Reddit reviews Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton Studies in Political Behavior)

The book itself came out in April 19, 2016 https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Realists-Elections-Responsive-Government/dp/0691169446

However, the Vox interview was last month. So, the readers of /r/EverythingScience would be better off either reading the book or at least the synopsis/reviews? Sociologists/political scientists are scientists. This book won the

>Winner of the 2017 PROSE Award in Government & Politics, Association of American Publishers

>One of Bloomberg's Best Books of 2016

>One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2016

Whatever that means.

I'll take number 4.

My favorite intro book on media and politics is Media Politics: A Citizen's Guide by Shanto Iyengar. It's a great textbook for teaching undergrads and covers pretty much everything.

For general theories of how political elites interact with the media, I would recommend Cook's Governing with the News, Patterson's Out of Order, and Zaller's A Theory of Media Politics (It's an unpublished manuscript, so just Google it and it'll come up.)

There's a ton of great work on the concept of media bias, but I'll give you two older works that I think capture the intersection of journalistic norms and coverage really well. Check out Gans's Deciding What's News and Schudson's Discovering the News. There's also work that looks at how economic forces lead to bias. See Hamilton's All the News That's Fit to Sell for an intro to that.

On media effects on behavior, start with Iyengar and Kinder's News that Matters. Beyond that, I'm partial to Graber's Processing the News, Soroka's Negativity in Democratic Politics, and Ladd's Why Americans Hate the Media and How it Matters.

If you're interested in how recent changes to the media environment (cable TV, internet, etc.) have affected things, I would recommend Prior's Post-Broadcast Democracy, Arceneaux and Johnson's Changing Minds or Changing Channels, Levendusky's How Partisan Media Polarize America, and Hindman's The Myth of Digital Democracy.

Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't recommend some Lippmann or some Edelman. Those are for more high-minded/theory-driven thinking about how the media constructs our realities.

I know that's a lot, but there's a ton of stuff I'm cutting out as is (nothing about selective exposure or motivated reasoning, barely touching on the framing literature). If you have any more specific questions about American media, I can probably narrow it down some more.

Oh, and a couple quick recommendations on the other questions (which aren't really my specialty). I really liked Democracy for Realists by Achen and Bartels. Frances Lee's new book on political messaging in Congress is pretty interesting. And I'm a subscriber to the legislative subsidy school of thought on interest groups.

>Idk what that link says, it's not opening

https://www.amazon.it/Democracy-Realists-Elections-Responsive-Government/dp/0691169446

>My identity doesn't define me or anyone

That's what Identity is

>Acting like because I'm brown in inherently less privileged than some white trash is bullshit

No one argued that, luckily

>Americans don't like to be defined by their identity, and doing so is a lite form of racism and bigotry.
http://journalist.wsj.com

Than Americans need to stop voting exclusively on identity

This reminded me of an idea posited in Democracy for Realists which suggests that voters (and, in turn, the post-election polled electorate) do not react to positive and negative developments in the way we might think they should.

That is to say, when a drought or some other natural disaster happens, we would expect that people form an opinion of the responsible politicos based on the effectiveness of their response to the disaster. Did they see it coming? Did they try to prepare? Did they respond immediately? Did they respond effectively? And so on.

What the work tried to present was evidence that, instead, people will form a negative opinion based on the fact that the disaster happened in the first place! It didn't matter how the state responded - just the mere existence of the disaster was enough to generate a negative outlook from the electorate.

It is, in a way, scary, because it suggests that there was no way out of the "Yolanda funds" meme. A typhoon erased an entire city off the map, ergo the government sucks.

To bring this back towards the present, it would certainly be interesting to see if the President's approval ratings take another hit in April ... because there may well be a correlation with the fact that earthquakes happened.

As far as the book recommendations go, it would be good if you could qualify what kind of books you're interested in (e.g. philosophy, psychology, history, science, etc.).


