 Good evening. This being 701, 702. Let's get started. My name is Robert Eisinger. I'm a professor of political science here at Roger Williams, and it's my great pleasure to introduce my friend and colleague Chris Aitken. But before I do a few brief announcements, first I say it knowing that some of you know it already. Please silence your phones, devices, contraptions, GPS's, whatever we now call them. Second, some logistics. After Chris concludes his talk, there'll be an opportunity for questions and answers. You see the microphones here, and that will be followed by a book signing outside. Here's the book. Here's the book title, and it's wonderful. A special thanks go to several individuals who helped make this event happen. I cannot include all of them, but I think it's worthy to include Kate Barash, Heidi Dagwon, and Joe Auger. Let's give them a round of applause. Bonley, my first days in graduate school at the University of Chicago, where Chris Aitken was then the chair of the political science department. I won't regale you with stories, but let's just say in a department full of bombastic personalities and healthy egos, Chris distinguished himself for his serenity and calm demeanor. Chris is a political junkie, anybody who interacts with him knows that, and he speaks fondly and passionately not just about political science, but about politics. Within the discipline of political science, Chris is known for his work in political methodology. That is how one studies politics and the methods used to derive meaningful answers to compelling puzzles. His early and current work on representation and survey responses remain the gold standards by which undergraduates, graduate students, and colleagues assess the challenges of accurately assessing political attitudes and beliefs. Chris Aitken is known for his clarity of thought both in the classroom and in his written scholarship. He's also known for his dedication to his students, his methodological rigor, and his kindness. What is less known about Chris is his keen interest in the history of political science, most specifically how the pioneers within the discipline from the late 19th and early 20th century continued to shed light about how we can best explain political behavior and the evolution of political institutions. If you ask Chris a question, he may in fact refer you to Alexis de Tocqueville, James Bryce, Woodrow Wilson, Harold Gosnell, and some others. But beyond his insights as a political scientist, Chris remains one of the more decent people I've ever encountered in higher education. Chris has a coterie of students who remain his friend and have befriended him in large part because we've learned a lot from him and we know that if we continue to stay friends with him, we will continue to grow as scholars and as citizens underlying his incredibly impressive CV degree from Berkeley by Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude, PhD from Yale, US Army Reserves, professional stints at Michigan, Chicago, and now at Princeton is a love of life, a wonderfully ricense of humor, a contagious laugh, and a thoroughly irrational affection for Michigan Wolverine football. Tonight's talk is appropriately titled, Why Elections Produce Unresponsive Outcomes. Please join me in welcoming to Roger Williams, the Roger Williams Strauss Professor at Princeton University. Chris Aiken. Well, I knew Robert, I've known Robert a long time and I knew that the, his introduction of me would be entertaining and laudatory and I'm sorry that my parents aren't still alive to hear it. My father would have enjoyed it and my mother would have believed it. What I want to talk about today is this book that came out in the spring with my colleague Larry Bartels who's at Vanderbilt and I thought I would begin by telling you one secret story about this book that has never been told in public and that story is this. While we were writing this book, I got interested in Rhode Island history and the colonial period. Now, I came up here on the train yesterday from New Jersey and I did not need a passport when we left Connecticut and came into Rhode Island. But ladies and gentlemen, this was a near thing. Rhode Island did not want to join the union. It was the last state to join and the people of the state were bitterly opposed to becoming part of the United States. If you look at the Federalist Papers, you will see that there are several references to Rhode Island. I have Clinton Rossiter's edited version of them and Rossiter was a famous political scientist at Cornell a generation ago and if you look in the index, there are four references to Rhode Island in the Federalist Papers. In two of those, Rhode Island is actually mentioned. In other cases, a description is given of how disastrous politics can be even in a small place and Rossiter is sure that that was Rhode Island that was being mentioned. Well, I wanted to write about this several pages in this book and Larry exercising his customary good sense and wise judgment said, well, we just can't go on at that length. The book is pretty long already. You can write a sentence and a footnote and that will be yet because, you know, when is anyone ever going to have a chance to talk in Rhode Island about this subject? Here I am. I have proven him wrong. So there is no Rhode Island reference in this book, but it does appear on page 56 and it does discuss this very point and it's relevant to not just a side issue because what happened in that period and saved me from having to bring my passport yesterday was this. The elected leadership, that is to say the politicians widely despised by the American people in every state were the ones who got Rhode Island into the Union. The people of the state, we didn't have polls in those days and the leadership of the state made sure there was no referendum because they were sure they were going to lose it. The people of the state didn't want to do it and democracy left to itself at that point would have turned you into a little banana republic up here sandwiched between Connecticut and Massachusetts. That didn't happen. That didn't happen but it was precisely because political leadership got it done and not because popular government got it done. Well that's exactly the theme that I want to address today. So we didn't get Rhode Island into our index but neither did the Federalist papers. So Rogue Island was how Rhode Island was referred to by the people in the other states at that point and it was credit, it was clashes between debtors and creditors that were fundamental and they just barely managed to get it done. There may be people in the audience here who know a great deal about that period. So that's my remark about Rogue Island. What about now? Well we have a story now about how democracy is supposed to work and I want to bring to your attention how different