Since the risk of one’s vote actually affecting the world is nearly non-existent, it makes rational sense to vote in a way that “feels good” and affirms one’s ill-informed biases, or membership in a partisan tribe. This helps explain why many voters vote ideologically but objectively against their own interests. Caplan’s argument suggests that people are more likely to spend the time to make an informed decision and act on it when they believe their one vote may realistically be decisive, such as in a small group, or when making a personal purchase (though even in this last circumstance, advertisers know rational analysis by a consumer can readily be circumvented).

On the other hand, Gerry Mackie, a University of California political theorist disputes the expressive theory of voting and proposes a “contributory theory of voting” (Mackie 2011). Rather than needing to alter the outcome for a vote to matter (or merely being expressive), a vote can contribute to a larger margin of victory or mandate (or reduce the margin if on the losing side), which may incrementally influence the boldness of the winner’s policy actions. Voters activated by this view of an election may have a slight incentive to vote in order to plump up the side they prefer, though there is no evidence that this prompts voters to become well-informed.

There is another counter-argument, which a few academics have proffered, that deserves comment. As long as some voters are well-informed, the ill- informed voters will essentially cancel each other out. Most votes are essentially just random noise, from which the pure signal of the informed voters can emerge. This is only a valid analysis, however, if poorly-informed voters’ choices are genuinely random. If there is any general bias in one direction or another, such as from exposure to TV advertisements or a history of party affiliation, the mathematics behind this assertion falls apart.

So, is it possible that rational ignorance is the underlying cause of a “bad rap” that average people get for political incompetence? Is it the structure of the political system, with its primary reliance on mass elections, that essentially promotes these low levels of political knowledge? Even Edmund Burke, who was not shy about saying how foolish the people could be, also noted that a reason for this was that they generally acted “without deliberation”. Sortition provides the means to remedy this by giving a representative subset of everyday people both the opportunity and, by dramatically increasing the impact of a participant’s vote, the incentive to overcome rational ignorance and actually deliberate.

Thinking Fast and Slow

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who, along with Amos Tversky, won the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics for their pioneering work on decision-making, provides a new lens with which to examine political decision-making by both voters and legislators. His life’s work is summarized in his groundbreaking treatise Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman 2011). He explains how evolution has left us with a mind that has two distinct systems for making decisions—the unconscious, automatic system that works in the background, and the conscious mind, which requires attention and effort. For ease, he refers to these two brain systems as “system one” and “system two”. Of the many thousands of (mostly trivial) decisions we make throughout the day, the first system is in charge. We all rely on mental short-cuts or “rules of thumb”, known as heuristics.

From an evolutionary survival standpoint, it is better if our brain and body react instantly and automatically to a rustle in the grass that may be a lion, rather than take time to carefully examine all the evidence. It just isn’t beneficial to devote our limited mental resources to giving time-consuming attention to most decisions. In fact, although our brain blocks awareness of it, many decisions that we believe (in retrospect) we made intentionally have been conclusively demonstrated to have actually been made through our unconscious “system one” mental process. If challenged, we then justify our unconsciously made decision with reasonable-sounding rationalizations. As Kahneman puts it, “the conclusion comes first, and the arguments follow” (Kahneman 2011, 45). Gut-level reactions or intuition about whether a stranger is a threat or trustworthy, for example, generally occur in a split second, below the conscious level. With effort, we may amend our initial decision by using system two thinking, but we often stick with and rationalize the instantaneous unconscious decisions, telling ourselves a sort of story that makes the decision seem thoughtful and intentional. I will be using Kahneman’s shorthand, referring to system one and system two thinking.

Electoral politics is less about the conscious and rational mind and more about the unconscious and emotional mind than most people like to admit. The political class is well aware of candidates’ and parties’ need to “frame” issues and elicit emotional responses from voters, rather than rational cognition. George Lakoff’s books The Political Mind and Don’t Think of an Elephant brought the importance of such framing front and center (Lakoff 2009, 2014). But modern campaigns are taking an even more disturbing turn, learning from neuroscience research.

