Ignorance and Bliss in Democratic Politics:
Party Competition with Uninformed Voters
Christopher H. Achen
Center for the Study of Democratic Politics,
Princeton University, and
Department of Political Science,
University of Michigan
[email protected] ; [email protected]
Larry M. Bartels
Department of Politics and
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs,
Princeton University
[email protected]
March 31, 2002
Many advocates of democracy believe that it is the most responsive form of government,
but acknowledge that citizens are remarkably ignorant and frequently unable to connect
their preferences to their political choices. Squaring these two judgments has proven
very difficult. To begin doing so, we examine a stylized world in which two parties
compete for votes from citizens with political interests represented by single-peaked
utility functions over a unidimensional ideological space. The voters do not know what
policy was implemented by the incumbent party, what policy would be implemented by
the opposition party, what policies would serve their interests, nor even that an
ideological dimension exists. They know only whether their past experiences in the
public sphere have been pleasurable or painful, and they vote accordingly. Thus they are
retrospective voters who are ignorant but not stupid. We show, under symmetry
conditions on the distribution of voters’ “ideal points,” that reelection-seeking
incumbents in this stylized world will attempt to implement the ideal policy of the
median voter. Democratic competition may thus produce policy that is responsive to the
political interests of citizens even when voters cannot observe the parties’ policy choices
and cannot formulate any explicit policy preferences of their own.
Prepared for presentation at the Political Accountability conference, Princeton
University, April 5-6, 2002, and at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science
Association, Chicago, April 25-28, 2002.
 Copyright by the authors.
Ignorance and Bliss in Democratic Politics:
Party Competition with Uninformed Voters 1
The year 1890 not only marks a low record in rainfall in Nebraska
but also the end of unquestioned Republican supremacy.
(Barnhart 1925, 534)
Introduction
The idea of democratic government carries enormous prestige in contemporary
political discourse. As many observers have noted, nearly all dictatorships and repressive
regimes claim to be democracies of some sort, usually in some “true” sense given by
religious, Marxist, Confucian, or personalist ideologies. However various the definitions
of democracy, the proposition that democracy is a good thing has very few detractors.
Why democracy is a good thing has generated much less agreement. Even in
scholarly treatments, the criteria for qualifying as a modern democracy (or “polyarchy,”
to use Dahl’s term) vary markedly from one author to the next, and may extend to half a
dozen or more items (e.g., Dahl 1989, 221; Przeworski et al. 2000, 13-55). One
important element would seem to be “the continued responsiveness of the government to
the preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals” (Dahl 1971, 1). Political
responsiveness plausibly could – and apparently does – promote a variety of more
concrete values, including freedom, human development, and material well-being (Dahl
1989; Mueller 1992; Przeworski et al. 2000). Thus, advocates of democracy frequently
fall back on pragmatic justifications along the lines of Churchill’s oft-quoted claim that
democracy is the worst form of government except all those others that have been tried
from time to time.
1
We thank Adam Meirowitz for his generous advice and encouragement, and our colleagues in
Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Democratic Politics for stimulating discussion of
issues addressed here. Remaining errors are our own. This is a preliminary draft not for
quotation.
1
Unfortunately for democratic theory, how all this is achieved remains rather
vague. Much, though by no means all, recent scholarship follows Schumpeter (1950) in
emphasizing the key role of competitive elections in ensuring the responsiveness of
politicians to the interests of voters.2 At the same time, however, the development of
social choice theory (Arrow 1951) has raised serious questions about the sense in which
election outcomes can be said to reflect the diverse preferences of a heterogeneous
electorate. As Riker (1982, 244) put it, the kind of democracy that survives the logical
critique of Arrow is not “popular rule” in the sense sometimes envisioned by democratic
theorists, but “an intermittent, sometimes random, even perverse popular veto” on the
actions of public officials.