that is from what the previous 20 centuries before the 18th, the way that they thought about political leadership and proper government. Democracy was not widely respected in that period. It was thought to be that kind of disaster that had been seen many times where demagogues would promise crazy things and lie repeatedly and the voters wouldn't care and they vote for them anyway and so forth. That was thought to be a standard feature of democracy. So if we had been meeting here 300 years ago we would be in the middle of the forest but if we had tried to do that and if I had said to you you know I think democracy in the end is probably the best form of government you would have said oh a crazy wide-eyed radical with crackpot ideas. Everyone knows that's not the case. What was thought to be sensible by thoughtful people including professors and oh a great many other categories of people was that the king had been appointed by God in one or another sense and right thinking people including intellectuals thought that point was beyond criticism and they spent a lot of time congratulating themselves about being in the best of all possible political systems and their failures and errors were swept under the rug. So the argument was always that the king was never wrong because after all he had been appointed by God. This applied to Queens too and couldn't be wrong but he or she might have been badly advised. So there was a lot of discussion about the evil people around the king who was always a good a good person. Now we don't believe in divine right of kings anymore. We have a different divine ruler and that's the people. So Robert Dahl my teacher a famous political scientist who wrote a great deal about democracy in his lifetime passed away just recently in his 90s. He argued that a kind of classic statement of what Larry and I call the folk theory. This is the notion that ordinary people have policy ideas. They want to get those policy ideas enacted into law. Have those policies carried out by the by the government and they look for candidates who agree with them, agree with the ideas that they have about this about how the government should be run. When they find candidates who agree with them they vote for them and that's how we get responsive government. The people that are elected are people who have our ideas and the reason they have them is we pick them on that on that basis and that was the idea that Dahl promoted through his long career. This is from early part of his career but he continued in exactly this line. Well as I say we call that the folk theory. What is a folk theory? It's a theory that you can't actually find any experts to endorse in detail. Dahl himself didn't endorse this theory in complete detail. He qualified it in a variety of ways and so does everybody else. So there is no there is no author I can point to who has this exact idea of how democracy should work. It's it is just something that appears in 4th of July speeches. It also appears in campaign speeches. So when you listen to the candidates for president this year you heard this kind of logic all the time. Appeals to the innate goodness of the American people and the government is corrupt and bad and not running well but I will take your ideas and I will carry them out and that's why you should you should vote for me. So we have the same theory really about the people that the people that those who believed in the divine right of kings had. That is to say as Rousseau put it in the 18th century people are never corrupted but sometimes deceived. And we have our own set of people who who are thought to be the usual suspects for deceiving people. Interest groups sometimes political parties corruptions of various kinds depending on your politics the media of the side that you don't agree with and so on and so forth but people themselves are thought to be good decent people who are are never never misled and those those ideas get elected into politics into into legislatures of the presidency. The problem with this is that it's just not true and we've known it's not true for more than 100 years. So if you read Graham Wallace in 1909 for example he talks about how when you talk to real people when you talk to actual voters they don't have policy ideas. One of the things that happens when you walk a precinct is that you talk to real voters and you hear them out on exactly these these kinds of topics and and the things that are so dominant in the in the media so dominant in the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal and and the little magazines of opinion from the National Review to the New Republic and so on those make almost no impression in the life of ordinary people they're busy they've got sick grandparents they've got little kids they've got they're working two jobs they're they're just plain busy and a lot of other things are way more interesting and way more fun sports for example family family life and so this uh conversation that goes on those of you who are political science majors you're plugged in and there is a group of people who are deeply deeply involved in all of this stuff and can rehearse the entire presidential campaign speech by speech and blunder by blunder but that's not most people most people just aren't paying attention and the developments that have occurred over the last 50 years that have been so impressive in so many ways the internet for example when I get up in the morning I can read the New York Times and the Washington Post and several other things you know for free uh and I just you know erase my cookies every now and then so they never know how many I've read uh and I can follow all kinds of things in a very inexpensive very inexpensive way that was simply impossible 50 years ago so information is available now cheaply in a way that it simply was not and a generation or two ago and a lot of people infer from that that political information political knowledge must have risen really dramatically and the answer to that is it hasn't the percentage of people who knew the name of their member of congress in the 1950s was a half the percentage of people who know the name of their member of congress today is a half and on a wide variety of other topics the information level about politics just hasn't moved and a simple fact is that the details of politics as opposed to sex scandals and so forth just aren't very aren't very exciting to most to most people there is an enormous difference between the two presidential candidates this year on foreign policy a dramatic difference sufficiently dramatic that a lot of Republican foreign policy experts and intellectuals have endorsed Hillary Clinton that's how far Donald Trump is from from the American norms on this on this score but when you look at this survey research look at the opinion polls ask ordinary people how do the