A raft of recent books has presented the research that shows the astonishing role that various cognitive biases and unconscious brain processes play in most decision-making.² The conscious mind spins plausible rationalizations that mask what are frequently emotionally-based decisions (anchored in system one thinking). We only believe that we understand our own decision-making, and believe that it is rational far more often than it actually is. A current theory within the field of evolutionary psychology even suggests that rational thought evolved in humans essentially as a means of formulating persuasive arguments and finding flaws in others’ arguments, rather than as a means of private truth-finding (Mercier 2016). We more easily detect evidence and embrace arguments that can be used to bolster our current beliefs than those that might challenge our current beliefs.

Drew Westen is a clinical psychologist and political strategist. His book, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, gave concrete advice to Democrats on the importance of emotionally compelling stories and how to mold voters’ attitudes toward candidates using what is sometimes called neuro-marketing. Westen’s research team placed partisan voters into functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners to see which neural networks in voters’ brains were activated when exposed to new political information—particularly information that contradicted the voters’ prior beliefs. Their research corroborated what many studies by political scientists and psychologists have suggested, that “people vote for the candidate who elicits the right feelings, not the candidate who presents the best arguments” (Westen 2007, 125). Westen also notes that

It is true that 80 percent of the time we can predict voters’ judgments about complex issues from passions that bear no logical relation to truth. And it is true that a big chunk of that 80 percent—typically over half of it, and sometimes virtually all of it—is partisan sentiment. (Westen 2007, 115)

It is the minds of the remaining 20 percent, who have “changeable minds”, that his book is about shaping.

Matt Qvortrup, Chair of Applied Political Science at Coventry University, wrote in 2024,

In the past decade, neuroscience has enabled us to identify the parts of the brain that get activated when you watch political adverts. What these results show is that most people are driven by fear and emotion rather than by rational argument in election campaigns … In practice, this means that voters are more susceptible to messages that stress the negative rather than the positive. Researchers found that negative images and statements … heightened activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is also associated with decision-making … Negative political advertising works, and we now have the fMRI scans to prove it. Politics is a bare-knuckle fight, and our brains reflect that. Evolution has conditioned us to be driven by fear when we are under threat. We want to survive above all. (Qvortrup 2024)

The implications of the psychological techniques Westen proposes will be discussed further in subsequent chapters, but suffice it to say here that his research shows “that successful campaigns compete in the marketplace of emotions and not primarily in the marketplace of ideas” (Westen 2007, 305). This shouldn’t be surprising, based on commercial product marketing research. Westen discusses test-marketing political ads, and even “the use of cutting-edge technology designed to measure unconscious associations, so consultants can test how well an ad, slogan, or political appeal is working in ways people can’t consciously report” (Westen 2007, 280).

James Fishkin, a Stanford University Professor of Communication, notes in his book When the People Speak that there is an important distinction between persuasion and manipulation. Deliberation embraces persuasion based on full disclosure of information and analysis. Manipulation, on the other hand, is a special kind of persuasion that refers to the intentional use of psychological techniques, misinformation, or “strategically incomplete but misleading information” to get people to change their minds as intended by the manipulator (Fishkin 2009, 4). Unlike legitimate persuasion, manipulation is done in ways that the target person would not accept if they rationally considered the issue in light of adequate, balanced information, and if using system two thinking.

Well-structured deliberation has the potential to overcome manipulation and a variety of natural cognitive biases, and to move from mere “public opinion” to a considered “public judgment”. But deliberative persuasion requires a subject who is willing and able to spend the time and effort to absorb and consider the information being presented from alternative perspectives. Manipulative persuasion, on the other hand, can be quick and carried out without the permission or knowledge of the person being manipulated. Manipulation can, indeed generally does, happen at an unconscious or emotional level. While it is theoretically possible to garner votes through deliberative persuasion, manipulation is far more practical. Manipulation is the bread and butter of electoral politics. With a distracted audience, busy with all of the problems of work, home, and daily life, a deliberative process is simply out of reach in a mass electoral arrangement. Electoral politics is based on manipulation, not because candidates necessarily have sinister intent, but simply because it is the only realistic strategy for winning.

