Perception and Reality

Ezra Klein has the link to a fascinating paper by Larry Bartels and Christopher Achen about the ugly reality behind political decision-making. Rather than try to summarize the paper, I'm going to steal this one graph and talk about it, since I think it encapsulates things nicely:

The horizontal axis plots people's self-report about where they stand on the left-right spectrum on spending issues. The vertical axis plots people's self-report about where they stand relative to the Republican Party on the left-right spectrum on spending issues. The chart separates the answers out into one line for Democrats and one line for Republicans. Partisanship, however, is logically irrelevant to this question. Two people who self-identify as having the same view on spending ought to be the same distance from the Republican Party, even if one person is a Democrat and one is a Republican. But, as the authors observe, "they are markedly divergent, especially for people whose own positions do not happen to fall at the midpoint of the 7-point scale."

If you ask some different kinds of questions, you'll see that people usually vote for the party that they think reflects their views. One might think this means people are looking at where the parties stand, comparing that to where they stand, and then voting for the party they prefer. Bartels and Achen, however, use their way of looking at the data to argue that this is backwards -- people are committing to a political party, and then having done so simply convincing themselves that the party they're committed to shares those views.

Comments

That's the core of "Rovian" politics really...

All you need to do is throw up enough dust to obscure things, then people will assume that the "moral" candidate, by definition will support all their views. This is actually how Bush got close enough in 2000 to steal the thing. They basically nosed up to Gore as much as they could, and made it a contest of personality.

Posted by Karmakin | July 26, 2007 9:08 AM

It strikes me that the self-identified Republicans are pretty consistent (with the strongest Republicans the most anti-spending) whereas the Democrats are confused (presumably because of the Blue Dogs and DLCers.)

"Strength of identification" may be tied to local factional partisanship unrelated to national issues. I.E, a Southern Democrat might be viciously partisan vs. his Republican counterparts on local, non-ideological grounds having to do with alliances and pork, without having much of any loyalty to national Democratic issues.

Likewise, strength of committment to low spending might also be relative to local arguments, and unrelated to actual spending levels proposed. IE a Massachusetts (verbally) anti-spending Democrat might actually propose higher spending levels than a Mississippi Democrat who is verbally less anti-spending compared to the rabid local republicans.

based on the chart, not the article.

Posted by John Emerson | July 26, 2007 9:20 AM

But what is the relative number of people associated with each point? One expects that the responses of some fraction of the population will be, um, peculiar... but what's the actual percentage?

Posted by MattF | July 26, 2007 9:21 AM

I want to reduce the military spending a lot and to have many more services.

Posted by abb1 | July 26, 2007 9:35 AM

people are committing to a political party, and then having done so simply convincing themselves that the party they're committed to shares those views.

Which then becomes a feedback loop - people start believing stuff because the party tells them it is true, particularly the less true it is. I wouldn't think this would differ much from the dynamics of religious practice ('The Church even loves sinners like me who have abortions and do drugs' versus 'The Muslims eat babies!').

That's the core of "Rovian" politics really...

Enh. I don't think they're particularly inventive or innovative; they just take existing practice and sharpen it to a fine point.

m, they are good at the long con

Posted by max | July 26, 2007 9:37 AM

It strikes me that the self-identified Republicans are pretty consistent (with the strongest Republicans the most anti-spending)

It strike me that some people are just plain barking goofy.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | July 26, 2007 10:14 AM

I think you are probably right about the background influence of party identification. But some hypotheses about other factors:

Democrats who are 7 in their desire to reduce spending, but -3 in their perceived relative proximity to the Republicans on spending are doves who want drastic cuts in defense spending, but correctly recognize that is not the Republican position.

Republicans who are 1 on the horizontal scale, presumably representing some, but not a lot more spending on services, but 1 in their perceived relative proximity to the Republicans on spending are folks who are "compassionate conservatives" favoring some increase in faith-based spending, and who see that as at least somewhat near the Bush - hence Republican - position.

One question: "Perceived proximity" is a distance scale, and it is not clear to me that it makes sense to present those options on a +/- continuum. Might not some people who indicate "0" interpret that as "zero distance"?

Posted by Dan Kervick | July 26, 2007 10:37 AM

Yeah, I'm unclear on that last point too. Is it that the people on the + side consider themselves x amount more anti-spending than the Republicans while those on the - side consider themselves y amount more pro-spending, or is it something else entirely?

