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Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society


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Government by the people, for the peopletwentyfirst century style


Doris A. Graber
a a

Department of Political Science, University of Illinois, Chicago, IL, 60680 Available online: 06 Mar 2008

To cite this article: Doris A. Graber (2006): Government by the people, for the peopletwentyfirst century style, Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society, 18:1-3, 167-178 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08913810608443655

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Doris A. Graber

GOVERNMENT BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE Downloaded by [CIDE Centro de Investigacion Y Docencia] at 16:37 12 March 2012 PEOPLETWENTY-FIRST CENTURY STYLE

ABSTRACT: Citizens' competence for democratic self-government must be judged by their ability to perform the typical functions of modern citizenship, rather than by their scores on surveys of political informationwhich are flawed in a variety of important respects. The role requirements for effective citizenship have changed throughout American history because government has grown vastly in size, complexity, and the range of functions that it performs. Effective use of citizens' political talents therefore requires limiting public surveillance and advice to broad overview aspects, rather than to micro-management. Citizens perform these more limited functions adequately, demonstrating that government by the people remains viable under modern conditions.

The United States has undergone vast changes since November 19, 1863, when Lincoln ended his commemorative speech at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, with the promise that government by the people would remain a sacred political goal. I shall argue in this essay that this goal remains alive, but that the means required to implement it have changed in tune with economic, social, and political developments. What does government "by the people" mean in a modern context? Can Americans still successfully rule themselves?
Critical Review 18 (2006), nos. 1-3. ISSN 0891-3811. www.criticalreview.com. 2006 Critical R e view Foundation. Doris A. Graber, Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60680, is the author, inter alia, of Processing the News: How People Tame the Information Tide (University Press of America, 1993) and Processing Politics: Learning from Television in the Internet Age (Chicago, 2001); and is the founding editor of Political Communication and the book review editor of Political Psychology. 167

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Answering the latter question first requires defining what rule means. Webster's supplies two definitions. The first is "to have an influence over; to guide." The second is to "have or exercise supreme powers, control, or authority; to govern." If we apply this second definition, the mass public is not fit to rule under modern conditions. Most citizens have insufficient political knowledge, experience, and skill to exercise supreme control over such large, complex institutions as the U.S. government, state governments, or the governments of major urban areas. Direct democracy is not a viable form of governance when mass publics are huge and diverse and governments exercise vast powers over many aspects of citizens' lives. The framers of the U.S. Constitution did not envision direct democracy, and neither did Lincoln. Instead, the Constitution provides for a representative democracy in which citizens select rulers from among their peers and then monitor the rulers' activities more or less closely. The presumption is that candidates for public office are chosen because they have the characteristics required for exercising supreme authority, and because they share their fellow citizens' preferences about what government should do and how it should do it.

The Informational Needs of the Monitorial Citizen


If citizens cannot rule directly and if that was never their intended constitutional role, can they fill the advisory role spelled out in Webster's first definition? I shall argue that they have done so throughout American history and that they still can, if the advisory role the Framers intended is adjusted to cope with life in twenty-first century America. The model of citizenship that I have in mind was set forth in detail by Michael Schudson (1998) in his chronicle of the various stages of citizenship through which the United States passed as it moved through successive phases of economic and political development. Schudson contends that the ideal of the Informed Citizen, who has full knowledge of the organization of government as well as the pros and cons of various public policies, became increasingly unrealistic in the twentieth century because government functions expanded and diversified into highly technical fields (cf. Lupia and McCubbins 1998; Popkin and Dimock 1999; Neuman et al. 1992; Graber 2001). The Informed Citizen model, of necessity, was superseded by the more realistic Monitorial Citizen model. Today's citizens can and must

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be alert to political news that portends major political developments that concern them individually, and that they may thus want to influence. When salient news is reported, monitorial citizens should increase their attention to political messages from trusted sources in their political environment (Page and Shapiro 1991; Schudson 1998). Such information will allow them to fulfill the normal tasks of monitorial citizens: namely, to develop reasonable opinions about the situation in question to guide their votes at election time; to discuss the situation with fellow citizens; and to provide verbal or material support to political activists who support a particular position. On the rare occasions when citizens want to mount their own lobbying efforts, they will need far more information than is required for the more common tasks of a monitorial citizen. Most of the time, then, it makes sense for citizens to base their opinions on political analyses provided by experts via the news media or other sources. It is neither economically nor politically rewarding for ordinary citizens to spend their limited resources of time and effort to duplicate the data collection and analysis performed by experts whom they trust and whose values and preferences resonate with their own (Downs 1957). Of course, following the advice of trusted experts requires developing criteria for determining which experts are and are not trustworthy and which of them reflect one's values. Readily available criteria include judging experts' trustworthiness and wisdom by the qualities attributed to their social position, such as being prominent journalists or members of the clergy; or by using party labels to attribute particular views to prominent party spokespeople. Such mental shortcuts are often referred to as heuristics.

