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Voter behavior and motivation (and knowledge of the issues, and of basic facts about their own government...) is well-studied and has been for decades. Politica

Voter behavior and motivation (and knowledge of the issues, and of basic facts about their own government...) is well-studied and has been for decades. Political scientists studied it really heavily for quite a while because early results were fucking alarming (and proved to be accurate, and also not just a temporary aberration) if you're starting from a firm belief in liberal democracy and a broad franchise. Voters, to a great extent, aren't motivated by what one might either expect or hope, nor 1/10th as well informed about the operation of their own government or the issues at stake as one might hope. It's a shit-show, so much so that it's practically miraculous that voting produces functioning governments ever, at all, and the whole thing's terribly fragile (after convincing themselves the data weren't wrong, the next step was a few decades of trying to figure out some mechanism by which this whole thing wasn't as worrisome as it seemed, which effort turned out to be based mostly on "copium", to use a modern term, and was eventually regarded as having more-or-less failed)

tgma 1y ago
I understand that. That is not the point though. Although, if you believe in that theory, you should reject democracy and aim for some form of aristocracy or monarchy. I don't believe that many political scientists [sic] today publish and advocate disenfranchisement, perhaps because that's not politically correct, but all that is beside the point. My point specifically is if people are voting for someone, more often than not (at least in the US, perhaps less so elsewhere where they elect the parliament and the parliament by proxy elects the executive which induces some machinations), want that person for whatever reason and consider that person aligned with their interests even if some second-order effects are not so. They did not get "fooled" and bait-and-switched even if they later feel the performance was not great. Proof for that is you are not going to find that many who say they would have switched their votes even after the fact. Those political scientists and the GP have the arrogance and audacity to project their own interests on every single person and conclude they did not vote appropriately.
- walkabout 1y ago
  > Although, if you believe in that theory, you should reject democracy and aim for some form of aristocracy or monarchy. Not necessarily! It means that the model of the typical voter's behavior (and of the reasons why elections go the ways they do) isn't what many conceive it to be (or hope it may be), and that democracy's weaknesses, vulnerabilities, strengths, and capabilities may in-fact be at least somewhat different from what one operating from that idealized (and apparently very wrong) model of voter behavior would expect. It could still be the best of a bad lot. > They did not get "fooled" and bait-and-switched even if they later feel the performance was not great. They are extremely often operating from incorrect information, either regarding facts about the state of the world, or about probable outcomes of various policies. This can include things that directly affect them (or don't) in ways that one would expect them to notice—one fun form of study that's been run a few times is to ask a population whether a tax increase or decrease that in-fact affected only a tiny sliver of the population but was the subject of substantial propagandizing and/or publicity affected them personally (this is about as direct as it gets!) and the typical result is pretty much exactly what your most-pessimistic guess would be. Supposing that people very-often hold a bunch of incorrect beliefs about how policies affect them but are also good at voting for their own interests when it comes time to mark the ballot is probably somewhere in the category of wishful thinking—and that's assuming motivations and intentions focused on policies and their outcomes in the first place. There's less-strong but still-quite-strong evidence that, as the kids say, "vibes" are a huge factor in the outcomes of elections, even when those "vibes" come from things that even the extremely politically-ignorant ought to know have nothing much to do with, say, who the President is, like a rash of shark attacks for example. This, of course, doesn't mean that this "vibes-from-irrelevant-stuff" voting makes the difference for anywhere near as many people as incorrect information does (it almost certainly doesn't) but that it has an outsize effect on the true-swing (not self-reported swing, that's mostly bullshit) vote, which tends to consist almost entirely of so-called "low-information voters", with the result that it may not have any effect at all on most voters but elections still turn on it (one of a billion reasons FPTP voting sucks is that it amplifies the power of this effect). I do think, separately, there are cases of rational trade-offs, of picking (say) an anti-abortion candidate who holds many other positions one dislikes because one's stake in one's position on abortion is that important. That's not the kind of thing I mean, and I don't think it's the kind of thing most people mean when they say people are making mistakes by "voting against their own interests", though the effect of such a choice may well be that one is also in these cases (consciously!) voting against one's own interests on various issues.
willhslade 1y ago
What's a great overview of this phenomena in book form? I'm intensely curious about this.

tgma 1y ago

I understand that. That is not the point though. Although, if you believe in that theory, you should reject democracy and aim for some form of aristocracy or monarchy. I don't believe that many political scientists [sic] today publish and advocate disenfranchisement, perhaps because that's not politically correct, but all that is beside the point. My point specifically is if people are voting for someone, more often than not (at least in the US, perhaps less so elsewhere where they elect the parliament and the parliament by proxy elects the executive which induces some machinations), want that person for whatever reason and consider that person aligned with their interests even if some second-order effects are not so. They did not get "fooled" and bait-and-switched even if they later feel the performance was not great. Proof for that is you are not going to find that many who say they would have switched their votes even after the fact. Those political scientists and the GP have the arrogance and audacity to project their own interests on every single person and conclude they did not vote appropriately.

walkabout 1y ago
> Although, if you believe in that theory, you should reject democracy and aim for some form of aristocracy or monarchy. Not necessarily! It means that the model of the typical voter's behavior (and of the reasons why elections go the ways they do) isn't what many conceive it to be (or hope it may be), and that democracy's weaknesses, vulnerabilities, strengths, and capabilities may in-fact be at least somewhat different from what one operating from that idealized (and apparently very wrong) model of voter behavior would expect. It could still be the best of a bad lot. > They did not get "fooled" and bait-and-switched even if they later feel the performance was not great. They are extremely often operating from incorrect information, either regarding facts about the state of the world, or about probable outcomes of various policies. This can include things that directly affect them (or don't) in ways that one would expect them to notice—one fun form of study that's been run a few times is to ask a population whether a tax increase or decrease that in-fact affected only a tiny sliver of the population but was the subject of substantial propagandizing and/or publicity affected them personally (this is about as direct as it gets!) and the typical result is pretty much exactly what your most-pessimistic guess would be. Supposing that people very-often hold a bunch of incorrect beliefs about how policies affect them but are also good at voting for their own interests when it comes time to mark the ballot is probably somewhere in the category of wishful thinking—and that's assuming motivations and intentions focused on policies and their outcomes in the first place. There's less-strong but still-quite-strong evidence that, as the kids say, "vibes" are a huge factor in the outcomes of elections, even when those "vibes" come from things that even the extremely politically-ignorant ought to know have nothing much to do with, say, who the President is, like a rash of shark attacks for example. This, of course, doesn't mean that this "vibes-from-irrelevant-stuff" voting makes the difference for anywhere near as many people as incorrect information does (it almost certainly doesn't) but that it has an outsize effect on the true-swing (not self-reported swing, that's mostly bullshit) vote, which tends to consist almost entirely of so-called "low-information voters", with the result that it may not have any effect at all on most voters but elections still turn on it (one of a billion reasons FPTP voting sucks is that it amplifies the power of this effect). I do think, separately, there are cases of rational trade-offs, of picking (say) an anti-abortion candidate who holds many other positions one dislikes because one's stake in one's position on abortion is that important. That's not the kind of thing I mean, and I don't think it's the kind of thing most people mean when they say people are making mistakes by "voting against their own interests", though the effect of such a choice may well be that one is also in these cases (consciously!) voting against one's own interests on various issues.

willhslade 1y ago

What's a great overview of this phenomena in book form? I'm intensely curious about this.