 Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Trevor Burris. Joining me today is Hans Noel, Associate Professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of Political Ideologies and Political Parties in America from Cambridge University Press. He has also authored many articles, one of which is the subject of today's episode. Ten things political scientists know that you don't, and Hans actually informed me that he is turning that into a book, which makes me very excited because I have recommended this article many times to many people because I think it is very important that people realize this. So, welcome to Free Thoughts Hans. Thanks. Thanks for having me. What prompted you to write the Ten Things article? Well, so I was approached by the editor of the journal that it's in, the forum. They were doing a special issue on, actually on things that political scientists could learn from practitioners and so forth, which is a great issue. And those, that's really great. And I said, oh, you want to contribute something to that. But I think that's really good. But I'm a political scientist, so I don't know what, what they, what we can learn from them. I know what those, some things that maybe others don't always know if that we can teach the other way. And so that led to that conversation. And then I said, like, let's put this piece together. And it has been very well received. And a lot of people use it and assign it in classes. It's getting a little bit, a little bit older now, which is why I'd like to update it with the book. But I just sort of felt like, you know, there's a lot that political scientists can and should learn from people who are actually doing politics. But there's a lot of commentary about people doing politics from people who are doing politics that is a little bit ignorant of the things that social scientists have at this point figured out. Yeah, at the end of your article, you write, people would probably be better off if they knew more than they do about a lot of things. Politics might, however, be the last thing on that list. That seems a strange thing to say. What do you mean by that? Well, I mean, for me and for you and presumably for a lot of the listeners now, politics is really important because we're really interested in it. But, you know, we have other things that are interesting in our lives. I'm spending the year now in Florence, Italy, as we mentioned a minute ago. And, you know, everything that is all this great arts and architecture and history here, none of which really has anything to do with politics. And you can and should be able to live a very full life without being that involved in politics. But as I go on to say in the piece, that's as much as we'd like to think you'd be able to live lively how, you know, happy life without involvement in politics, we think that people have a responsibility to know about politics or at least to know about it if they're going to participate in politics. And so we may as well figure out what it is that the experts on politics have to this point managed to learn. And it might be the case that people are disappointed in that, though, some of the things that the experts know might disappoint some people. Oh, I think that's definitely true. And, you know, unlike in most other disciplines, we think, well, you know, if this isn't how it works, maybe we should be able to change it. And that's probably, you know, legit in some cases. But it would be, you know, it would be useful to have a better understanding of what we think we already know before we start going around saying, well, I don't like how our system works. And we ought to be different and ought to be changed. That's not going since those those eggheads in Washington don't know what they're doing. Maybe they don't. But if we knew better what they think they do know, we'd be better off. So let's start. Let's start at the beginning of the list. The number one thing is it's fundamental. It's the fundamental stupid. What is what is that thing that you know? Well, so that's a riff on the line from the Clinton campaign in 92, the Bill Clinton campaign, which they, you know, they their mantra for their campaign was it's the economy stupid, meaning let's keep our focus on the economy because the economy is the thing that we think people are going to vote on and it's going to cause them to vote for Clinton, which in fact is is what happened. And that that phenomena that strategy that Clinton had in that campaign generalizes, we think in general that the thing that drives most election results is how happy are people? And in particular, how happy are they with the big things that the government's responsible for like the state of the economy? So when the economy is doing well, incumbents tend to get reelected when the economy is doing poorly, incumbents tend to get booted out. And then of course, when the economy is doing just sort of so so, then you tend to get really close elections, which is what we've had in the last couple of presidential elections in the United States. You know, in that sense, you don't need to know anything else about Clinton versus Trump or whatever else was going on in 2016. The state of the economy was that you'd expect a incumbent party, the Democrats, who've been in the power for two terms to have a hard time winning. And in fact, Clinton outperformed that expectation by a couple of points. But you sort of expect that that would be a year when the Republicans would would probably win. And that that tends to be what happens. And so we want to really overinterpret every election into all the different nuances of what happened. And that's nothing wrong with that because the other stuff also probably mattered. But a baseline is when things are going well, people return the incumbent to office. And when they're not going so well, they like to throw them out and replace them with someone else. So does that mean that campaigning doesn't matter or at least doesn't matter as much as people might think it does? Well, probably not. I mean, campaigning definitely matters in some ways. And there's sort of two broad things that campaigns are doing. One is, you know, they're mobilizing voters and they're getting them to the polls and so forth. And what we basically have seen is that in most good elections, both parties do a pretty good job of that. So it's a little like saying, well, you know, does advertising not matter because the the market share between Coke and Pepsi hasn't changed very much? Well, but if one of them stopped advertising, things might be different. And so there's a little bit of that that's going on. The other thing that campaigns do is they can focus and shape the conversation around the state of the economy. So Bill Clinton said, you know, it's the economy's stupid. Let's talk about the economy. Let's talk about the fundamentals and push it in that direction. He could have done something different and then that might have had some other effects in the other direction. So things matter on the margins. And if the elections are going to be very, very close, then all kinds of other things that are in the campaign probably matter. In 2016, the election came down to fewer than 100,000 votes in three or four states. Those people are going to be affected by the campaign. The magnitude of a campaign effect might be small, but if the race is close, then it could still matter. So we don't want to say campaigns don't matter at all, but they matter in the context of a sort of baseline that is set by the fundamentals. How popular is the president? How is the economy doing? And so forth. It reminds me though, because it seems that if they both stopped, if they agreed to stop campaigning, which of course is this huge pie in the sky, all these political ads. I mean, some political scientists say this is just almost wasted money. A lot of people think they have huge effects. People spend hundreds of millions of dollars on ads. And it sometimes seems like a destructive equilibrium, which is, you know, if