S5E10: Gashed Hull: A Rational Public: Ben Page and Robert Shapiro

This is Larry Lessig.

So we all walk around with models in our heads, with ways we think the world is, whether or not the world is actually as we think it is. Especially as old people, we grow up learning stuff about how stuff works. Whether when we're young, that learning adjusts to the world around us. We bend and evolve as we're shown a directed or as we see things differently. But as we get older, we get more and more stuck. We don't quite notice that the world is not actually as it once was. And we get frustrated when things don't happen in the way that they are supposed to happen. Where they're supposed to happen means simply how they happened before. We boomers are the best example of this just now. There are lots of things we think about the world formed by our hundreds of years of life.

Okay, not actually hundreds of years, but

sometimes it feels like that by our hundreds of years of life. And how we've come to think about things through that experience. In particular, how we've come to think about the role of news in our society. Because we grew up thinking about news in a particular way. When we grew up, there were just a couple handful, three national broadcasting networks. And every day at the end of the day, at the same time every day they fed us the daily news. That news was right down the middle. It was Walter Cronkite. It was telling it as it was. It was focused on trying to expose not the ugly underbelly of America, but the stories that America needed to know. And that news was then complemented by newspapers, maybe by a weekly magazine. Those newspapers too, in the main were just covering the news. And the weekly magazines were great.

I remember as a kid, I think

I was 14, when I subscribed to Newsweek. And that publication was not the ad infested mess you experience whenever you click on a Newsweek article today on the web. It was actually interesting and digestible and covered important topics. I read it cover to cover every week it came. And these sources helped us ordinary people understand the world. And that understanding drove our politics. In this first episode of of this part of the season, we're going to explore a bit more the consequences of this pattern of media. My guests are two of the most prominent scholars in political science. Ben Page from Northwestern University, Robert Shapiro from Columbia. In 1992, they published a critically important book. And if only to help us understand the bizarrely unique period of American culture, I'm going to say from roughly 1960 through 1985, we're going to pay attention to the argument of this book the book was called the Rational Public, and as the book began in its preference quote, this book has two related objectives. First, to show that public opinion is, quote, rational in a specific sense of that term, and second, to describe what kinds of government policies the American public favors in the early 1990s and how and why its preferences have changed over the years. Besides making a general argument then, the book offers a concise but fairly thorough history of American policy preferences from the 1930s to the beginning of the 1990s. Both objectives this part's highlighted in my book, so pay attention here. Both objectives are related to the author's commitment to democracy, their conviction that ordinary citizens are not to be feared, that governments should respond to their wishes, and that the politically active should learn more about what the public wants, end quote. That last paragraph's really important because by the end of this season you're gonna see I, too, am deeply committed to democracy. I too believe that ordinary citizens are not to be feared and the government should respond to their wishes. But as this season will argue that the way we understand those wishes, the way we encourage them or incentivize them or direct them or guide understanding of them, is fundamentally broken. So we have to relocate into a place where it won't be broken, where we can do the work of democracy successfully or effectively because we can't do it anymore. Our challenge, in other words, is to determine whether in fact we should feed fear, democracy as it is, and whether the conditions under which democracy should not be feared could be built. Robert Y. Shapiro is an American political scientist specializing in public opinion polling and statistical methods. He's the Wallace S. Sayre professor of Government at Columbia. He received his SB from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That was a degree in political science, a master's in policy Studies, and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago. Benjamin Ingram Page is the Gordon S. Fulcher professor of Decision Making at Northwestern University. His interests include American politics and US Foreign policy, with particular interest in public opinion and policy making, mass media, empirical democratic theory, and political economy. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1958, then from Stanford in 1961. He got a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1965 and his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1963, and then he completed additional postdoctoral training in economics back here at Harvard and mit.

Enjoy the conversation. Bob Shapiro, Ben Page, thank you so much for talking to us about the extraordinary book published literally 30 years ago now, the Rational Public. What's striking about this book is it's based on surveys conducted between 1935 and 1990, which is a very distinctive period in human history, in American history, because it's a period that coincides with the explosion of broadcast technologies. We have public opinion polls in a context where people are seeing an increasingly concentrated media. And the consequence of that is what you're actually revealing now. At the beginning of the book, you say, quote, the populist democratic ideal of directly representing the public's preferences and weighting all citizens equally has reached a high point of worldwide esteem. It feels a little like the good old days to reflect on the time when that was true. But I think it was true, wasn't. It wasn't a. Did you feel yourself inspired to write this book by the feeling that people generally thought democracy kind of made sense? Why don't we start with Bob on that?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, during that period, democracy was on the rise in the world. After World War II, this kind of populist kind of folk theme about the greater importance of the people in governing had emerged and was important. And it was also at the time, and our work showed it, it was possible for political scientists to study majoritarian democracy directly, given the availability of public opinion data. There were enough data available to do that, and we could actually study to what extent the opinions or policy preferences of the people were responded to by governments. And also, this was an important theme, of course, in political political science. There was a lot of talk about this theoretically, but empirically, the studies that examined this directly were pretty meager. I mean, the main game in town was a famous study by Warren Miller and Donald Stokes called Constituency Influence in Congress. And that was, in part, the only game in town that actually looked at this directly. And so there was an opportunity to do it. There were theories in political science that suggested because of electoral accountability, you'd expect policymakers and leaders to respond to public opinion. And the time was ripe to study this directly, and Ben was ahead of the curve on this. I was a graduate student at the time, and I was following his lead, and he was excited about this, and I got excited about it as well.

