Professor Danny Oppenheimer, who gave a Democracy Day talk, has an unromantic view of “the people,” yet he still believes in democracy. Dr. Oppenheimer is professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon, and has been given multiple awards for excellent teaching, as well as the Ig Nobel Prize. He’s written “Democracy Despite Itself: Why a System that Shouldn’t Work at All Works So Well” (the subject of this talk) and “Psychology: A Cartoon Introduction.”
Oppenheimer described various biases that affect elections. For instance, Oppenheimer described how people judge candidates’ faces for competence within milliseconds. Quick competence judgements are very consistent across the population, and they in fact predict actual election results. (This is probably a bad way of choosing candidates, although it’s possible that physiognomy could be valid. Oppenheimer doesn’t think so, except at the extreme left tail. A truly odd look and mental issues could both be caused by a single birth defect, for example.) Additionally, people consistently prefer candidates who look like themselves: They prefer facial morphs of themselves and politicians to the politicians themselves.
The logistics of voting matters more than we’d hope. In a Texas municipality where there were school bonds on the ballot, some polls were held in schools while others were held in fire stations. Voting in a school made people more likely to support school bonds. Another example: The ordering of names on the ballot also matters. People are more likely to vote for the first name they see, especially in low-profile elections. Oppenheimer also described the case where paleoconservative third-party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan won the liberal Palm Beach County in Florida. The reason was that the ballot was organized in a confusing way such that many people probably voted for Buchanan when they thought they were voting for Al Gore. Given that Florida was such a close state in this election, if the Palm Beach ballots had been less confusing, we might have had Al Gore as our president.
In addition, most people know absolutely nothing about policy. Oppenheimer showed a Jimmy Kimmel man-on-the-street video in which many seemingly normal urbanites could not name a single country on the map — not even the United States. Oppenheimer described how in a survey, Americans thought that the government currently spends 20 percent of its budget on foreign aid, and that the government should be spending only 10 percent of its budget on foreign aid. In reality, the government only spends about one percent of its budget on foreign aid. Even policy students overestimated foreign aid to be five percent (though maybe this could be biased by the fact that the distribution cuts off at zero percent). People could not keep track of their own political positions at all, and when surveyors tricked people into thinking they selected the opposite of their real selections on a policy preference survey, the participants believed it and defended these opposite positions as their own.
(You should be wondering whether the studies he cites replicate: There is a replication crisis in behavioral science. He said that none of the studies failed to replicate.)
Therefore, Oppenheimer has no illusions about the rationality of the masses. This does not stop him from being a whole-hearted supporter of democracy. In fact, he talks about how believers in general rationality often try to restrict democratic freedoms somewhat in the name of protecting governance from the irrational minority. Oppenheimer doesn’t think this restriction is helpful. The positive effects of democracy, according to Oppenheimer, are empirically evident, and they don’t depend on human rationality. Democracies are more peaceful, have better economies, and are better in most other ways as well. This is also true when you control by world region. Oppenheimer says that as soon as authoritarian states are replaced by democratic states, there is a sharp increase in all the good qualities, and vice versa when a democracy is replaced by something illiberal.
Oppenheimer theorized that a primary reason for this was the psychological need for a sense of control, and a sense of the system being fair and appealable. He described an example of a community protesting against a red light camera because they felt cheated of the humanity of a traffic cop they could appeal to. Under democracy, there is a peaceful way to attempt regime change (voting), and even if this never works properly, it keeps the populace calm. Under autocracy, the only way to change things is through violence, and the people know it. Another primary reason is that politicians under democracy are at least incentivized to keep things good in the short term. (Though voters don’t know about specific policies, they generally know whether their country is doing well in general.) Oppenheimer doesn’t think that authoritarian governments are generally incentivized to improve their country in the short or long term. (He doesn’t think special cases like Singapore are consistently replicable, especially since Singapore is only a city-state.)
The talk was very interesting (and often hilarious), and personally, it definitely made me want to read Dr. Oppenheimer’s book. Though liberal democracy is far from perfect, it is clearly a very successful system in various ways, which was a great thing to be reminded of on Democracy Day.
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