Competitive Electoralism

Competition, Consensus, and Compromise

The “Western” electoral system, often called “liberal democracy,” is a competitive system, which some political scientists refer to as agonistic pluralism—the public contest among politicians. Schumpeter essentially formalized the redefinition of “democracy,” writing “the democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote” (Schumpeter 1942, 269). This agonistic view assumes participants come with pre-established conflicting or incompatible preferences, values, and interests and dismisses the possibility of finding near consensus on many issues. Agonistic theorists accept the inevitability of eventual winners and losers (hopefully through elections rather than violence). This leads to a majoritarian view of democracy, leaving the minority losers with only the hope of coming back to fight and win another day. Leading political philosophers such as Chantal Mouffe and Nadia Urbinati are associated with this view.

In recent decades, alternative theories of democracy have gained significant attention. The relatively newer interest in deliberative democracy is sometimes described as the seeking of consensus, or near consensus, through a process of giving and genuinely hearing conflicting arguments among political equals. Jürgen Habermas described this as a scenario in which the “unforced force of the better argument” persuades the others and wins out. However, this is an ideal—a goal to aim for—rather than something easily achieved in real-world situations. It should be noted, however, that the agonistic, or competitive notion of democracy advanced by other political scientists is likewise merely an ideal, only loosely associated with how things happen in the real world. Many sortition advocates self-identify as “deliberative democrats”.

Grounded in deliberative democracy as an ideal, hundreds of citizens’ assemblies of ordinary people have interrogated conflicting expert witnesses and ultimately reached a near consensus on controversial topics. The dramatically increased diversity within randomly selected groups (compared to elected groups), combined with carefully designed deliberation procedures and facilitation, allows such groups to make epistemically better decisions than factionalized elected bodies.

In an earlier chapter, I mentioned Mary Parker Follett’s integrative deliberation, in search of win–win alternative resolutions. But there is another approach that can also go beyond the divide between consensus-seeking deliberation, as opposed to the agonistic majoritarian concepts of democracy. This is simply the notion of compromise. Rather than hoping that high-quality deliberation can uncover a best resolution, or simply letting the majority faction get its way, some have argued that democracy should fundamentally be based on compromise. Sometimes deliberation will discover integrative win–win solutions, and other times a majority faction can give in on its non-essential preferences to accommodate minorities.¹

John Stuart Mill, one of the most important political theorists of the nineteenth century, advocated for compromise through proportional representation systems, arguing that the British (and American) winner-take-all voting methods promote the tyranny of the majority. In his view, democracy is not defined by majority rule, where the majority can routinely impose its will on everyone else. Democracy means “the government of the whole people by the whole people,” including the minorities within it (Mill 1963–1991, 448). This requires the ability to compromise. For this to be possible, the representatives must act as trustees, able to learn from those with opposing views and even be able to change their own opinions, and strike compromises.

But partisan elections require telling voters what representatives believe and will do before they get elected, and before they enter debate to hear the other side. Pre-established party platforms and partisan campaign promises disable democratic deliberation and often stymie compromise. However, regardless of where one comes down on this agonistic versus common-good divide (“conflict is inevitable” or “we can seek common ground”), I will show that sortition is still a better tool than election.

I subscribe to the approach of Brazilian political theorist Gustavo H. Dalaqua. Rather than assuming that there is an uncrossable chasm between the dispassionate rationality of deliberative or epistemic democracy on one side, and the passion of pluralist agonistic democracy on the other—by embracing compromise as the essence of democracy, we can have our cake and eat it too. Dalaqua writes:

A politics based on compromise unites the agonistic and deliberative strands of democracy, for it allows the extant antagonism in society to unfold in a discursive manner. It permits political groups to manifest their rival passions inside political institutions, but at the same time forces them to deliberate and reach provisory agreements (i.e., compromises). (Dalaqua 2019, 602)

On most issues, it is useful to explore pluralistic disagreements and then deliberate to seek integrative consensus. But if no win–win option is found, rather than quickly moving to a majority winner vote, a search for acceptable compromises should come next. This is not achievable when competitive partisan elections make defeating opponents the overriding priority, rather than the building of community. A lottery-selected body of non-politicians, who don’t have a primary goal of exposing and defeating each other, makes this democratic ideal a possibility.

The remainder of this chapter will focus on the pathologies of the competitive system based on elections that is dominant today, and generally referred to as “representative democracy”.

Tribalism

In his 1651 ground-breaking book of political philosophy, Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes asserted that without civil society—in what he termed a hypothetical “state of nature”—there would be “nothing but a war of all against all.” But humans are naturally social—living in groups with at least a rudimentary civil society—so that his concept of “without civil society” is not, in fact, a “state of nature.” A lot of disagreements between political philosophies, including our country’s current political divisions, find their roots in different views of human nature. It is almost cliché to say that conservatives see people as naturally “selfish”, while liberals see them as naturally “good”. The Framers of the Constitution took the “conservative” view. If humans were like angels, there would be no need for government, Madison wrote in the Federalist No. 51. This is a false dichotomy, as clearly humans can naturally be either one or both at the same time. It depends on the specific situation and the broader environment, including institutional structures and culture.

Current research supports the notion that human nature within the family and tribe evolved along a cooperative and altruistic vein (Sussman and Cloninger 2014). Evolution has left humans with a ready ability, depending on circumstances, to cooperate and act altruistically toward members of their own “tribe”. even while being horrifyingly brutal toward outsiders. While specific ethnic and other group animosities are learned, the potential for a sort of tribalism that can lead to war and the dehumanization of non-members is evolutionarily rooted (both biological and cultural). But external animosity is not inevitable nor universal. It is common to view cooperative altruism and violent competition as contradictory human natures. While it is easy to think of these behaviors as opposites, it is more appropriate to think of them as two sides of the same coin. It would be difficult to imagine getting people to go to war, for example, if not for the ability of individuals to give selflessly, putting the needs of others ahead of their individual drive for self-preservation. The camaraderie of comrades on the battlefield is well known, as are the atrocities of war. The challenge is to foster such community spirit without the bloodshed or animosity.

Competitive elections utilize, and more troublingly, exacerbate the negative side of tribalism. Madison warned in Federalist No. 10 about the dangers of factions, or parties, which “inflamed [men] with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good” (Madison 1787b). George Washington warned of “alternative despotism of one faction over another” (Keane 2009, 337).

Competitive electoralism has a deeply detrimental impact on how tribal instincts play out throughout society. In a journal article titled “Politics makes bastards of us all: Why moral judgment is politically situational”, researchers reported that people of all political persuasions were more likely to engage in immoral judgments and behaviors when immersed in the partisan political realm (Hull, Warren, and Smith 2024). The driving force of elections gives politicians a powerful incentive to fan division and hatred, using tribalism to further their electoral ends of gaining power.

Electoral politics has a broadly corrosive effect on both civil society and governance. Party-based government has formalized and aggravated the negative impact, with Congress members ascribing evil motives to the actions of partisan opponents, while trading votes in order to serve favored special interests and lobbyists. In America today, at most two political parties (and sometimes just one) maintain control of all three branches, overcoming the nominal separation of powers Madison sought. When a party controls both Congress and the Presidency, for example, that party facilitates coordination and often seeks team loyalty, rather than a check and balance between the branches. This party- sponsored coordination among the branches maximizes the collective power of the party members. Meaningful checks and balances generally only exist within the current system when different parties control the different branches. But a common consequence of such “divided government” is partisan gridlock, with one extreme example being the 2011–2013 debt-ceiling and budget sequestration standoffs between the Republican-controlled House and the Democratic Senate and President. The steady erosion of Congressional authority and the development of what is often called “the imperial presidency”, especially with regard to military and surveillance matters, also obviously weakens the principle of checks and balances.