foreign policy opinions of these two candidates differ they simply don't know that was true in the democratic primary as well those two candidates between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton were very different on foreign policy and that went almost undiscussed so in all these ways we simply know that whoops wrong button we simply know that this just doesn't work now the irony here is that none of we know all this but it doesn't make an impression on us so George Gallup wrote a book in 1940 called the pulse of democracy in which he said polling is going to be great we can find out what the voters think and the government can just do that and that is the folk theory of democracy in a very straightforward way nothing about leadership nothing about about having more information on the part of of the people who work full time in politics just enact into law what it is that ordinary voters are thinking now if you think that the polling business works like that that it simply reflects what ordinary voters think then Robert Isinger's book the evolution of presidential polling is a great place to look the politicians and the pollsters have been tangled up with each other for many decades and the matter is a lot more complex than than Mr. Gallup or more recently Frank Newport who works for Gallup would have you believe now you may say one of the chapters in our book is called actually it's called it feels like we're thinking of course horrible grammar but it feels as if we were thinking has no ring to it at all so I put the grammatical thing up here today but that's not what the chapter is called this is this is a little graph here that shows you opinion about the budget deficit in the Clinton years so if you think back those of you who are old enough to remember that period the deficit the federal budget deficit that Clinton inherited was quite substantial in 1993 when he took office by the end of his term combination of the tax increase that George H. W. Bush had negotiated at the end of his term and the one that Clinton put into place had eliminated the budget deficit the economy was roaring everybody was working and so the question was then in 1996 when Clinton was up for reelection the question to ordinary voters was what's happened to the budget deficit since Clinton took office this was an intensely discussed issue at the time it was in the headlines of all the newspapers internet was a little young at that point but it was all over the internet too what did people say when asked now this is worked on by the University of Michigan the American National Election Study very famous long-running series of surveys in presidential and midterm years and the vertical axis here the y-axis ranges from 50 to to minus 50 50 is the response it the deficit has improved a lot minus 50 is it's gotten a lot worse so this line here that I didn't get it to show this line is the average response of democrats as a function of how much information they knew so we asked we asked people political information questions how many justices of the supreme court are there who is the chief justice of the supreme court which party has the majority in the house of representatives questions of that kind that are easy for people who follow politics closely and hard for people who don't so we grouped people into percentiles here so this works exactly like your SAT scores did right 90 percentile means 90 percent of the people know less than you do 10 percent of the people know more so there's an eight there are an equal number of people at each of these at each of these points and we simply look at them by party so in this group these are the democrats up to the 70th percentile the average response they're giving is zero that means the economy the budget deficit hasn't gotten either better or worse they simply have no idea right and that's up to almost three quarters of the population they just among democrats they simply have no idea and it's only in the upper 30 percent and really dramatically only in the last 10 or 15 percent that you start to get responses that are close to the truth which is a dramatic change for the better in in the budget deficit the situation among republicans on the other hand is different at the low end of information they look just like they look just like the democrats they know probably that the deficit is always getting bad they don't exactly know whether the president is responsible for it or not they may be a little vague about what a deficit is they simply give an average response of zero but as they start to get a little more information here among republicans they move to an average response that the deficit has gotten worse somewhat worse how could anyone think the deficit had gotten worse in that period we believe that the mental process they go through is this they don't actually know what's happened to the deficit but they do know that the president has responsibility for it they do know that clinton is in office they do know that clinton is a democrat and they know that democrats are no good so it must have gotten worse so in this intermediate in this intermediate stretch on an issue of it was you know really central it was then what immigration is now very much central to the to the debates republicans are on the wrong side and as it and you have to go fairly far up among republicans just to get to where they say well and it may be neither better nor worse and only at the really high ends of information are they prepared to concede that maybe clinton has made some some helpful difference now if you're a democrat sitting there saying to yourself i knew those republicans were confused let me just tell you that if i had put up the same graph or whether ronald reagan had improved inflation in his period in office which he did dramatically just as dramatically as clinton improved the budget deficit the graph would be exactly the same except that the two parties would be reversed that is to say it was the democrats who were lying to themselves in in that in that period so this graph isn't about republicans it's about people and about how little we how little attention we we pay now professional political scientists mostly defend democracy in a in a different way and we defend it with something called the retrospective theory of voting and i'm going to skip through some of this just in the interests of time but the idea simply is that yeah the voters don't follow things in detail but it's okay because they can tell good from there right they can tell whether things are going all right so they can pick a candidate or pick a government in the same way that you pick a dentist you have a toothache you go to the dentist he or she does something to you and you decide whether or not you're getting better and if you're not getting better you change dentists and if you are