Modern scholarship on political psychology and public opinion has raised
additional problems for democratic theory. Lippmann (1922), Dickinson (1930),
Schumpeter (1950), Berelson et al. (1954), and Converse (1964) each questioned, with
ever-stronger empirical justification, whether voters know enough to be the minimally
competent citizens that democratic government seems to require. A great deal of more
recent work by Popkin (1991), Page and Shapiro (1992), Zaller (1992), Bartels (1996),
and others has addressed precisely that question. While the implications of that work are
far from settled, our own view is that it raises significant challenges to “traditional
conceptions of how policy decisions might be justified on democratic grounds” –
challenges very much analogous to those raised by Arrow’s theorem decades earlier
(Bartels 1998).
The gap between democratic theory and reality on the ground is especially
striking with respect to ideology. The familiar spatial model of electoral competition
(Downs 1957; Enelow and Hinich 1984), in which candidates’ policies and voters’
preferences are represented as “points” in an ideological “space,” has provided an
enormously fruitful framework for thinking about the interaction of elites and masses in
democratic political systems. Unfortunately, it seems to correspond rather poorly with
2
Mueller is a notable exception, arguing from the examples of Mexico and Hong Kong that “If
the freedom to speak, organize, and petition is respected, responsiveness happens, and democracy
comes into view even without elections” (1992, 986).
2
what we know about how ordinary citizens think about politics, a point first made by
Stokes (1963).
A comprehensive review by Kinder (1983) of the scholarly literature on public
opinion nicely captured this tension between formal theory and political psychology. On
one hand, “if ordinary citizens were to reason ideologically, as political elites presumably
do, then the prospects for democratic control would be enhanced.” In that sense, “the
extraordinary interest in the possibility of ideological reasoning was and still is an
expression of concern for the quality and very possibility of democratic forms of
government” (1983, 391). On the other hand, the claim of Berelson, Converse, and other
leading figures in the first generation of systematic scholarship on the nature of public
opinion that “the vast majority of Americans” are “thoroughly innocent of ideology” has,
in Kinder’s telling, been “largely sustained” in the face of intense scholarly scrutiny (and
additional historical experience) in the subsequent decades (1983, 391, 401).3
Theorists are quite used to shrugging off criticism of unrealistic assumptions, and
with good reason. With Weber, they believe that ideal types have a central role in social
science. Wholly realistic models, even if they were possible, would be so appalling
complex as to be useless. Sophisticated simplification is the heart of theorizing. Any
serious social science explanation has an “as if” clause.
Yet this argument can be taken too far. Useful models must approximate
something about reality, not just spin out the beautiful (or merely cute) mathematical
consequences of arbitrary, convenient assumptions. In our view, this is a test that spatial
models have too often failed. Democracy can be defended with model-building only if it
is possible to sketch realistic political processes for which the model’s causal
mechanisms constitute an ideal type. Moreover, the model’s predictions must match up
to well grounded empirical findings about the corresponding reality. That is our aim in
this paper.
We postulate a world in which ordinary voters know much less, and think much
less ideologically, about politics than they do in the traditional spatial model. They may,
3
There is less agreement about the strength of the evidence adduced by these pioneers, but in our
view, their claims stand even if many of their arguments do not. Indeed, some of those who
disputed the methodology never disputed the claims.
3
in fact, be better off under a left-wing government than a right-wing government, or vice
versa; but they do not know that. Nor do they know the actual policy any government
has enacted. Each voter knows only whether the incumbent government has brought her
pleasure or pain, and votes – ignorantly, but not stupidly – on the basis of that
retrospective evaluation.
We proceed to explore the extent to which the results of political competition in
this world of uninformed voters reproduce the results of the traditional spatial model. To
the extent that they do, the traditional model’s lack of realism will seem correspondingly
less troubling. And for those of us who care more about actual democracies than about
abstract or idealistic democratic theory, we hope that this paper points the way toward
what the discipline currently lacks—a politically realistic defense of elections within the
context of liberal democratic theory.
The voters in our model are very uninformed by comparison with those in
previous spatial models of elections, even models focusing on the effects of limited
information. For example, McKelvey and Ordeshook (1985; 1986) advanced strong
claims regarding the attractive properties of electoral competition even when “some
voters are uninformed about the positions of the candidates” (1986, 911). In their model,
all voters know the distribution of voters’ ideal points, informed voters know the
candidates’ positions exactly, and uninformed voters know the levels of “informed”
support for both candidates (from poll data) and the left-right order of the candidates’
positions. By contrast, in our model none of these assumptions holds. Voters do not
know the candidates’ positions, do not know other voters’ positions, and do not know
their own positions – indeed, they do not even know there is an ideological dimension on
which they might have positions.