Okay, so the basic motivation is pretty clear. We're all excited around the world about democracy. Let's see whether the promise of democracy is being produced. I want to talk at the end, actually, a little bit about, Ben, your work with Gilens, about exactly how close the connection is between the public's views and what Congress does. But let's focus in this first part on the conclusions that you draw about the basic framework of rationality. I'M going to you in the book a number of times, kind of summarize it, but here's, I think, a very clear, crisp summary. You say, quote, what we maintain is that collective public opinion and collective is an important word there is real, that it forms coherent patterns and makes reasonable distinctions among policies in accordance with the underlying values of Americans and the information that is made available to them, and that public opinion reacts to new information and events in ways that are generally understandable and and sensible, end quote. And you evince this through a wide range of political issues which you map the surveys for and find sensible ways to explain the evolution and the particular spikes that might occur because of events that are happening in the public, which leads you to think that it's reasonable to describe this public, the collective view, views of the public as stable and sensible and as the title says, rational. Were you surprised by that when you found it? Ben, why don't we start with you?

I think to some degree, yes, of course, we spent a long time so pretty quickly we began to get an idea the results were but going in we'd been reading all these sort of Gabriel Amen and Walter Lippman, the Federalist Papers, all these things that talked about fluctuating opinion and errors and delusions by the public and so forth and so forth. So, yes, it was a little surprising to find that was simply wrong.

Bob yeah, and I just want to emphasize the point. We were responding to critiques of public opinion that argued that public opinion was wild and volatile, or this goes back to de Tocqueville, stable and immovable. And then the other aspect of public opinion had to do with the public's lack of attentiveness to politics, not knowing much about anything and in general, because of that not being trustworthy as an entity that should be responded to by political leaders. But when we started to look at the data and also today, if you reflect on how public opinion polls are reported in the press by survey organizations and so forth, even back then, if you reflect on it, they were always reported on way as if the public had stature and had opinions that were something that warranted attention. And also the patterns of opinion change that occurred over time, even if you look at trends in presidential popularity, they tend to be associated with events and changes in economic conditions. There was really a sensibility there that may have already existed right before us, but no one had looked at this in a very systematic way over a long period of time. And looking at a great deal of data the book and unfortunately it's the part of the book that either people don't read or don't think about are the middle chapters, three to six, that really provide a story, a narrative about patterns and trends in public opinion over time that make a whole lot of sense and that seem sensible and reasonable. And there it's up to a point that is, we reach a point where you're sort of jumping to the conclusion, our readers jump to the conclusion that we're saying that the public is wise. And that's something that's very different. And that's something that's actually of concern in the latter chapters of the book that people tend to overlook as well.

So say a little bit more about what you think the wisdom that data demonstrated is, or is it just that wisdom might be something that the data can't speak to? Bob?

Yeah, yeah. And the wisdom part is a real tricky one because it has to do with the information that the public has. Now, one standard that one could use in evaluating the information the public has is does the public have the best available information? And I think that may be the first hurdle. Does it have enough information? And then it speaks to the quality of the education in terms of its accuracy, honesty, trustworthiness and so forth. And in the book we have three chapters that talk about sources of opinion, change, manipulation and misinformation and deception. And then a pretty potent concluding chapter, we sort of come to the conclusion that there are all kinds of warning signs out there about having to watch out for the quality of information, I.e. that the public is misled or misinformed and changes to its opinions, and then government responds to those opinions, that's a bad thing. And we can point to cases of that. One of the famous ones we keep coming back to is the Gulf of Tonkin, what happened there that led to increases in public support for support of escalating the war. And that was founded on this incident in the Gulf of Tonkin involving the infamous Maddox and Turner joy about these alleged attacks on, on these boats that didn't occur to the extent that it was initially reported. And that led to a shift in public opinion more supportive of escalating the war. And the rest is basically history. We can look back at the invasion of Iraq in 2003, predicated on the existence of non existent weapons of mass destruction. And so here you have the public responding seemingly reasonable, sensible ways to new information, but the quality of the information is seriously at issue here.

Right? And in the context of obviously the Gulf of Tonkin and an event that's obviously before Polling, the attack on the main which triggered the Spanish American War or the weapons of mass destruction. These are obviously government driven driven misimpressions or misimpressions driven by political people who have a political interest in the outcome. But before we get to that character of the flaws, I want to just make sure that we surface something the book nicely points to, but it's easy to miss, which is the character of the information ecosystem. We could say, I just want to quote a couple places in place, the first book where you mention this, and I think it's important to highlight it, to emphasize what I think will be obvious in contrast. But you say early on, you say for a full assessment of the role of public opinion in democratic politics, the quality of information the public receives matters too. Then later you say we need to know whether the contents of the mass media do in fact have significant effects on public opinion, and if so, what the quality and what are the sources of what appears in the press and on tv. Then this is the point that the next two points will emphasize. You say by the same token, centralized and pervasive media can make possible genuine collective deliberation in which the public learns, discusses, listens to policy debates and is educated. And then towards the end of the book, you say political information and interpretations conveyed to the public have become highly unified due to the development of centralized national mass media of communications, and especially in the foreign policy realm, heavy government influence over the flow of political information. Practically all Americans are exposed to the same facts and ideas through network television news and the wire service reports that dominate daily newspapers and provide the grist for discussion by friends and neighbors. And one final quote here, the highly centralized mass media, especially the wire services and television network news, provide much the same information to the people all over the country. And the media, political leaders and other elites often help provide common standards of judgment as well. In my way of reading what you evince, this is an extremely important architectural fact of the media, of the ecosystem of information.

