Democracy for Realists, Groups, and Ordinary Voters

ABSTRACT

Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels’s Democracy for Realists offers a compelling critique of voters’ role in democratic politics and underscores the importance of group identity to vote choice. Even so, there may be grounds for attributing greater policy meaning to elections than Achen and Bartels acknowledge. Politicians have an incentive to respond to widely shared views in the electorate; this can often make it difficult to detect issue voting even when ordinary citizens’ issue preferences are critical. Group-based voting also may have policy content. Understanding the connections between group identity and policy substance constitutes an important challenge for future work building upon Achen and Bartels’s foundation.

Keywords:

• Christopher Achen
• Larry Bartels
• group identity
• retrospective voting
• social identity

Notes

1 Members also reportedly were influenced by a Gallup poll showing the bill’s continued popularity (Douglas and Hackman 1938). Pepper’s victory came on the heels of an earlier primary win by New Dealer Lister Hill in Alabama, which had also been taken as a signal of popular support for the minimum wage bill. Pepper’s victory helped persuade members that Hill’s triumph had not been a fluke.

2 It is difficult to explain this simply in terms of group power. Most districts had few union members as of 1938.

3 Jews’ shift to the Democrats started before 1932. The Al Smith campaign, for example, signaled an openness to ethnic immigrants that no doubt attracted many Jews to the party. However, it is also worth noting that the movement of Jews into the New York Democratic Party in the 1920s in part reflected the strength of labor liberalism in that state’s party, as seen in the key role played by Robert Wagner, among other leaders during the period (see Huthmacher 1968 on Wagner in particular).

4 Caughey, Dougal, and Schickler 2017 find large policy differences between individual voters who switched parties between 1932-36 and 1936-40 and voters who remained loyal. But it is always possible that issue positions were determined by changes in party choice rather than the reverse.