POLS AND POLLS
The American Prospect
September, 2000

Daniel Yankelovich

Politicians Don't Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness, by Lawrence R. Jacobs and Robert Y. Shapiro. University of Chicago Press, 425 pages, $17.00.

Politicians Don't Pander is one of those valuable books that force us to confront our compartmentalized thinking about politics. Lawrence R. Jacobs and Robert Y. Shapiro, two prominent political scientists, point out that Americans simultaneously hold two contradictory beliefs, each with firm conviction. One is that the growing influence of public opinion polls has increased political pandering -- politicians abdicating true leadership in favor of slavishly following polls. The conflicting belief is that the pernicious combination of money and partisanship causes officeholders to ignore the wishes of the public in favor of pursuing their own agendas and those of special interests.

As one can deduce from the book's title, the authors come down squarely on the side of the second belief. They marshal an impressive body of documentation against the pandering-by-polls platitude, bolstering the claim that today's politicians are busy with agendas that have little to do with the preferences of the vast majority of voters. Here, in broad outline, is their case:

·      Politicians' responsiveness to the voters varies from one period of American history to another. In some periods, politicians respond faithfully to the public mood; in others, they go off on their own, seeking either to shape public opinion to their own views or to find ways of going around it.

·      We are currently living in a period of relative unresponsiveness to the public will. "The practice of American government is drifting from the norms of democratic responsiveness," the authors say, dating the decline since the 1970s.

·      It is true that politicians rely heavily on opinion polls. But it is not true that they use them to pander to the public. A large body of research suggests that (except just before election time) today's politicians use polls and focus groups to blindside voters -- to find words and phrases to mislead and manipulate them in order to free themselves to pursue agendas that the majority of centrist voters reject, or would reject if they were clearer about what the politicians were actually up to.

·      The result is ideological dissonance: The views of a fractious elite (politicians and the activists and donors that influence them) diverge from the more pragmatic, less ideological sentiments of the majority of the voting public.

Why have these trends occurred? What happened in the 1970s and subsequent decades to make politicians pay less heed to ordinary voters? Jacobs and Shapiro cite a number of structural changes in American politics that caused this shift:

·      The explosive growth of special-interest groups (remember when the American Medical Association and the National Association of Manufacturers seemed to be the only interest groups that mattered?).

·      Party reforms that have weakened the influence of the leadership in the House and the Senate in favor of giving greater power to individual operators who come from safe seats.

·      Greater ideological polarization and partisanship accompanied by a decline in civility among politicians.

·      Divided government -- one party controlling the legislature, the other the executive branch of government, with voter preferences shoved aside as the parties squabble over divergent policy goals.

The combined effect of these changes is to give politicians strong incentives for discounting what most Americans prefer.

The authors are pessimistic about our chances of reversing these trends. They don't think elections will do the trick. And they believe that, under the present system, politicians have learned that manipulation pays off and that they can get away with putting their own agendas (and those of their activist or moneyed supporters) ahead of the centrist majority's.

The two scholars paint a disheartening picture. They accuse Democrats and Republicans of systematically hiding their real policy goals through clever use of what they call crafted talk, specially designed to deceive voters and to obscure their true positions. They express concern that this state of affairs "invites political recklessness"by undermining our tradition of popular sovereignty and feeding the growth of voter cynicism and alienation. Their distaste for these changes leaches out of their dry, qualify-every-statement academic prose style.

Yet the authors seem more sure of their ground in describing the problem than in prescribing solutions. Though they acknowledge the popularity of campaign finance reform and reform of party rules to reduce the influence of party extremists, they don't think such reforms will be enough to change the status quo, in which it is "safer to defer to party activists and campaign contributors than to the median voter."Our society must, they believe, find new ways to shift incentives for politicians back toward responsiveness to the centrist preferences of the people.