everyone stands up at the concert, if one person stands up at the concert, then everyone has to stand up. But if everyone could just agree to sit down, then we could be, you know, relaxing. And then if someone brings a box and everyone has to bring a box, and eventually you could have the entire crowd standing on 200 boxes, because no one can agree to just, okay, let's take away all the boxes and just stand on the floor again. It seems kind of destructive sometimes. I mean, maybe it is. But one thing that's important is, you know, empirically, we find this pattern that the economy has this effect and the fundamentals in general, it's, you know, other things like foreign policy and like have this effect, but we only observe it in a world in which there are campaigns. So it might be that if there were no campaigns at all, then things wouldn't work out this way. The other thing about campaigns is that, you know, we talk a lot about how there's like all these ads and it seems annoying and destructive. Well, that's, again, to people like us who pay a lot of attention to politics and maybe don't need advertisements to know what's going on with politics, you know, it seems like it's a distraction. But one thing that we know is that the more ad campaigns that exist, the more of that whole phenomena plays out, the more informed people are about politics. And so it might be that while the campaign is not necessary to determine who wins, it does actually inform people a bit about who is running and what they stand for and what direction they are. And that may not necessarily be a bad thing. And given that the cost of campaigning isn't, you know, it seems like a lot, we talk about a lot of money, but it's nothing like the cost of campaigning and for, you know, a consumer product or something. You know, it's maybe not such a bad thing that people have a high attention to campaign. You might worry about the tone, what if it could be more positive and all of that. But now it seems like we're on the, you know, at a level of fine-tuning something, like, oh, if only some people would just be nicer, that, you know, while, you know, while I'm sure that would be nice, I'm not necessarily, you know, if I was working on reforming the political system. That's one thing that way in which politics is different than some other disciplines. Like, you know, in chemistry, you just, this is how it works. But in political science and in other, you know, social sciences, learning about it, we can actually change what we do and we could actually steer things in different directions. If I were working on doing that, I think getting rid of campaigns wouldn't be high on my list of reforms that I'd be interested in trying to implement. So number two, the will of the people is incredibly hard to put your finger on. Yeah, so I think the issue that I'm getting at here is that it's, we'd like to think about why I took a poll and a poll says this is what people believe and what they think. But, you know, most people are not that interested in politics and therefore they don't actually have well-defined opinions about things. It maybe makes more sense to say people just don't have an opinion on something rather than saying that 60% support something and 40% disapprove. But if you ask people, if you call them up and say, hey, what do you think about the death penalty or do you prove the job that the president is doing as president, they're going to give you an answer, right? But it's not a well thought out answer. And that's not their fault. It's like I said before, you know, people have more important things to do with their lives than to know about politics. But they will give us an answer. And the reason why that's important is because in maybe a different context where an election will say to come up, well then there would be a campaign and there would be a conversation and that might change people's minds about things. And so we do a survey and we say, oh, you know, 60% of people approve of the job the president's doing or, you know, right now Donald Trump's approval rate is really low. Okay, so that tells us that he's not going to win re-election. Oh, but what's going to happen when the campaign turns around? He starts trying to sell some people on himself. Well, then they might change their minds. And so it's not that you can't ask surveys or you can't do this, do these things, but you want to realize that people's, the public opinion, people are very responsive to things and particularly responsive to partisan messages, right? So what Republicans are telling people, Republican voters are going to believe and what Democrats are telling people Democratic voters are going to believe. And so given that that's this sort of dynamic, we should just sort of imagine that public opinion is this independent force in the world that I've just I've tapped it by asking this question. And now I know what the people want. Well, they want what they have been told they're supposed to want because they're only answering survey questions and the survey questions are asked in an information environment that was shaped by partisan politicians who are trying to shape that information. Yeah, this issue comes up, but I do a lot of work on campaign finance policy and it comes up a lot. And what I see is kind of an implicit premise that is often unstated when people criticize spending money in elections is they often say, oh, the Koch Brothers or George Soros are distorting the will of the people or they're distorting American democracy. And it seems like the implicit premise there is that there is some sort of real political opinion will of the people almost were so in and when someone comes in and spends money to speak to the electorate, sometimes that's distorting, but I don't even really know what that would mean. Now, I think that's right. I think it's sort of nonsensical to talk about there being this pure thing that could be distorted. Now, you can still say, oh, I'm concerned that too much money from these people is going to create an information environment that's going to steer things this direction or that direction. And what we'd like to do is have a, you know, conversation that includes everyone have a voice or whatever you can worry about that. But that's very different than saying, well, we just can't have people spending money, we just need to get out the pure thing. There is no pure thing. And so then we got to be thinking about what, you know, what, how are we getting a diversity of voices that are being affecting the information environment are the facts that are in the information environment true, those kinds of things. It's a very different question than, well, I just need to know what people really think. Number three, that leads into number three, which is the will of the people not only is it hard to put your finger on it may not even exist. Yeah. So this is an interesting finding that, you know, it's been known in political science for a long time and economics for a long time, that, you know, as we tend to think about, we'll just aggregate up people's preferences. If we know, do we want to have a, you know, do we do a change our immigration policy to make it more difficult for immigrants to enter the country? And so let's just, you know, see what everyone thinks. And if mostly let's let's lay aside the question that they may be having thought about the issue already, let's, let's figure out what they mostly think, what's informed them, whatever. And then like they want this policy. Oh, so now we know what they what they think. But the thing is that if the dimensions of policy that exist are in any way more complicated than just there's one question, yes or no, which of course they are on all issues, then it's quite possible that people might prefer a majority might prefer something prefer, you know, some policy A that to policy B, but B is preferred to policy C and then C is preferred to policy A. Right. So this can get a little technical and I don't want to get too deep into it here. But the idea