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ABSTRACT
Political scientists should put aside questions about whether voters are rational or irrational, informed or uninformed, and questions about how flawed democracy is. Although they are interesting, these questions are secondary. Answering them in no way helps people—it does not help them with their violent neighborhoods, their declining incomes, their flooded homes, or their dying crops. Instead, researchers should focus on the first-order question of how to improve democratic accountability.
Notes
1 So that I don’t leave the wrong impression about chimpanzees, I should note that they surpass humans at some cognitive tasks, such as remembering the location of items (Inoue and Matsuzawa Citation2007).
3 Of course, Hillary Clinton’s disadvantages, whether real or imagined, may have offset Trump’s disadvantages.
4 For those keeping track, primates also exhibit this tendency, as shown by a fascinating article on rhesus monkeys (Blanchard et al. Citation2014).
5 For a critique of the shark-attack finding, see Fowler and Hall (forthcoming) and the forthcoming exchange with Achen and Bartels in the Journal of Politics.
6 https://fundingthenews.usc.edu/report/intro/ Accessed January 1, 2018.