Talking Together

Just picked up a copy of Talking Together: Public Deliberation and Political Participation. Yes, note the titular colonicity -- gotta have a colon to qualify as serious academic work, otherwise it's just hackery.1

Anyway, this book focuses on deliberative democracy. Basically, you sit a bunch of people in a room, educated them in an unbiased fashion about the issues, then poll them to get results theoretically better than the kind of uninformed opinion you'd often get from a random survey of U.S. adults.2

I'm burying the lede. I've only skimmed the book so I can't give an overall judgment, but there are concepts that matter to me: political engagement, participation, attention, and of course my old favorite, knowledge (which plays a bit part, not a starring role). In this case, there is a set of multiple regression tables in Chapter 5 with participation as the dependent variable and a host of independent variables tossed into the recipe. These ingredients are grouped as demographic factors (race, gender, etc.), social capital (belong to organization, religious attendance, etc.), political capital (efficacy, trust, knowledge, attention), and the last in the model -- deliberation.

Now the lede: deliberation still explains unique variance even after controlling for every possible other variable in the social science universe.3 Now the secondary lede: knowledge sometimes retains its explanatory power, even after all these controls. In some tables yes, some tables no.4

So knowledge leads to participation? Couldn't it be the other way around?

There are some obvious causality issues here, and the authors rightly mention them, so I'm not going to get into that methodological mess. Just skimming, the book is sound, thoughtful, and a worthy addition to the participation/social capital/deliberation literature.

---
1 Like this blog
2 That these people differ from regular people is hardly surprising
3 Okay, not every variable. Beer consumption is oddly missing
4 Attention, however, offers zilch to the model

Voting, or Not

I blogged yesterday about John Stossel asking whether there are not some people who simply should not vote. Here's a link to Stossel's ABC bit (thanks to Jon-Michael). See my post below for the link to Stossel's column.

To pick on a rock concert to question young people on their political knowledge, that strikes me as unfair. I notice Stossel didn't go to a nursing home and quiz old people. Why not? Maybe because they're the only ones still watching ABC.

Are some people simply so politically disconnected that we're better off not having them vote?

That raises the counter question -- would you have a test for who can vote, who cannot? The typical response is to spit and sputter and explain how that's not what he or she is proposing, not a test. Not a Jim Crow test. But it comes down to that, doesn't it? Hell, even Jon Stewart posed this one to Rick Shenkman, who wrote Just How Stupid Are We? The book details the political ignorance of the American electorate. I blogged about it some time ago. In that blog you'll find a video link to Shenkman's funny The Daily Show appearance. Watch it. Shenkman doesn't agree with a test either. But it is the natural consequence of asking this kind of question.

People who can't answer how many U.S. senators there are -- and we agree everyone should know this -- can still vote their economic self interest, or at least their perceived economic self interest. There is no constitutional requirement for basing your vote on specific criteria such as those approved by political scientists and journalism professors who blog too much. Sure, this leads to ideological inconsistencies and unexplainable voting patterns, but let's face it -- that's good fodder for political scientists who study this stuff, yet more academic articles to be read by tens of people worldwide.

In a perfect world we would have a deliberative democracy, and in a perfect world Georgia would not have lost to Florida. But the world ain't perfect, and neither is democracy. It's messy, and people who vote who don't know a hell of a lot, and they vote for what some may think are the wrong reasons. I suspect this has a lot to do with Stossel's problem. He'd be less concerned about the youth vote if it was going one way and not the other.