behind this was get the era was a economist working at Rand in the 50s is kind of interested in the question of well, so we keep talking about our international competition and the Cold War. And we keep thinking like, let's just understand if we're rational and they're rational and everybody knows sort of understanding what happens when you aggregate things up. And so you got to go off on this question of like, can we aggregate up people's preferences into something that's sort of coherent and rational. And what you know, then he said, okay, we don't want to be democracy. So what should a democracy have a democracy to have so like one person doesn't decide everything that would be a dictatorship. And if everybody wants something, well, that should they should get it. Right. So it's laid out a handful of things that he thought you might expect a democracy to have. And then the end is you can't do that. Right. Something that we think is important for democracy is at least plausibly going to fall apart. The thing that's most likely to fail is we'd think that a democracy should work no matter what people want. They should want all the different, you know, we should have any possible set of preferences. And we just said a minute ago that those preferences are all kind of mushy and they could go in all different directions. Any possible set of preferences should be acceptable and we ought to be able to aggregate them up. Truth is any aggregating system that we have, whether it be a majority rule or some other, you know, super majority or anything we do might possibly give us some sort of perverse outcome where the whole country votes for Donald Trump. But in fact, somebody else, the whole country would prefer. And we just didn't the system didn't allow them to make that choice. And we never observed that. And that's possible. It's just a mathematical fact. And so I'm sorry, go ahead. Well, we saw that in 1912, right? We saw that in 1912 kind of with Woodrow Wilson. Yeah, I think the 1912 was probably the most clear example. The Republican Party in 1912 was represented by Taft, who was probably the least progressive of the major candidate's progressive being a particular dimension. It's not quite the same as progressive we mean today, but at any rate, Taft. And then he was challenged by Theodore Roosevelt, who had been a Republican president in the past and he wants to run again. And he's probably the most progressive again in this historical context. And so it splits the Republican Party and then they're faced face off against Woodrow Wilson, the Democrats, and Wilson wins. But it is quite possible that had Taft or Roosevelt by themselves been the candidate that either one of them would have beat Wilson. If you look at the votes in the across the country, in most states, the Wilson, sorry, the Roosevelt vote and the Taft vote add up together to about what Taft had gotten previously. So we imagine that the Republicans literally are splitting their vote and there were more Taft and Roosevelt votes together than there were for Wilson. So maybe we got the wrong president. And the one thing to say there is, oh, well, we got the wrong president because the Republican Party was split and we shouldn't have let them be split. But that's not completely the answer, because well, how do they not split? Should they have nominated Taft? Should they nominate Roosevelt? Which one was better? Well, they faced off within the party and we got one answer, but it's hard to know. And so I think the end result is whatever you do in a collective action, you can't be too confident that it really is what the people wanted. It just depends on the system that you used. It depends on the rules that we had in an application. And there's not anything wrong or right about those rules, but different rules give you different outcomes. If that's the case, if different rules give you different outcomes, then it's very hard to be very confident about any particular outcome, because a different set of rules that are just as reasonable would have given you a different one. Which leads nicely in number four, that there's no such thing as a mandate. I'm sure probably Woodrow Wilson might have said something like giving his inaugural speech in 1912. I have a mandate from the people, but that seems probably a stretch. Yeah, at least what we think of as a mandate is now the people have said that I should be the president or the people have said this policy platform is the one that we should implement. Given all the squishingness about what people want and the problems with aggregation, it's hard to believe that is ever the case. And so instead what happens with mandates is it's just it becomes a rhetorical argument that politicians use to convince you that they should go along with this. And I think maybe we shouldn't trust it very much, but more again, political scientists have studied this question directly and said, well, what happens when people say that they have a mandate? We found that they try to create this narrative. There's a nice book by Julia that argues that presidents use the mandate argument. In some cases, exactly when they need it the most because their political support is the weakest. That is that they don't have an overwhelming majority. They don't have a majority everywhere else. So they have to use that rhetorical argument to justify what they're trying to do. If they weren't using the mandate language, that might be because they didn't need to because they just had their party has control of everything and so they could just implement policy. Yeah, like Roosevelt in the 30s or Reagan in 84, not having to say you have a mandate because he won by so such a huge amount that it wasn't really necessary to build it up. That's right. Yeah. And you don't have to make an argument to the other party in Congress that you should be listening to me because the other party in Congress is a minority already and your party is there doing what you want. But the key there is that the notion of a mandate, we should think of it as a rhetorical strategy and not as some kind of true, well, he won. So whatever he wants to do, we ought to do. It's a rhetorical strategy. And what do we do with that as a citizen? Well, if you like what the president wants to do, you probably want to say, hey, you should still do it. That's how our system works. And if you don't like it, then you're going to be, ah, there's no mandate. It doesn't really tell us much what to do, but we should be thinking about it as a rhetorical strategy rather than some sort of right of the leadership because they were represented by a majority through some particular system. Number five is, is it DuVergere or DuVergere? It's DuVergé. He's French. DuVergé. Okay. Or that number three. DuVergé, it's the law. So DuVergé's law is the one of the few things that I think political scientists would be willing to call a law. It's really probably not a fair to do that. We don't have laws in the same way that we have, you know, Newton's laws of physics or anything like that. We don't have those kinds of laws and social sciences. But DuVergé's law has been called that and it's a finding that in fact, doesn't really hold up perfectly empirically, but it's still an important one. The idea behind this is, well, why is it that we only have two parties in the United States? And the answer that DuVergé would propose is, well, in the United States, we have first past the post election rules. And so when you have, that is to say, in order to win a seat in Congress, you just get the most votes in the congressional district and then you get it. Places that have that kind of system tend toward fewer parties and maybe especially even to two parties. And the reason is that say you're running for office, let's think about the presidency, which is similar thing. Say you're running for office for the presidency, got Clinton running, got Trump running, you're like, I don't like, I want a third party choice. But now you go to vote. And you're going to go vote on between