Re: Bartels
Doug Henwood wrote:
Michael Hoover wrote:
paper that bartels wrote with achen about electoral implications of natural disasters used to be available on line but link no longer appears to work…
It’s this one, right? http://www.international.ucla.edu/cms/files/PERG.Achen.pdf
Gotta love this, from the conclusion (after the paper demonstrates that voters punish incumbent parties/presidents for droughts and shark attacks that they had nothing to do with):
Our account of democratic politics strikes directly at key assumptions in two different contemporary schools of thought. Perhaps most obviously, it questions the ability of ordinary citizens to assess their public life critically, listen to the proposals for change coming from contenders for public office, and then choose between the candidates in accordance with their own values. Like most survey researchers who have talked extensively to real voters, we believe that few such citizens exist. The present paper is one more item of evidence. The central fact about democracies is that the voters understand little beyond their own and their community’s pain and pleasure, and they think about causes and effects as the popular culture advises them to think. The romantic vision of thoughtful democratic participation in the common life is largely mythical. Democracy must be defended some other way, if it is to be defended at all.
Our work also strikes a blow at the customary fallback position for contemporary defenders of democracy, namely the view that the voters may know very little, but they can recognize good and bad government performances when they see them. Hence they can choose retrospectively in a defensible way. In most recent scholarly accounts, retrospection is a natural and rational feature of democratic politics. In our view it is natural but not so obviously rational. Voters operating on the basis of a valid, detailed understanding of cause and effect in the realm of public policy could reward good performance while ridding themselves of leaders who are malevolent or incompetent. But real voters often have only a vague, more or less primitive understanding of the connections (if any) between incumbent politicians’ actions and their own pain or pleasure. As a result, rational retrospective voting is harder than it seems, and blind retrospection sometimes produces consistently misguided patterns of electoral rewards and punishments.