Right.

That we're all basically watching the same story.

Absolutely. And as you pointed out right at the beginning, that's unusual in American history. Took us a while to get there. And Walter Cronkite was kind of the symbol of nightly TV news network news that all, almost everybody watched or at least heard about from their family or friends. And so that's one of the really big changes since the time we wrote. But I want to give a little footnote to what you said before that before we think about changes, we want to distinguish between two things. One is the claim that public opinion is wise after it goes through all these processes, and the claim that it's capable of being wise if it gets good information. And I think one of the things the book accomplishes is it shows that in a particular moment in history when there were centralized media and pretty good deliberation, the public was capable of very good formation of opinions collectively. And that means the capability is there. And we don't imagine that there's been any kind of big change in the capability of individuals, because it turns out that even if most people aren't paying a ton of attention, most people don't have a lot of information. Collective opinion is capable of processing information if the information system does well. And so that goes back to this setting that you evoked about faith and democracy. That our little contribution to faith and democracy, I think, is the claim that when things go wrong, it's not the public. The public is capable of producing very sensible, even wise opinions. The problem lies a lot with the structure of communications, the media and so forth, but especially Bob and I would say with political leaders who mislead factions of the public. And I assume we'll get to that later in the podcast.

Yeah. My further response to that, I mean, you do have this relatively homogeneous information system information environment. You have basically the three networks with their common type evening news broadcast. You've got major newspapers, you've got active, vibrant local newspapers that might pick up stories in the national news and convey them further that way. And you can find the same kinds of things on radio, although with the exception of talk radio, which might be something you might want to come back to, but the other thing going on at the same time, and this is where the common standards of judgment and this kind of sensibility and rationality of public opinion is. Further, the added evidence for this is in chapter seven, which is called parallel publics. Now, part of this kind of rational differentiation and coherence in public opinion extends to the ready finding of subgroup differences that can be explained, that is racial differences in opinions, income differences in opinions, even gender differences in opinions, age cohort differences in opinions that have an explanation and make sense. That that is, public opinion isn't homogeneous across all groups. There are differences across groups, but when public opinion changes in the aggregate, collectively over time, we found that every subgroup for the most part changed in the same direction. They had differences in opinion, but when new information came in, they responded in similar ways, having to do with the content and the information and how it was intended interpreted in this more homogeneous press and people were applying the same standards of judgment that were coming from the press and we think also coming from political leaders as well that were being covered in the press. So you find this pattern of parallel publics, which changed after the period that we covered. That is what we found. And the big divergence, the divergence from parallelness, so to speak, came across for the opinions of people identifying with different parties. You found partisan divergence on policy issues that came from a change in the information environment, with the source of that change being changes in real world politics where the parties were becoming different and more conflictual. And that's something that. That's very important and you might want to talk about further.

Okay, so, yes, so the point about this parallel, I think, is really interesting. And we can see one dramatic example. Well, you can't see because it's an audio podcast, but we're all familiar with the example of the impeachment around Richard Nixon, where if you look at the support for Nixon among Republicans and independents and Democrats, of course the level of support is very different in the beginning of that period among those three groups, but they collapse at basically the same rate across all three groups. And again, it's because they're all watching the same story. And, and to the extent we then tie this parallel reality to the fact we're watching the same story, if we're not watching the same story, that becomes very different. But I wonder whether there's not two things change. One thing changing is like, you know, people are tuning into different channels. There's a Fox group and there's the MSNBC group. And so the stories they're hearing are different.

But the other is I wonder whether

people identify more deeply like their own identity gets tied up with a certain political identity. So that when I stop liking Nixon, it's not just that I don't like Nixon, it's a criticism of myself. I've got to really be very deeply critical of myself to be able to stop liking Nixon, because it tells me something about who I am, that he turned out not to be as good as he is. And it seems like that fact, the fact of this identity tied to politics could also be driving this divergence.

Ben, it seems to me this is a good point at which to think about the difference between, between what happens at the public level and what happens at the elite level. I think Bob would agree, and he knows all this evidence better than I do, but I think he'd agree that the strength of party identification in the public has not increased. In fact, it's decreased. There are millions of people who are really sick of both parties. Trust is down. And so it's just not the case that people, that average citizens are totally tied up with their party and therefore refuse to budge. The big thing that's happened is the activists and money givers and political leaders of the two parties have gotten further and further apart and now behave in uncivil ways, say things that are not true. And so insofar as people have political identities, they're getting bad messages.