In Westen’s view, prior to the 2008 elections, the Republican Party was way ahead of the Democrats in exploiting the possibilities of emotional manipulation of voters. However, one of the endorsements on the back cover of the 2008 paperback edition of his book is from then-Chairman of the Democratic National Committee Howard Dean, who states that “This book could easily be titled The Next Step”. And indeed, the Obama 2008 campaign seemed to absorb Westen’s advice with its emotionally appealing, though intentionally vague “hope and change” theme.³ In June 2009, Advertising Age announced that the Obama/ Biden campaign was unanimously selected as “marketer of the year” and the winner of the International Grand Prize at the International Advertising Festival, beating out stellar advertising campaigns that year by the likes of Burger King, Warner Bros, and many others. Staying at the cutting-edge of modern advertising techniques, in 2012 the Obama re-election campaign conducted a set of massive experiments using a variety of persuasion (manipulation) scripts on voters and potential donors. In subsequent rounds of canvassing, they used only the scripts that proved most successful during the experimental phase.

Unlike elections, citizens’ assemblies facilitate and encourage participants to use system two thinking and to avoid manipulation. This potential will be examined more later on, but in the next few sections, I am going to go a bit deeper into political decision-making in an electoral environment.

Follow the Leader

It is widely assumed that partisan animosity is the result of deep policy disagreement. However, it is often the other way around. Partisan loyalty generates opposition to policies advocated by the other side as a signal of team loyalty. Politicians have an incentive to fan such animosity for electoral purposes, rather than policy purposes. Voters generally recognize that most public policy topics are more complex than they have time to absorb, and so reasonably defer to favored politicians who claim to understand these things. A respected group of fifteen political scientists wrote in Science magazine in 2020, “Overall, the severity of political conflict has grown increasingly divorced from the magnitude of policy disagreement” (Finkel et al. 2020).

In studies conducted by Geoffrey Cohen, a professor of psychology formerly at Yale and later at Stanford, partisan voters were asked to evaluate a policy proposal in a news story. Some participants read a version of the story that suggested a policy (for example, either a very generous or a very stingy welfare proposal) was favored by prominent Democrats, while other participants read a version of the story that suggested it was favored by prominent Republicans. When asked to give their own opinion, the participants’ evaluations of the policy closely mirrored the suggested preference of the party they generally agreed with, regardless of whether the policy would generally be deemed liberal or conservative (Klein 2021). Other recent research confirmed that many partisan voters will align with policy positions they believe a party leader has taken, independently of whether they self-identify as liberal or conservative (Edwards 2018). This research was able to take advantage of the fact that Donald Trump had taken antithetical liberal and conservative positions on many issues (such as both advocating heavily taxing hedge fund managers, but also advocating giving them tax breaks) so that survey respondents could be presented with either a liberal or conservative policy actually supported by President Trump, and asked what they thought.

In a fascinating study published in a 2019 issue of the highly respected Science Advances, Cornell researchers found that the formation of “partisan” divisions on policy may evolve through chance information cascades, rather than ideology or thoughtful deliberation. They divided 2,000 Democratic and Republican adherents into ten “parallel worlds” with both Democrats and Republicans in each world, and gave them an assortment of unfamiliar policies to grapple with, on which the Democratic and Republican parties did not already have identified positions, such as whether artificial intelligence (AI) should be used to identify online criminals. When participants’ responses to the policy questions (indicating the partisan preference of each respondent) were shared within a given “world”, partisans tended to coalesce on policy positions. But in one world, for example, the Democrats adopted a particular policy, while in another world, that policy was adopted by Republicans and opposed by Democrats. As the researchers observed, “Our results suggest that partisan alignments across substantively diverse issues do not necessarily reflect intrinsic preferences but may indicate instead the outcome of cascade dynamics that might have tipped in a different direction due to chance variation in the positions taken by early movers (Macy et al. 2019). Tribal solidarity trumped ideology.