Posted by Ginger Yellow | July 26, 2007 11:13 AM

this is why party politics is somewhat silly. there's ample evidence that people choose up sides, usually for not very good reasons, and then just support their team. further, neither party is free of vestigial positions that a given party member almost certainly would not embrace if it weren't part of the team's platform. yes, there's an argument that the net benefit from a party's position still justifies support, but i don't think most people think like that. put another way, neither party adopted a coherent set of principles, and then figured out where that led on all relevant policy grounds. instead, they're a mismash of positions, many of dubious provenance.

Posted by dj superflat | July 26, 2007 1:25 PM

Anyone who calls himself a conservative will come down on the liberal side of an issue if they knew all the facts (unless they are filthy rich). Instead of learning all the facts they dismiss anything that doesn't fit with what they already believe to be true. Kind of like how religion works. Leo Strauss was a genius.

Posted by jg | July 26, 2007 1:51 PM

The biggest statement this graph makes, in my opinion, is simply that there is a widely varying perception of the Republican party's fiscal conservatism.

However, there is a problem with the graph. "Many more services" is not on the same axis as "reduce spending a lot". It is easily possible for someone to want to increase services but reduce spending, for example. Or, as another example, want to increase spending but reduce services, which would seem to describe the Bush administration reasonably well. (Unless you consider wars and corporate tax breaks as services.) The plot of people's responses between spending and services is likely to be fairly linear, but it is not a single axis.

This may seem irrelevant, but it raises a question. Do the Democrats on the left feel that they are far from the Republican party because they think that the Republicans do not want to provide more services (which would seem to be a true assumption) or because they feel that Republicans want to reduce spending (which would appear to be false)?

Posted by Bitt Faulk | July 26, 2007 3:12 PM

I think there is much less than meets the eye in that graph if I understand correctly that people were asked to give a number from 1 to 7 on more services vs reduce spending. The reason is that the 1-7 scale is abstract and there is no reason to believe that people mean the same thing by the same number.

Consider two people who have the exact same views on policy choices let's call them Bill and Hillary Clinton. They both are democrats and both know their views are far from those of Republicans. Neither is a 1 (third way and all that) but Bill might call himself a 4 (super centrist) and Hillary call herself a 3. There is no problem about their beliefs about policies and parties, just their mapping from beliefs about policies to this arbitrary scale.

Now consider say Gerald Ford. He was against universal health care, but he considered himself a centrist. He might call himself a 4 (same number as Bill but different meaning). There is nothing irrational about Bill Clinton considering himself a centrist and identifying with the Democratic party and Gerald Ford considering himself a centrist and identifying with the Republican party. They disagree only about the meaning of the word centrist (or the number 4) which has no precisely defined connection with policy or with parties or with anything concrete.

To get an interesting graph, Bartels and Achen probably asked about specific policy questions summarized the answers for the x variable (actually for all I know the figure your showed was made that way). Now that is interesting. But an argument based on the assumption that an abstract number from 1 to 7 has a precise meaning and should govern our voting is silly.

Now I use such data myself, but the interesting question is whether it has anything to do with anything outside of the questionaire, not whether it is an exact measure of something important.

More general rule. If a discovery can be easily explained by assuming that a variable (here leftiness) is measured with error, then it is uninteresting. Applying this rule would imply refusing to publish most published work in the social sciences.

Posted by robert waldmann | July 27, 2007 1:19 AM

In 2000, a plurality of Americans believed that Bush was more pro-choice than Gore. American voters have little knowledge of which cluster of beliefs and basic policy principles go with others in the current political context.

Posted by Reality Man | July 27, 2007 3:26 AM

This is an interesting paper, but really only provides another example of long understood facts and phenomena. Another interesting avenue that I would highly suggest you take a look at is the Agenda-Setting Effect (also called "framing" and priming until Lakoff jacked the term), i.e. how does news effect the partisan identification heuristic pointed to in the paper.

It's also important to note that the dynamic at play here does not effect young people in the same way, since the heuristic of party identification is not developed fully until the mid to late twenties. If you're interested in this subject, let me point you to this piece, which was part of my master's thesis:
Keys to a Future Majority - The Agenda-Setting Effect, Priming, And Youth Voting

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