Clinton or Trump. But now you don't like either of them, you'd rather have a third party choice. But, you know, as much as you might like Jill Stein or Gary Johnson, you've got to be pretty confident they're not going to win because you can see the polling minute and you see that it's unlikely that they're going to win. Meanwhile, you probably have an opinion between Trump and Clinton. So why vote for the third party candidate when the, well, you know, you have an opinion over the two people who are most likely to win and you could affect the outcome in that direction. So what DuVergé says is, you know, it doesn't tell you what to do. He isn't saying that, you know, that's right or wrong. He just says most people are going to think that way. And if they're going to think that way, most politicians, therefore, are going to think that way. And so then really skilled politicians are not going to run as third party candidates. Right. This is the smart thing that both Trump and Sanders did, for instance, both of them were outsiders. And neither of them said, I'm going to run as a third party independent candidate because that wasn't going to work. They said, I'm going to run and capture one of the party nominations because that's what's going to be the way to ticket to winning. And so if that's what's going to happen, you're going to reduce yourself down to two parties. And so then people who complain in the United States, well, I wish we had a third party choice. And I think there's a legitimate sense that maybe that would be a good thing. I won't take aside one way or the other on that. But people who complain about that tend to think, oh, we just need to let these third parties flourish and we should stop, you know, saying not nasty things about Jill Stein or whatever if they're running, we should be, you know, nice about the third party and they'll win votes. But the system is not geared toward having that. So if you want to have a third party, a viable third and fourth party, as we do have in many countries around the world, in a different system, probably a system that is proportional in some way. A proportional representation is where the system where instead the way that you would get seats in the legislature is by what proportion of the vote you get. You get 20% of the vote, you get 20% of the seats. And so then you don't lose anything. There's no harm in voting for a minor party because you can still help them get a little bit. It also matters that some countries have a parliamentary system rather than a presidential system. Presidential system is sort of like a single member district on steroids, right? The presidency is a single seat and you have to win it. Whereas in a parliamentary system like in Great Britain or in Canada, where they do have slightly more viable minor parties, there still tends towards two large parties, but you tend to have more viable third parties. There too, though, you can you send them to parliament and then, you know, they can make a coalition government or something in parliament. Whereas in our system, a third party would just be, you know, an appendage that have to ally with one of the main parties than they would not be able to succeed at trying to influence the executive or as a parliamentary system where you're choosing the your executive, you're choosing your prime minister from the legislature and the legislature is choosing and selecting them. Having a voice in the legislature is enough. So those dynamics, again, the rules that we have affect the outcome there. And if you really want a third party, then we got to be changing institutions. And until you do, the metaphor I like is it's a little bit like saying, well, you know, I really wish we had better public transit in my in my city. And so I'm going to go down to this corner where the train ought to be there and wait for the train to come until until you build the transit, you there's no point in going and waiting for the train. You want to get a change the institution first and then you can, you know, you can vote for your third party. But occasionally third parties in America, I mean, he said, as you said, it's not a perfect model and a perfect law, but occasionally third parties like Ross Perot and 92, who a lot of people decided that they weren't throwing our vote away with him getting 20% of the vote. And then 1860 is another example of third parties. It happens. Is there any sort of theory about why at these times third parties might be more successful? Because a lot of people thought it might have been this year or this last election with distaste for Republicans and Democrats and it ended up not being a very big third party year. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, when you have a clear division within an existing coalition, that's going to happen. So again, 1912, we talked about earlier, you know, the Republicans not basically nominated two people. And so some Republicans thought this was the right person and someone else thought that was the right person. You know, much depends in this Duverger logic, much depends on who we collectively think are the top two candidates, right? I mean, you know, Trump and Clinton are the representatives of the two major parties. And so they're the two that everyone should vote for. But if everyone believed that the race was really a Johnson versus Stein race, then everyone should switch and vote the other way. So there are going to be times when the political alignments and shifts and so forth are such that the parties are torn apart a little bit, there's some uncertainty about the direction, and then that's going to lead us to these kind of unusual places. So I mean, 1860 is a perfect example of that where, you know, you've got, you know, slavery is a key issue in politics that both parties have been trying to avoid. And then the Republican Party is now has an element that is going to talk about it. And so you have, you know, divides within the north and the south. And then meanwhile, you already have the existing divisions over the tariff and other things that were, were dividing the parties. And so that kind of creates these pockets, and it's not clear who you're at, who your partner is supposed to be. And so then, you know, the voting plays out, if you kept voting, if they voted and you saw the outcome, and then you got to vote the next day, and you kept doing that, which is a little bit like what polling does, you might eventually get to a place where, oh, now we've all figured it out and we're going to vote this way. But it may take a while to get to that new equilibrium with its clear two parties. And so whenever, you know, there's a, there's always a pressure towards two, two parties in the system, but there's also a pressure towards tearing things apart because nobody likes to, you know, we all want what we think is right. So I have my policy preferences and they do not match up with any party. I disagree with this party on this thing and I disagree with that party on that thing. That's what politics is about is about coordinating with people, but we don't like that. We want to be able to say, this is what I want my own choice. The metaphor that I like here is about when you, you know, going to the, by ice cream, you know, you go to ice cream in the United States, you got your 31 flavors and there's a million flavors, different things. And sometimes people say things like, well, I can't, we have, if I can have 31 choices of ice cream, why can't I have at least three choices for, for politics? And as you know, it can see why people may think that. But the difference is, if we go to the ice cream place and I want chocolate and you want vanilla and someone else wants Rocky Road, well, that's what we'll get. Each of us gets what we want and we get to take it home. But politics isn't like that because we only get to have one present and we all have to share. So it'd be a little bit like at the end of the day after everyone's gone to buy ice cream, we tallyed up and we found out which ice cream sold