As in the classic chicken or egg dilemma, it is not always obvious whether partisan leaders, or their partisan followers (or chance information cascades, as suggested by the research just mentioned) are responsible for changes in partisan and policy preferences over time. Research by sociologist Aaron M. McCright notes a dramatic shift in attitudes about environmental protection by Republicans. It was Republican President Nixon who was responsible for the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. Surveys since 1974 indicated broad agreement among liberal and conservative voters on environmental issues. As late as 1990, about 75 percent of both Democrats and Republicans believed the government was not spending enough on environmental protection. However, a sharp divide started forming around 1992. McCright argues that following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the “red scare” in 1991, environmental zealotry—a “Green scare” appeared as a replacement (Michigan State University 2014). A number of politicians utilized this alleged threat to mobilize voters. Over the following two decades, a deep partisan divide has developed on environmental issues, especially related to energy and climate change. It seems likely that a reinforcing feedback loop between partisan voters and partisan political leaders was at play, but the initiation seems to have come from politicians, rather than the voters.

Research by Gabreil Lenz and others has confirmed that rather than voters having prior policy positions and then selecting candidates who agree with them on those policies, the relationship is more often the inverse (Lenz 2012). When voters learn of the policy positions (for example, support for public works, military spending, nuclear power, etc.) of candidates they already favor, they come to favor those policies as well. For most policies, though not for single-issue voters, when a voter learns that their preferred candidate has the opposite position from them, the voter is more likely to change their opinion about the policy than change which candidate they favor.

James Fishkin observes that modern technology “has made it possible for elites to shape opinion and then invoke those opinions in the name of democracy” (Fishkin 2009, 6). How often have you heard elected officials insist that “the people have spoken loud and clear” about whatever policy the candidate favors, simply based on the fact that the candidate won the last election? Even in the absence of overt attempts at manipulation, many political scientists and media experts who study public opinion formation believe much of what passes for “public opinion” can be traced to elites. John Zaller, author of The Nature and Origin of Mass Opinion, argues that elites induce the public to hold opinions they would not accept if they had the best available facts and analysis (Zaller 1992).

Whether it is by chance (information cascades), or changes in leadership, or vagaries of the rank and file, the policy preferences of major parties are highly mutable over time, as long as the parties remain opposed to one another on some issue or other. The agglomeration of policy positions held by Democrats as opposed to Republicans seems logical to us only because we are accustomed to them. But these policy positions are surprisingly malleable. They are capable of changing sides and trading roles, in tandem, without explanation or evidence of careful reasoning. The idea that the Republican Party favors “free trade” had been sacrosanct for generations. But, when the leader of the party, Donald Trump, decided to jettison that seemingly foundational policy and impose a variety of protectionist trade tariffs, amazingly few Republican politicians or voters made a peep of objection.

Partisan leaders have immense influence when it comes to framing public support for policies. A clear example is found in the partisan handling of the market-based approach to health care—the “individual mandate”—which required that Americans purchase health insurance or face a tax penalty. The idea was advanced originally by the conservative Heritage Foundation in 1989, as an alternative to the single-payer system, in which the government would insure all residents and pay for it with taxes. In 2006, the market-based individual-mandate system was enacted in Massachusetts and embraced by the state’s Republican governor, Mitt Romney. Indeed, this sort of reform was known as “Romneycare” before it was repackaged and came to be known as “Obamacare” on a national level. In the fruitless hope of gaining some bipartisan (that is, Republican) support for an expansion of health-insurance coverage, President Obama rejected the progressives’ single-payer proposals in favor of the “Romneycare” model. Most Democrats quickly followed. Ironically, Romney would become the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, promising to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (by then commonly known as “Obamacare”). Once the Democrats endorsed a private, market-based approach to health care, the Republicans turned strongly against it. As the political commentator Ezra Klein puts the point: “A policy that once enjoyed broad support within the Republican Party suddenly faced unified opposition” (Klein 2012). The ideological underpinnings and operational details of the reform became rapidly irrelevant. Team loyalty trumped substance.

