Democracy for Realists Quotes

“Well-informed citizens, too, have come in for their share of criticism, since their well-organized “ideological” thinking often turns out to be just a rather mechanical reflection of what their favorite group and party leaders have instructed them to think”
― Christopher H. Achen, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

“Elections do not force successful candidates to reflect the policy preferences of the median voter,”
― Christopher H. Achen, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

“when ordinary people are exposed to intensive political education and conversation on specific policy issues, they often change their mind”
― Christopher H. Achen, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

“When voters got a chicken in every pot at election time, they usually liked the incumbent party’s ideology just fine, whatever it happened to be. But when incomes eroded and unemployment escalated, they became ripe for defection to anyone who promised to bring home the poultry.”
― Christopher H Achen, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

“If a single nutty or dangerous vision comes to be sufficiently widely shared, demagogues may be able to ride it to power.”
― Christopher H Achen, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

“Walter Lippmann (1914; 1922; 1925) faced more squarely than other commentators of his time the inevitable limits of human cognitive ability in politics. “Once you touch the biographies of human beings,” he wrote (1914, 215), “the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.” He saw that the cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change (1922, 16): “For the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.” Lippmann remains the deepest and most thoughtful of the modern critics of the psychological foundations of the folk theory of democracy.”
― Christopher H. Achen, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

“Unfortunately, while the folk theory of democracy has flourished as an ideal, its credibility has been severely undercut by a growing body of scientific evidence presenting a different and considerably darker view of democratic politics. That evidence demonstrates that the great majority of citizens pay little attention to politics. At election time, they are swayed by how they feel about “the nature of the times,” especially the current state of the economy, and by political loyalties typically acquired in childhood. Those loyalties, not the facts of political life and government policy, are the primary drivers of political behavior. Election outcomes turn out to be largely random events from the viewpoint of contemporary democratic theory. That is, elections are well determined by powerful forces, but those forces are not the ones that current theories of democracy believe should determine how elections come out. Hence the old frameworks will no longer do.”
― Christopher H. Achen, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

“Certainly there was much to despise about the legislatures of the Gilded Age, which were often severely malapportioned in favor of rural interests, heavily influenced by party machines, and directly or indirectly controlled by powerful corporate interests.”
― Christopher H. Achen, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

“In the wake of the English Civil War a century earlier, the Earl of Shaftesbury had argued in parliament that monarchy could be sustained only with the support of an army or the nobility.”
― Christopher H. Achen, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

“in thinking about politics, it makes no sense to start from issue positions—they are generally derivative from something else. And that something else is identity.”
― Christopher H. Achen, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

“When the average man loses his money he is simply like a wounded snake and strikes right or left at anything, innocent or the reverse, that presents itself as conspicuous in his mind.”
― Christopher H. Achen, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

“incumbent politicians may face a dilemma: should they implement the policies voters want or the policies that will turn out to contribute to voters’ welfare?”
― Christopher H. Achen, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

“Public perceptions of the prevalence of crime seem to be more strongly related to local media coverage of crime—largely a product of broadcasters’ commercial incentives—than to official crime rates”
― Christopher H. Achen, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

“there was much to despise about the legislatures of the Gilded Age, which were often severely malapportioned in favor of rural interests, heavily influenced by party machines, and directly or indirectly controlled by powerful corporate interests.”
― Christopher H. Achen, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

“Americans are much more resolute in their identification with party than they are in their identification with ideology.”
― Christopher H. Achen, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

“what if voters don’t really know what they want?”
― Christopher H. Achen, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government