Cato Unbound

Especially in a system that is rigged to limit competition to only two parties, there’s another problem: party elected officials can often afford to ignore their supporters’ views. Thus Bush and many Republicans in the Senate disagree with their party’s base on immigration issues. And the Democratic leadership disagrees with its base on civil liberties issues like FISA and the War on Drugs, and on holding the Bush administration accountable for its crimes (whether through impeachment, in the past, or prosecutions in the present).

On issues about which there is broad bipartisan agreement among the leadership of the major parties–the War on (Certain Classes of People Who Use) Drugs, so-called free trade, rejection of single-payer health care, deregulation (at least from the late Seventies through the middle of last year), a broadly interventionist foreign policy, and so forth–there is very little that citizens can do to change policy, even if a majority of the grassroots of one or the other major party comes to disagree with the inside-the-Beltway consensus.

madison may have spoken against parties (“factions”), but is there any reason to think that madison held the view that deliberation would lead to convergence if not thwarted by faction?

this seems to be the favorite fantasy of the broderites–that if we could only be bipartisan enough then we’d arrive at a universally-acceptable solution–but is there any evidence that madison agreed?

i mean–the competing vision is just that, with respect to many deep values, people disagree about stuff and are going to keep disagreeing, but still have to live together with minimal bloodshed. that seems like an equally madisonian outlook.

i’m just asking: is fishkin’s outlook really madisonian at all?

(and i’m happy to accept answers of the form, ‘yes’, provided they’re substantiated with the follow-up ‘and here’s the quote from federalist 51’ or whatever.)

Three months if they read any Kahneman and Tversky.

Sorry, MH–did you mean ‘run’ or ‘ruin’?

I have to agree with Kid Blitzer that this doesn’t sound very Madisonian to me. After all, Federalist No. 10 argues that factions (parties for all intents and purposes) are natural, inevitable, and preferable to the draconian controls necessary to prevent them.

Madison’s solution wasn’t to make the political process more deliberative to the mass of the electorate, but to A. encourage more elitist institutions where reason and the general good might prevail, and to B. establish a constitutional order which limits the potential damage done by the inexorable forces of self-interest. This isn’t particularly democratic, but neither was Madison.

I’d also point out that Madisonian political theory really puts a damper on the very idea of a general good achievable by enlightened statesmen.

I’ve been trying to read all the stuff in this discussion, but am baffled because you-all seem to be arguing that the opposite of partisanship is deliberation, or ideology, or something. Yet what I observe is that the opposite of partisanship is *celebrity*. People either align themselves first with a party, or first with a charismatic and/or familiar individual. In both cases they will claim their alignment is ideological, but I am not convinced.

I think this is why the same Beltway Villagers both make a fetish of “bipartisanship” and endorse nepotistic succession in US politics. I think this is why the UK and Canada, which have strong political parties, have had less charismatic and well-born political leaders in the past 40-50 than the US has had.

Of course there can be charismatic, aristocratic party leaders — and such men are very, very dangerous. But generally speaking, the opposite of party is *personality* (under which I include aristocracy, where “knowing the family” stands in for “knowing the person”).

Maurice, I expect it that ‘run’ would turn to ‘ruin’. But, these days, what isn’t?

But it seems to me that much of this disagreement turns on a fundamental divergence as to what politics is about.

That makes it sound as if it is a disagreement about method, when it is really a disagreement about facts. Your position seems to be that the competing interests in the political process are informed and rational about pursuing their interests, and that those interests conflict; while Rosenblum et al believe that most participants in the political process are neither informed nor deliberative enough to adequately identify their interests and support policies which further them.

In general, I think the latter view is correct. But, of course, the truth is some combination of both (with emphasis on the latter, however).

What’s interesting to me about this is that your respective positions seem to be inverted from the stereotypical liberal and conservative views (for simplicity’s sake, I’ll equate libertarianism with conservatism). Liberals tend to be more optimistic about human nature and peoples’ ability to compromise and reach solutions that are beneficial to the majority. Conservatives think of themselves as realists who recognize the people have competing interests and that conflict is inevitable. I think this inversion is more a product of the fact that these affinities are multidimensional and not merely bivalent—for example, the further to the left one looks, the more one sees a more pessimistic and confrontational viewpoint.

At any rate, my personal experience and observation is that very, very few people are adequately informed and deliberative such that they are able to assess and support policies that favor their interests. This is most obviously true when one looks at the class of voters who are not otherwise actively engaged in the political process; but what’s more telling is that it’s also true of the political class, as well. You can clearly see this with many current GOP politicians who are stupendously ignorant and thoughtless about the macroeconomic issues at hand. Certainly, a few of them are lying and posturing in devious political scheming; but it seems apparent to me that many of them are simply ignorant and probably stupid, to boot.