If voters are so readily led or manipulated by their preferred partisan leaders, does this also doom the prospects of a citizen panel selected by democratic lottery? Actually, no—while electoral politics is grounded in “system one” thinking linked to tribal loyalty, research has indicated that when people are induced to take the time to earnestly engage in counter-arguments on a variety of issues— think for themselves using “system two” thinking (as in a citizens’ assembly)— the influence of partisan leaders drops sharply (Tappin, Berinsky, and Rand 2023). For the vast majority of voters, elections are all about the “system one” mental process, relying on mental short-cuts, such as cues from leaders, rules of thumb, gut reactions, information that comes readily to mind and familiarity, rather than “system two” focused attention and genuine analysis. It is possible for people to switch systems, given sufficient time and motivation. Participating in a deliberative group, such as in the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly, can allow “system two” thinking to take over. But it is not possible to get most people to switch to “system two” in a mass election by simply exhorting them to learn about the issues and candidates.

Voter Decision-making

One might hope that informed, rational thought was in the driver’s seat when it comes to deciding how to vote. This does not appear to be the case most of the time. Some may argue that rational ignorance is not as big an obstacle as I have made out, because many voters become virtually informed by offloading the time-consuming effort onto some trusted surrogate or organization. The voter might look at lists of endorsed candidates by the League of Conservation Voters, or the NRA, the Chamber of Commerce, their union, church leader, or simply Uncle Luke (who pays attention to politics). However, a recent study found that voters widely misinterpret candidate endorsements from special interest groups, frequently drawing the opposite understanding by incorrectly assuming an organization agrees with the voter’s policy preferences, when in fact they are at odds. In other words, such off-boarding to surrogates has a high likelihood of failing for all but a few well-known special interests (Broockman, Kaufman, and Lenz 2024). Further, this decision to defer to some particular (hopefully) “better informed” person or organization is itself usually an emotionally-based and rarely a carefully considered choice that weighs all the other options. It is still based on rational ignorance, simply one step removed.

We all tend to suffer from what psychologists call naïve realism. This is the tendency to believe that we see the world objectively, and that those who disagree with us about policy or other matters must be uninformed, irrational, or biased. Undergirding and expanding on this predisposition is the illusion of information adequacy. Experiments have shown that “people tacitly assume that they have adequate information to understand a situation and make decisions accordingly. Yet, individuals often have no way of knowing what they don’t know” (Gehlbach, Robinson, and Fletcher 2024). The researchers explained the dynamic this way:

For example, many drivers have pulled up behind a first car at a stop sign only to get annoyed when that car fails to proceed when traffic lulls at the

intersection. Drivers of these second cars may assume they possess ample information to justify honking. Yet, as soon as a mother pushing her stroller across the intersection emerges from beyond their field of vision, it becomes clear that they lacked crucial information which the first driver possessed.

While voters almost inevitably suffer from this cognitive bias, the learning phase of a citizens’ assembly can readily overcome it.

But the problem of voter decision-making goes much deeper. Several studies suggest that the voter decision-making process has less to do with rational thought than many people presume. In 2005 Alex Todorov and colleagues at Princeton found that when they showed people photographs of candidates for US Congress or Governor (who participants were unfamiliar with), for less than one second each, and then asked them to rate the faces in terms of which one looked more “competent”, the participants’ flash assessments predicted the actual winners nearly seventy percent of the time, far more than the 50/50 expectation of chance alone (Todorov et al. 2005). This finding has been replicated many times. Two Swiss researchers on the faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Lausanne had two separate groups, one of Swiss adults and one of children, look at pairs of candidate photos, and pick which they thought looked more honest. To make sure the participants wouldn’t have any knowledge of the candidates, they used candidates from another country. They used official candidate photographs from the French parliamentary elections. They further avoided using photos of “unwinnable” candidate faces (whether due to ethnic bias, ugliness, or whatever) by limiting their pool of candidates to races in which a challenger had defeated an incumbent, thus assuring that either face could win an election, since both had at some point. The choices by both the adults and the children matched the actual winner of each election contest over 70 percent of the time. This indicates that a superficial factor, which the French voters would probably deny played any part in their decision, may in fact have tipped the balance in the election process (Antonakis and Dalgas 2009).