The strategic imperative of a winner-take-all election, with its zero-sum game logic, generates an “us versus them” culture that goes beyond mere criticism to demonization of opponents. Ad hominem attacks on opponents, while distasteful, are commonplace. Voters generally say they dislike negative campaign ads, but since they are often effective (sometimes simply by driving down voter turnout), politicians regularly resort to them. Ironically, many of the calls by politicians themselves for “more civility” and complaints about an opponent’s “negative campaigning” are themselves calculated negative campaign tactics, intended to portray opponents in a negative light, since the implication is that the opponents are the ones who are being uncivil.

A democracy structured on an adversarial election process with winners and losers gives candidates a built-in incentive to promote and amplify these “us versus them” tribal dichotomies. Rather than allowing for a thoughtful exchange of ideas, leading to a common vision of a way forward, this type of “democracy” prompts citizens to revert to warring tribes bent on defeating the other party. This dynamic is not uniquely modern. In his famous treatise, Politics, Aristotle mentions that the city of Heraea replaced the election of magistrates with the selection by lot, specifically to overcome the partisan machinations and plotting induced by elections (Aristotle 2016, 130).

This us/them partisan divide, generated and/or exacerbated by elections, is not a characteristic of genuine democracy, but rather an existential threat that is undercutting democratic principles. In recent years, there has been a rash of political science journal articles examining what is termed “affective polarization”—characterized by even greater disdain for the “other” party than approval of one’s favored party.

A study published by Yale researchers in 2020 showed how deeply this threat to democracy has permeated American society. “Our findings show that US voters, regardless of their party affiliation, are willing to forgive undemocratic behavior to achieve their partisan ends and policy goals”, according to Professor Milan Svolik,

We find that polarization raises the stakes of elections and, in turn, the price of prioritizing democratic principles over partisan interests. Voters’ willingness to sacrifice democratic principles may not be desirable in terms of protecting democracy, but it has an intuitive political logic: They are trading off one political interest against another. (Graham and Svolik 2020)

The study found that only 3.5 percent of voters were willing to use their vote to punish a candidate from their preferred party for engaging in anti-democratic behavior.

This willingness to ignore or forgive anti-democratic behavior by those on your side of the partisan divide may have become glaringly obvious since 2016, but has existed forever. Sadly, we seem able to perceive and condemn this dynamic on the other side, but to either be completely blind to it or even approve of it on our own side. A team of researchers from Stanford University and MIT published a study with 8,000 participants in 2022, examining depolarization strategies among partisans. They found that “while these depolarization interventions reliably reduced affective polarization, we do not find compelling evidence that these interventions reduced support for undemocratic candidates, support for partisan violence or prioritizing partisan ends over democratic means” (Voelkel, et al. 2020). It is widely proclaimed that democratic principles are fundamental. But many people’s partisan priorities, as shaped by an electoral milieu, indicate those “principles” are merely instrumental and easily jettisoned—valuable if they help elect the genuinely “good” politicians we support. Contrary to the widespread assumption, elections and partisanship actually foment anti-democratic attitudes.

Professor Yphtach Lelkes, of the University of Pennsylvania, was quoted in a 2021 New York Times article stating that “affective polarization is the canary in the coal mine. That is, it tells us things are dysfunctional without causing the dysfunction. Affective polarization as an indicator of dysfunction rather than a cause doesn’t diminish its importance” (Edsall 2021). I would argue that the cause of the dysfunction, which affective polarization reveals, is society’s reliance on elections themselves.

I should note that this dynamic is most extreme in higher offices, such as federal elections, and may be weaker or nonexistent in more local elections. However, since the same party labels are used, and local voters are also national voters, the psychological effects filter down, even if the local candidates don’t fan the flames. And it goes far beyond mere partisan suspicion and hatred. This casting of electoral opponents as “enemies” infects the rest of society. For many people, partisan loyalty, like religion, ethnicity, race and other classifications can be more about a personal identity than policy preferences. Research has shown that many people refrain from making friends or even living in the same neighborhoods with supporters of the “other” party. Any efforts to seek the common good seem unrealistic and naive in this combative atmosphere. Flipping the classic quote of nineteenth-century general Carl von Clausewitz, “politics is war by other means”. Alternatively, partisan “lack of civility” can prompt non-partisans to wash their hands of the whole sorry mess and turn their attention to more appealing activities outside the political realm.

Of course, it isn’t just politics where we see factions and forms of tribalism— team sports, hometown loyalties, etc., also stem from this instinctual propensity. As mentioned above, the other side of tribalism is the altruistic sharing and self-sacrifice it promotes within the tribe. A major advance made possible by civilization is the extension of that tribal boundary—ultimately, perhaps, to include all of humanity—the “human family,” as proclaimed in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations 1948). However, the propensity of elections to foment inter-group hatreds, which elections foster for compelling tactical campaign reasons, is counter-productive. They are harmful in relatively homogeneous developed countries, but can be totally devastating when foisted on nations rife with ethnic and religious divisions. I should note, however, that within the political realm, it is not only elections that foster this tribalism. Any society divided into leaders and followers can give leaders this same incentive, in which leaders (even without any elections) find it beneficial for their own purposes to demonize opponents. My point is not that elections uniquely promote this tribalism, but that, unlike a sortitional democracy, electoral systems increase and thrive on it. The election panacea, favored by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and all “modern democracies”, is the completely wrong approach to democratic governance, in both developed and developing nations.

Competitive Democracy

Within mainstream political science, it is understood that elections are not sufficient for creating “democracy”. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, many political scientists have written about competitive authoritarianism (Levitsky and Way 2002). Countries such as Hungary and Turkey (and dozens of others) have competitive elections, but the incumbent leader and party can abuse and distort institutions to further entrench their regime. Fears that the United States may also be heading down that path have grown in recent years. But here I want to dispute the notion that elections can ever produce real democracy.

Some sort of competition is inevitable in any political system, whether between orators in classical Athens or between policy options supported by different individuals or interests today. The optimal public policy can sometimes best be uncovered through the contestation of competing ideas. However, it is often hard to tell which conflicting ideas reflect genuine disagreements or interests, and which conflicting ideas are essentially manufactured by politicians in order to inflame and mobilize their base, or demonize opposing politicians.

The idealized version of the competitive model imagines the process of politicians competing to win votes, allowing “the people” to effectively control government and win the policies they prefer. While traditionally presented in high school civics classes, few political scientists subscribe to this myth of how our electoral system works. An electoral political system makes competition for power (rather than policy) its heart and soul. In a competitive electoral system, the people do not rule themselves, but are instead given the hypothetical opportunity to choose, through elections, which team of the “political class” (along with their sponsors) will get to rule them. Unlike a traditional oligarchy, whether based around family ties or class, competitive elections allow a steady circulation of oligarchs in and out of power.

The person most often credited with popularizing the elite competition view of democracy is Joseph Schumpeter. Schumpeter’s 1942 book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, has had a profound impact on the field of political science—even today. Expanding on the concepts of the famous German sociologist, Max Weber, Schumpeter sought to describe how “democracy” actually did function, rather than how it was imagined, or how it ideally should work. He argued that “democracy is the rule of the politician”. Schumpeter wrote, “democracy does not mean and cannot mean that the people actually rule in any obvious sense of the terms ‘people’ and ‘rule’. Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them” (Schumpeter 1942, 284).

