Selective participation, so often maligned as a source of class bias, leaves the median voter more economically literate than the median citizen. More importantly, the public’s ungracious tendency to scapegoat its most faithful agents encourages felicitous hypocrisy. Politicians face an uneasy predicament: “Unabashed populism plays well at first, but once the negative consequences hit, voters will blame me, not themselves.” This hardly implies that it never pays to take the populist route. But leaders have to strike a balance between doing what the public thinks works, and what actually does.