the most and then we all have to eat the same ice cream. Right? That'd be a terrible business model, right? That's why we don't do that for businesses. But politics is, is literally, I mean, in some ways politics is that set of things that we don't get to be that way about, right? We have to either, we all have to have one immigration policy. We all have to have one, you know, tax policy, even to the extent that we would say, okay, well, different states could do different things, right? That solves that problem. We still have to, we all have to either live in a world where every state can set its, its taxes or they can't, right? And then each state gets to do what it does. So you have to agree on, you know, have to coordinate in some way. So that changes your logic completely. Now it's not like, which, which ice cream flavor is the one that I want the most? It's of the ice cream flavors that lots of people want, which one do I want the most? And that changes your thinking about it and therefore drives you to a different logic when you're, when you're voting and building parties and everything. Now you put it very clearly in the essay. Perhaps the most important lesson to draw from Duverger's law is that voting is not about expressing your opinion. It is about coordinating with other voters and your institutions determine how you must coordinate that kind of says it all right there. Then that gets into parties, which is number six, where you, you break, you attack the fantasy of it seems every election, especially presidential elections that someone's going to come into Washington and just sit down and put aside partisanship and just make good decisions about for the country. And of course, candidates like to say that they'll do this. They like to be outsider candidates to say that they will do this. Why don't they do that? Yeah, this is, I mean, we saw that this just this week, there's this conversation about whether or not Donald Trump is an independent or not, eventually came around to all I see this potential for a third party in Donald Trump. And journalists love this. They really do. But it's, it's, it's a little bit of a strange idea that, you know, that what matters is just what, you know, let's just do good policy. The reason is we disagree on stuff. We really do. And those disagreements would be easy to set aside if we are if we're talking about ice cream, something where we all can just go and do our go our own way. But, you know, we don't on a set of things that we're our politics, we don't agree that about those things. So, you know, and even on the question of like, well, let's let let people decide, right? So should we have a minimum wage or should we let businesses go their own way and like sort of buy their own ice cream in terms of of that? That's the policy decision about whether we're going to live in a world with minimum wage or not. Or, you know, do we want to let people have, you know, just find how they think about what marriage is on their own? Or are we going to impose that as a system? And different people have different senses about, well, like this is something we have to impose to have a social effective order. And these are things that we don't. I don't think anybody thinks that should be literally nothing, right, that we have, which is okay, we all should very least follow the traffic laws and, you know, grab on the right side and not be able to rob and steal and, you know, harm one another. Right. And so what are the things that we have to do? And we disagree. And so if we're going to disagree, then we may as well disagree in a way that's sort of not systematic. The thing that parties do is that they can they encourage people to set aside internal disagreements. Right. So again, the ice cream metaphor, you know, it is a question of like, there's lots of those. So there's your like, your fruit kind of based ice creams. And then there's your like, you know, sort of chocolate direction ice creams. And maybe, you know, you don't like either of those. And you're really frustrated. But at the very least, you could say, okay, I'm going to go in this direction. And maybe I don't really, I really would rather have, you know, Oreo, something, instead, I'm going to end up with with a double chocolate fudge, but at least they're both on the chocolate direction. And I can have work out the sort out that that compromise there. So what parties do is they force people force groups to form compromises in smaller levels. And then they go together and so get ready to set aside some of our disagreements for the goal of trying to capture government and implement the things that we we do agree on. And that's how the system is going to work. And part of that, you know, both as a normative thing, like, okay, fine. So let's accept parties and expect them to do that. But even independent of that, that's what people are going to do. So even if you get rid of parties and get rid of the stuff, people are going to coordinate like that. The nice thing about parties is it makes it very transparent. And you know, which coalition you're buying yourself into and which one you're supporting, which one you're opposing. And you have a quote from Schatzneider from the 40s. Democracy is unthinkable, save in terms of parties, which we always also hear when you study the founding era that everyone was sort of lamenting the fact that the parties arose. But it seems like they're necessary. Oh, yeah. I mean, the interesting thing, you know, it's a modern democracy, right? I mean, you could have a small scale, you know, town hall type democracy with 20 people, maybe. But any kind of modern democracy requires that. And the interesting thing about the founders is, yeah, so the founder of founders said they worked, didn't like parties, Washington's under his farewell address is concerned about, you know, factions. Madison's worried about factions in the, in the Federalist Papers. Jefferson said, you know, if he could only go to heaven with a party, he'd rather not do it. And yet within a few elections, they were building parties. Oh, yeah. They were already in each other's throats. Yes. And they were, and they were doing, they were going out and organizing. They were saying, okay, we need to win this election. So who do I need to win? Who are my allies? Who are not? So like, even if you didn't want to have parties, people are going to do it. So we may as well, from a, you know, perspective of trying to organize and understand our politics, we had to accept that we have them and then maybe try to steer them in useful directions. Because people will, out of one side of their mouth, say parties are terrible. And then the other side of the mouth actually start to organize them. I'd much rather it be transparent that that's what they're doing. I imagine that Jefferson and Hamilton as sort of leaders of their respective parties probably would have said something like, well, the only reason I'm doing this is because Hamilton is organizing his party or vice versa, which just says, you know, ultimately, you know, we shouldn't be doing this, but when you have people on the other side who are organizing, you have to do it. But maybe we can get past it someday and not thinking that, no, we're never going to get past that. It kind of touches back to this idea of, you know, if only, if only they would stop. I mean, that's the thing. Yeah, if only they would stop. So the other side is doing it, you know, I'm the, I'm, that's, you know, I'm only doing it because, because they're doing it. I think a lot of the founders had this idea that we talked about a little bit earlier about, there really is some public will. And I'm on the side of what's in the interests. And then they're, you know, they're interested in special interests. They're a faction, they're a special interest. They're a faction. They're a special interest. But, but I'm not. And, and I think that's where a lot of that grows. And what was sort of a, appreciate that that's not really how things work then, then the sort of naivete