Bob Yeah, I agree with that. But the one piece I would add is that is that that level of conflict has penetrated to the level of mass opinions, doing two things. One, alienating a big segment of the electorate in the way that Ben described. But there are strong partisans in the electorate that really provide the basis of the party that have diverged significantly. And that's been driving the divergence in public opinion across a wide range of issues. And in terms of what's been going on at the elite level, just to put this in perspective, that is, at the elite level, the parties have diverged on all manner of policy issues. Back in the period we wrote, you still had the remnants of the old parties where the Democratic Party was this uneasy coalition of northern liberals and southern Democrats. So the party itself was internally moderated in some way, and some issues were kept off the political agenda, like race. The Republican Party was, in a sense, a more moderate party because it was conservative on economic issues and it was more moderate or even liberal on issues of civil rights, women's rights and so forth. It was still, in a sense, the party of Lincoln, also the party of the Equal Rights Amendment that originated in that party. And the women's suffrage movement received significant attention from the party as well. But beginning with the emergence of the civil rights movement in the 60s, the parties began to diverge on issues and realign on issues of race. And this is a long story here. And then as new issues came up, gay rights, abortion, energy, environment, oh, I mean, guns, law and order, you name it, they diverged in liberal and conservative directions, coinciding and developing further that the ideology of the parties. So there was real conflict on real issues. And the other thing that was happening during this period is the parties, because of this realigning and the Republicans making inroads in the south, the parties became more competitive with each other for control of the House and the presidency. Used to be the case that the parties would go back in the 20th century, the parties would go back and forth between control of the White House, but the Democrats, for the most part, controlled Congress. And the inroads the Republicans made began in 1980 when Reagan was elected and brought a Republican Congress with him. And from that point thereafter, the Republicans were competitive for the Senate. And then in 1994, they took the Republicans, took control of the House, and thereafter were competitive for control of the House. So we have both parties competitive for everything, which means the likelihood of unified party government has increased. And in recent years, we've seen politics going back and forth between Democratic control of government to Republican control of government, with real changes in policy occurring as a result of that. So elections have mattered more. And that's contributed to the heightened emotional level in politics in which people have. There's research on, separate research on this by Liliana Mason and others that show how people's identities, social identities, have conformed in certain ways to their partisan identities. So this identity politics that emerged has really heightened people's concern about politics and the emotional attachment they have to partisan conflict.

Yeah, I think it's important to distinguish partisan identity with party identity. There's an extraordinary statistic I just came across. It was an article by Axios that contrast party identification in 2004 with party identification in 2023. And in 2004, 35% said they were Democrats, 33% said they were Republicans, and 31% said they were independents. But today, 49% of Americans say they are independent, and 25 say that they are Democrats and Republicans. But you. You wouldn't think that that radical shift away from the quote, unquote parties means there's a radical shift away from partisan identity. It seems partisan identity is as rich and committed as it ever was. Even though you might think my party's pretty bad at representing my identity, but I still am basically a Democrat or basically a conservative or a Republican. Is that fair, Bob?

Yeah, I think that's fair. But there's. There are two caveats here. One is the people who say they're independent, if in the surveys you follow up and ask them if they lean toward one party or the other, they will say they lean toward one party or the other. So that the core real independents who are really detached from the parties is probably closer to about 15%. And they tend to be. And that 15% tends to be a group that's less attentive and active politics. Whereas the others who lean basically don't want to call themselves Democrats or Republicans because they see themselves alienated toward the parties. But the leaning part really has to do with the fact that the parties now compared to the 1950s, partisanship is really much more closely tied to people's positions on policy issues. The correlation between party identification and issue positions is much greater now than it was in the 1950s. But the level of partisanship has oftentimes looked similar to the 1950s, except the meaning of it's different. Back in the 1950s, it was more of a brand and team identification. And today it's an identification tied to positions on policy issues.

And it would seem that that relates to this separation in the media as well. I mean, Fox famously led this decision among cable television networks to begin to be clearly identified in a partisan way, not necessarily political party, but at least a conservative network when it made that decision self consciously. Roger Ailes, who advanced the idea, did it because he believed it would be a more profitable strategy for the network to build a loyal brand of people who, who identified themselves with the network in that way and other networks have. MSNBC has a similar strategy. CNN strategy is confused between the two. It's not quite clear what they're doing. But the point is that if the business model of the media benefits from increasing partisan identification, like if they're going to make more money the more extreme we are, that adds to the problem, doesn't it? It's not just that you've got a passive public that happens to be partisan. You've got an active media trying to make it even more partisan because that's going to help them in the bottom line that they're seeking. Ben, do you want to.

Yes, that seems right. But it's also true that the whole thing works only because political leadership is very polarized. That's the driver of the whole thing. There wouldn't be any point in being Fox News if the Republican Party hadn't acquired this distinctive, very conservative character in its policy making and policy preferences. So I keep coming back to the question of how you might think fix things. And I believe, you know, thinking about doing something to the media maybe. I mean, we can certainly think of ways we'd like to improve the media, but I suspect they'd improve themselves if we worked out ways in which the parties were left sharply divided. And the two party system together with divided parties leads to all sorts of pathological things happening.

Yeah, especially in a Constitution that divides power between a presidency and Congress. If we were a parliamentary, parliamentary system in the old style, this would be less consequential. But when you say that it's a problem with leaders, I would think that Republican leaders would say, well, look, it's not easy to pick our leaders. We might prefer leaders like, you know, moderate, reasonable leaders. We might prefer serious government people to be at the top of our party. But it turns out the base is not quite as interested in that. The base is significantly driving us towards, you know, people like Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene or Donald Trump. Ben?