getting better you reelect the incumbent so that's the argument and morris farina at stanford has made a lot of this and has has said things like that that summarize exactly what i just said if jobs have been lost in a recession something's wrong and so forth now there's much to this what are the things that surprises people who come to political science for the first time is as james carville famously put it in 1992 during that election campaign it's the economy stupid and what this is is a graph of the state of the economy in each of the sorry about that each of these years got it in each of these years the growth in real disposable income per capita in the spring and summer of the year before the election and these numbers here on the horizontal axis are the percentage growth the annual percentage rate of growth and you can see we've had some years where growth rates were negative and some in which they were substantially positive but we simply plot that against the vote for the incumbent this is adjusted for the fact that when a party's been in office for a while people are inclined to vote against them so right now the democrats have been in office for eight years that gives the republicans an advantage in a year like this one and with any good sense in the primaries they would be winning they're not winning uh says something but what this tells you is that if you all you know is the state of the economy in a given year you can do a terrifically good job of predicting who is going to be elected there's some deviation off the line that's because wars come along some candidates are better than others but to a pretty good to a pretty good basis uh you can predict that's retrospective voting right people just say how's the economy been doing lightly if it's good they reelect the incumbent if it's bad they don't so there's a lot to this retrospective theory but for it to make sense as a defensive democracy the voters have to know whether it's the government's fault that's happened so this is a long story and i'm glad to go into it more in the in the question period but i want to give you just one example in 1916 in new jersey there were shark attacks along the shore then four people died two of these shark attacks were uh in beach towns uh the so-called jersey shore towns and the summer was ruined people used this as an argument against wilson he had cabinet meetings to deal with this he sent coast guard cutters up and down to try to try to kill the sharks and the whole thing worked in exactly the way that the jaws movies if you've seen those and there's a novel two actually by peter benchley who lived in who lived in princeton uh and knew about the 1916 shark attacks in new jersey there's actually a brief reference to the to those attacks but they but the jaws movies recapitulate in great detail what happened in new jersey in 1916 denial that there were sharks trying to keep the news away from the summer people and all that sort of thing so here's where the sharks were this is a little map here and the shark apparently was if it was just one shark no one knows for sure apparently swimming north further north than usual attacked in this little town of beach haven and then again up here in spring lake so you can see that this is just there's princeton it's just not very far it's less than an hour's drive down to these places and you can stand there in the shore now and watch the people in the water in their swimsuits and think about 1916 that uh we studied this uh those shark attacks and they reduced the vote for princeton for uh would go wilson i said princeton because he was a former member of my department before he became president it reduced the vote for wilson in the fall by about 10 percentage points in in that part of the state so people voted against the incumbent because there were shark attacks and that's not the only kind of voting against the incumbent that people do so agricultural states depend on rain and you can look back over the last 100 years and see um whether states were too wet or too dry we've done that we has to make that close to three million people voted against al gore again the democrats were the incumbent incumbents then because their states were were too wet or too dry he lost seven we think about seven states because of that of course more than enough to keep him from from being um from being president now you might say well but a lot of this is rational right so in the depression people voted to get rid of herbert hoover he didn't want to do anything about the economy franklin roosevelt did that's that's perfectly good rationality but it turns out that across europe people just threw out the incumbents when the when the depression hit they threw out socialist governments if the socialists were in power they threw out right wing conservative governments if the conservatives were in power they threw out middle of the road governments if they were in power people simply voted against the incumbents because time was hard i didn't have anything to do with whether they were going to be better or off better or worse off after it happened so in in summary here um this is i'm going to skip a little bit of this in summary we think that people do did this then and do it now this is uh polling data from 2008 the bluish line there is the percentage of people favoring obama the reddish line is the percent favoring mccain and you can see that mccain was doing quite well in the first part of september and then the great recession started banks and finance companies started to fail and obama was obama was elected so if this is the way the voters think it's hard to make this the foundation of democracy either so i'm going to that's about um alberta and i'm skipping over the canadian uh canadian case because it's common for americans to do that but i'm glad to glad to discuss it in the in uh in the question period and uh these effects are often long-lasting so the republicans were the majority party before franklin roosevelt the depression came along and the democrats were the majority party for more than a generation after that so we argue that these effects and the way the voters think about voting the retrospective effects are not only unrelated to what the government is doing frequently but they're they have powerful long-term long-term effects that that turn the tide in elections for a full generation afterwards all of this um me as more alberta there um all of this means that um we can't think about democracy with both theory and we can't think about it with the retrospective theory voting that simply doesn't simply doesn't work so this is so the alternative that we turn to frequently in places where there are referendums and initiatives is just to have people themselves decide or to give or to give their elected officials very short terms of office so it was