The Problems with Civics-IQ Tests


Before discussing whether citizens are able to perform the role of monitors efficiently and in ways that benefit a democratic polity, we need to put into perspective the common claim that "the pervasiveness of popular ignorance about politics and government . . . is one of the strongest findings that has been produced by any social science" (Friedman 1998, 397). The claim that citizens are political ignoramuses is, indeed, very widespread among social scientists. But does ignorance entail incompetence in monitorial citizens?

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Exploring citizens' competence for monitorial self-government requires that we identify the qualities they need if they are to develop sound judgments about the policies that affect their lives. If we keep in mind the actual roles that most citizens perform as advisors to the government, many of the criteria that social scientists have used to declare citizens incompetent have little practical relevance. These criteria cover academic knowledge that experts must master and, although it would expand citizens' overall knowledge base, having such knowledge is largely irrelevant for coping with the ordinary tasks of monitorial citizenship. Just as average citizens can choose a well-qualified surgeon to remove an appendix without knowing abdominal anatomy or the pros and cons of various surgical instruments, they can also make sound political choices using a limited array of decision criteria. For instance, they need not know macroeconomics to develop sensible opinions about the wisdom of lowering tax rates. Even if they know macroeconomics, they may find it useful to base their decision on other criteria, especially in light of the fact that macroeconomists rarely agree on the soundness of particular tax policies. To assess citizens' political knowledge, Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter (1996) developed a widely praised national civics test. The test contains forced-choice questions about the basic structure of the American government, American political and economic history, the two-party system, and the stands of the parties on major political issues. The test would be useful for hiring a political-science professor, but there is no credible empirical evidence that learning the answers to these questions is essential for making the kinds of political judgments that monitorial citizens typically face. If citizens score poorly on such tests, it is wrong to infer that they will make unwise political decisions. The same holds true when judgments of civic incompetence are inferred from answers to factual questions in opinion surveys. Many theorists and public-opinion analysts conclude from respondents' poor showing in such quizzes that the public is woefully ignorant and therefore poorly qualified for citizenship duties (McGraw and Pinney 1990; Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; Kuklinski et al. 2000). Leaving aside the issue of whether the questions are relevant to the judgments that monitorial citizens need to make, the factual-ignorance findings themselves are open to question. Qualitative research frequently shows far more positive results, even for questions calling for schoolbook knowledge. The difference is that qualitative research probes deeper into what people know than quantitative survey research can. Respondents do much

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better when allowed to discuss the areas of political knowledge with which they are familiar, and to frame information in their own way. By contrast, survey-based tests call for knowledge about topics selected and framed by researchers that often covers areas of little interest to respondents, and that is not necessarily more significant than the knowledge realms that the respondents choose to discuss when queried in openended interviews. There are other methodological problems with using the typical close-ended survey questions to assess people's political knowledge. The information that interviewers request is often absent from television newscasts and only sparsely covered by most newspapers. When the information is covered, its framing usually differs substantially from the framing used in interviewers' questions. That makes it tough even for people who have the relevant knowledge to answer the questions as posed. Ignoring people's tendency to do "online information processing" is another reason for underestimating civic intelligence. Politicalknowledge survey researchers often assume that people need to retain all the information on which their opinions are based; if a respondent has forgotten that information, as exposed in his inability to answer a survey question, then his opinion is considered a snap judgment devoid of informational basis. In fact, however, people process political information when they encounter it, and usually store only the resulting conclusions, rather than the underlying data. This explains why respondents often cannot cite the data that underlie specific opinions (Graber 1993; Lodge and Stroh 1993; Lodge et al. 1995). It is also worth noting that Delli Carpini and Keeter's (1996) fiveitem knowledge index produces results that are not nearly as horrible as one might suspect from the language used in reporting respondents' scores. Test takers were asked which party controls the House of Representatives (55 percent correct), which party is more conservative (57 percent correct), which branch of government determines that a law is unconstitutional (68 percent correct), and the proportion of votes required to overturn a presidential veto (37 percent correct). They were also asked to name the current vice-president (84 percent correct). This means that on four out of five questions, more than half of the test takers knew the correct answer. Much research that follows in the tradition of judging civic competence by quizzing people about political facts inquires about the names of current political leaders, because that makes it easy to judge the correctness of the answer. However, it is one of the least satisfactory ways