of trying to get rid of parties becomes seen as exactly that naivete. And it's always a, I study the founding era a lot because I do constitutional law here is one of the things. But, and you look at opinions about public opinion, which to me are some of the most fascinating opinions around, not so much your own opinion, but a person's opinion about how other people form their opinions. And those are usually incredibly biased and partisan to, you know, well, they're, you know, they're just being manipulated by, by their party, whereas my party is not manipulating anyone. They're being manipulated by their donors, where we're not being manipulated at all. And of course, you see that throughout the, all of American history. Yes. Yeah. And that, and that's a good way to go into number seven, which is how most independence are closet partisans. And we talk about independence all the time as this great, rare thing out there with people who just dispassionately look at the issues and have a voting record that is, you know, goes back and forth between parties. But that, that's kind of a myth, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, I think, I mean, I'm sure that there are some people who are like that who, you know, really spend a lot of attention paying, you know, thinking through all the issues. But, you know, building on several of the points that we've mentioned already, if people aren't, don't actually have well-defined opinions. And if they don't know, sort of pay attention a little bit, and they need the cues to help figure out what they're thinking. And if politics is organized by elites into parties, then when you go to vote, it's probably not the case that you're carefully evaluating the two choices, you kind of are leaning in one direction or another. And one of the things that we found is, well, it is in the case that more and more people today claim to be independent than used to be. If you ask, are you a Democrat or a Republican, or you're independent, no, I'm independent. But the increase in people who are independent is mostly among people who still, when they go to vote, vote consistently for their party and not for the other. And so it's not, it's not something sort of sensible to say, well, there's this huge group of voters out there that are up for grabs, because most of them actually aren't. And one of the interesting things about this, I don't want to diminish the importance of independence, because people, there is a change there, it must mean something. There's a really great book by Samara Klar and Yana Krupnikov, that's just out a couple years ago, on the subject on independent voters. And one of the things that they find is that people are more likely to say that they're independent when you remind them that politics can be contentious and that so many people in politics are nasty and hostile and jerks and everything. And so I think what part of it is, people just like, I don't want, party politics is people are mean and they argue with each other. And I just want a sensible, common sense compromise. That's what I would like to have. And so then it's what they say who they, that's what they want. And then they say that they're independent. But of course, well, most of us, when we want a sensible compromise, what we really want is when we want the other side that's crazy to compromise. And so some research on this, too, is a nice piece by Laura Hargrave and Harbridge, sorry, and Neil Mahotra, I think, that shines this where they ask people, what do you want in terms of compromise? And what they mostly, well, now do is they'd like the other side to stop being so entrancing and to come over to where they are more or less. And so that's common sense. People would think that way. And so it's sort of not surprising. But as a consequence, it's not reasonable to say most people are independent. Most people have chosen sides. And what they believe is going to be shaped by what side they're on. And so really what we have is this contest between the two sides. And therefore, it very much matters what the leaders of those two sides decide what the battle lines are going to be about. And that's the common sense phrase, which aggravates me to no end, sort of always betrays that. And we just need common sense solutions to X, which of course is considered crazy by the other side. And the other interesting thing about independence is the idea of someone who is super interested in politics, but does not have partisan allegiances, is kind of, like someone who's really independent probably doesn't care about politics at all, correct? Yeah, yeah, you would think that. I mean, there's, again, there are surely some people like that. And, you know, any of those, anybody who's like that or really, really cares about politics, but there's kind of, you know, above the fray, like there might be the person who's listening to this podcast. But for the most part, no, people like that tend to take sides. And even if you don't think you're taking sides, you know, odds are you probably still tend to find one side to be more persuasive than the other. And therefore, you're going to lean that direction, even if you think you're arriving at an independent decision every time. Number eight is a provocative sentence that, especially for this town in Washington, D.C., where I am, that special interests are a political fiction. Yeah, well, I think this builds on the topics that we've just been discussing in the last couple of items here. And that, you know, we like to think of like, there's some like right thing that is common sense, or that is the general what's in everyone's interest. And then there's these special interests that are out there trying to undermine things. Problem is like, what's a special interest? A special interest is any interest that is mainly shared by a particular group and not everyone. But we have a diverse society and there's almost nothing that we all want exactly the same. Even things that we broadly all want, we're still going to have one accomplish in slightly different ways. Right. So what is a special interest? Special interests are, you know, business leaders, that's a special interest and labor groups, their special interests, they disagree on things. So they both have their interests. Pro-life and pro-choice activists are going to be this and just about anything that you can imagine is going to be a particular group and that's everybody. What a reasonable approximation of what a special interest is, is it's the interest of anybody who's not me because what they want is not what's in the common good, but of course, whatever I want is in the common good. So again, echoing this notion about common sense principles and compromise. And so, you know, this is what the founders understood as a problem. They said, look, the founders, the founders said, oh, we've got all these different groups, these different factions. We can't expect them all to agree. We can't expect people not to have their differences. So we'll just try to have a system that prevents them from organizing and political parties do more organizing than Madison imagined would happen and what he was writing in Federalist 10. But that is that landscape of people who want different things is sort of how political scientists approach things. And that's sort of we come to this and say, okay, there's lots of different interests and how we're going to aggregate them and the parties, there's our ideology, what sort of structure is this. But we approach this question initially as there's lots of diversity in what people want. And we don't tend to imagine that there exists some kind of general interest that if only we could just set aside our biases, we could arrive at a good policy. We recognize that just about every policy effect helps some people and maybe doesn't help some other people. And that's what political conflict is about. Yeah, you write that the most important distinction is not between special and general interests, but between organized interests and unorganized