quite common in the colonial period in this country to give governors one year terms and that was to keep them on a short leash so they were constantly uh campaigning for office and had to do exactly what people wanted done even if even if it was just a short term preference on the part of the voters this is support for floridation floridation uh is not a hot issue anymore it's kind of died down but it was hot in the fifties and sixties this was the process of adding compounds of fluorine to gas to water because that helps reduce the number of cavities that that kids get i grew up in a town that believed that floridation was a communist conspiracy and i have uh many thousands of dollars of dental bills to show for for it this is this is support for floridation by mayors this was a survey that was done in the in the fifties not by us these are i hit the wrong button again these are um mayors was very short terms with one year terms these are two to three year terms and these are mayors with four to five year terms and you can see that the safer the person is in office and the more insulated they are from popular pressures the more likely they are to do that to do the right thing it's precisely when they have to do what the voters want done in the short run that they harm their children a more dramatic instance of this is the 1991 oakland hills firestorm which killed 25 people and devastated about 3000 homes the federal emergency management agency found that it was proposition 13 the voter approved initiative that cut taxes that was primarily responsible for the inability to respond to the to the thing and as far as we can tell the voting data aren't quite right on top of the fire area but it looks as if the people in those areas that were where the fire took place had voted about uh three to one in favor of the tax cutting initiative in other words by a three to one majority they voted to burn their homes down now this way of thinking tells you not that the voters are always wrong because they're not often elites are wrong too but what it tells you is that an exclusive reliance on just one of those groups is a mistake so just as cutting the voters out of the policy process entirely which is the way the divine right of kings worked that's a mistake so also is turning over policy decisions just to the voters and we have a system now for in many states for making policy decisions by just having the voters make those decisions themselves and they make a lot of make a lot of mistakes our primary selection of presidential candidates just in my lifetime has gone from one in which people who actually know the candidates had some voice in the selection process we have now turned it over entirely to ordinary people on on both sides this is particularly relevant uh on the dispute about super delegates which um you know both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump talked about a good deal and they talked about how it's undemocratic to have to have super delegates that's that's folk theory thinking and it seems to us seems to us a mistake how do people how do people actually make decisions in the voting booth we think it's identities that is to say social identities religious identities professional identities gender identities all kinds of identities that which we all have often many identities and it's those that are fundamental now we uh when last spring when our book came out we hired Donald Trump to help us make this point and he's done a wonderful publicity job for us but it's particularly clear in his case I think that his support comes from people with a certain identity it's an older uh heavily white group of people with strong views about the country being american is important to their identity and they have a feeling that they have been mistreated by the system and that's that's part of their identity as well again if you're a democrat congratulating yourself that you don't do this kind of thing I suggest that you're quite mistaken these forces are just as strong on the democratic side as they are on the republican side Clinton is getting strong support from minorities and those are again are often strong identities for people there's also a huge gender gap this year and those gender identities are an important part of what distinguishes these two candidates what we argue though is that policy views are not crucial and the example I keep referring to is Donald Trump's proposal to build a wall across the boundary with Mexico his voters agree with that so if you survey them and say you think we should build a wall across Mexico they say yes and if you say does Donald Trump support that they say yes and it looks like a great victory for the folk theory of democracy people have preferences they find a candidate with those preferences and they vote for that person of course it doesn't work like that at all right they developed their preference for building a wall across Mexico because he proposed it and over and over and over again in more subtle cases that are harder to that are harder to talk about simply but which political scientists have investigated in great detail for 50 years that's what's going on just as much on the Democratic side is on the Republican side if you watch MSNBC in the mornings my wife does you'd be hard pressed to know that Hillary Clinton has had any troubles with her email servers or a lot of other challenges that she has faced and much the same is true about Fox News and the challenges that Republicans have have faced so these identities affect not only how you vote and the ideas you adopt but they even affect to some degree your judgment of what the facts are as we saw in the case of the of the budget deficit in the in the in the Clinton years so there's a lot of intellectual history here from the 19th century that we have lost we want to we want to revive it so I want to give just a couple of examples here and then I'll uh fall silent of examples in which identities are are powerful and and important this is Catholic support for Democrats from the period of 1952 to 2008 you can see there's just one huge jump there in 1960 that's that's John Kennedy running for president right this couldn't matter less anymore right John Kerry was Catholic the only people who made an issue of his Catholicism in that race were the Catholic bishops they were mad at him because he wasn't adhering to Catholic doctrine nobody else cared but that identity effect in that year not only raised support for the Democrats among Catholics you can see Rhode Island just jumping right off the line at that point because this is the most Catholic state in the country but Protestants particularly in the south went in the other direction people who never voted for a republican in their life voted for Richard Nixon because they couldn't abide the thought that the pope was going