On the other hand, our model includes more genuine politics than most
“principal-agent” models of political accountability, in which politicians are typically
thought of as exerting more or less “effort” on behalf of a single representative voter
(e.g., Ferejohn 1986). For example, Fearon (1999) analyzed a model in which “The
electorate does not observe the policy chosen, but does observe a measure of its welfare
4
that depends partly on the policy . . . and partly on random factors” (1999, 71).4
However, his model includes only a single (“median”) voter rather than the continuum of
voters considered here. We shall show that satisfying the median voter is necessary but
not sufficient to win reelection in a version of Fearon’s model with multiple,
heterogeneous voters.
A Model of Party Competition with Uninformed Voters
Our model includes two political parties, an incumbent party A and an opposition
party B. It also includes a continuum of voters indexed by their “ideal points,” where
voter i’s ideal point yi ∈ ℜ characterizes the position in a unidimensional policy space
that best reflects her ideological interests. For us, a voter’s ideal point is a policy
position for the parties such that, if that position were adopted, the voter would
experience more utility than if any other position were adopted. Thus we use the term
“ideal point” as a convenient shorthand, but do not mean to imply that voters think or act
ideologically; indeed, we assume that they do not know their own ideal points, nor any
other voter’s ideal point, nor even that an ideological dimension exists.
The distribution of voters’ ideal points on the real line is given by the probability
density f(y), where f is symmetric around zero and strictly unimodal with cumulative
distribution function F. (Thus, the median voter’s ideal point is at zero.).
The incumbent party chooses a point θ ∈ ℜ. The policy choice θ is interpreted as
an ideological position in the same unidimensional policy space as the voters’ ideal
points.
The policy outcome x is a random perturbation of the policy θ. In particular,
x=θ+ε,
where ε is a random variable with probability density g(ε). The random perturbation may
be interpreted as the result of slippage in the policy instrument, with the incumbent
attempting to implement θ but instead implementing x. Alternatively, it may be
4
Random factors enter Fearon’s model somewhat differently than in the model we consider here,
but he reported in a footnote (1999, 72) that a version of his model more exactly analogous to
ours “yields qualitatively similar results.”
5
interpreted as a shift in the entire distribution of voters’ ideal points between the moment
of policy choice and the moment of policy implementation such that a voter who
previously preferred policy yi now prefers policy yi′= yi − ε. (We will maintain the
former interpretation, since it avoids notational complications associated with shifts in
the distribution of voters’ ideal points.) In either case, the incumbent party A knows the
distribution g(ε) when it chooses its policy, but only learns the realized value of ε after
the policy choice is made. As with f(y), we assume that g(ε) is symmetric around zero
and strictly unimodal.
Each voter experiences a utility loss as a function of the distance between the
policy outcome x and her ideal point yi. In particular, voter i’s payoff is
νi = −h(| x−yi |)
where h(⋅) is the same continuous, concave, strictly (positively) monotonic function for
every voter. To help fix the scale, we set h(0)=0, and we also assume h(∞)=∞.5 For
example, h(⋅) might represent absolute value or quadratic losses.
We consider voters’ decision rules in which voter i votes to reelect the current
incumbent unless voter i’s utility loss in the previous period, −νi , exceeds some fixed
threshold value µ (with µ>0). The threshold value µ may be thought of as representing
the expected utility loss associated with the opposition party; this expected utility loss is
assumed to be constant across voters (since, under our assumptions, no voter knows
anything about what policies the opposition party would adopt or what effect those
policies might have on her own welfare).6
5
The latter assumption is not essential but avoids unnecessary clutter.
6
The corresponding expected utility loss associated with the incumbent party is
[π µ + h(| x−yi |)]/(π+1),
where π represents the precision of the prior relative to the precision of the evidence provided by
the actual utility experienced in the previous period. Thus, the prospective expected utility loss
associated with the incumbent party in the next period is less than the expected utility loss
associated with the opposition party whenever
[π µ + h(| x−yi |)]/(π+1)<µ ,
which is to say whenever h(| x−yi |)<µ, regardless of the relative evidential value of experience in
the previous period.