Books I recommend:


Psychology (or: On Human Nature)

The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime

Thinking, Fast and Slow (my personal favorite)

The Undiscovered Self

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

History

Strategy: A History

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism

Economics

Economics in One Lesson

Basic Economics


Politics

Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

As always, the list of books to read is too long, so I'll stop here.

Insofar as your question is about voters being mostly ignorant about the issue they are supposed to vote about, that's an established and well-known observation in political science, as far as I know.

See Somin's Democracy and Political Ignorance, for instance. Another book in a similar vain would be The myth of the rational voter by Brian Caplan.

Both are associated with George Mason University, so you may not like what you read there. I know, it wasn't fun to read Caplan's book.

However, his basic explanation of rational irrationality can also be found in the works of Dan Kahan, including better evidence.

The problem has also been noted by others, see Democracy for Realists by Achen and Bartels.

No, I don't think it is. When you start reading any academic discussions about different voting systems then very, very rarely does one see a particular system being described as 'more democratic'. This is because when you start digging into the mathematical mechanics of voting theory, you find that there are paradoxes and inconsistencies within all of them which can lead to perverse results, as documented in arrows' impossibility theorem. Hence, most discussions tend to revolve around the particular political dynamics generated by different systems and whether they encourage stability, deliberation, direct accountability, entrenchment of parties and so on. There are compromises and trade-offs and no one system is inherently better. Fundamentally the discussion we're having around our voting system in this country (and especially on reddit) is pretty facile, as it never gets beyond looking at numer of and distribution of votes to thinking about what sort of dynamics different systems would introduce.

They're going through a bout of electoral reform anxiety in Canda right now, and there's some interesting [commentary] (http://induecourse.ca/trump-and-electoral-reform-connecting-the-dots/) coming from various academics and commentators.

To be honest the weight placed on elections is probably too much anyway. There's minimal evidence that any one type produces significantly better policy, and there's mountains of evidence that people are terrible at voting in the way that most democratic theories (including the one which implicitly underlies the idea that PR is some kind of ideal) need them to. The evidence for that claim is in this book, which is excellent reading if you're an insomniac. Review and summary here.

>We can govern ourselves quite effectively.

That's a pretty bold assertion. Do you have any examples of places larger than a town who function well via strictly direct democracy?

>We don't need the middleman of the politician. Only the rich want politicians to push their selfish agenda.

I think that everyone wants "politicians to push their selfish agenda", but most wouldn't class their agenda as "selfish" in their own eyes. "the rich" do have more resources to work the system though, but a direct democracy would likely make that advantage even worse. In a system where we just make all collective decisions directly, the ability to shape public opinion is paramount, and it's people with resources who can take advantage of that best.

>Why don't you give us some examples where these referendums haven't worked out well.
Hmm, In recent months Brexit leaps to mind as does Columbia's referendum on a peace deal with FARC to end their 50 year insurgency. Heck, I suspect that were a referendum held in the US as to whether to leave the UN, that it'd possibly pass...though it'd be a objectively terrible idea.

Anyway, more generally, there's a reasonable bit of research as into how voters make decisions and it's not really all that rosy. For instance, on a quick search, here's a study of AUS voters and how referendums on constitutional matters were considered

This highlights some core issues with voting in general that have gotten notice of late. A decent book on how it appears that people actually vote and the issues with prevailing theories is "Democracy for Realists". I've found it enlightening, though somewhat depressing, reading.

People collectively aren't the rational, informed electorate that we'd like to have and "more democracy" isn't always a good answer to political problems. Many policy issues are nuanced and require delicate balancing of interests and aren't easily broken down into simply digested bullet points. Referendums can be useful on clear, straightforward decisions where the details are fairly simple and the costs/benefits are fairly clear.

People have day jobs and generally aren't inclined to spend the resources necessary to really get properly informed on matters of policy well enough to make solid decisions. Presumably simplifying this to voting on representatives/parties who support policy slates to make the detail decisions should make that cost less, and voters don't even do that well per the evidence that we have.

edit clean up and I added some direct responses to a couple of other questions/assertions.