interests. Exactly, yes. So when you think about sort of sort of broad groups that are maybe, you think policy doesn't help, it's not helpful for those groups. So I think this sort of classic example of this is the unemployed. There's a large group of people who perhaps face difficulties because they're losing the child, but that group changes. So from year to year, some people with persons unemployed now and they're not later. And so policies that might help the unemployed and help reduce unemployment level or whatever else are hard to do because that group isn't going to organize in the same way that say a religious group is going to organize where this group is always identifies that way and they're going to move or a racial ethnic group is going to say like we have particular interests and we know who we are. And so less organized, organization is important. Again, cutting back to political parties and there's a certain way in which this whole essay could have been about the importance of political parties in one way or another because one of the things the parties do is they help to mobilize and organize otherwise potentially unorganized groups and pay attention to policies that might sort of bring a bunch of small diffuse groups, bring them together and form a majority coalition. But without somebody doing that, the interests of certain groups are going to be underrepresented. And number nine, I think grows from this too, the grass does not grow by itself, which is the question of what is a real grassroots movement versus what is an astroturfing. I think this question is very tied to things we've discussed where a lot of people, they think the other side is somehow faking their political coalition or it's somehow created by dastardly and special interests who are manipulating public opinions, all these things we've already discussed. Whereas my grassroots movement is real and natural why is that this whole attitude mistaken? Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, I wrote this essay right as the Tea Party was becoming a major movement and so everybody, a lot of people were saying, look, there's a Tea Party isn't really this movement, it's just the Koch brothers or the so-and-so is fueling this. And no, it's not no one really has these grievances. And the thing is that you could point to organizers, you could point to groups who are doing things to mobilize the Tea Party activists, you could point to Fox News running news stories that were clearly having the effect of mobilizing people and making them think of their cells as part of a movement. And so you're like, oh, that's what's happening. Well, but that's always the case. Every movement is like that. The civil rights movement had leaders who were mobilizing and the like. And so I think again, it's sort of unfortunate that we want to imagine that there's just people wake up one morning and say, I'm frustrated and I'm just going to walk down to the street and then they know if I'm lucky, maybe when I get to the town square, there'll be other people who are also frustrated and will have a protest. All protest is going to get organized in some way. And so now you've got the flip side where you have the town hall meetings that where people are showing up and it was before it was to be able to show up to the town hall meetings and it was liberals who were saying, oh, the only people who are coming are being dragged there by some nefarious funding organization. And now it's no, no, it's, you know, Soros is paying these protesters to go to these groups. Nobody is, you know, pulling out a checkbook and paying protesters to show up at these things. But someone is mobilizing them. They're saying, hey, look, there's going to be this town hall meeting. You got to go down there and talk and we need you to come and we need to have a larger voice. And so that's, again, how sort of dynamic sort of grassroots popular politics requires that kind of seating. And then the difference is, if there were no, there was nothing to mobilize or no public opinion to get down there, then people wouldn't would respond. You'd say, look, we have to go down there and protest against this, you know, policy that's going to raise marginal, marginal tax rates on the, on the wealthiest people. And, you know, I'm the Koch brothers, I don't want that to happen. No one's going to show up unless there's some interest. Right. And so that's not the message that they have. They sell the message in some other direction. And if you don't like that message, then that's, that's, you know, a concern. But your concern is not just with the, you know, Soros or the Koch brothers. It's also with the other voters who bought that message and then went more mobilized by it. So number 10 is all these things that, that political scientists know. Number 10 is we do not know what you think you know, which is the things that a lot of myths that people believe about politics. Yeah. I mean, a big part of what, what was behind my mind as I was writing this essay, and I'm thinking about in general on this is, you know, for some of the things that we say, including some of the things that we've said in the last, you know, in this hour that we've been talking, people are like, oh, well, that's obvious. Right. If you have course, there's a mandate, it's just rhetorical thing. And we, that's obvious. So part of that is, well, yeah, it's obvious now that we laid it out and we had some people went out and found examples and so forth. But the exact opposite could have been seemed obvious to you too. And so that's part of what social science is about is taking some things, some of which seem obvious and sorting the out and figuring out, is this really what's going on? Or is it not? And there's a lot of seems obvious things that we don't think are true. We want a real really common one that political scientists get upset about a lot is this idea that gerrymandering is what's responsible for polarization. And I think there probably is, Joe, some kind of gerrymandering that the way in which districts are drawn does have consequences. But among their consequences is probably not that you have increased polarization. It's not like you draw lots of safe Republican districts and lots of safe Democratic districts. And if you think about it a little bit, it actually doesn't make sense that gerrymandering would do this because if I was a partisan person, I wouldn't want to draw districts that would be good for both parties. I'd want to make them good for my party and not good for the other party. And then, of course, the other party is going to be pushed back the other direction, going to end up with changes. And so we don't think that gerrymandering is why polarization. And of course, one way we know that that's not true is that if it were the case, that changing drawing districts is what is causing things to become more polarized, then you'd see polarization in the house where we draw districts. But we wouldn't see polarization in the Senate because those districts are states and they've been the same since the beginning. But in fact, you do see polarization in the Senate. So that suggests that polarization is about something more than just gerrymandering districts. But people all around think the way to solve polarization is to get rid of gerrymandering districts. And as I say, there might be other consequences of gerrymandering that we're concerned about, but that is not probably one of them. And we have this, you know, what exactly is the cause story of polarization, that I don't know, right? I have a bunch of theories about what might be driving things. But we try to, you know, disabuse people of some bad of some things that we think that they do know. But the real tricky thing, the real point of this last item in the list is there's a lot of stuff we don't know. And it might be that it really matters. How much effect does the economy have versus a campaign? I don't know exactly what the numbers are, but this is why we keep doing research and we keep trying to