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March 23, 2007
The depth of public ignorance on political issues is a well honed topic of political discourse. Jeffrey Friedman in Public Ignorance and Democracy over at the Cato Institute says:
The public’s reliance on distorted, simplistic stereotypes for its political views was noticed as long ago as the 1920s by Walter Lippmann and was given a definitive treatment in Philip Converse’s 1964 paper, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.” Converse found that more than 86 percent of the American people based their political decisions on criteria ranging from blind party loyalty and a candidate’s perceived personal traits (is he smart? does he “care about people like us”?) to such vague and dubious criteria as the “nature of the times” (if there is prosperity and peace, the incumbent party must be responsible) and primitive judgments about the attitudes of political parties toward social groups such as races and classes. Even most members of the small segment of the public that relied for political guidance on “liberal” or “conservative” ideas had only a rather feeble grasp of the meaning and policy significance of those ideas. That left only 2.5 percent of the public that judged politics against some sort of “abstract and far-reaching conceptual” yardstick, such as a firm grasp of the meaning of liberalism or conservatism.
You would get a similar result if you asked people about markets. Yet markets work in terms of allocation of scarce resources even if most of us don't know how they work, and that one of the assumptions of conventional neoclassical economics---capitalism works by approximating the equilibrium model of “perfect markets”--- is that market participants have complete knowledge of supply and demand conditions.
The classic conservative response, since Plato, is that since the public doesn’t know what it’s doing politically, it should not have political power. Hence we need rule by elites who have knowledge of public policy and political action. It is an anti-democratic argument; one that ignores ideology and the mass media.
What citizens do is interpret politics through the their mental models of it—their ideologies which simplify the world by screening most of it out. It is the media that stands between citizens and politicians with journalists providing the only contact most people have with political affairs.This relationship between politician and journalist is managed. In Talk is cheap and newspeak beckons in the Sydney Morning Herald Julianne Schultz decribes what this 'manage' means:
Behind the scenes a retinue of advisers tests the words and the messages to find the ones that are the most persuasive, that carry the desired meaning, before releasing them into the echo chamber of the press gallery and then onto talkback radio to bounce around and maybe even "corrupt thought". The combination of charm and threat, the blink-and-you'll-miss-it speed of the news cycle, has its own routines. Most of the time these are not visible, there are no heavy-handed "Big Brother is Watching" posters on display, but the ubiquitous, persuasive attention to detail and the words that are used to frame issues are just as effective.
This is how ideology works--- its a mechanism to assimilate self-confirming data, to dismiss conflicting data and to condemn their purveyors as stupid or evil.
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