Absolutely. And we need to ask why? And I think there are two paths to think about. One is who influences the choice of candidates. And we have a system that's pretty much unique in the world of one party primaries and one party districts. That means that we can. In a one party district, a party can nominate a complete lunatic and they've got a good chance of winning. And why might they nominate a complete lunatic? Because in primary elections, turnout's very low. It's typically, what, about 20%? It's one party. And that means that doorbell ringers, activists, small donors really constitute what you referred to as the base of the party. The base is not the 25% who say they identify. It's not the 45% who lean or identify. It's this small core of very active people who provide money and work. They can nominate lunatics. I think this has been happening fairly often.

Bob, two things. I just want to reiterate the importance of the changes in the kind of media environment, because you've had organizations like Fox News and MSNBC News that can capitalize on niche markets to make their enterprise viable. And once that's set up, these media amplify partisan conflict and maybe reinforcing it. They didn't create it. The conflict is real, but the media are important, important in amplifying the conflict and raising the emotional level. And political leaders knowing this can kind of use the media to their advantage if inflaming things is in their interest. With regard to the other part, the other thing that's emerged is that candidates have been able to initiate their own campaigns and seeking office independent of the parties. The parties have become weaker in that, in the context they had been strong in the past in terms of recruiting candidates and helping candidates. That is, candidates can actually run their own separate operations in fundraising and the like. And particularly candidates who have their own means can move forward as well.

Yeah. And the consequence of that is that if there's strong support for extremist positions on either party party, either from big money or small money, then those extremists can become much more successful inside of the party than the party otherwise would wish. Right. The party might be having exactly the kind of aggregating incentive that we want A democracy to encourage where they're trying to figure out how do we get to a majority. But if they're captured by the extremes because the extremists come in either with lots of money or they can appeal to lots of small, small donors, then it's harder for them to achieve that. Ben?

Absolutely. Absolutely. And as you think about what might be done, it's pretty clear that what has to be done is to change the incentives of people involved so that the and people who change the power situation of who is nominating candidates so that there's no longer a reason that I in shorthand, I'm talking about lunatics, maybe that's too strong. But so that there's no longer a way in which somebody who is really out of touch with the district, whether to the far left or the far right, you need a system in which they're not going to be nominated in primary elections. And so I go back to one party districts and low turnout and single party primaries just to say again, that leads to, as you say, big influence by either big or small money. Small money, I think we may differ about this. But small contributions, there's some evidence, are more radical than large ones. Large contributions are economically conservative on the average. Small contributions are both economically and socially conservative.

I'm sorry, Bob, did you want to add into that?

Well, the other thing I would add, if you can also ask where does the extremism come in? Where did it emerge? And I think that there were certain issues that had elements to them that were intrinsically divisive and may have just taken a while for that divisiveness to come out. We see it in the case of the issue of abortion and what's happened over time. At the time of Roe versus Wade, for example, there were literally no partisan differences on that issue. In fact, in the public opinion data, if anything, Republicans were a little bit more pro choice choice than Democrats were back in the early 1970s. And over time, if you look at that issue, collective public opinion's been pretty stable. But underlying that has been a divergence between Democrats and Republicans, with Democrats increasingly being more pro choice and Republicans more pro life. And in staking out that position, the question is the middle ground has been shaky there. And also on issues related related to race, we find similar kinds of things. We see that to some extent also on issues of gay rights and so forth and also other issues, that is, there are characteristics of the issues and that have this kind of divisiveness that has been important in all this.

I think Bob's right, particularly about social issues. And I would say that given the structural problems that I mentioned with institutions and rules, divisions among activists on those issues are kind of natural in the way Bob says. But they really started there and got communicated to the parties. The party leaders and ordinary citizens tended to then sort themselves out into the parties to fit with that. But there's a whole other story about economic polarization between the parties. And we can go into it if you want, but I believe it has to do the social stuff. Has to do with social change. The kind of thing Bob's talking about, like more and more women working outside the home, had a whole lot to do with. With the politics of abortion and birth control and so forth. The civil rights movement had a whole lot to do with race entering the political system in a new way. Gay rights likewise. But over on the economic realm, the big thing happening was globalization. And globalization meant that low wage labor in other countries was competing with labor in advanced rich countries. Fundamental change in the real world events that in turn meant that American business and American labor went off on different paths. Business wanted to reduce costs so they could compete with China. And if they couldn't reduce costs in the United States by cutting wages, cutting benefits and so forth, they just would leave and go to China. So the political power of workers decreased very substantially and their interest diverged from capital, from business. And that meant that that got hooked into the two parties again in the way, I suggest, through our crazy system of nominations and elections in which the most extreme people in society can have the most influence on who's nominated.

It's an interesting context, though, to tease out the difference between the extremist views of people and the economic interest of donors. So in the economic debates, and Ben, your work has pointed to this really importantly, you see a strongly concerned conservative influence by both Democrats and Republicans, like the rich Democrats and the rich Republicans are the conservative parts of the party in their donations and the policies they're supporting.

That's right. On economic issues.

Right. On economic issues. That's right. So I'm saying the economic context is an interesting context to see this separation, whereas in social issues there's not so much a separation. You're going to see rich and poor Democrat or conservatives basically in the same direction as rich and poor liberals. But in the economic context, there is that pretty important distinction. And the work you've done with Marty Gilens is very interesting to compare. One point in the book, you say some economic style theorizing suggests that citizen policy perspectives are a major Influence on policy. The work you did with Gilens suggests that actually that might not be a fair characterization of the relationship between the policies and citizen views because there's a second influence here that's quite dramatic. That is going to be the influence of money, Ben?

