Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

Inclusion and democracy.

The course is focused on historical texts, most of them philosophical. Context for understanding the texts and the course of democratic development will be provided in lecture and discussions, and by some background readings (Dunn). We begin with the remarkable Athenian democracy, and its frequent enemy the Spartan oligarchy. In Athens legislation was passed directly by an assembly of all citizens, and executive officials were selected by lot rather than by competitive election. Athenian oligarchs such as Plato more admired Sparta, and their disdain for the democracy became the judgment of the ages, until well after the modern democratic revolutions. Marsilius of Padua in the early Middle Ages argued for popular sovereignty. The Italian citystates of the Middle Ages did without kings, and looked back to Rome and Greece for republican models. During the English Civil War republicans debated whether the few or the many should be full citizens of the regime. The English, French, and American revolutions struggled with justifying and establishing a representative democracy suitable for a large state, and relied on election rather than lot to select officials. The English established a constitutional monarchy, admired in Europe, and adapted by the Americans in their republican constitution. The American Revolution helped inspire the French, and the French inspired republican and democratic revolution throughout Europe during the 19 century.

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Democracy and Its Critics

One in a while, every twenty years perhaps, a book appears that makes one see a whole area of human experience in a new light. Once pointed out, the new insights are sp obvious that one cannot understand how one could have missed them before. In the broad area of the political economy of western society, J.A. Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1943) was one such book. So, with all its faults, was J.K. Galbraith's The Affluent Society (1957). Fred Hirsch's Social Limits to Growth (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1977) is another.

Social limits to growth

Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age

What affects who participates in politics? In most studies of political behaviour it is found that individuals with higher education participate to a larger extent in political activities than individuals with lower education. According to conventional wisdom, education is supposed to increases civic skills and political knowledge that functions as the causal mechanisms triggering participation. However, recently a number of studies have started dealing with the question of whether education is a direct cause for political participation or merely works as a proxy for other factors, such as pre-adult socialization or social network centrality. This review article provides an introduction and critical discussion of this debate.

Education and Political Participation

Procedural fairness theory posits that the way in which authoritative decisions are made strongly impacts people’s willingness to accept them. This article challenges this claim by contending that democratic governments can achieve little in terms of acceptance of policy decisions by the procedural means at their disposal. Instead, outcome favorability is the dominant determinant of decision acceptance. The article explicates that while central parts of procedural fairness theory are true, outcome favorability is still overwhelmingly the strongest determinant of individuals’ willingness to accept authoritative decisions. It improves on previous research by locating all key variables into one causal model and testing this model using appropriate data. Findings from a large number of experiments (both vignette and field) reproduce the expected relationships from previous research and support the additional predictions.

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Reconsidering the Role of Procedures for Decision Acceptance

How can democracies satisfy citizens' demands for legitimate decision making? This article reports findings from a randomised field experiment designed to mimic decision making in large-scale democracies. Natural collectives of individuals with a shared history and future (high school classes) were studied. They were asked to make a decision about how to spend a sum of money under arrangements imposed by the researchers and distributed randomly across classes. Within this setting, empirical support for three ideas about legitimacy enhancing decision-making arrangements is tested: participatory constitution-making; personal involvement in the decision-making process; and fairness in the implementation of arrangements. Throughout the analyses it was found that personal involvement is the main factor generating legitimacy beliefs.

Which decision-making arrangements generate the strongest legitimacy beliefs? Evidence from a randomised field experiment

To paint a fuller picture of economic voters, we combine personal income records with a representative election survey. We examine three central topics in the economic voting literature: pocketbook versus sociotropic voting, the effects of partisanship on economic evaluations, and voter myopia. First, we show that voters who appear in survey data to be voting based on the national economy are, in fact, voting equally on the basis of their personal financial conditions. Second, there is strong evidence of both partisan bias and economic information in economic evaluations, but personal economic data is required to separate the two. Third, although in experiments and aggregate historical data recent economic conditions appear to drive vote choice, we find no evidence of myopia when we examine actual personal economic data.

Digging into the Pocketbook: Evidence on Economic Voting from Income Registry Data Matched to a Voter Survey

Can politicians facilitate citizen acceptance of unwelcome policy decisions by acting responsively during the decision-making process? We suggest a framework to analyze the responsiveness–acceptance connection and report findings from two studies designed for that purpose. First, we ran a survey experiment to examine how exogenously induced responsiveness actions affect reactions to a policy decision. Second, we conducted a case study to see how results hold up in a real-world setting. We find that responsiveness actions are rewarded provided that citizens are convinced that politicians have paid attention to their wishes and views. Responsiveness actions that signal willingness to communicate (“to listen” and “to explain”) are more effective than the action to follow majority opinion (“to adapt”). However, the responsiveness–acceptance connection is sensitive to perceptual bias; policy losers are hard pressed to accept that politicians have indeed acted responsively.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0010414015626445

Mikael Persson

Papers

Education and Political Participation

Reconsidering the Role of Procedures for Decision Acceptance

Which decision-making arrangements generate the strongest legitimacy beliefs? Evidence from a randomised field experiment

Digging into the Pocketbook: Evidence on Economic Voting from Income Registry Data Matched to a Voter Survey

Responsiveness Beyond Policy Satisfaction: Does It Matter to Citizens?