6
Decision rules of this form are consistent with empirical evidence suggesting that
actual voting behavior is based in significant part on retrospective evaluations of the
incumbent party’s performance in office (Key 1966; Kramer 1971; Jackson, 1975;
Fiorina 1981). They are also consistent with prospective voting by citizens who view
their pain or pleasure in the current and past periods as informative about the pain or
pleasure they can expect from the same incumbent in the next period, and who update
their beliefs using Bayes’ rule. Such voters exploit the fact that in a stable environment,
the best prospective forecast is computed from a retrospective evaluation.
We do not consider voters who are masochistic (and thus reward incumbents who
inflict pain), voters who are completely indifferent to pain (and thus never punish any
incumbent), voters who are congenitally unhappy (and thus punish every incumbent), or
Stockholm Syndrome voters (who perhaps punish annoyances but reward more serious
pain). We also ignore the possibility of random decision rules; each voter’s choice is
assumed to be a deterministic function of the policy outcome x.
Of course, purely retrospective voting blurs together politically relevant and
politically irrelevant sources of pain and pleasure, and that in turn raises important
questions about the “substantive rationality” of voters’ responses to good and bad times.
Yes, they are rational in the thin sense familiar to economists, but what, if anything,
distinguishes them from primitive peoples who killed the pharaoh – or voted the
Republicans out of office – when the rain ceased to fall?
One possible answer is that we have met the primitive peoples, and they are us.
Another, less pessimistic view is suggested by Barnhart in his analysis of the electoral
consequences of drought in nineteenth century Nebraska. “To suggest that the farmer
held the politician responsible for the shortage of rainfall would be an unwarranted
exaggeration of the thoughtlessness of the voters,” he wrote. “The situation of many
farmers forced them to think about the things that had brought about that situation. . . .
They could not make it rain, but they thought they could lower railroad rates” (Barnhart
1925, 540). Whichever view is correct, the model of voter behavior in this paper implies
that droughts, floods, hurricanes, and plagues of grasshoppers will all endanger
incumbents.
7
We assume that parties only receive utility from holding office; they are not
motivated by a desire for boodle, pork for their supporters, or satisfaction of any policy
preferences of their own. Thus, party A’s payoff is
 1 if A is reelected
νA = 
 0 otherwise
and party B’s payoff is the reverse of party A’s: νB = 1−νA .
Party A’s policy choice θ, in combination with the random perturbation ε and the
voters’ decision rule, determines her own payoff, her opponent’s payoff, and all the
voters’ payoffs. In contrast, party B is a “dummy” player in this game: he can parade,
promise, and propagandize, but the voters do not see, hear, or care.
The distribution of voters’ ideal points f(y), the loss function h(⋅), and the
probability density g(ε) are known to both parties but not to the voters. The policy
choice θ and the realized policy outcome x are also known to both parties but not to the
voters.
Policy Choice in the One-Period Model
The incumbent party A seeks to maximize the probability that it remains in office
following the next election. To remain in office, party A must choose a policy θ that
produces a policy outcome x whose associated utility loss is acceptable to a majority of
voters.
Let δ be the real number such that h(δ) = µ. That is, δ is the distance from any
voter’s ideal point that produces a utility loss of magnitude µ. The range, continuity, and
monotonicity assumptions on h(⋅) ensure that a unique such δ exists for any µ ≥ 0. For
1/2
example, under quadratic loss, δ = µ .
The incumbent party gets reelected if and only if at least half the voters’ ideal
points are in the range from x−δ to x+δ: for all voters in that range, | x−yi | ≤ δ and thus h(|
x−yi |) ≤ µ. Thus, winning policy outcomes are those for which
V(x) = F(x+δ) − F(x−δ) ≥ .5 ,
8
where F(⋅) is the cumulative distribution of voters’ ideal points. Given the symmetry and
unimodality of the distribution of voters’ ideal points, the set of winning policy outcomes
for any given δ must be a compact set of “centrist” policy outcomes bounded by
symmetric threshold values −xδ and xδ .7
The incumbent’s problem is to choose the value of θ that maximizes the
probability that the policy outcome x will fall in the interval [−xδ , xδ ]. Recalling that the
policy outcome x is the sum of θ and the random perturbation ε, the incumbent wants to
choose θ so as to maximize
G(xδ −θ) − G(−xδ −θ) ,
where G(⋅) is the cumulative distribution function of ε. The first-order condition for this
maximization is
g(xδ −θ*) = g(−xδ −θ*) .