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to judge' civics IQ: easy name recall is a skill that many very wellinformed individuals lack. Choosing name memory tests is a perfect example of the Drunkard's Search Qervis 1993), where the objective of the search becomes secondary to finding an easy search method. (The drunkard looks for his key wherever the light is best, rather in the dark area where he dropped it.) It is easy to measure people's ignorance of public officials' names, but why is our knowledge of this kind of public ignorance important? The idea that constrained ideological belief systems are essential to sound political reasoning is another example of a test that is ill suited to gauging civic competence. Constrained belief systems may be a sign of intellectual sophistication, but they do not necessarily equate with political competence. Philip E. Converse, whose 1964 essay on belief systems sparked much of the debate about civic competence and ways to measure it, acknowledges as much when he notes that a rigidly constraining belief system may prevent political sophisticates from making logical decisions about the issues in question. Besides being irrelevant to the goal of measuring civic competence, many of the knowledge tests are also poorly designed. They ignore important physiological and psychological aspects of human memorization and pay insufficient attention to current knowledge about steps in the decision-making process under various contingencies (Graber
2001).

Satisfying Solutions
How, then, can one test people's ability to make good judgments? According to Herbert Simon (1995), the ideal decision-making process requires considering the total pool of information about the situation, weighing the significance of various factors, and then reaching a conclusion that maximizes benefits for the decision maker. Given the impossibility of getting all the information and making all the complex comparative choices, Simon concedes that decision-makers are usually forced to "satisfice" rather than "optimize." That means that they get enough information to feel that they can make a reasonably good choice to cope with the situation in question, even if it is not necessarily the ideal choice. Of course, defining which information is "enough," which data need to be consulted, and which choices can be deemed reasonably sound is

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a subjective process. Decision makers must also consider the costs in time, effort, and missed alternative opportunities in gathering the requisite information. Most importantly for my purposes, one must distinguish between the information needed for the comparatively minimal tasks performed by average citizens and the far more comprehensive and difficult tasks that various elites undertake. To make the situation concrete: Mary Senior is a 70-year-old ordinary citizen who is enrolled in Medicare. She knows that the government is making prescription-drug reimbursements available, starting in 2006. She also knows that she is currently paying over $1,000 a year for prescription drugs and that a subsidy would be most welcome, considering her strained financial resources. The relevant government website (www.medicare.gov/medicarereform/drugbenefit.asp) recommends a four-step decision process that is well-suited to the competence of average citizens: i.Talk about the problem with many different people "across the kitchen table, in senior centers, at churches, between friends, neighbors, parents and their children, pharmacists and their customers." 2. Ascertain the status of your current prescription coverage and your level of satisfaction with it. 3. Determine your priorities for various aspects of the program, including the cost of drugs, the array of drugs that are covered, and convenience factors such as purchase authorization requirements, the accessibility of drug providers, and mail service options. 4. Compare at least three available plans in terms of cost, coverage, and convenience. These recommendations require Mary Senior not to know the intricacies of all government drug reimbursement plans, but only the ones that apply to her. There is not even a suggestion that she might want to investigate private-sector alternatives to the government plan, for example. More detailed knowledge would be essential if Mary were an administrator or a counselor in the field or if she aspired to be a lobbyist, or even if she distrusted the government to provide good options. But none of these considerations apply in Mary's case. She simply wants to choose the plan that benefits her the most, and she trusts the government's advice (Lupia and McCubbins 2000; Lupia 2000; Popkin and Dimock 2000). Her comparative analysis is limited largely to matching the status quo against the benefits of the proposed changes in terms of the scope of coverage and monetary and convenience costs, using data from three plans. The recommended decision process is eminently sound because it conserves personally and collectively valuable time, effort, and re-

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sources. It also reduces the risk of overwhelming ordinary citizens with more data than they can handle efficiently. Furthermore, it is in line with common decision-making practices. For the most part, members of the general public, as well as elites, make judgments based on a limited subset of the available information. The choice of a specific subset is often determined by the information that citizens have most recently encountered, priming their memories (Anderson 1983; Iyengar 1991; Krosnick and Brannon 1993). If the choice of a Medicare prescription-coverage plan outlined here seems like a reasonable way for citizens to assess the merits of vital policy options, isn't it a reasonable way to assess other policies? Take immigration policy, which is less likely to have a direct personal impact on most Americans. Many citizens, especially those living along the southern border of the United States, worry about the many immigrants who enter the country illegally. The cause for concern may be the danger to the immigrants who may perish in the harsh border conditions; the economic and social burdens faced by communities where illegal immigrants settle; or the potential competition with U.S. citizens for employment. When new laws are proposed to cope with the problem, citizens can assess their merits through a four-step process like that suggested to Mary: Understand the main impact of the problem on your life, know your values and priorities, know the thrust of major options, and discuss the situation with others.