find good answers. Another common, I mean, maybe the most common belief, I don't know if this is true, but at least belief about Congress and Washington, D.C. is that everyone is sort of purchased by their quote-unquote special interests and money just buys the votes of your average congressman. And even this widely accepted tourism, which I'm sure most people think that political scientists can easily prove is not easily provable. Yeah. I mean, the one obvious alternative explanation is, well, if I, it's not so much that I, you know, I want certain outcomes and so I'm going to bribe you, but well, I'm going to give money to the kind of candidate who I think is going to do the things that I want. And so then I give money, you know, so then the pharmaceutical industry gives money to a candidate and then that candidate does good things for the pharmaceutical industry. Well, maybe because that's what that guy wanted, would have done anyway. I'm probably, there probably is some influence of money. We think most of it's actually more about access than bribing. So it's not like, if I get this, if I don't get this, you know, I get this donation from this, you know, this interest group or this PAC, then I'm going to do whatever that PAC wants, because honestly, you could just go somewhere else if that was the case, right? You could just, okay, fine. I don't, you're voting that for that thing is going to be bad for my constituents. I can find resources someplace else for on that one thing. What's more likely is, okay, but now the pharmaceutical industry or whatever the PAC is, now they get some access. They get to come talk and influence things. And then that might have some consequences, but it's much more indirect. And it's more about signaling. And of course, politicians that I don't know what the right policy is, I got a bunch of different things. Well, this group has a lot of money and they're a lot of organized and they say, this is a good idea. Well, maybe I'll listen to that. Maybe not even a bad idea to have that ability for different groups to organize and try to impress your folks. We talk about lobbying as if it's some kind of, you know, the various vote buying kind of thing, but the logic behind lobbying is just, here's some people who know a lot about something, they're going to camp out in the lobby and try to tell us stuff. Yeah, that's at least not obviously a problem. And so how big of a, what are the consequences? I'm not, I think money does have some pretty serious effects on politics, but it's very tricky to figure out exactly what it is. And it would be a strange way to try and change the world. I often make an analogy, let's say that there was some billionaire who was a flat earth or who was trying to change the world and make sure that we could have better policies for flat earth. It would be a weird strategy to find politicians who do not currently believe in the flat earth position and give them enough money until they believe it, as opposed to finding people who believe in flat earth and then giving them money to try and get them elected. Yeah, no, that's a much, much more reasonable strategy. And then part of it is becomes you don't even need to do that, because what political parties are doing is they're recruiting people who believe in a whole host of ideological things. And if flat earth becomes part of what it means to be one of the parties, then you're going to bring along people who are educated in that information environment. And so you end up with flat earth as sort of a bonus from supporting that ideology if flat earth were to be that thing. So yeah, I think that that's exactly makes much more sense. But then we've both described a way now in which money could influence outcomes is just more complicated. And so it makes sense to her to think about how does that work? And then what kind of policies should we implement? So if it's the case that the way in which money influences outcomes isn't by buying people off straight, but is by steering and shaping things, then one problem, one thing that we might imagine is the more in which that money goes through central organizations like political parties where they have to balance off lots and lots of interests, that's better. Whereas if the money is going straight at people, then they can mobilize a flat earth person and just get flat earth people on the on the parties platform. And so we should have campaign finance regulations that don't undermine parties, but undermine individual contributions, for example. So that's one plausible thing if that's the case. And there's the research that suggests that that's what you ought to do. There's a book by Ray LaRosha and Brian Shaffner that makes that argument. And I don't know if that's right. And I've talked to lots of really smart people in campaign finance who don't think that's true. And I don't know. And that's exactly the point is that we're not quite sure about exactly how it is that money influences outcomes. Now, we look at our politics, and I'm not sure if it's opinions about politics or opinions about Washington DC have ever been lower than they are today, shared by both sides. And we have Donald Trump, much to everyone's surprise in polarization and all these things. And one lesson I think people can learn from your excellent essay, and I'm excited about the forthcoming book, is we might be expecting too much from politics. If we don't accept it as sort of a nitty gritty, this is how we hash out compromises and make deals, then we might actually have a difficulty using politics for what it is, which is a way of trying to get people with many different interests and attitudes to live together cooperatively rather than combatively. Yeah, I think that's a fair reading is that we do have a large expectation. We want things to work. And it goes beyond politics, right? You're like, why is this traffic this way? And why are these roads steer in this direction? And why can't we have a more effective way of getting to the beach and all these other things? We just think, you know, somebody, they did it wrong. The difference is that politics is actually a place where we are able to influence and get involved in outcomes. And so then it's not just being angry at the system. It's like we could actually participate in it. And so yeah, it would make a lot more sense to appreciate that what we could expect out of it won't be a policy that makes you happy or that makes me happy, but it's going to be something that's going to be some amalgam of the various forces that were allowed in to the system. So I think that was a good ending, unless there's something that you think I missed. So one final thought I'd make for people who are going to be steered towards this article is that, you know, this, I'm glad people would read it. I think it was a good piece. I'm glad to write it. I am writing a booklet version. And part of the reason I'm writing a booklet version is because there's been a lot of demand for it. But also because some of the stuff that's in the piece, you know, social science has marched on and we have a better understanding of things. And I would say things slightly differently here, which doesn't say I'm not going to give you all the caveats here, but that's the part of the point about social science is that we, you know, we keep learning and we keep building on things. And yet there are some sort of enduring things, you know, we don't, you don't need to be up on the latest research to know what's going on. You know, the important thing isn't that you have access to a political science journal. The important thing is that you have access to your sophomore political science lecture notes in a lot of ways, because there are some enduring things to be found there. And if you find that in the article that I wrote, that's great, but you can also get that from your own education. Thanks for listening. This episode of Free Thoughts was produced by Tess Terrible and Evan Banks. To learn more, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.