Since the density function g(⋅) is symmetric and strictly unimodal, this equality implies
either that xδ −θ* = −xδ −θ* (in which case xδ = −xδ = 0) or that xδ −θ* = xδ +θ* (in which
case −θ* = θ* = 0). Since xδ need not be (and in general cannot be) zero, it follows that
θ* = 0, which is the median (and mean) of the distribution of voters’ ideal points.
The same argument applies for any strictly positive value of δ, and hence also for
any strictly positive value of µ.
If V(xδ ) = F(xδ +δ) − F(xδ −δ) ≥ .5, the same inequality must hold for any xω less than xδ in
absolute value, since
7
V(xω ) = F(xω +δ) − F(xω −δ)
= {F(xδ +δ) − [F(xδ +δ) − F(xω +δ)]} − {F(xδ −δ) − [F(xδ −δ) − F(xω −δ)]}
= [F(xδ +δ) − F(xδ −δ)] + [F(xδ −δ) − F(xω −δ)] − [F(xδ +δ) − F(xω +δ)]
= V(xδ ) + [F(xδ −δ) − F(xω −δ)] − [F(xδ +δ) − F(xω +δ)]
= V(xδ ) + {[1−F(δ−xδ )] − [1−F(δ−xω )]} − [F(δ+xδ ) − F(δ+xω )]
= V(xδ ) + [F(δ−xω ) − F(δ−xδ )] − [F(δ+xδ ) − F(δ+xω )]
and, due to the symmetry and unimodality of f(⋅),
[F(xδ −δ) − F(xω −δ)] ≥ [F(xδ +δ) − F(xω +δ)]
for all xω such that 0 ≤ xω ≤ xδ or xδ ≤ xω ≤ 0.
9
To summarize: under any decision rule for which the voters’ choices are
monotonic in the utility they experience as a result of the incumbent’s policy choice, the
incumbent always aims her policy at the middle of the distribution of voters’ ideal points.
That is, she locates at the expected position of the median voter, even though none of the
voters can learn that fact nor use it to make voting decisions.
Policy outcomes will not, in general, match the ideal point of the median voter.
Incumbents always aim their policies at that point, but the random perturbation ε results
in a discrepancy between policy choices and policy outcomes. The median voter is
satisfied in expectation, but the incumbent may or may not be reelected depending on
whether the magnitude of the random perturbation is “small” or “large.”
It is worth emphasizing that the discrepancy between the eventual policy outcome
and the ideal point of the median voter results from the limitations we have imposed on
the technology (or information) available to political elites, not from the limitations we
have imposed on the information available to voters. As the magnitude of the random
perturbation ε goes to zero, the discrepancy between the policy outcomes and the ideal
point of the median voter also goes to zero, despite the fact that voters remain totally
unaware of the parties’ policies and of their own ideological interests. That is, with
perfect information on the part of elites, incumbents will locate exactly at the position of
the median voter.
It is also worth noting that our result depends importantly on the symmetry and
unimodality of the density function f(y) of voters’ ideal points, and on the symmetry and
unimodality of the density function g(ε) of random perturbations. Small deviations from
symmetry in either case seem likely to produce correspondingly small deviations from
centrist policy choices; but it is certainly possible to imagine distributions of voters’ ideal
points and patterns of random perturbation that would give incumbents incentives to
deviate significantly from the behavior suggested by our analysis.
Multiple Elections
The dynamic properties of a sequence of multiple elections under our model
depend crucially on the decision rules employed by the voters. If voters follow the same
10
decision rule in each period – voting to retain the incumbent party if and only if their own
utility in the current period exceeds the fixed threshold µ – then each period simply
reproduces the one-period model. Incumbents maximize their chances of reelection in
each period by aiming for the middle of the distribution of voters, and they win whenever
the magnitude of the random shock εt is not too large.