This is not the understanding of democracy that is presented in high school civics classes, nor in speeches by politicians at 4th of July events, but it is widely accepted among political scientists as unvarnished reality (though some dispute his unconditional “cannot mean” in the quote). The respected British professor of political theory John Dunn, for example, wrote “In no modern state do the people in fact rule, and … there is little reason to see in the history of any modern state over any period of time a reasonably straightforward intention to permit them to do anything of the kind” (Dunn 1996, 180–181).

Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, in their book, The Civic Culture, argued that too much participation can be detrimental to democracy (Almond and Verba. [1963] 2016). A constant flood of demands from divergent groups on a political system, especially a winner-take-all system, can fracture a society. They suggested political participation should be only “intermittent and potential”. We are left with a shadow of democracy, in which the deliberative skills and participatory spirit have atrophied, or more accurately, never been developed or allowed to mature.

Joseph Schumpeter argued that modern representative democracy was essentially a system of competing teams of politicians, vying for power. The politicians cheer on the other members of their own party against the “enemy”, even when they disagree on critical policy issues. Not unlike sports teams, allegiance to one team or another is not necessarily based on policy preferences. In many cases, parties do not so much exist to promote a platform, but rather platform planks exist to help get members of the party team elected.

Anthony Downs extended the Schumpeter concept one step further in a two-party, left/right environment. While it may not be literally true all the time, Downs wrote that electoral democracy can usefully be thought of as a system in which politicians

never seek office as a means of carrying out particular policies; their only goal is to reap the rewards of holding office per se. They treat policies purely as a means to the attainment of their private ends, which they can reach only by being elected … Parties formulate policies in order to win elections, rather than win elections in order to formulate policies. (Downs [1957] 2003, 28)

A few individual politicians change their policy choices depending on which way they believe the wind is blowing (or the policy preferences of campaign donors), and where there is a sufficient base of votes that can be mobilized to turn out. However, the negative ramifications of being seen as a “flip-flopper” mean that these partisan shifts often occur behind the scenes or over a long enough time frame that most voters don’t notice the change.

Party platforms and policies can even become mirror opposites over time. In 1971, the Republican president, Richard Nixon, imposed wage and price controls, a profoundly anti-free market policy, and unimaginable in the current Republican (or Democratic) Party. While most African Americans are likely to vote Democratic today, in the first half of the twentieth century it was the party of white supremacy, with some Democratic Party state rules expressly prohibiting the participation of Blacks in party primaries.

Downs’s point that policies are tools created to engage in electoral battle, rather than being the goals for which elections are fought, was specific to winner-take-all two-party election systems like that in the US. It is possible that in multi-party systems with proportional representation that parties and candidates actually are engaged in electoral battle in order to implement preferred policies. The Green Parties in various European countries come to mind as parties that (at least initially) had a mission. But the steady mutation of various European socialist parties to social democratic goals, and then often ending in policies completely amenable to capitalism, suggests that winning elections indeed does have a higher priority than policy. Of course, prioritizing core policy demands versus electoral imperatives can lead to internecine battles within parties (as illustrated by the swings within the UK Labour Party with Tony Blair and Ed Miliband). When I served in office, I frequently heard fellow legislators explain why they couldn’t vote for an amendment they actually liked, saying that they needed to stay in office in order to do good work. Even if true, this is a convenient rationalization for prioritizing winning elections over policy.

In all modern “representative democracies”, the use of elections has propelled the development of political parties. Parties establish the framework for electoral choices by the voters, mobilize voters and organize governance (or opposition) once the election is over. In multi-party systems with proportional representation voting, it is often the party negotiations after the election where the trade-offs between power and policy are actually settled (without any voter involvement).

Most political scientists assert that parties are an inevitable element of electoral systems. In the US, political parties have a tiny vanguard of active members (candidates, party officials, fund-raisers and the like), while the mass of citizens have no formal partisan connection, at most exhibiting some level of party identification. Perhaps 60 to 70 percent of Americans have a more or less consistent partisan preference, but this allegiance has historically been shallow and not policy-based.

The rise of Donald Trump, fomenting both loyalty and hatred, almost certainly increased the feelings of partisanship. The growing view that supporters of the other party are “enemies of the country” rather than merely “opponents” is clearly dangerous. A trend that may accompany this trend, but was less noted by commentators, is increased disdain for politics of all sorts.

Testing Competitive Theories

A core concept of any democracy is the notion that the government should reflect, or be responsive to, the preferences or interests of the whole population, or at least the majority of the population. Scholars have proposed at least three basic theories for how our competitive system works.

The most optimistic version can be termed the majoritarian electoral democracy theory, and sees the political class constantly monitoring the preferences of voters, with political parties leaning toward the political median in order to win elections. Under this system, voters, or at least the voters in the middle of the spectrum (the so-called “median voter”), should have a powerful influence, if not absolute control, over policies adopted by the government.

Another common theory, called pluralism or polyarchy, holds that interest groups, either mass-based (e.g. unions, fundamentalist Christian organizations, the NRA and AARP) or professional and business-oriented interest groups (e.g. the Chamber of Commerce, American Medical Association, National Home-Builders Association and banking and investment companies), compete to shape government decisions.

A third theory argues that electoral competition in most democracies is little more than a charade, with (typically) wealthy elites pulling the strings of the dominant political parties. This elite domination theory is typified by such works as sociologist C. Wright Mills’ influential 1956 book, The Power Elite (Mills [1956] 2000). Left-wing political observers, such as Noam Chomsky, have argued that an individual’s ability to gain access to the levers of power—getting into the political class—is effectively determined by whether an individual has shown an ability and willingness to serve the interests of those with great wealth and power.

Expanding on the earlier research of Martin Gilens discussed in chapter 2, Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University undertook a ground-breaking quantitative analysis comparing the validity of these basic theories of how our “democracy” actually works. Their paper, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens”, for the first time presented a multivariate analysis comparing these common theories using a unique data set of 1,779 policy issues. The researchers compiled the results of numerous public opinion polls between 1981 and 2002 in which policy preferences and respondent income data were included. They also coded the expressed policy preferences of a large number of organized interest groups—both mass-based and professional and business interests. Next, they examined whether the policy preferences of people in different income groups and of interest groups ended up being adopted by the government. Using the top ten percent of income earners (the affluent) as an available proxy for the likely preferences of the top one percent or genuinely wealthy elite, and the 50 percent income decile as a proxy for the median voter,² they made some important discoveries. On issues where the preferences of the wealthy and the middle group diverged in terms of preferences, there was a strong correlation between the policy preferences of the wealthiest ten percent and government action. But this was not the case for average Americans. They found no evidence for the majoritarian or “median voter” theory. Rather, they discovered that

the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy … Nor do organized interest groups substitute for direct citizen influence, by embodying citizens’ will and ensuring that their wishes prevail in the fashion postulated by theories of Majoritarian Pluralism. … So existing interest groups do not serve effectively as transmission belts for the wishes of the populace as a whole … When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. (Gilens and Page 2014)

The authors do offer several caveats, however. First, they observe that “this does not mean that ordinary citizens always lose out; they fairly often get policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by economically elite citizens who wield actual influence”.

They acknowledge that it is conceivable (though they doubt it) that high-income citizens have a better grasp of the common good (as many eighteenthcentury aristocrats quoted earlier in this book believed), while average citizens simply are mistaken about their own self-interests. They also note that their study could not examine the framing of the agenda—in other words, the policy questions deemed worthy of asking by the various polling firms—and whether this agenda was itself set by economic elites or interest groups. The vast array of “under the radar” policy issues considered (or ignored) by Congress, which are never subject to opinion surveys (and about which hardly any ordinary people are aware), suggests that their study almost certainly understates the dominance of elites and interest groups. And finally, they note that the public preferences revealed by the surveys were not the result of meaningful deliberation, but rather off-the-cuff opinions. Their research could not examine to what extent these preferences were shaped by the persuasion efforts of elites and interest groups, and whether those opinions would hold fast following serious deliberation. On many of the issues that were surveyed, it would be ridiculous to think that most respondents had sufficient background knowledge to have any considered opinion at all. Democracy should not mean blind governmental responsiveness to off-the-cuff opinions.