Memory Resources In most cases, assessing complex political situations is not as difficult as it may seem, because citizens already have a fund of knowledge and corresponding opinions that they have amassed over decades directly through personal experiences or indirectly through reports by others, including the mass media (Zaller 2003; Patterson 2002; Graber 2001; Kahn and Kenney 2002). Learning is continuous. It is also cumulative, because people filter new information through the prism of previously stored information. The new data then supplement, refresh, or modify people's fund of stored information (Neuman et al. 1992; Bartels 1993 and 1996; Graber 1993; Huckfeldt and Sprague 1995; Beck et al. 2002). Focus-group evidence does show that people from all walks of life are far more sophisticated about many specific political issues than academic knowledge tests indicate (Page 1996; Lupia 2000; Delli Carpini

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2000; Gamson 2001; Graber 2001; Zaller 2003). When ordinary people discuss major political issues using their own words and perspectives, even groups that generally score poorly on typical testsAfricanAmericans, Latinos, and poor peopledisplay substantial political insight and cognitive complexity about major political issues that concern them (Gamson 1992; Tetlock 1993).While their performance is far from that required of the Informed Citizen, it is adequate for fulfilling such monitorial civic responsibilities as discussing politics intelligently and voting for candidates and ballot propositions. The need for citizen alertness is cyclical; it is greater in times of crisis and less at other times. Citizens' behavior reflects such cycles. People who normally ignore much of the political news flock to the media during crises. For example, during the six-week period following the 2000 presidential election, when control of that vital office was at stake, public attention to news skyrocketed. Survey responses showed that the public grasped the complex political and constitutional aspects of that situation and judged it intelligently. Similar trends were recorded in the months that followed the terrorist strikes on New York and Washington in 2001 and the Persian Gulf war in 1991 (Graber 2004). If their own fund of knowledge seems insufficient, people know how to select better-informed opinion leaders who are in tune with their own predilections. They also know how to judge telltale indicators. For example, seeing television pictures of New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani in action after the 2001 terrorist attack marked him as a potential presidential candidate. Many citizens inferred from these broadcasts that he was a capable decision maker who knew how to respond to major crises. Similarly, people may infer from a politician's absence from a crisis event that he or she did not care about the plight of the people whose lives were at stake.

The Proof is in the Pudding


As the old adage proclaims, the true value or quality of something can only be judged when it's put to use. The key criterion by which to judge citizens' decision-making strategies is their effectiveness. Do the simplified decision-making processes that citizens use lead to desirable results? Would more information-intensive processes lead to better results? The answer varies (Ottati and Wyer 1990; Bartels 1996; Kuklinski

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and Hurley 1994; Mondak 1994; Elkin and Soltan 1999; Norris 2000a and 2000b; Popkin and Dimock 1999). For example, in 1987, California voters had to assess the merits of five complex ballot initiatives. Some voters spent considerable time analyzing and comparing various choices while others simply ascertained who favored and who opposed each initiative and sided with their presumed soulmates. A study of the match between voters' decisions and their interests showed that voters relying on judgments made by trusted others did almost as well as those who had invested far more time in the decision (Lupia 1994). From a cost/benefit perspective, those who used heuristics were the winners, demonstrating that amassing a large fund of factual information is not always the most sensible approach. In other situations, shortcuts may be detrimental. Kuklinski and Hurley (1994) found that black Chicagoans who used race as a cue for supporting various policies were less likely to choose policies that accorded with their own preferences than blacks who studied the actual positions that competing advocates had taken. Obviously, heuristics can mislead. But so can the decision criteria used by experienced political executives, legislators, or administrators. Given the complexity of modern politics, the multitude of unforeseeable contingencies is likely to reduce even the most careful decision-making process to an informed guesstimate. We lack precise error rates for various decision approaches, but the evidence does suggest that errors made in heuristically guided decisions are random, rather than systematic (Mondak 1994). Decision quality is very much constrained by the information available to decision makers at the mass as well as the elite level. When that information is incomplete or wrong, it may be very difficult for mass publics and even elites to detect the inaccuracies and discover the truth. Consider the question of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The majority of Americans, elites as well as members of the mass public, apparently accepted the well-publicized claims of the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein's government had weapons of mass destruction and that this danger justified going to war in 2003. When closer investigations failed to bring proof that these weapons existed, and the news media publicized reports raising doubts about the accuracy of the initial information, many people changed their opinions about the factual situationand the wisdom of having gone to war. But opinion change was not universal. In the absence of absolute proof that no such weapons existed, many others, including political elites, retained their