Alternatively, we might imagine that voters remember their own histories of pain
and pleasure under each party’s rule and update their beliefs about which party is likely
to treat them better in the next period. This is the Bayesian retrospective voting model
proposed by Zechman (1979), Achen (1992), and elaborated by Gerber and Green
(1998). Paradoxically, the voters’ ability to remember and make inferences from past
political experience in this version of the model may make them worse off, on average,
than they would be if they simply employed the fixed threshold µ in each period.
We demonstrate this point using an example in which voters compare an
incumbent party A which has been in office for two periods with an opposition party B
that has never been in office. We assume that the utility loss function h(⋅) is the squared
distance function and that the density function of voters’ ideal points f(y) is a uniform
distribution over the interval from −λ to λ. Voter i’s best estimate of the prospective
utility loss associated with the incumbent party A, calculated at the end of the second
period, is
2
2
(µ π + (x1 − yi ) + (x2 − yi ) )/(π+2) ,
where π represents the precision of her prior estimate µ of expected utility loss (relative
to the precision of the evidence provided by the actual utility experienced in any single
period) and x1 and x2 are the policy outcomes in periods 1 and 2, respectively. Since the
opposition party B has never been in office, the voters’ best estimate of the prospective
utility loss associated with B is simply the prior µ. Thus, voter i will vote for the
incumbent party A if and only if
2
2
2 µ − (x1 − yi ) ≥ (x2 − yi ) .
For any given x2 , the range of voters’ ideal points for which this condition is
satisfied is defined by
11
2 1/2
− [4µ − (x1−x2) ]
2 1/2
≤ 2 yi − (x1+x2) ≤ [4µ − (x1−x2) ]
and the incumbent is reelected if and only if the fraction of voters for whom this
inequality holds is at least .5. Given the assumption of a uniform distribution of voters
over the interval from −λ to λ, x2 will be a winning policy outcome if and only if
2
(x1 − x2) ≤ 4µ − λ
2
and
2
2
x2 ≤ 2µ − x1 .
(The first of these conditions ensures that the relevant range of voters’ ideal points has a
width greater than or equal to λ, and the second that it includes the median voter, as it
must in order for x2 to be a winning policy outcome.) To the extent that the second of
these constraints is binding, the incumbent party will have an incentive to choose a policy
2
θ2 close to zero in the second period in order to minimize the expected value of x2 .
However, to the extent that the first constraint is binding, the incumbent party will have
an incentive to choose a policy θ2 close to x1 in order to minimize the expected value of
2
(x1 − x2) .
Thus, it will sometimes be advantageous for the incumbent party to exploit
voters’ partisan loyalties by aiming its policy in the second period at voters who are
already favorably disposed because they were well-served by the first-period policy
outcome. More generally, the incumbent party’s optimal policy choice in each period of
the multi-period model considered here will depend upon the complete sequence of prior
policy outcomes, to the extent that those outcomes affect the voters’ current choices. The
result is that incumbents’ policies will not always be aimed at the ideal point of the
median voter, and policy outcomes will be correspondingly less likely to reflect the
median voter’s political interests.
It is worth noting, however, that these departures from centrist policy are
attributable not to the voters’ lack of ideological sophistication, but to their memory for
past pain and pleasure. In the language of Fearon (1999) – but contrary to the gist of his
argument – voters make themselves worse off by focusing on “selection” in an electoral
12
setting where their only real leverage derives from their willingness to “sanction”
incumbents whose current policy choices deviate too far from the voters’ interests.
Long-Run Behavior of the Parties
What happens when the voters acquire more experience with the parties than just
one or two elections? Here something depends on their priors. In the present version of
this paper, we will make just an informal version of the argument.