to be sailing on a barge up the Potomac and taking over the White House you laugh but I remember uh what about um what about a case that everyone thinks must be an exception so this as we all know one of the big realignments that's taken place in American politics has been the south from being the solid south for uh about a hundred years always voting for the Democrats it has now become reliably Republican and you might say to yourself well we know why that is it's because once black people started to vote in the south that and they were Democrats that drove Republicans into the into the Republican sorry that drove white Democrats into the Republican Party on grounds of racial conservatism not exactly this is the change in the uh margin not as to say the difference between how many people are Democrats and how many people are Republicans among white Southerners over the period from 1960 to 2000 as you can see there's two lines here which I'll explain in a minute show that that proportion is dropping pretty steadily in the south that is to say white Southerners are becoming a republican as we all know what's not so obvious in this line is that the darker one is racially conservative white Southerners and the lighter one is racially liberal white Southerners and as you can see the racially conservative ones drop a little more but they're both plummeting it isn't policy right it's identity and being a white Southerner who is a Democrat has become more and more and more difficult we're not alone in this other people have looked at this and said Jesus can't be true but it looks like it is it's not really race last example I'm going to give here is about abortion we have a long-running study in political sciences are people my age exactly my age who were interviewed when they were high school juniors and they've been interviewed four times so we can look at people in 1980 who were interviewed in 1982 and these are people in this graph these are all people in 1982 who said they were republicans and we know their opinion their opinion on abortion in 1982 because we asked them and these are conservative people on abortion these are people who say abortion is sometimes necessary these are people who say that abortion should always be permitted right and so the this the height of these curves tell you how many of those people stuck with the republican party the upper graph is men and the lower one is women you can see that people who were conservative on abortion in 1982 practically all stuck with the republican party until 1997 both men and women didn't make any difference but as they became more liberal on abortion policy it didn't the men didn't care right there's a little drop but there's not much of an effect the women plunge in fact this number is just about 50 percent that is to say women who were liberal on abortion in in 1982 about these are white women they were about half gone by the year 1997 15 year period about half of white women with liberal abortion views left the republican party and that's a lot of that's a large part of realignment why not men okay right it's just not a central an issue for me this is a similar one where we look at people who were pro-life in 1982 that's a comfortable majority actually and we look at what happened to them by 1997 their abortion views by party so over here on this side these are the republicans and they were pro-life in 1982 and they're mostly still pro-life in 1997 over here the democrats are who were pro-life in 82 have mostly converted to being to being pro-choice who has really converted the women not so much right the men the men converted a lot more look at these two things tell you women care much more about abortion than men do when they find themselves in a clash between their party's views and their views they mostly just change their views to accord with their party when women find themselves in a clash between those two things they dump their party because it's much more simple to them so there are two competing identities here and one of them is a gender identity and the other one is a partisan identity and you can see what what difference that that makes so we argue then that these identities predict and that they are central to to politics we think we ought to spend more time thinking about that and we think that the romantic interpretation of the folk theory isn't the right way to think about politics this has all kinds of consequences so you'll find occasionally people who think that the Germans were anti-Semitic and that's why they elected Hitler that's folk theory thinking again historians who've looked at it think that exactly the opposite was true they were anti-Semitic because they were for Hitler they weren't for Hitler because they were anti-Semitic last graph party this is this is um this is how liberal your member of congress is as a function of how liberal the constituency is you can see here that among the scale here is conservative at the top and liberal at the bottom among republicans the red dots they're all pretty conservative when the constituency gets a little more a little more conservative they get a little more conservative too but not much among democrats exactly the same thing they're down here toward the left because they're more liberal they don't respond much to their constituencies either again that tells you the folk theory doesn't work right mostly democrats are democrats and republicans are republicans and how liberal or conservative the constituency is doesn't doesn't make much difference well there are lots of good things about democracy uh and we can talk more about that i want to halt here but what i really want to say to you is that in the federalist papers and the ideas of the founders this was a republic and not a not a democracy republican capital r republican conservatives often say that but they have a hard time sticking to it just as the just as the democrats do leadership matters to say it would be more democratic to get rid of the super delegates for example it's not an intellectually serious argument and thinking more about the balance of popular views with the opinions of the professional politicians is really what we need to think more about let's skip this i think so i think that what political science needs to be more centrally about and what the thinking of educated and informed members of the citizenry needs to be about is thinking about candidates and their voters as coalitions of groups coalitions of identity groups as well as issue networks and issue networks are how those groups come to have certain policy views this whole package the fact that we mostly do what we're told and we mostly think what we're told means that there are huge imbalances in power uh in in the current system so america is a democracy but it's not very democratic talking about the divine right of