"The American Voter Revisited": Another Peek Inside the Brain of the Electorate

[DeepModem Mom]

WP: Another Peek Inside the Brain of the Electorate
By Libby Copeland
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 24, 2008; Page C01

So a bunch of academics decides to revisit one of the defining books of modern American politics, a 1960 tome on the electorate. They spend years comparing interviews with voting-age Americans from 2000 and 2004 to what Americans said during elections in the 1950s. The academics' question: How much has the American voter changed over the past 50 years? Their conclusion -- that the voter is pretty much the same dismally ill-informed creature he was back then -- continues a decades-long debate about whether Americans are as clueless as they sound.

Reader, before you send that outraged e-mail, consider that you may be an exception. You, of course, are endlessly fascinated by the debate over domestic wiretapping, but it's possible your neighbors think FISA is a hybrid vehicle. In fact, it's quite possible your neighbors are Republicans only because that's what their parents were, and ditto for the Democrats across the street. They couldn't even mumble a passable definition of "liberal" or "conservative." "You could get depressed," says the University of Iowa's Michael Lewis-Beck, one of the political scientists who wrote "The American Voter Revisited," released last month and inspired by 1960's "The American Voter."

Or not. Talk to other academics and it's unclear if we should be depressed at all. Many political scientists agree that the American voter doesn't always present well. Asked directly about certain issues, like whether he prefers diplomacy to military action for resolving international conflicts, he may profess ignorance or use some phrase he heard on television. Or she might say, when asked why she likes a candidate, "Oh, I just like the way he talks."

The question that political scientists have pondered for decades is: If a person can't name the staples of liberal ideology, or can't talk coherently about foreign affairs, or cares only about a few issues, or changes his opinion in response to information that he can't remember later, might he still be able to make thoughtful choices in the voting booth?...

***

"The American Voter Revisited" is chock-full of depressing conclusions, couched in academic understatement. In-depth interviews conducted with 1,500 people during the two most recent presidential elections revealed that the "majority of people don't have many issues in mind" when they discuss voting, Lewis-Beck says. Sometimes they say they're attracted to a candidate because "I just don't think we should change parties right now." They tend to inherit their party allegiance from their parents, and those beliefs tend to stay fixed throughout their lives, he says. "For many people," the authors of "Revisited" write, "dealing with political issues is too much of a bother."...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/23/AR2008072303693.html?nav=hcmodule

[griffi94]

1. who would have guessed that a lot of average american voters

are uninformed creatures of habit.

[Arugula Latte]

2. Lots of Americans are dumbassed ignoramuses

The "I'll-swallow-anything-because-I-have-'Faith'" atmosphere of religious nuttery that permeates many communities and a crappy educational system are the main culprits, IMO. Also, geographical isolation has contributed to the stupidity.