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faith in the initial news stories and their implications (Zaller 2003; Patterson 2002; Graber 2001; Kahn & Kenny 2002).

The Bottom Line


Downloaded by [CIDE Centro de Investigacion Y Docencia] at 16:37 12 March 2012 The ultimate test of the public's ability to provide sound input into the political process is an appraisal of how well American democracy is generally functioning. Citizens routinely participate in governmental functions in many different capacities. Voting is the most common and most closely examined situation. While judgments are bound to differ along party lines about the merits of citizens' ultimate choices, it is clear from exit polls and other surveys that people make reasoned choices. In 2004, for example, Bush voters told pollsters that concerns about family values and leadership in the war against Iraq were major reasons that propelled their vote for a second term for the incumbent. Others believed in the wisdom of the old adage that one ought not change leaders in the middle of an unresolved crisis. Still others saw the election as a Hobson's choice and picked the president as the lesser of two evils: "Better the devil you know than the one you don't." During campaigns, politicians and pollsters repeatedly talk to groups of voters about their concerns and preferences and then pledge to act in accordance with citizens' wishes. Candidates rarely label citizens' comments as stupid and senselessquite the contrary. When so-called town-hall forums have been televised, questions asked by ordinary citizens and their responses to politicians' answers, on the whole, made as much or more political sense than questions asked by professional journalists during news conferences. This kind of evidence, which is abundant, refutes the idea that well-informed elites always know best (Tetlock 2005). Public-opinion polls that ask for the public's judgment about diverse political situations are another important barometer of people's ability to comprehend the political scene. When one looks at the tens of thousands of polls reported by reputable polling companies over many decades, one is struck by the good sense shown in respondents' answers. These answers may be based on people's own evaluations or on a variety of either personal or sociotropic reasons, or they may reflect press reports or judgments made by respected pundits. The source does not matter. What matters is that, in the aggregate, actions taken in confor-

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mance with these opinions provide reasonable, beneficial solutions for the problems under consideration (Page and Shapiro 1991). Ordinary citizens have also displayed intelligence and civic competence when they have served as jurors in complex criminal cases. Quite a few nonprofessional politicians have run for office, including the top positions in the American political system. Passing an academic knowledge test has not been a job requirement. In fact, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and its subsequent reincarnations explicitly forbade knowledge tests and even literacy tests for voting. Aside from concerns about misuse of such tests, the prohibition is a reafFirmation of the traditional American belief that political wisdom does not require academic testtaking skills or knowledge of specified facts. While average citizens play indispensable political roles in democracies, it is nonetheless important to acknowledge that elected and appointed public officials and a small number of citizens with aboveaverage interest in politics have always shouldered the major day-to-day burdens of governing (Devine 1970; Bennett 1995; Bimber 2001). Parties and interest groups developed because complex modern societies require intermediaries between citizens and elected and appointed public officials. These proxies relieve the majority of citizens of the exceedingly costly burden of continuously monitoring public problems and pondering solutions. For believers in the Informed Citizen model, it may seem outrageous to argue that democracy can be well served even when most citizens leave most civic tasks to elites. But that is the way the system works and has always worked. It was the Founders' intent that policies and laws would be made and executed by citizens' elected representatives, with most citizens limiting themselves to serving as intermittent monitors. The end result has been a serviceable democracy based on an economically sound division of labor between political practitioners who chart the course of government and implement it, and citizen monitors who provide oversight in areas of greatest concern to them. Richard Gunther and Anthony Mughan (2000) conclude, after studying democratic governance in politically diverse countries, that what seems to matter most is the spirit in which both elected and unelected political elites conduct the affairs of government. Democracy is safe as long as government personnel, news media, and the public are ideologically committed to democratic principles. At best, as Winston Churchill stressed, this system does not work nearly as well as one would hope. But, as he also noted, on balance, it manages to sustain its goals despite the imperfections of its tools.

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