The influence of candidate appearance on election outcomes may be pervasive. MIT researchers replicated the results using candidate photographs from Brazil and Mexico, while asking voters in the United States and India which candidates would make better elected officials (Lawson et al. 2010). Gabriel Lenz, a co-author of this study, reported that “We were a little shocked that people in the United States and India so easily predicted the outcomes of elections in Mexico and Brazil based only on brief exposure to the candidates’ faces” (Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2010).

Recent research by Rodrigo Praino and Daniel Stockemer suggested that this candidate “attractiveness premium” is most impactful in single-seat winner-take-all elections, which are standard in the United States, and in low-information races where voters know relatively little about each candidate. They also found that the effect is substantially neutralized in party list proportional representation elections, which de-emphasize the characteristics of individual candidates (Praino 2018). Other research, based on laboratory experiments as well as actual elections, showed that voters tend to favor candidates with lower voices, although, in a separate study, they found no evidence that people with lower voices are more effective as leaders (Florida Atlantic University 2018).

It is conceivable that voters are picking up on something about candidates from their face or voice that actually does make for better leaders. So, researchers checked this too. A 2018 study found that although voters are swayed by candidate appearance and perceptions of candidate personalities, these superficial impressions completely failed to predict whether these candidates would be effective if elected to office. The researchers asked 138 local politicians in the UK to rate their own personality, and also asked 755 of their colleagues to anonymously rate their performance in office. They also had 526 people look at photographs of the councilors and surmise about their personalities. Wyatt and Silvester then compared these personality profiles and ratings of appearance to the politicians’ share of the vote in re-elections, as well as their evaluated performance. Candidates whose appearance was described as competent did better in the elections, but were not deemed by their colleagues to be any more effective in office (Worth 2018).

This certainly doesn’t mean that most voters decide who to vote for based on split-second intuition based on appearance. Not surprisingly, further research has found such effects to be strongest among less informed voters who watch a lot of television. Some voters rely on party labels, or even a careful analysis of candidates’ stands on certain issues. But enough voters, especially in close races, apparently use these quick gut reactions to swing the outcome one way or the other. Vast amounts of psychological research suggest that people then rationalize their selection with plausible “reasons” to help convince themselves that they voted responsibly.

It seems unlikely that our instant gut assessment of candidates’ faces is a good method of choosing political leaders, and nobody publicly embraces that belief. But all the evidence indicates many voters are relying on such quick system one thinking, instead of laborious system two reasoning. The 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump is an interesting example. Most voters knew at least a bit about the person as a celebrity, and most had an instant gut reaction to him becoming a candidate—either drawn to what they perceived to be self-confident leadership willing to take on a corrupt establishment, or repulsed by what they felt was narcissistic bravado. The continued support for Trump by his “base” throughout his presidency and beyond, and/or the disdain by his opponents, may be attributable to what psychologists refer to as confirmation bias and the Einstellung effect, in which we can all be effectively blinded to, or misinterpret, new information, based on initial information and beliefs.

It also turns out that voters informing themselves by reading the newspaper, watching TV news, scanning the Internet, etc., to keep up on public issues, does not make these voters better able to evaluate candidates. A study by Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth found that those with a favorable opinion about a particular political figure, and who also had more political knowledge (in that they followed the news, etc.), were more immune to factual corrections that contradicted their bias than were people who also had a favorable view of the person but were less “well-informed”.

In fact, the factual corrections tended to harden the erroneous beliefs of the “better informed” participants, as a sort of defense mechanism (Nyhan and Reifler 2010). Thus, even balanced presentations, depending on the messengers, may not lead to a common understanding of reality by voters, as each chooses which facts to accept and which to reject. Research has shown that political misperceptions, with motivated reasoning and psychological resistance to factual correction, are fundamental stumbling blocks for electoral systems (Flynn, Nyhan, and Reifler 2017).

The psychological failings of the electoral method of choosing political decision makers go far deeper and are far more troubling than how it affects voters. The psychological and other effects of the competitive election process on legislators and society as a whole are even more disturbing.

What sorts of people choose to run for office? And what sorts would never consider it? How does the competitive partisan environment affect legislators’ ability to absorb information, deliberate, and make good decisions? How does the feeling of power they experience change their ethical judgments? I will examine these and many other problems in the next chapter.