What Politicians Believe About Their Constituents: Asymmetric Misperceptions [pdf]

There's two assumptions many in the civic tech space seem to share that I don't think are so obvious (not that I think they are wrong, just that I think they're not obvious):

A1: The world would be better if politicians paid more attention to public opinion or knew more about it. I don't think this is so clear. Citizens support many policies not in their interest, don't know everything that experts do, etc. Most democracies reflect a tradeoff between popular control on the one hand and expert judgment / elite control on the other. I don't think either extreme is the best, and don't know where we are on that continuum relative to the ideal. But for what it's worth, my sense is that citizens actually understand this to some extent and ofter defer to legislators' judgments: http://stanford.edu/~dbroock/papers/broockman_butler_legisla...

A2: In order to increase citizen engagement, we should focus on lowering the cost of acquiring information about politics, the cost of participation, or the cost of providing information to representatives. I think this misses the real challenge: increasing people's motivation to participate and the benefits to participation. It's never been easier to participate in myriad ways -- the cost is epsilon. But if people see the benefits as zero, which many seem to, they still won't engage. I don't think the cost side of the equation is where the action is.

> how young people interact with an increasingly-old government today

Interesting. Is government, by which I assume you mean elected officials, really aging?

As one of those new fangled 'young people' I'd like to chime in here and say the problem lies with the reverse. Politicians are not too enthusiastic about engaging with young people, be it due to our more progressive stance on social issues, generally better understanding of the technologies they find so frightening, or just because most politicians are lying, cheating, manipulative people who took advantage of a good system then ruined it for future generations. I can only speak of Australian politics but in my case I've had representatives refuse meetings, not write back or totally ignore the sentiments of the younger population in favour of maintaining their existing support base. Its rather annoying.

Here are some guesses.

On (1), the mental model I have is more like an understanding of who the super-intense supporters are. 90% of people might say they support background checks for gun purchases, but it's the 10% who support it who are voting on the basis of that issue, in part due to organizations like the NRA. I think our findings are consistent with that, in the sense that politicians seem to believe they don't need to learn what public opinion is in order to get re-elected; they can focus on other forms of information-gathering.

On (2), I suspect there is something there, but it's hard to make sense of Democrats from that angle, as Democratic primary voters, for example, are more liberal than the average person, yet Democratic politicians don't seem to see their districts as more liberal than they are. My guess is the key group is something more like "the people who choose to write in and go to meetings."

I'm not too well educated on their gov'ts, but how effective was it? Any signs or indicators that it worked out for the better?

Call me intolerant or ignorant, but I personally fear seeing what the general populus would try to get passed in America if such a system were established. Perhaps a naive` worry, but a worry nonetheless.

Make it pay really well and people won't try to get out of it.

> > I've long maintained congress would be much more representative if eligible citizens were randomly selected for 1 congressional term, like jurors are in juries.

> And like jurors in juries, wouldn't we then be governed by people not smart enough to get out of their congressional term?

Now, I think that a by-lot Congress is a really bad idea for a variety of reasons, but that's a moderately stupid argument when it comes to juries (given that it assumes that everyone is actively seeking to avoid jury service, so the only people who actual serve are those who fail), and its even stupider applied to Congress -- its relatively common for people to want to have a say in the government of their country (to the point where already wealthy people will sometimes spend many times the salary a member of Congress earns per term on a campaign out of their own money), and shifting from an elected to a by-lot Congress would reduce the political power of voters as voters, increasing the delta represented by serving in Congress.

And that's even before considering that members of Congress are paid substantially more than most workers; changing nothing besides the selection method would make being selected for Congress not much different than winning the lottery for most citizens -- only those who are both already wealthy and politically disinterested would have rational, self-interested reason to avoid service.

Easy potential fix: make the pay reasonably attractive (say 150% of median wage), and allow people to buy themselves out of it by paying their replacement's salary (and if the first 100 people picked all opt out to pay, then that's about 99x pure government profit).

This is my personal favorite interpretation of our results -- they could know if they cared to know, and so the fact that they don't know suggests that they don't care. With that said, this paper is at odds with that: https://www3.nd.edu/~dnickers/files/papers/Butler_Nickerson....

Slightly better, and works well in practice[0], replace step 6 with "Repeat from step 3 until one candidate has more than 2/3 the votes, and possibly chage step 5 to cut candidate list down more quickly (imagine how long it would take to eliminate 1 at a time with 100 candidates). If after 2 candidates remain neither gets more than 2/3 the vote, flip a coin.

[0] Search "AA 3d Legacy Election"

> Their age doesn't predict their accuracy.

I was actually asking about the case where the demographic they're predicting the opinion of is age restricted -- are they good at predicting the views of a particular age range, even if they're not good at predicting the overall opinion?

My question was just about restricting the age to be near theirs.

It's not that right-wingers are innately more reactive than left-wing voters. It's that left-wing voters are only now getting genuinely angry about being told, for the past four decades, to just shut up and take whatever the Establishment gives us.

Consider the current two Presidential primaries. Among the Republican Party, there's a contest to see who's the most conservative, and candidates are competing to come up with a platform that appeals to the party base. Among the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton is presumed to be the obvious, inevitable, entitled winner, and so there's a deliberate attempt to suppress actual competition for the nomination, most especially competition from the insurgent left-populist Bernie Sanders.

Tell that to conservatives in 1917 Russia.

I'd say social conservatism is more rooted in apprehension of rushing headlong into things than ambiguity intolerance.

The malaise and pessimism might be what makes it intractable. Liberals in the prior generation made sweeping changes, in women's and minority rights, for example.