Absolutely. Yeah. I think this is where we should make clear that the rational public has a whole lot more to say about the nature of public opinion and why politicians should pay attention to it than it has to say about whether they do. And we don't actually know very well what was happening back then, but I suspect even then responsiveness may have been smaller than we thought. It's just very difficult to tell. Marty Gillen's kind of data are almost the only way you can. You can get good evidence about that. But that seemed pretty convincing to me that when you take account of what affluent people want and what organized interests want, especially business interests, then average citizens appear to have very little influence in American policy making.

Miniscule, you said statistically non significant was the way you characterized there, which is troubling. Bob, did you want to add something before I want to shift it?

Yeah. The one thing we need to keep in mind in looking at all this, especially when you want to make broad claims about public opinion and in particular the effects of public opinion on policy, we're talking about what's happening on average. It's one thing to say that public opinion on average has a positive significant effect on policymaking. And then when you dig into the data further, you find when you look at the opinions of different groups by class or, or economic status, you find that the rich are having more influence than others. A couple things to keep in mind here. It could be the cases where the rich is having influence. Some of those cases might be cases in which the public as a whole, other income groups are in agreement, but it may be the rich that are more directly influential, but the public is getting what it's want in some cases. Also when you say on average, there may be individual cases, just, just case studies and where you can actually see kind of clear cut influences of public opinion on policymaking, where you can be pretty confident of some kind of causal effect, although on average it's a wash. Bob's right.

And that points towards something that Marty and I call democracy by coincidence, because it's true that the wealthy are affluent, often agree with average people. And when they do, even if the average people have no influence, things happen in policy making that average people are fairly happy about. And in fact, if they weren't true There would be revolution, there'd be people in the streets. So that's all very well, but the, the problem is nothing guarantees that they will always agree. And on some very important issues, they're sharp disagreements. Almost everything having to do with taxing the wealthy, doing things for lower income people, spending money and so forth. They're big differences between the wealthy and the average. And then just one other point on this, I think we ended up concluding that the really big way in which the public gets thwarted is not so much that policies are passed that everybody's against. It's much more the status quo bias. It's much more the prevention of things that large majorities of people want. And if you go through the polls, you'll find a whole lot of obvious cases of that. Gun control is one of the first that leaps the mind. But there are many, many more. Some of them having to do with expanding Social Security instead of cutting it, expanding Medicare instead of cutting it, doing environmental things, a whole range of policies and which this is another set of kind of structural or institutional problems for America. The status quo bias, the way in which the filibuster in the Senate, of course, the separation of powers, divided power so that one, one chamber of Congress can stop everything. And in general in the United States, it's just very hard to do things.

Yeah. One interesting part of the story you tell about the period where, let's just say this is the working period where influence of attitudes is productive is the role of credibility or the role of credible sources. And you have data to show that the public's pretty good at distinguishing between sources they think are generally credible and sources that are self interested or sources that are just pushing a particular political line. And so when you see a source pushing a particular political line, it has less of an effect on the attitudes than if you have someone who's credible. But when we think about the challenge of trying to build a public that could believe the news again, what is the chance of restoring, for example, credibility in the media? Because the overwhelming fact is everyone has lost any faith in the trust of the media. Whether that's justified or not is a separate question, but it is a reality. So how do you see credibility playing into this story, Bob?

Yeah, that's an important question. I mean, in the book, in the chapter on influences on public opinion, we talk about influences through the media. Again here, when you talk about sources of information, you think of the media and you talk about people's lack of trust in the media, but in terms of how the people are Getting information, it's coming through the media, but the media are covering these varying political sources. So we do some analysis in which we show that in reports which the media are using as their sources presidents or in the media, you find in editorializing and commentary where you find messages from specialized interest groups and so forth. We find, and we do some we think was an interesting multivariate analysis to show that the messages coming from self interested interest groups and others doesn't have much of an effect. The effect of presidents is tempered by whether or not the president is popular or not. And then news commentators and experts on net seem to move public opinion a little bit more than other sources. And then events themselves. Objective information has some independent effect. But of course a lot of that is filtered through how leaders interpret and provide standards of judgment for those kinds of things to talk about that today is much more difficult. And this takes us back to the parallel public's argument. You find divergence in public opinion ostensibly here because Democrats and Republicans are taking their cues from different sources that they trust, which tend to be basically partisan leaders and that contribute to moving the public in opposite directions. And that wasn't going on in the period that we studied, but that's happening more so today. And had we actually found that in our data, if we found that Republicans and Democrats diverged while everyone else changed in parallel, and we found a little bit of that, there was more divergence, bipartisanship, but that divergence tended to reverse after, when we looked at the data over a long period of time. But had we found that there was that divergence, we would say that there was a certain level of coherence to that because different segments of the public, Democrats and Republicans, were responding to what they thought were more credible messages coming from partisan leaders. And again here the wisdom of all that hinges very heavily on the quality of the information that they're getting from the leaders.

Okay. So to the extent we live in a world without this credible source anymore, because even the credible source you were talking about, quote, experts or media figures has been weakened, then it's harder to imagine that kind of credibility driving the parallel publics in any sense that looks parallel at all. I mean, more likely you're going to see divergent publics then.

Yeah. And again here when you talk about experts, we saw it front and center in the debate about how the COVID pandemic was handled and where science and expertise was highly. Became highly politicized.

