Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (2016) — a mini book review

09 November 2016

Probably accurate conclusion — tediously delivered

Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels' — Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton University Press, 2016) — has too many stylistic and reasoning flaws to be recommended to general readers.

Nevertheless — is this a book for our evidently demagogic times?

Achen and Bartels wrote that:

The comforting view that there was something particularly evil about [Nazi] Germans and that the rest of us are immune will always have appeal for some. In truth, however, the desire for a strong leader who can identify domestic enemies and who promises to do something about them without worrying overmuch about legalities — those germs, mutated to fit the particular local subcultures, are latent in every democratic electorate, waiting for sufficiently widespread human suffering to provide conditions for their explosive spread.

An overly long and scattered "proof"

The book takes 328 pages to deliver the relatively simple ideas that voters are ignorant, overly influenced by the economic situation existing immediately before elections, and do not actually hold politicians accountable for much of anything that politicians can actually control. With regard to the latter, the authors' examples include the effects of New Jersey shark attacks and regional droughts and wet periods on election outcomes.

Achen and Bartels eventually conclude that party politics are not fundamentally ideological, but rather the result of agglomerated social group identities. Which, they say, are further compromised in decipherable meaning by the fact that people have trouble defining the groups they are in, much less accurately defining the beliefs of the political groups to which they belong.

The authors' main thesis

Democracy, the authors say, does not work in the ideological precise and accountability ways that we have traditionally assumed. Meaning, in effect, that democracy does not work very well at all — if intelligent direction and voter control are considered desirable qualities in governance.

None of this should shock anyone who has been paying objective attention to the flow of American history:

Not only is the electorate as a whole quite uninformed, but it is the least informed members within the electorate who seem to hold the critical balance of power . . . .

Elections that "throw the bums out" typically do not produce genuine policy mandates, not even when they are landslides.

The parties have policy views and they carry them out when in office, but most voters are not listening, or are simply thinking what their party tells them they should be thinking.

[I]n well-functioning democratic systems, parties that win office are inevitably defeated at a subsequent election.

Voters want "a real leader, not a politician," by which they generally mean that their own ideas should be adopted and other people's opinions disregarded, because views different from their own are obviously self-interested and erroneous. To the contrary, politicians with vision who are also skilled at creative compromise are the soul of successful democracy.

In every society, policy-making is a job for specialists.

The most powerful players in the policy game are the educated, the wealthy, and the well-connected.

[F]ew established democracies do as little as the United States does to limit the distorting effects of money in the democratic process.

At the moment, America is a democracy, but it is not very democratic.

The book's stylistic negatives are noticeable

Most of the book serves as a pretended literature overview of existing studies of the voter behavior and political outcomes in American and a very limited number of other democracies.

I say "pretended" because the authors summarize these studies in such abbreviated ways that it is impossible to tell what each actually said or even what premises and methodologies most of them used.

Here is an example:

In the 1950s and 1960s, political scientists were well aware of the intellectual developments of the preceding century in psychology and sociology. The key statements from that period about American politics (Truman 1951), about empirical political theory (Easton 1953; 1965), and about comparative politics (Almond and Powell 1966) all took their starting point to be groups making demands on government, constrained by the institutional structure and the political culture. Government, in turn, had its own agenda, and it reacted back upon the society Individuals played little role; elections received little attention except as a "feedback loop" in the informal systems-theory language popular at the time (Richardson 1991).

Achen and Barels also have the (potentially annoying) habit of filling some of their paragraphs with briefly quoted segments of what other researchers have said:

Lenz (2012, 225) found "surprisingly little evidence" that policy preferences "carried much weight in voters' judgments" once he allowed for the reciprocal impact of vote intentions on policy preferences. However, his parallel analyses of performance evaluations provided "further evidence of the importance of performance-related issues, such as the economy. Although politicians, journalists, and scholars often interpret elections ideologically," Lenz concluded (2012, 225), "a growing body of evidence suggests that it is the economy and other performance domains, not ideology, that largely explain election outcomes. My results support this view."

The authors perversely avoid cogency

Chapters go on and on in a repetitive, blathering style that takes the narrative no farther than it has already gone. Toward the end of the book, I found myself skimming, looking only things that had not already been said.

Indeed, nowhere do Achen and Bartels bother to list all their (relatively simple) conclusions in one concise place.

Questionable methodology in places

Without delving into the statistical analyses provided, it is possible to question the authors' supposedly "scientific" methodology. In two places, for example, they veer from the rails without making any effort to justify the sloppiness.

In the first instance — during the discussion of the effects of New Jersey shore shark attacks on the Woodrow Wilson presidential election — they decide to eliminate numbers from one New Jersey township, simply because "it does not act like the rest of New Jersey at the polls." (at page 122) Similarly, discussing the same shark effect, they arbitrarily drop townships whose vote totals changed by more than 25 percent during the four year period that they were reviewing.

Talk about leaving oneself open to accusations of fudging data.

I am not saying that these instances are methodologically unjustified. But if they are justified, one had better explain why. The authors do not, to any persuasive degree.

Erratically arbitrary reasoning

The authors' unscientific bent shows up in their curiously illogical treatment of the political effects of drought and wet periods on elections, when those are compared to the complete non-effect of the 1918 Spanish Influenza Pandemic on politics. "[V]oters thought of the pandemic as part of the natural world . . . rather than as part of the social world." (at page 142)

I might buy that reasoning had the authors bothered to explain why droughts and wet periods (also part of the natural world) did have a political effect. One might also wonder why voters ignored the Flu Epidemic, but still made President Wilson pay for the New Jersey shark attacks.

From my point of view, there is too much picking and choosing of data and explanations throughout this book to satisfy rationally tuned readers.

In a similarly puzzling vein, some of the effects that the authors detected on election outcomes were quite slight, like 1-3 percent shifts in the voting direction. This, it seems to me, might just as well have been randomly caused. The authors do not explain this possibility away.

Recommended only to political scientists

Even as someone who loves quality scholarly writing, Democracy for Realists falls too short of tolerable stylistic, methodological and reasoning rigor to recommend to general readers.

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Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (2016) — a mini book review