Suppose, for example, that they believe that the parties will always mistreat them
severely. Then the incumbent virtually always proves to be a pleasant surprise, he adopts
the same policy again no matter what it was, and he is re-elected. Barring dramatic bad
luck on his part (bad draws from the random term), he is re-elected in every subsequent
time period. Even fairly bad experiences in subsequent periods will not get him out of
office: The voters have seen a lot of him, have firm posterior evidence that on average he
is good for them, and so even occasional out-and-out failures will be forgiven. In this
world, the voters never learn how the challenger would do, and the incumbent never
converges to the median voter.
Imagine now to the contrary that the voters select a prior realistic enough that
every incumbent is eventually defeated, and that in expectation at any time period, each
party will occupy office at least some fixed positive proportion of future time. Then in
almost all infinite sequences of elections, the voters will experience each party
unboundedly many times. Then if the parties adopt stationary pure policies, the voters
will eventually learn the mean level of utility each party offers them. In fact, the same is
true if the policies are stationary and mixed: the mixing just creates an additional level of
averaging. But now, except for random error, we are in the Downsian case: each voter
knows the utility difference between the parties. Hence the ideal point of the median
voter is the winning position for both parties, and they will creep toward it in nearly all
election sequences.
Thus again, at least in stable worlds in which the parties adopt stationary policies,
we arrive at the comforting traditional conclusion asymptotically: parties will converge
to the position of the median voter. We emphasize, however, that this result has been
achieved without the voters doing anything but voting their retrospective pleasures and
13
pains. They need know nothing about their own interests, nor about the policies the
parties have adopted. The process is stochastic, and a few pharaohs may die
unnecessarily along the way. But in an older and relatively stable democracy, the
electoral process will give the voters policies that comport with their interests as well as
the heterogeneity in interests permits.
Discussion and Conclusion
Our analysis suggests that reelection-seeking politicians have strong incentives to
choose “centrist” policies, even in a world in which voters are too uninformed to know
what the incumbents have done or why they have done it. As long as there is some
significant positive relationship between the welfare produced by incumbents’ policy
choices and their chances of being reelected, they are likely to behave in much the same
way whether voters are attentive, well-informed, and highly ideological or inattentive,
uninformed, and innocent of ideology. Thus, our analysis provides some reassurance that
the putative connection between contested elections and democratic responsiveness does
not depend on heroic assumptions about the attentiveness of ordinary citizens to the
details of a political world that is complex and distant.
To the extent that policy outcomes in our model fail to reflect the political
interests of the “median voter,” they do so for reasons that have little to do with the
cognitive limitations of ordinary citizens. Incumbents may choose the wrong policies
because they misunderstand what will serve the median voter’s interests, or well-chosen
policies may be imperfectly implemented; in either case, the failure occurs at the level of
elite politics rather than at the level of mass politics. The only instance we have
examined in which voters seem to go astray is the one in which they attempt to use their
past experience to “select” good incumbents rather than simply rewarding or punishing
incumbents on the basis of policy outcomes in the current period. That case deserves
further exploration; the resulting distortions in the incentives facing incumbents may well
turn out to be small, or temporary, or unproblematic in contexts where there are, in fact,
persistent differences in the ideological impulses of the competing parties.
It is worth noting in this context that our model departs from much of the existing
formal-theoretic literature on political accountability by dispensing with any direct
14
conflict between the goals of the principals (citizens desiring less pain and more
pleasure) and the goals of the agents (politicians desiring reelection). In particular, our
politicians do not have any ideological preferences of their own that might tempt them to
choose policies different from the policies that maximize their chances of reelection. We
suspect that our model could easily be extended to apply to cases in which incumbents
have intrinsic ideological preferences, producing a straightforward trade-off between
policy goals and reelection goals.
On the other hand, our model does reflect the distinction between politically
relevant and politically irrelevant sources of pain and pleasure that lies at the heart of the
formal-theoretic literature – and of much discursive writing – on political accountability.
We have shown that voters can discipline politicians even when they cannot distinguish
“politically relevant” pain and pleasure (that is, pain and pleasure produced by the
incumbent government) from everything else going on in their lives. Taking more
explicit account of the vast array of sources of pain and pleasure beyond the control of
any incumbent would require adding a significant additional random element to our
model. Doing so would, we presume, produce more randomness in election outcomes,
but no fundamental alteration in the nature of the incentives and problems facing
incumbent politicians.
15
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