Yeah. There's another dimension to your story that was a little striking to come across and I want to ask you to unpack it a bit. And that's the characterization of the public as deliberating on these issues of national import. Obviously not in a literal sense. They're not gathering in rooms to deliberate, but indirectly through the inputs that they're getting. You're suggesting that there's a level of deliberation which is healthy because obviously it's exposed to a wide range of perspectives. And that's important to think about in the present context, because if you're not exposed to a wide range of perspectives, your deliberation is going to be less valuable. But was it surprising to you to feel like you could describe something called deliberation which characterized the period that you were looking at and found that to be a central part of how we described democracy back then? Bob?

Yeah, and I'll defer to Ben a little bit because he wrote a follow up book entitled who Deliberates? But the emphasis on the book has to do with deliberation. I mean, you obviously have. There's a history of research that talks about how people's interpersonal connections and interactions has an influence on the opinions that people form and how they change. There were famous sociological studies in the 1940s that talked about this in terms of networks of people within the mass public. But we also talk about in the book a couple things. One is changes in the salience of issues. That is, issues become more salient, people become more engaged in them, and we'll talk about them more. And then the other part of this has to do with there's sort of a division of labor that goes on here. That is, some people may be more interested in some issues than others. Deliberation collectively across issues can be thought of as a process of deliberation at work.

Yes, I think the phrase division of labor applies not only to ordinary citizens caring about different things, but it applies to a division of labor between leaders and followers. Basically, even in a democratic society, they're always likely to be leaders, opinion leaders and policy makers. Our notion of deliberation, and as Bob says, it's followed up a little more in this later book, is that an awful lot of deliberation happens in an indirect fashion through experts and others and media pundits and so forth arguing with each other. And this takes us back to how centralized or non centralized the media are, also to how polarized or not polarized leaders are. When they weren't as polarized. It was a whole lot easier for the kind of thing that, that you, Larry, were describing a minute ago in which there are honest debates about what kind of policy would actually work. Would this help public education or would it hurt public education? Would this foreign policy bring us peace or war? And so forth. The kind of debate that occurs now is much more divisive and based on conflicting beliefs. Those standards of judgment are no longer common standards of judgment. And that's a real problem. And just to repeat a bit, that takes me back to this whole question of structural problems about how our leaders are chosen and. And how our policies are made.

Okay, so we're coming to the end, and I have one more quiz to run you through. But what's striking about what this conversation reveals is certain critical contingencies that happen to come together in a healthy way characterize the period you were studying. 35 to 19. The contingencies of concentrated media in the sense of people watching the same show, not the ownership of the underlying assets and leaders who, because the parties were not ideological, were not as necessarily polarizing or polarized, which facilitated a certain kind of deliberation and discussion. And when we think about those particular. And finally, most important for this story right now is credible experts or credible sources that people can rely on when they're listening to distinguish fact from fiction. Those characteristics seem kind of rare in our particular context. I have one question, very small question, and then I want to get to the final quiz here. The small question is about Lippmann. You begin the book by being very. Distinguishing the argument you're making from the suggestion that Lippmann had, Walter Lippmann had, about the way the world was. But if all of these structural characteristics are so important to the world that you were describing, and Lippmann was obviously writing in the period before those structural characteristics, might it be that Lippmann was right about the period he was talking about and just wrong about the period you were studying?

Maybe. Maybe he. There's no way to know. Lippman had no benefit of polls of any kind. So when he talked about public opinion, I don't know whether it was taxi drivers or what, but I wouldn't put too much weight on it.

Right? I mean, it is another amazing coincidence that polling happens just at the beginning of your period. It's 1936, that you have the first that galloped as the first national poll about the presidential election. And support surprises the world because everybody thought Alf Landon was going to sweep. And obviously Gallup said, no, it's FDR who's going to sweep. And we don't remember Alf Landin, because Gallup was right. It was FDR who swept. So polling is a part of the story, beginning at the period you're talking about, but before nobody has any access to any scientific polling.

Well, actually, if you, if you reread Lippmann's book Public Opinion, he does cite some polling data using different kinds of convenience samples of college students and businessmen or something like that. There are some data cited there that illustrates kind of the lack of attention that people pay to politics. But there's some things that Lippmann said that really strike through that, his emphasis on kind of experts, public administrators, and things like that. He emphasizes the importance of these kinds of elite groups there. And it's kind of interesting that John Dewey, when he reviewed Lippmann's work, he was basically very positive toward it because it's the role of those kinds of leaders that could best benefit the education of, of the public. And so at least John Dewey at a particular point viewed Lippmann positively. And in that same spirit, it comes back to the role of leaders in processes of education, which is really the final emphasis of the last quote that appears in our book.

Okay, so now I'm going to get to the quiz part. So here's, here's the quiz. You have at the end of the book, a wonderful collection of what we might think of as quotes about the free speech ideology. Some might call it the free speech fantasy, but characteristic support for the idea of free speech, which comes from different parts of our history, obviously, but might or might not make sense, or might or might not be true about the particular period we're in right now, even though it seems true about the period you were describing. So, for example, John Milton, obviously, long before America, 1644, declares, quote, Let her and falsehood, truth and falsehood grapple. Who ever knew truth put to the worst in a free and open encounter. End quote. So the question I have is how much faith should we have in that statement today, even if we imagined there was good reason to have faith in that statement in the period you were studying?