This “scientific confirmation” of the assertion that ordinary citizens do not “rule,” and do not even have a significant influence, let alone direct their rulers on policy matters, has been hyped by those on the left as proof that America is an oligarchy rather than a democracy. But this oversimplifies the implications of the paper. It has also been seriously critiqued by some other academics, both in terms of methodology and interpretation (Matthews 2016). Their study also doesn’t empirically demonstrate whether domination by economic elites and business-oriented interest groups is common to all electoral governments, or just the American variant. After all, there are alternative electoral models (incorporating proportional representation, campaign finance regulation, media access, etc.) that are intended to avoid this elite domination of government and allow the people to rule.

To examine this question, two Swedish researchers undertook a massive study combining survey data on a wide range of issues from over two million respondents on implemented policies in 43 countries. They discovered several interesting things. Firstly, they found that the more affluent favor more economically conservative, but culturally liberal policies than the less wealthy, and that in both of these domains, elected governments appear more representative of the wealthy. However, elected governments repeatedly

implemented policies beyond even what the most affluent quintile in our data wants. Thus, the discrepancy in responsiveness cannot be explained by unequal responsiveness to different groups of voters. Instead, it is possible that a systematic bias against certain types of policies is driven not from below, by citizens, but by the political establishment itself, a proposition that has been theorized but not systematically tested. (Perrson and Sundell 2022, 2)

The researchers propose that their study indicates that the notion of a differential in government responsiveness to different income groups masks a more significant political class (politician) domination.

This leads us to question whether the story really is about unequal responsiveness, as most existing literature would have it, or about the general lack of responsiveness on behalf of the political system. The idea of unequal responsiveness implies that there is [a] causal effect of the attitude of the affluent [on] policy. But our results show that an alternative explanation is that some other factors cause policy to be more economically conservative and culturally liberal. While that in practice means that the affluent are better

represented, it could be coincidental if the true causal mechanism is related to factors internal to the political system … The picture that emerges is one where parties have considerable leeway to pursue policies preferred by leadership and core activists, and sometimes do, even in the face of a hostile public opinion. (Perrson and Sundell 2022, 28)

It should be noted, however, that a constraint on their analysis arises from the lack of fine-grained detail in the available income data. They could only compare the policy preferences of the top fifth (quintile) of income earners with the rest of the population. But it is possible that this nominally “high-income” group is not that dissimilar from the bulk of the population, while the top 0.1 percent of income earners (for example) could have distinctly different policy preferences, but be essentially invisible in the data because of their rarity. If politicians were being uniquely responsive to the super-rich, it wouldn’t be detectable in any study based on survey data.

The other limitation of all such studies is the relevance of off-the-cuff public opinion in terms of judging meaningful responsiveness and representation. Also, as noted above, there are a relatively limited number of “issues” that polling firms have chosen to include in their voter surveys. This generally, though not exclusively, reflects the agenda of “news-worthy” topics that political leaders have promoted. Competitive elections inevitably generate a simplified pseudopolitics for mass consumption. Keen observers are aware that much of what passes for “politics” is performance for the media. Murray Edelman formulated the concept of symbolic politics in the 1980s, which underpins most political communication. There are two political “realities”; there is the actual effect political actions have in the real world, and the theatrical packaging or symbolic impact in the electoral arena. According to Edelman, political players are compelled to produce a simplified make-believe political world using symbols and rituals to sway voters through the mass media.

Psychology of an Elected Representative

I now turn to examining the cognitive biases and psychology of being an elected representative. It is my contention that the sort of people who seek election, the sort of people who win election, and the psychological effects of wielding the power once elected, virtually guarantee that the group as a whole will be ill-suited for making public policy. In this section, I may seem to be castigating all elected politicians, so I need to be clear about one point. The studies I cite below should not be interpreted as a condemnation of all politicians. Among elected politicians are many wonderful, selfless, honest individuals. It is a matter of psychological tendencies and the final mix of people thrust into making public policy decisions.

Yes, the capacity of rationally ignorant voters, who are showered with propaganda, to carefully choose leaders is suspect. But we should be even more suspicious of the policy-making capacity of those who seek, and win, elections. Those who seek elected office generally have a different set of personality traits than the public in general—though there are, of course, exceptions. Few would dispute, at the very least, that they are more extroverted and self-confident (or over-confident).

Recent research at the University of Kent’s School of Psychology found that people who exhibit social dominance are more confident in their decisions, yet perform no better than others at making those decisions. Traits such as extroversion, self-confidence, high-status, and social dominance are linked to a willingness to seek elective office. These traits also improve election prospects. But they are not associated with better decision-making ability (Belotelova and Martin 2025).

Researchers in the Economics Department at the University of Zurich in 2018 used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study differences between individuals who were more and those who were less willing to take on decision-making that would have an impact on others. They examined several common notions, such as whether these “leaders” were less risk averse, or simply enjoyed being in control. To their surprise, these factors were not predictive of who would take on such leadership roles. Instead, they found that “leaders” in this experimental scenario were those who were less concerned about certainty, while those in a follower mode were more concerned about being certain of the best decision when the welfare of others was at stake (University of Zurich 2018).

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that suggests many who choose to lead are willing to “trust their gut.” However, it seems likely that superior societal decision-making would come from individuals more concerned about making sure their decisions were optimal, rather than merely felt right. One would hope elections could at least weed out people with antisocial personality disorder or psychopathy. Some psychologists suggest that individuals with psychopathy (associated with a lack of conscience combined with manipulative charm) are actually more common among politicians (and corporate CEOs) than in the general population. Psychologists who study this estimate that about one percent of the general population are psychopaths (many of whom end up in prison), while approximately four percent of elected officials are. One study, published in the middle of Trump’s first term, concluded that, by a large measure, there are more psychopaths in Washington, DC, than in any state of the union. The author of the study speculates that “psychopaths are attracted to the kinds of jobs Washington offers—jobs that reward raw ambition, a relentless single-mindedness and … the willingness to step over a few bodies along the way” (Robertson 2018).

Psychopathy is not the only psychological concern we should have about elected officials (though the successful election of Adolph Hitler gives pause). Research by Peter Belmi and others indicates that a willingness to engage in unethical Machiavellian manipulation is associated with both a higher class background and interest in pursuing power (Belmi and Laurin 2016). A team of UK and German researchers reported on a game theory lab experiment in 2020 with 308 people participating in mock candidate nomination and election phases. The experiment indicated that individuals who were more willing to lie at the nomination stage were also more likely to succeed in getting elected (Fehrler, Fischbacher, and Schneider 2020).

The researcher from the University of Bath’s Department of Economics, Dr. Maik Schneider, explained:

Our study highlights why it may not be too surprising to find candidates on the campaign trail who lie. This should concern us all given the low levels of trust in politics. There is a clear paradox here in terms of an electorate which says what’s missing in politics is greater trust, yet results which indicate that candidates who lie more, somehow still have a higher chance of gaining office. (University of Bath 2020)

So, do elections elevate more Thomas Jeffersons and Nelson Mandelas, or Richard Nixons and Adolph Hitlers? A 2014 Rasmussen survey found that 78 percent of Americans believe politicians are less ethical than Americans in other professions (Rasmussen Poll 2014a). But it is not merely the pre-existing psychology of those who decide to seek office that is of concern. Scientific studies have indicated that power often corrupts. Lord Acton famously wrote that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men”. (This second sentence of his quotation somehow rarely gets included.)