people to rule is we argue bad science and it has real consequences that sometimes go as far as burning your home den okay that's it and i welcome your questions yeah uh if we can have the first two questions come from a student that would be great i'll just i'll just i can also talk loud okay i think it's on okay um so you talk about the divine right for people to rule and obviously looking at it from the platonic view that's the whole thing he does discusses in the republic so i'm kind of just wondering what you're feeling on his whole unjust regime thing is in relation to how it plays out now today um that's uh a very large topic as uh i'm sure you knew um it is interesting to read Plato and Aristotle now because so much of what we are saying here was was quite familiar to them and and more familiar than it is to most of us getting an education in high school civics class for for example their description of what of the problems of uh democracy with uh demagogues for example which i referred to earlier uh is you know describes Huey Long perfectly or Joe McCarthy perfectly um maybe other people too um and so their their focus is on um as i think a lot of americans really um really is um on getting good government right getting and and not necessarily doing exactly what we want them to do so um i was talking to um man once from my parents generation and just an ordinary person not an educated person and he said to me Franklin Roosevelt knew the war was coming and he knew we were going to have to fight it we didn't want to fight it he lied to us about how we weren't going to fight it he meantime prepared for that war he but he lied and lied and lied until Pearl Harbor and he said he was a great president so there is some sense on people's part that that leadership and the right answer is what's central well that's play though right play though is not about popular responsiveness uh he's he's about just government and right outcomes and i think a little harder thought about that on our part would be would be helpful in the current climate here's a question hi there um so i'm just curious uh this election of course it's seeming in many guards that the populism that donald trump's really brought forth is kind of like reconnaissance of like the whole 1972 election um just in regards to you know where um the party leaders you know the their chosen candidate has really been somewhat of a it fell through completely for them um do you see essentially any ability for the republican party to come back after this election um and also just in regards to um term limits as well because you're discussing how um with those one year term limits there is a lot of pressure and political leaders weren't actually able to do their jobs do you see the term limits as being something just a populist you know sort of request um you know that's not going to happen anytime soon or do you think um that it's there's something more to that as well uh those are two good questions let me take the um term limits thing first because we actually talk about those in the book and i i think the upshot of term limits sound good to people uh get get a less professional legislature and so on fresh blood there is a fair amount of research on this now and what happens is when you have term limits you get amateurs uh in in office and they are easily suckered by the interest groups so voting for term limits is really voting to have the interest groups in insurance rather rather than the legislature and you know we don't do this in other aspects of our lives you don't you don't say to yourself geez this you know this surgeon uh he's been in there six years i think i should get a younger one this airline pilot you know he's been flying 10 years i think i should get one just out of flight school we don't think that way in other aspects of life and i think the reason we don't is that we don't think of politicians as a professional class as knowing something that's a serious mistake that's a serious mistake um on the other question i think that i think that the future of the republican party is just extremely interesting at the at the moment we were talking about this at dinner that challenges there you know there are three pieces basically to the republican party there's there are the there's the business interests the evangelicals and other christian conservatives and then the tea party slash donald trump people and that's too simple in a variety of ways but you get the drift of what i'm trying to say business people and the evangelicals had worked out how to live together but nobody has worked out how to live together with the tea party and so will it evolve um or will they will they split will we have a third party movement the republicans split in the first part of the 20th century we had three-way races for for president in in 1912 and 1924 for example that was a republican party split to sort that out i think that's a that's a possibility the other possibility is um that the trump people are um old and a few elections and there are fewer and fewer of them all the time uh young people don't want to go in that direction if they're republicans that's another possible outcome i would be it's leading you if i said i had any idea what the how that's going to play out i don't think anyone does uh i'd be curious to know your opinion on uh the electoral college as opposed to the popular vote which does not in fact decide the outcome of elections right in recent times that's been the case um what in your in your opinion should the electoral college be abolished should popular vote decide i find that when i'm talking on the coast there's great enthusiasm for abolishing the electoral college when i'm talking in the center of the country in the little states there isn't um i'm from montana originally it's a little state and i listen a lot to coastal people talking about the flyover states and how they're totally irrelevant and should be ignored and so on and that reminds me of the constitutional convention and the provisions that were put in the united states senate being the obvious one but the electoral college being the other one two because it is a federal system and because the states do have legal sovereignty limited but nevertheless sovereignty that we have we have provisions in place so that the big powerful states can't just do whatever they want this isn't what i thought when i was young um and there are two good sides to the argument but i guess i lean a little toward the senate and the electoral college more questions i'll walk to you you can shout kuba shout away and i'll get a mic um well first off i do agree with the the point that politicians do need to be considered as a profession um but i was intrigued by the graph that posits the idea that the the more secure the mayor was in their term the better decisions that they