Ben, I think that takes us back to your point about what was unique about our period. I think you're right that the two most crucial things were centralized media and not very polarized parties. So it probably is true that the marketplace for ideas does not work as well when you get pulverized parties and diffuse media. I would say that if you want to fix it, which is really the bottom line, all this for me. How do you fix this mess? I would start with the polarization. I'm not sure centralized media are necessary And I think free speech could work quite well with social media and so forth, if we didn't have political leaders who were passing along lies and falsehoods. And I believe the way we can prevent that goes back to the institutional. The ways we elect the leaders, basically. Bob?

Yeah. Now, I mean, the way that I view that having to do with this battle between truth and falsehood here, what's ironic is that the increases in partisan differences that occurred and the expansion of the media could have, in theory, played out very differently and positively. That is, the American Political Science association in 1950 lamented that the parties didn't offer a dime's worth of difference or allowing for inflation, a dollar's worth of difference in their positions to the public, but they asked for it and we got it. And it could have played out differently. That is, this could have increased the level of political education going on in the public where the. Where the parties are for different sources and the media convey this. And there could be a more active, positive debate without the incivility that we see today. That is, a lot of those who were supporting more responsible parties were thinking about a parliamentary system where you had a loyal opposition. Well, the opposition in current politics has not turned out to be so loyal. But the thing is that for one, it could be the divisiveness of the issues that really increase the emotional level in politics. And contributing to that were political leaders that saw politics in that particular way. And that's come to dominate politics, which has led to, in terms of the marketplace of ideas where truth and falsehoods don't. Don't at times compete equally with each other. A lot of that is really coming from political leaders in terms of expressing things that aren't perfectly true. On the other hand, the public is buying into this. But of course they're buying into this because they look to leaders for guidance. And with regards to free speech, I mean, that's a good point as well. We have political leaders doing things to put the kibosh on free speech, but we have things going on in. In civil society in which individuals and organizations tend to be less favorable toward free speech, letting opposition leaders speak and so forth. And perhaps some of that blame should be focused on the public side of things as well. But the leaders are the first movers in this. Right?

I mean, I want to distinguish between describing free speech from the perspective of asking whether we should protect it or not. I think that's off the table. Of course we're going to protect it, but I want to talk about more from the standpoint of is it working the way people expected it would work? So Milton was our first example. In your quote, you then quote Jefferson, who in his first inaugural says, quote, the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. And then 60 years later, John Stuart Mill, quote, wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument, end quote. We might ask John Stuart Mill what he would predict about people's view of the 2020 election. Like, do people today believe the 2020 election was not stolen? And while among Republicans there's been a slight shift, still 2/3 of Republicans believe in fact the election was stolen. And then Holmes in 1990, the the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market. Well, would Holmes say that maybe the election was stolen because it turns out the Republicans have not accepted the truth of the counter? These are ideals, ideologies that might make sense in a certain world, but we can feel a little anxious about them in the current world. Is that a fair, fair characterization of your, your view of those quotes now that you think about them today? Ben?

Oh, I think the, the big point is it's not impossible to get back to a world in which all that is is right. And the way to get there is to think about how deliberation works in a modern complex society when it's working well, and it goes back to diversity among the leaders, moderation among leaders, the willingness to be civil to each other and talk about the merits of cases and so forth. Once again, if you want to fix it, go to how we pick our leaders.

That's brilliant. I think one big point of the book that I'm working on is to think about how do we structure deliberation so it can bring the best out of us? Because I too believe that it is possible to bring the best out of us, even if the current environment doesn't do that. Bob, did you want to add to that?

Well, the election example really says something about norms and social pressure here. That is when you have Republicans, both leaders and members of the public, saying that the election was stolen. Given the ostensible concern, consensus in Republican circles that the election was stolen, people are reluctant to deviate from that. So the question is, how does that norm change and that norm changes? I think if political leaders basically reach a consensus that the election wasn't stolen, or at minimum, well, it may have been, but we need to move beyond that, or something like that. You don't find that in Republican circles that is the current Republican presidential candidates or ostensible candidates have either been silent on it or have supported the party line on that.

I'm so grateful to both of you for the amount of time you've given us, and even more grateful for the book you wrote 30 years ago, which I think I agree, Ben. I very much hope somebody does the same hard work. It'll be easier this time to gather the data, but the same work work to analyze whether the reality for the period that you described is anywhere close to the reality of the period we live in right now. And for the purpose, Ben, as you emphasized again, to figure out how we fix it, how we get back to a place where we can have the same kind of confidence in a rational public. Thank you so much for taking the time and for the contribution.

Thank you.

This has been the 10th episode of season five of the podcast Another Way. It's been an episode beginning the idea that we have a gashed hull in our democracy that will force us to rebuild democracy elsewhere. These podcasts are produced by Equal Citizens. They're made by Josh Elstrow of Elstro Production. You can find out more about equal citizens at equalcitizens.us. you can give us your thoughts and feedback at that site. You can also click a red donate

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the costs of this endless series. Not endless, but you know, it takes something to do it. Of podcasts and the other work the Equal Citizens has been doing to try to find a way back to, or to, for the first time, a representative democracy. Thanks for listening to this first episode in Part two, Gashed Hall. This is Larry Lessig. Stay tuned for more. Sa.