In some cases, the mere winning of elections can alter an individual’s character for the worse. As mentioned in chapter 1, Lord David Owen, a former UK Foreign Secretary, leader of the Social Democratic Party and trained MD, has proposed that the medical profession formally recognize a mental illness he calls the hubris syndrome, which some people in powerful positions succumb to. In his book, The Hubris Syndrome: Bush, Blair and the Intoxication of Power, he argues that this is a distinct and diagnosable mental condition, with dangerous policy implications. Among over a dozen symptoms, he includes excessive confidence, loss of contact with reality, impulsiveness, a disproportionate concern with image and presentation, a consequent type of incompetence in carrying out policy, etc. (Owen 2012). But mental states or character traits of politicians need not reach the level of a diagnosable syndrome to be a problem for society. What about reasonably well-adjusted, yet self-centered or callous people who simply love the limelight?

Experiments in which participants were randomly assigned to powerful or non-powerful roles found that the mere possession of power over others, over time, leads to corrupting behavior. Even participants who tested high in inherent honesty prior to the experiment had a tendency to succumb to the corrupting tendency of power. One such study from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland found that there was a marked tendency for increased power as well as levels of testosterone to lead to corrupt behavior³ (Bendahan et al. 2015). Other experiments have revealed that winning in one competition tends to promote cheating in subsequent competitions. In summarizing recent research on winning and cheating conducted by Israeli professors Amos Schurr and Ilana Ritov, University of California, Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner (who did not participate in this particular study) was quoted in a Scientific American article, observing that

When we win in competition, in particular when we establish we are above others in rank, we will feel more powerful… And dozens of studies have found that the simple feeling of power makes people feel above the scrutiny of others and act in impulsive, self-gratifying and unethical ways. Feelings of power, whether it comes from wealth, a person’s position in a hierarchical structure or in this case competition, can indeed lead to various abuses like lying and stealing. (quoted in Cepelewicz 2016)

The researchers found no such negative psychological effects when participants instead won through a lottery process.

It may sound like negative stereotyping, but social psychologists have repeatedly found that high-status, wealthy individuals (as most members of Congress are) are significantly more likely to engage in selfish or unethical behavior than are middle- and lower-class individuals. Numerous independent experiments conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, are instructive in this regard. Studies, by Paul Piff and others published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for example, found that upper-class drivers (easily identified by their luxury automobiles) were four times more likely than other drivers to cut off other vehicles at a busy four-way intersection, and three times less likely to stop for a pedestrian waiting to use a crosswalk. This result has been replicated in studies by other researchers.

In another study, participants in a waiting room were told they could have “one or two” pieces of candy from a jar identified as being for children. Upper-class subjects, on average, took twice as much candy as participants from lower classes. In yet another experiment, groups of subjects played a computerized dice rolling game, in which the participant with the highest score would win a cash prize. The game was secretly rigged so that it was impossible to score above a 12, but upper-class individuals were significantly more likely to cheat and report scores that were impossible to achieve (Piff et al. 2012). Yet, an experiment conducted by University of Michigan professor Leigh Tost suggests that when participants are put in powerful roles and are reminded of the impact of their actions on the future well-being of others, they often behave more generously—a sort of noblesse oblige (Kosdrosky 2015). Of course, generosity may be exercised in a corrupt, unethical manner as well (such as through favoritism). So, while the overall tendency is clear, rather than corruption being an absolute side effect of power, the circumstances and context (longevity, visibility, magnitude, etc.) also matter.

Brian Klaas observes in his book Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us that some individuals are more easily corruptible than others. Some situations offer more opportunities and incentives for corruption than others, and some systems generate a culture of corruption, including elevating the more corruptible, while others do not. As Klaas summarizes his findings: “Corruptible people are drawn to power. They’re often better at getting it. We, as humans, are drawn to following the wrong leaders for irrational reasons linked to our Stone Age brains. Bad systems make everything worse” (Klaas 2021, 148). Rather than being a check on corruption, due to the allure of power and voter rational ignorance and other factors, elections are more likely to elevate more corruptible people, who are then incentivized to resort to more corruption to maintain and concentrate power. Long “service” through regular re-election allows them to build their corruption skills and self-justifications, while improving their ability to hide their corruption from the public. The concentration of power in electoral systems grants elected politicians extraordinary opportunities to engage in corruption, often with dire consequences.

However, it is possible to mitigate this hubris effect by changing the way representatives or leaders are selected. In experiments, it has been shown that introducing random selection into the selection process can sometimes reduce the self-congratulatory hubris and unethical behavior. Researchers at German and Swiss universities found that procedures like those of the Renaissance Italian city republics, with alternating rounds of competition, combined with random selection to either generate a final pool of applicants or to make the ultimate selection, appear to reduce these negative psychological effects without hurting competence (Berger, et al. 2020).

Effect on Deliberation

Another negative aspect of leaving political decisions to elected politicians has to do with the psychological impact of deliberating within a competitive “us/ them” environment. It is generally assumed that hearing other people’s perspectives on controversial issues can open participants to compromise and cooperation, and indeed this is sometimes the case. However, Professor Adam Galinsky has found that feelings of power make individuals less inclined and less able to consider others’ perspectives (Galinsky et al. 2006). But more troubling—when “perspective sharing” occurs within a competitive framework where members may anticipate threats from opponents (as in a partisan legislature), it can actually have the reverse effect. As Galinsky states,

When you’re in a cold state, perspective taking can warm you to cooperation. But when you’re in an inflamed state, thinking about the other person’s mind changes perspective, taking from the glue that binds us together to the gasoline that worsens the competitive fire. (quoted in Zaki 2012, 21)

Galinsky’s experiments showed that when negotiators in a competitive environment were prompted to think about the other person through perspective taking, they tended to focus on the possible ploys of the opponents, and were more likely to act unethically themselves.⁴ Experimental psychology has also shown that people who feel powerful are more likely than others to rely on intuition (“system one” thinking in Kahneman’s terminology), and less likely to engage in careful rational analysis. People with great power seem more prone to rely on their gut and feel the “correct” answer to problems.

A study of 700 US citizens published by University of Cambridge researchers in 2019 found that partisan extremists, whether Democrats or Republicans, tended to exhibit less cognitive flexibility than the general population. Three different assessment tools of psychological rigidity all showed the same dynamic, revealing greater rigidity of partisans (whether of the left or right) in processing non-political information as well. Thus, this cognitive infirmity runs deeper than mere confirmation bias regarding Parisian policies. The study couldn’t show causation, so it is still an open question whether adopting firmer political beliefs makes people less cognitively flexible or if people who are less cognitively flexible tend to adopt more adamant political views (Zmigrod, Rentfrow, and Robbins 2020). But whether a cause or an effect, the result is that those who are extreme partisans and are motivated to run for office bring along a weakness when it comes to processing information.

Once a worldview or belief is deeply embraced, whether religious, political, or otherwise, evidence that undermines or would even disprove that belief (in the mind of an impartial observer) is often denied by the believer as being invalid evidence. Indeed, when faced with contrary evidence, true believers often strengthen their commitment to the questionable belief. Many psychological studies over the past several decades have confirmed this dynamic (see, for example, Batson 1975).