would objectively make so how do you contrast that to a congress where many of the representatives are essentially guaranteed income and see um simply because of the nature of of whether their finances or the electorate so so how do you i don't know how do you draw a line from the mayor argument to a congress that is gridlocked and when not gridlocked ineffective robert don't you have any students here who could ask simple yeah why don't you make you gotta defend the uh non-competitive district there's a reason for good government buddy the the issue that you raise is an important one obviously just as the previous questions raised here were hard and important the i think the issue is partly this you can't um when i was your age the states were gerrymandered so it would often be the case that that um 25 percent of the voters could elect a majority of the legislature and the supreme court struck that down in the 60s the warren court did they explicitly excluded themselves however from going into partisan gerrymanders and i i guess my view is we at some point they need to go into partisan gerrymanders because the legislatures just as they wouldn't reform themselves then aren't going to reform themselves now you do have this situation in which uh in the house in this election for example it's a handful it's a handful of seats that are competitive if the democratic sweep on election night is at the high end of the polls uh we might get a change of 50 or 60 seats but it's not going to be 100 as it would have been a century ago and it is precisely for the reason you raised that that this happens and i think it has two consequences one is that these people are essentially in office forever and cemented in but the other consequence is that their only challenge comes from in the primary and that means that in both parties the the people that are out to the wings pull pull the incumbents further out and you know in we have a lot of data on this now but the in both parties in congress now the number of moderates is really quite small i was in in college there i was tom foley's first college summer intern a guy who eventually became a speaker of the of the house but he was just newly elected and i got to know him a little then and kept in touch somewhat over the years and i was invited to his memorial service at the capital a year ago which was a real honor for me but bob michael spoke who was the minority leader in the time when foley was my speaker and michael talked about how uh you know this democrat and this republican would meet each week together talk about the things that the two parties could agree on say yeah we're gonna yell about this but actually we can live with it and so on and they would work out something acceptable and the result would be you know good government doesn't that doesn't happen anymore and that's a problem i think the constitution just doesn't isn't designed to work well with with parties that that polarized and i do think that a lot of people disagree with this i'm in the minority but i do think that redistricting is part of the problem a couple more questions yeah thank you so theories on the social contracts were a highlight of the enlightenment period i was just wondering do you believe that theories of the social contract is still relevant in today's society or do you think we've progressed to believe in a more relevant theory of political thinking that's another softball yeah i'll be glad to get to bed tonight um there is a political theorist in the room this is not going to be up to speed but i'll i'll do the best that i can there is an element of social contract in being a member of the democratic society right you do you do commit yourself to certain norms certain values use you do not say for example it'll be great if we win the election but if not i will have the military take over the country and and things like that so there there is a there is a kind of implicit agreement that we're all under that certain certain norms are going to be upheld and certain norms that are i think you know have become violated all too often later these norms of civility and and listening to the other side and not assuming that that they're evil or or stupid um and and so in that sense i think i think that aspect of the social contract is is very relevant if you're referring specifically to rousseau's version of the social contract that for me doesn't work anymore and that's maybe a longer discussion than than you want from me right now but i'd i'd be glad to chat afterwards if you want to pursue it who wants the last question no i'm not i had when i was teaching this at an early stage i was teaching this course at the university of michigan an early version of some of this and i had a student come to me late in the semester and she said i want to make sure i understand the argument that you're making i said well why don't you kind of summarize and i'll see she laid it all out i said i think you've got it she said this is really depressing i said now i'm sure you've got it and there is i i don't hold that there are people who think that uh procedures for deliberative democracy where we'd sit in the room and talk to each other and so forth but that would make a difference i'm skeptical about people wanting to go to those meetings most most people don't want politics to be like a philosophy seminar so my own goal here my own view here i should say is that we have to stop lying to ourselves about you know human human nature when we've written when we've done things like this for and we did an op ed this summer and uh you know we got feedback and some of the email feedback was yes the other candidates are motivated by these group loyalties we however all have only justice and rationality in supporting our candidate so it's easy enough to see this stuff in other people it's the challenges to see it in yourself i'm more inclined to think that that's not going to happen um and that we need institutions that balance uh as james madison also a product of my department although not lately um uh said that it's it's putting countervailing forces in place so that no one of us gets to have our own little biases and prejudices operative and that out of that process of having to deal with with other power centers you are you get closer to something reasonable because you don't get to control with all yourself but what's hard about this is that that's exactly what people don't like you know they want a strong leader will do what's right meaning what i want that's not democracy democracy is about compromise and that's exactly how the constitution is written on that sobering note let's give a big hand for chris agon there there remain opportunities to continue the q and a solo and there's a book signing outside if you have more questions so continue the dialogue and conversation outside