Is the Will of the People Sufficient to Govern?

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” -- H.L. Mencken

In a 2003 article, Is “Popular Rule” Possible? Polls, political psychology, and democracy, political scientist Larry M. Bartels considers whether the will of the people can ever suffice to run a government. Bartels is co-author of the 2016 book, Democracy For Realists: Why Elections Do not Produce Responsive Governments (book review here). Bartels thinks the answer is no. He writes:

“Leaders may ignore the dictates of public opinion, but they are assumed to do so only with good reason—and at their electoral peril.

My aim here is to suggest that this conventional view of democracy is fundamentally unrealistic. Whether it would be desirable to have a democracy based on public opinion is beside the point, because public opinion of the sort necessary to make it possible simply does not exist. The very idea of “popular rule” is starkly inconsistent with the understanding of political psychology provided by the past half-century of research by psychologists and political scientists. That research offers no reason to doubt that citizens have meaningful values and beliefs, but ample reason to doubt that those values and beliefs are sufficiently complete and coherent to serve as a satisfactory starting point for democratic theory. In other words, citizens have attitudes but not preferences—a distinction directly inspired by the work of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

Kahneman and Tversky have called attention to “framing effects”—situations in which different ways of posing, or “framing,” a policy issue produce distinctly different public responses. Framing effects are hard to accommodate within a theory built on the assumption that citizens have definite preferences to be elicited; but they are easy to reconcile with the view that any given question may tap a variety of more or less relevant attitudes. The problem for democratic theory is that the fluidity and contingency of attitudes make it impossible to discern meaningful public preferences on issues of public policy, because seemingly arbitrary variations in choice format or context may produce contradictory expressions of popular will.”

An example of a framing effect making a major difference in public opinion relates to the first Gulf War in 1991-1992. When people were polled, a big majority said there were unwilling to “go to war”, but a solid majority said it was acceptable to “engage in combat.” That war was then posited to the American people as an acceptable combat engagement, not an unacceptable war.


A democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. -- John Adams and Alexander Hamilton


Bartels cite another example of how framing changes opinions. When a first group in a study was asked, “Do you think the United States should let Communist newspaper reporters from other countries come in here and send back to their papers the news as they see it?”, 36% said yes. A second group was asked the same question but only after they were first asked whether “a Communist country like Russia should let American newspaper reporters come in and send back to America the news as they see it.” In this group, 73% agreed that Russian reporters should be allowed in the US to report as they saw fit. Posing the first question to the second group led those people to apply reciprocity despite strong anti-communist attitudes.

In one large survey at times when welfare was viewed negatively by many Americans, about 20-25% percent said that too little was being spent on “welfare”, but 63-65% said that too little was being spent on “assistance to the poor.” Even for issues that seem simple and easy to be consistent about, e.g., abortion, framing effects are easy to elicit. The human mind evolved to be quite sensitive  to how information if framed. Intelligent propagandists know this very well and exploit it ruthlessly to their advantage.

That is just one of several major mental traits that make it hard to know what people want. How are political leaders to decide what the will of the people is?

Bartels is not optimistic that this fundamental aspect of democracy can be adequately addressed. He writes:

“Perhaps these apparent contradictions in public opinion would disappear if political discourse were somehow elevated—but I doubt it. Political elites have had about as much chance of providing a clarifying debate on abortion as they have on any issue before the American public .... 

More generally, the hopeful assertions of democratic theorists regarding the positive effects of deliberation are largely unsupported by systematic empirical evidence. Indeed, most observers of political deliberation have painted a much less rosy portrait than philosophers of deliberative democracy. New England town meetings apparently involve a good deal of false unanimity, with most important decisions settled in advance through informal networks reflecting preexisting inequalities in social status and political power. The atmosphere of public-spiritedness and mutual respect central to theorists’ accounts of democratic deliberation may be difficult or impossible to achieve in societies burdened by sexism, racism, and fundamental cultural schisms.  

The most obvious alternative to theoretical progress along these lines is a much-diluted version of democratic theory in which the ideal of “popular rule” is replaced by what William Riker once characterized as “an intermittent, sometimes random, even perverse, popular veto” on the machinations of political elites. If that sort of democracy is the best we can hope for, we had better reconcile ourselves to the fact. On the other hand, if we insist on believing that democracy can provide some attractive and consistent normative basis for evaluating policy outcomes, we had better figure out more clearly what we are talking about.”

Is it time for the rise of the popular veto?

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.” -- Ernst Benn