It is astonishing how much mental gymnastics we are all able to perform in order to cling to preconceived worldviews when contrary evidence surfaces. Of course, each of us is unable to recognize this dynamic in ourselves—assuming this is a trait that only others exhibit. Political partisans, and especially elected officials, often fit this “true-believer” mold, where no amount of contrary evidence can shake their belief in various fundamental partisan canards. And, of course, with the Internet today, it is easy to seek out and find “information” that can shore up nonsensical beliefs. A randomly allotted legislative body would naturally include members who exhibit this same psychological propensity. However, the crucial difference is that in addition to being less prominent, their “false beliefs”‘ would be randomly distributed rather than fall along predefined partisan axes. So rather than settling into two or a few insurmountable ideological fortresses, the body as a whole could learn and abandon policies that have a preponderance of countervailing evidence, even while a few members persist in the kind of mental somersaults typical of partisan politicians.

Mindset of an Entire Elected Legislature

Just as voters rely on mental shortcuts, cues or heuristics in deciding how to vote, so too do legislators within an elected legislative body. First, I should note that members of Congress spend a small minority of their time working on policy and legislation. A study by the Congressional Management Foundation, based on self-reporting by members of Congress, suggests they are workaholics, but that most of their time is spent on media relations, fund-raising, constituency service and other campaign activities aimed at enhancing their re-election prospects, rather than committee work or lawmaking (Korte 2013).

On average, members of Congress reported spending 35 percent of their work time on policy and legislation, though it seems likely they would tend to overestimate rather than underestimate the amount of time devoted to their official tasks. While some members likely are genuine policy wonks who primarily work on policy, many others spend almost no time at all. It should also be noted that of that 35 percent, much of it is framed by partisan campaign priorities, which favors listening to special-interest lobbyists about policy wants and needs. One of the many benefits of sortition is that the representatives would not have campaign and fund-raising distractions, could devote their full attention to the task at hand, and would not have any incentive to seek out advice from special interests (indeed, it might make sense to sequester policy juries to avoid corruption).

Setting aside for the moment the tremendous amount of mental energy diverted to public relations, fund-raising and electioneering, even if legislators gave full attention to their nominal job, the sheer number of bills (covering a vast array of topics) confronting legislators means that they can’t learn much about each. Inevitably, they rely on lobbyists, campaign contributors, or other members of their party who serve on the committee to which each bill was referred, for guidance on how to vote. The fact that most legislators read very few of the bills they vote on (lay, people are often surprised by this fact) might not be so disturbing if the guidance they relied upon was policy-focused, balanced or impartial. This is almost never the case. Members of committees, especially conference committees charged with settling the differences between a House and Senate-passed version of a bill, frequently seize on the opportunities afforded by the fact that few other members will “check their work” to insert all kinds of special-interest favors into bills.

Kahneman’s system one thinking also shapes the legislative agenda. Psychologists have long known that people tend to evaluate risks based on how readily examples of some danger come to mind (“availability”), rather than any fact-based or statistical analysis of some event’s likelihood. The media act like an echo chamber, reverberating the novel danger, while ignoring common everyday dangers, which kill far more people. This has been called an “availability cascade”. Thus, a rare shark attack, terrorist bomb, or plane crash trumps concerns about ongoing dangers with far greater impact and likelihood. This availability heuristic spills over into demands for government spending. Kahneman describes it this way:

An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events, which may start from media reports of a relatively minor event and lead up to public panic and large-scale government action … The cycle is sometimes sped along deliberately by ‘availability entrepreneurs,’ individuals or organizations who work to ensure a continuous flow of worrying news. The danger is increasingly exaggerated as the media compete for attention-grabbing headlines … The issue becomes politically important because it is on everyone’s mind, and the response of the political system is guided by the intensity of public sentiment. The availability cascade has now reset priorities. Other risks, and other ways resources could be applied for the public good, all have faded into the background. (Kahneman 2011, 142)

While elected officials have the opportunity to use system two thinking to evaluate and rank dangers in a logical priority order, they have a countervailing electoral incentive to dismiss that approach. Elected officials could consult experts and come to understand that some media-fanned public concern is way overblown. But it is politically more expedient and shrewder to respond to the public’s gut perception of danger than to actual danger. Politicians often find it beneficial for their election campaigns to generate or accentuate these unrealistic public fears. Such whipped-up concerns also often have the advantage of having simplistic “solutions,” unlike real problems that typically have exceedingly complex and hard-to-explain solutions, which is anathema for a politician’s press conference.

Uncertainty Under Threat

Elections select for individuals who feel more certain about their views on societal problems and their solutions. Doubts or uncertainties on the part of candidates connote “weakness” and are not a good way for candidates to sell themselves to the electorate. This is also true of radio talk-show hosts, pundits, salesmen, and anyone who wants to be convincing. However, the reality of political decision-making is that there is always imperfect information, or uncertainty, even if the decision-makers have a psychological or partisan electoral reason to hide that reality.

Research is showing that in some situations, uncertainty and doubt can enhance open-mindedness and a willingness to examine alternative solutions to political problems. Political science professors Ingrid Haas and William Cunningham reported that “In situations where intolerance results from certainty, creating some doubt in the person’s mind might reduce intolerance … Doubt should increase open-mindedness, making people more open to opposing opinions and less likely to minimize the opinions of others” (quoted in Smith 2013, Haas and Cunningham 2013). However, the researchers also found that in the situation most elected politicians find themselves in, this dynamic gets short-circuited. They found that feeling threatened completely changes this impulse toward openness. “Uncertainty may be useful for the political process when it results in increased deliberation and willingness to compromise; however, our work suggests that this may only happen when people are not also feeling threatened”. Unlike a randomly selected jury, elected legislators inherently feel a certain amount of threat—from political opponents eager to seize on any opportunity to embarrass or impugn them in order to gain a partisan advantage in the next election (Haas and Cunningham 2013).

Another psychological trait that is exaggerated in groups placed in a competitive environment is the tendency (discussed in the case of individuals above) to anticipate the worst from the group’s opponents. Group loyalty can inhibit or induce unethical behavior, with the presence of competition being the fulcrum (Hildreth, Gino, and Bazerman 2016).⁵ Many experimenters have demonstrated this dynamic when participants are primed to identify with a group (such as students at a particular university) and are asked to play a game with members of a different group. The willingness to cheat is increased due to the anticipation of cheating by the other side. These expectations of dishonorable behavior are often confirmed simply because the opponents are also expecting the worst from the first side. This reinforcing feedback loop on a national scale can lead to war, even when neither side wants it. In an electoral framework, the decision-makers are regularly being psychologically prompted to expect, and thus get, and deliver the worst. There are exceptions, to be sure, but suspicion is commonly elected politicians’ default setting when dealing with members from an opposing party.

Elections are a zero-sum game for politicians—if you win, I lose. Within the confines of the legislative chamber, one might hope for a different kind of game (win–win for incumbents at least, with only future challengers losing). However, here political maneuvering often resembles the classic model in game theory called “the prisoners’ dilemma”. In the prisoners’ dilemma (for those unfamiliar with the scenario), two bank robbers are arrested and put in separate interrogation rooms. Each is told that if he testifies against his partner, he will get off with a minimal sentence, but if he refuses, and his partner agrees to testify against him, he will go to prison for many years. Both robbers also believe that if they both refuse to testify against each other, the police have no other evidence, and will both go free. If the two players are isolated and don’t know their partner’s level of loyalty, they each have a powerful incentive to cut their losses and testify. Thus, even though both “players” would benefit from a common plan, the scenario almost inevitably leads to a less desirable outcome (from the perspective of both players) to avoid the worst scenario. Likewise, in a legislature, in an electoral context, a compromise that would benefit both players (and perhaps the public generally) is beyond their grasp, because the risk is too great that the other player will not go along, and is instead already planning to use the opportunity to harm the opponent.