To produce this shift of incentives, they place their hopes on creating a more deliberative democracy through "altering the process of public communication."They cite with approval recent grass-roots strides toward citizen self-education, journalistic reforms such as the civic journalism movement, attempts to make opinion polling more deliberative, new communication initiatives to "confront officeholders with their defiance of centrist opinion,"and efforts to pay more attention to the opinions of the best-informed segments of the public. Using the communications media in these ways to shift politician incentives is the main thrust of their strategy.

My own experience in public-opinion research over the past half-century supports the authors' analysis of trends, but not their proposed remedies. I see huge difficulties with their strategy of shifting incentives, starting with the likelihood that the tactics they propose -- changing public communications -- will not do the job. One should be skeptical about whether using the media to shame politicians into being more responsive will be effective. Fiddling with communications to counter structural defects, especially if it involves the mass media, easily becomes an exercise in futility.

Even assuming that politicians had strong incentives to respond to the preferences of centrist voters, how are they to know what these preferences really are? Ironically, opinion polls, despite their proliferation, rarely reveal the public's real preferences on complex issues. Polls work best when people know what they want. But on most complex issues most of the time, people haven't worked through what they want, especially when painful trade-offs are involved. As a result, polls often mislead and confuse politicians.

The authors present the Clinton health care plan as a striking example of how polls can mislead even the most astute of politicians. When the Clinton plan was first introduced, polls showed majority-level support, encouraging Clinton to believe that his powers of persuasion could vanquish all public doubts. But over a period of months, a huge chunk of this support vanished, partly as people became more familiar with the plan's drawbacks and partly for political and media-driven reasons on which the authors elaborate in detail.

The authors of Politicians Don't Pander are trapped in one of the Enlightenment's infamous false dualisms. Their distinction between the policy choices of leaders and those of the public is too sharp. They are assuming that these two sets of choices are so separate and distinct that leaders have only two alternatives: to get the public to embrace politicians' choices (either through persuasion or manipulation) or to pursue the public's choices. But in reality, without active leadership, the public does not ordinarily have clear-cut policy choices of its own.

The problem is not that people are confused or dumb or incapable of formulating clear alternatives. None of these allegations is valid. Rather, the difficulty lies in the fact that good leadership shapes voter preferences. Leaders do not stand outside the process; they are an inherent part of it. The role of the leader is not the same as that of the scholar or the pollster: to study voter preferences. It is one of active participation in formulating policy options and preferences.

In a true democratic process, there is a clear division of effort between leaders and voters. Voters have their own values, and they know what these are. But they don't usually know how these values apply to specific policy issues. That's where leadership is needed: in spelling out various policy choices and their consequences, and generating new ideas for achieving the voters' most cherished ideals. And in addition to leadership, it takes time to assist the public in arriving at sound public judgments.

I believe the authors dismiss the transformational abilities of elections too quickly in favor of vague communication initiatives. If in the future some politicians were to offer the electorate a new, more democratic conception of leadership, elections could once again work their magic. The chances of such new leadership arising in the political domain are excellent -- look at what is happening in the private sector. Every day, both in new-economy companies and in not-for-profit organizations, less hierarchical and more dialogue-based forms of leadership are taking hold and gaining momentum. It cannot be long before these conceptions find their way into politics.

The new conceptions of leadership revolve around dialogue in which leaders lead by working with their constituents to hammer out a shared vision of the future and the policy options to achieve it. With such leadership, people have a voice in shaping their own destiny and are guided, not manipulated. They therefore feel less cynical and alienated, restoring a badly needed measure of trust to the system.

In short, the electorate needs two kinds of initiatives from leadership: guidance in clarifying a future direction with appropriate policy options, and action on the most badly needed reforms, reducing the influence of both money and party activists in politics. With initiatives of this sort, the power of elections to transform our political life -- a power realized many times in our history -- may again reassert itself. This traditional type of renewal has the power to restore the popular sovereignty that the authors rightly see as the heart and soul of our democracy.

These reservations about the authors' policy prescriptions do not detract from the enormous value of their thoughtful, well-documented analysis. The book gives all of us kibitzer-citizens on the sidelines a sound basis for thinking about our nation's political future.