I like to believe that the majority of people are well-intentioned and would support policies that benefit the majority were they sufficiently informed and deliberative—but the sorry truth is that so few are sufficiently informed and deliberative that we can’t know what the world would be like if most people had a clue. It seems to me that political theory that assumes that actors are informed and rationally act in their self-interest is just as simple-minded and factually wrong as the equivalent economic assumption. Obviously, in both cases, some people are informed and deliberative and most people are partly informed and deliberative…but not sufficiently so such that the process can be accurately described assuming informed and rational agents acting in self-interest.

That said, I think there’s a limited context in which a political rational choice theory is accurate: politicians acting within the context of their own political self-interest (i.e., power). Politicians are well-informed about their political self-interest and they certainly are deliberative about it. But public policy, and the aim of policy, are for the most part outside this context. Politicians have an incentive to confuse their political self-interest with the interests they are supposed to represent; and, worse, the press has greatly exacerbated this by making the focus of their reporting the maneuvering of political self-interest at the expense of reporting about policy and the interests manifested in policy.

Keith, I don’t think shifting the frame from ‘method’ to ‘facts’ does the work you think it does. The question Henry is asking, which I think is a good one, is this: what is the status of conflict in politics? Is it (a) an artifact of misunderstanding and distraction and misinformation, caused (we’ll say) by electoral politics, partisan advertising, and punditry, or (b) something endemic to human societies, such that people will always disagree sharply over important questions of value and interest?

That’s not an argument about method; it’s an argument about the human condition. In this case, it’s an argument over what you could ever expect of deliberation, even given a set of ideal assumptions about the people doing the deliberating. If conflict is a misunderstanding, then deliberation among rational and adequately informed people will dispel that conflict and allow them to reach common ground regarding the issue up for discussion. You could even argue that deliberation in this case could be a vehicle for education, so that even irrational and less-than-fully-informed people could deliberate, become better informed, and reach common ground. The deliberation would be screening out the influences that otherwise would distract or misinform citizens.

If conflict is endemic, though, then even the most rational and informed citizens will disagree, often severely, over important questions. In that case, we can’t expect much of deliberation. Harry B. suggests that it could still be valuable as a device for citizens to ascertain what their values and interests actually are. It’s true that it sometimes takes the experience of disagreement to show us what we really believe, but as Henry notes, that’s a pretty chastened view of deliberation compared to what someone like Fishkin expects from it.

Another possibility, by the way, and assuming that conflict is endemic, would be to look at deliberation as a means of self-expression, sharing personal narratives, or ‘witnessing’, as some feminist critics (Young, Fraser) have suggested. But again, that’s not nearly as expansive a claim as what many proponents of deliberation have put forward.

I’m not sure anyone will check these comments, but just in case:

Kid Blitzer: “madison may have spoken against parties (“factions”), but is there any reason to think that madison held the view that deliberation would lead to convergence if not thwarted by faction?”

Yes, Federalist 10 on the use of representatives: “The effect of the first difference is, on the one hand, to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose. On the other hand, the effect may be inverted. Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people.”

Fishkin is Madisonian in the sense that he wants greater deliberation as reflective consideration (the wisdom cited above). He does not believe that people will then completely agree or converge on the “right” answer (there is even a quote in Democracy and Deliberation that people can still decide based upon their own or their group’s interest, though I think he has backed away from this position somewhat). Deliberation will allow people to make decision after considering a wide variety of arguments, not just the partisan talking points handed down by party leaders. At least that is what I think he is trying to say.

Fishkin is not Madisonian, however, because he believes that average citizens are capable of reflective consideration under the right conditions. This leads to…

MH: If Fishkin’s idea was applied, my guess is that the experts and policymakers for these sessions (or whoever selects them) would come as close to running the country as any group has.

Actually, I have observed one of the Deliberative Opinion Polls. The plenary panel of experts and policymakers I observed was balanced, and they did not have as much power as you imply. The “deliberators” listened to them and then asked them questions, but they then went back to their own small groups for further deliberation. Those who select the experts would have the opportunity to abuse their selection power to skew the deliberations, though any unbalanced panel would certainly become pretty obvious on most salient issues. The most understudied aspect of deliberation, and where much opportunity for abuse lies, is with the moderators of the small group deliberations.

Henry: I think you misread Fishkin a bit. The deliberation you identify (shared values and public interest) is a more apt description of Habermas’s or Rawls’s Kantian theories. Fishkin does not expect everyone to agree, though he does expect at least some people to change their minds. He (along with Joseph Bessette to a great degree) simply want democratic citizens to have considered opinions. The problem he sees with “television advertising and the other paraphernalia of competitive electoral politics” is that they influence people to make decisions based upon criteria other than reflective consideration. He recognizes that disagreement is a part of politics. The question is how we respond to that disagreement. Do we deliberate about our disagreements, with the chance that we may find that we agree on more than we suspect, or do we engage in strategic action aimed at minimizing the impact of those with whom we disagree and maximizing our own power because we are sure that the position we have taken is right?