Another standard “game” used by experimental psychologists is known as the “dictator game”. One participant (the dictator) is allotted a sum of money, let’s say ten dollars. The dictator then proposes to the other participant a plan for splitting the cash; for example, keeping six dollars and sharing four dollars, or an even split—five dollars each, or keeping it all. However, the other person has the power to accept or reject the proposal. If rejected, neither person gets any money. If the dictator proposes to give only one dollar, a purely rational participant would reason that the alternative (resulting from rejection) is zero, and accept the plan. But human psychology rarely works like that, and most players reject such splits in indignation as a matter of revenge. When participants view each other as competitors, revenge behavior is especially likely. Interestingly, this behavior doesn’t occur when playing against a computer, where no moral “blame” applies, and participants generally accept any amount the computer randomly offers. As with the “prisoners’ dilemma” above, elected legislators are in a competitive mindset and primed for revenge. Competition can foster revenge behavior, in which an individual is willing to “irrationally” reduce their own payment in order to punish an individual who takes, or is merely expected to take, unfair advantage. When it comes to making public policy through legislatures selected by competitive elections, we can apply the quote of Brian Klaas above: “Bad systems make everything worse” (Klaas 2021).

Confirmation Bias—Cherry Picking

The tendency toward certainty and lack of openness to alternative interpretations of events, which is especially prevalent among elected politicians, builds on a psychological propensity that we all have—confirmation bias. This refers to the well-documented and powerful inclination people have to notice, and believe, casually observed evidence that tends to confirm their current beliefs, and to discount or completely ignore information that would tend to disprove their current beliefs. Accepting contradictory information risks creating the unpleasant feeling of what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance”.

The claim is not that this always occurs—certainly, we are all aware of times we have heard new information that prompted us to change our opinion about some issue—but confirmation bias is far more common than we realize, simply because by its very nature we can’t notice it when we are doing it. This tendency is thought to be exacerbated by what is sometimes called the “silo effect”, where people tend to select news sources that corroborate pre-existing opinions (whether by their choice or by Internet algorithm). In the US, conservatives may prefer to get their news from Fox News and liberals from MS Now. But even impartial, neutral information is often interpreted differently depending on one’s prior beliefs, associated with what is known as cultural cognition. For example, depending on the prior stance of you and your friends or political leaders on gun regulation, a mass shooting in an elementary school may reinforce a belief for one person in the need to restrict gun access, but also reinforce a belief of a different person in the need for more guns in schools in the hands of “good guys” to thwart such shootings.

Breaking down the information silos is widely advocated, but in a combative electoral environment, that may fail to reduce polarization. Indeed, once an individual has taken on a partisan identity, or come to identify more with one side than another, exposure to opposing points of view may actually intensify polarization—what is referred to as a “backfire” or “backlash” effect. A 2022 analysis by Philipp Lorenz-Spreen et al., which looked at many separate studies, found that “increased polarization was also linked to exposure to opposing viewpoints in one’s social media feeds. In other words, being exposed to the words of political opponents did not bridge the political divide. Rather, it seemed to amplify it” (Lewandowsky, Oswald, Lorenz-Spreen, Hertwig 2022).

In competitive situations with winners and losers, as when officials selected through partisan elections “debate” each other, there is a strong tendency toward what psychologists call “motivated reasoning”. Winning a debate requires seeking out convincing arguments for why your side is correct and the other side is wrong. The participants are generally unaware of this distortion of their own thought process. In these partisan situations, winning feels more important than finding the truth, so even the most brilliant minds will direct their abilities to this imperative. Partisans frequently feel that their side winning is ipso facto synonymous with the truth winning. Rummaging through a vast amount of information and potential lines of reasoning to astutely come up with the most convincing case for your side may simply further bury the truth. As a result, smart people (as well as stupid people) make stupid decisions all the time.

However, researchers who have carefully reexamined and attempted to replicate earlier experiments that showed this backlash effect have called it into question for ordinary people—at least in certain situations (Guess and Coppock 2018). When representative samples of people were given evidence on such things as whether capital punishment deters crime or whether the minimum wage should be raised, rather than doubling down on prior beliefs (backlash), their beliefs tended to moderate in the direction of the newly presented evidence. This is hopeful for the prospects of citizens’ assemblies. This may reflect the trust in the impartiality of the messenger. The researchers noted that “A reasonable objection to these findings is that while individuals may not exhibit backlash when reading relatively sterile descriptions of academic studies, they may do so when arguing about a particular proposition with an opponent … Perhaps in such antagonistic contexts, individuals become distrustful of counter-attitudinal arguments” (Guess and Coppock 2018, 1512–1513).

The backlash effect may be an artifact of the competitive partisan election environment. A 2023 research paper found that truthful fact-checking was more likely to backfire when the source was a political out-group member, and such fact-checking often left people with more entrenched beliefs in misinformation (Reinero et al 2023).

In a journal article titled “Identity Concerns Drive Belief: The Impact of Partisan Identity on the Belief and Dissemination of True and False News”, other researchers have published evidence that, rather than standard confirmation bias, in the partisan political realm, belief in false information may be a matter of upholding group identity (Pereira, Harris, and Van Bavel 2023). It is gratifying to believe positive things about one’s own political in-group members and negative things about political out-group members. Rejecting one’s identity group’s false beliefs is psychologically painful. Politicians seeking to drive voter turnout benefit from promoting partisan loyalty as a central element of personal identity. Electoral politics undercuts efforts to base public policies on facts. Removing deliberators from this partisan in-group/out-group environment by placing them together on the same team (a citizens’ assembly), where they can come to know each other on an individual basis, can sidestep this dynamic. This adds credence to the notion that citizens’ assemblies made up of everyday people, rather than politicians or extreme partisans, using good process, could avoid many of the common political psychological pitfalls.

Politicians also have an additional distorting incentive, which often locks them into preconceived positions. They won their election by asserting a particular set of priorities and a view of reality. Any change, perhaps based on new information, leaves them open to embarrassing charges of selling out, hypocrisy, or flip-flopping. Bargaining and horse-trading with political opponents in an elected legislative body may be acceptable, but actually deliberating and coming to new understandings is not. Unelected citizens randomly selected don’t have this dilemma. It is a bad idea to have those going into a deliberative situation having their conclusions firmly locked in place beforehand. This is a common scenario for bargaining, but genuine deliberation requires an openness to changing one’s mind.

As discussed earlier, numerous studies have shown that people who follow the news and have clear political opinions on some matters are less able to absorb and use new information if it seems to contradict their current beliefs. In other words, the goblin of confirmation bias hobbles the “well-informed” more than the less informed, who remain more open to learning from a variety of sources when placed in a deliberative setting. Though now scientifically supported, keen observers have long noted that those who believe themselves to be well-informed are generally not. While serving as president, Thomas Jefferson wrote in private correspondence, “The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors” (Jefferson 1807).

Overconfidence and the Illusion of Knowledge

Another psychological tendency humans exhibit, which can harm good decision-making, is known as the illusion of knowledge. We all believe we understand and know more about the world around us than we actually do. Sometimes this non-understanding is hidden by superstition, but it often is simply glossed over. Our brain automatically “fills in gaps” in our knowledge with assumptions derived from past experiences, etc. There are interconnections between this cognitive bias and the illusion of information adequacy, discussed at the end of Chapter 7. Politicians are exceptionally likely to believe they know more about policy matters than they do. Such self-confidence is associated with a willingness to run, and the projection of that self-confidence is beneficial for winning elections. However, what psychologists call the Dunning–Kruger effect suggests these feelings of self-confidence are unreliable (Kruger and Dunning 1999). The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which less competent individuals often have a feeling of superiority due to their incompetence at evaluating their own level of competence—or colloquially—too stupid to recognize how stupid they are.

Further, this feeling of being well-informed (whether valid or mistaken) that is typical of elected politicians may exacerbate the tendency found in the research of Nyhan mentioned above (in Chapter 7 on “Voter Decisions”), of resistance to accepting new facts that contradict current beliefs. Random citizens selected for a policy jury are far less likely to assume they already know the answers, and are thus more open to learning facts from impartial expert presentations. Psychological scientist Philip Fernbach of the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado, Boulder and his co-authors were interested in exploring some of the factors that could contribute to political polarization and the illusion of knowledge. In their research, they found that having to explain a policy can make people with extreme positions moderate their views, as they come to appreciate that they only had the illusion of understanding the issue (Fernbach, Rogers, Fox and Sloman 2013). While applicable to average citizens, even if this effect occurs among elected officials, the electoral imperative that impels them to project self-confidence and certainty on policy matters appears to trigger defensiveness and short-circuit any beneficial mitigation that could accrue from coming to appreciate their true level of ignorance.

But even very bright individuals, with a solid ability to interpret scientific information, and an eagerness to use Kahneman’s system two rational analysis, often fail to use these skills appropriately when steeped in a competitive, partisan (tribal) environment. Dan Kahan, a professor of psychology and law at Yale University, summarized research in an article in Scientific American entitled, “Why Smart People Are Vulnerable to Putting Tribe before Truth”. He writes that in various studies, “proficient reasoners are revealed to be using their analytical skills to ferret out evidence that supports their group’s position, while rationalizing dismissal of such evidence when it undermines their side’s beliefs” (Kahan 2018). Kahan argues that, at least for an everyday US citizen, that:

given what positions on climate change [for example] have now come to signify about one’s group allegiances, adopting the “wrong” position in interactions with her peers could rupture bonds on which she depends heavily for emotional and material well-being. Under these pathological conditions, she will predictably use her reasoning not to discern the truth but to form and persist in beliefs characteristic of her group, a tendency known as “ identity-protective cognition”. (Kahan 2018)

Kahan’s research suggests that a particular kind of scientific competence, however, can alleviate polarization. That is scientific curiosity—an enjoyable feeling of awe from gaining a new perspective and understanding. Subjects who ranked high on scientific curiosity were more able to amend their prior opinions and beliefs.

Another psychological trait that researchers have found to be beneficial to absorbing new information and good decision-making is what Mark Leary, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, refers to as intellectual humility—an awareness that one’s beliefs may be wrong. Leary’s studies have found no significant difference between liberals and conservatives in this regard, but it seems likely that the subset of individuals from across the political spectrum who are willing to run for office tilt toward intellectual arrogance rather than humility (Leary et al. 2017). Leary noted: “If you think about what’s been wrong in Washington for a long time, it’s a whole lot of people who are very intellectually arrogant about the positions they have, on both sides of the aisle” (quoted in Duke University 2017). Recognized good decision-making procedures that acknowledge the uncertainty of the world and the uncertainty about the impact of policy proposals are taboo for those who fight to win elections.

It would be possible, for example, to use the scientific method with test and control groups to determine which particular policy was in fact more effective at solving some societal problem. The policy tested could deal with the impact of various prison practices on recidivism, or education schemes on competency at graduation, or whatever. We would need to randomly assign some prisoners or schools to experimental groups and some to a control group. At the end of the experiment, we would have good information on which policy was actually better for achieving an agreed-upon goal. However, politicians seeking election are rewarded for asserting certainty about policy proposals without any scientific evaluation, often on ideological grounds.

Scholars often seek out “natural experiments” where different populations have been subjected to different policies (such as in different states), but without random assignment of subjects to experimental and control groups,⁶ these experimental results need to be reported with a caveat. As all scientists know, “correlation does not prove causation.” There are so many other variables that are different between states; these “natural experiments” are tricky to interpret. Naturally, politicians seize on studies that seem to support their predetermined policy preferences, while finding flaws and dismissing studies that contradict. This is because they are generally more concerned about making themselves look correct in the eyes of the voters than in determining the truth about some policy’s effectiveness.

Average citizens, with appropriate technical support and no such distorting electoral imperatives, are far more capable of honestly evaluating policy experiments than are politicians. A recurring problem with elected policymakers, especially those serving multiple terms, is their unwillingness to acknowledge when a pet policy has clearly failed. Rotation, along with sortition, brings in people with fresh perspectives. Lacking the pride of authorship, such policymakers are more able to recognize failure in current policies, rather than doubling down.

The reason certain individuals rise to leadership roles in partisan competitive legislatures often has more to do with certain (frequently problematic) personality traits or connections than policy ability. Only certain people seek leadership roles, often reflecting inflated self-confidence. Unlike elected chambers with rigorous internal hierarchies, lottery-selected bodies have an inherent equality. Since this equality can easily give way over time, regular rotation through sortition can maintain equality.

A study by Swiss and German researchers found that for an assigned task, an organization in which the leader was chosen by competence in previous performance, or by random selection, made no difference in the overall performance of the team. However, when the leader was chosen based on confidence, performance was worse than when a leader was randomly chosen. An overly confident leader tends to overweigh their own opinion, and be less willing to incorporate input from others. These researchers concluded: “Hence, when designing a procedure for leader selection in a situation in which social learning is important, declared random selection is a viable option, and overconfidence should be avoided” (Büchel et al. 2018).

Studies by University of Pennsylvania researchers found that “In egalitarian networks, where everyone has equal influence, we find a strong social-learning effect, which improves the quality of everyone’s judgments. When people exchange ideas, everyone gets smarter. But this can all go haywire if there are opinion leaders in the group”. An influential opinion leader can hijack the process, leading the entire group off course. While opinion leaders may be knowledgeable on some topics, these researchers found that when the conversation moved away from their expertise, they still remained just as influential. As a result, they ruined the group’s judgment. “On average, opinion leaders were more likely to lead the group astray than to improve it” (quoted in University of Pennsylvania 2017).

In sum, over-confident people who believe (whether correctly or incorrectly) that they already know a lot about a policy matter at the start of a process are actually less competent at absorbing new information and making optimal decisions. Randomly selected people generally recognize that they must learn about the issue before drawing conclusions, and as a result are better able to absorb information in order to make better decisions.

Chapter Summation

The distorting cognitive biases discussed in this chapter are standard equipment that all humans may fall victim to. However, it is possible to ameliorate their effects when forming a deliberative body. Firstly, the selection process should not be one that favors people who are especially prone to these biases, nor a system that will generate or exaggerate them. In addition to optimizing the selection process, systems can be put in place that are designed to help decision-makers avoid various cognitive biases. But elected officials have unusual traits, incentives, and competitive environments that make overcoming these cognitive shortcomings nearly impossible. The electoral imperative to project certainty and “leadership” reinforces the psychological biases.

Some people contend that elected officials are frequently sinister, pursuing goals in their personal or class interests, or serving some other behind-the-scenes powerful elite. The point of this chapter is that even if nearly all elected officials started out as honest, bright, and well-intentioned, the process of competing in elections and then being immersed in a competitive environment inevitably creates a body that, as a whole (though certainly not every member), is unfit for public policymaking. Rory Stewart, who was a UK Conservative Party MP who sought to become prime minister, and wrote about how being a politician is a soul-crushing and corrupting experience, tells a story of when he was first elected: The American politician, Mitt Romney, told him to get his thinking done now, because once in office that wouldn’t be possible. The evidence from many hundreds of citizens’ assemblies in recent years suggests that democracy using sortition can do better.