The Sociology of Democracy

The Sociology of DemocracyAndrew J. PerrinDepartment of SociologyUniversity of North Carolina,Chapel Hill

SOCI 101.004Introduction to SociologyNovember 24, 2015

I'm going to do something a little different today and talk about my own research over the past few years. Much of this comes from research related to my book, American Democracy: From Tocqueville to Town Halls to Twitter. In particular I highlight some of the contrarian claims my approach leads to in thinking about the health of, and threats to, contemporary American democracy.

Let me start with a common refrain: American political discourse is poisoned by incivility. Roughly a year after Barack Obama's inauguration, CNBC commentator Rick Santelli launched the Tea Party movement with what has since been dubbed the Santelli rant, a tirade from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade blaming the mortgage mess on irresponsible borrowers who added an extra bathroom they couldn't afford. I'll talk more about the Tea Party in specific later on, but Santelli's Rant marked the beginning of a degree of what has been called incivility in public life that has characterized the whole time since then.

The new incivility includes violent imagery, extreme comparisons, and a cluster of claims about race, immigration, and President Obama's personal background. Each of these serves as a way to undermine the legitimacy of citizens and leaders in the public sphere by emphasizing who is speaking instead of engaging with what is being spoken.

These examples are from the right, and frankly I think the new incivility is far more prevalent on the right than on the left. That said, the left, too, merges criticism of the speaker with that of the speech. The main such strategy on the left is impugning the motives and character of large funders, which I actually think is a far worse approach than arguing with the substance of what is being said.

President Obama ...will find a gay, handicapped, black woman, who's an immigrant.... she could be the devil, she can say I hate America, I want to destroy America.Glenn BeckPoisoning the Discourse[Representative Michele Bachmann is] a hatemonger. Shes the type of person that would have gladly rounded up the Jews in Germany and shipped them off to death camps....This is an evil bitch from Hell.

Mike Malloy

What some scholars have termed the Outrage Industry--intensely partisan television and talk radiois a hotbed of this kind of incivility, and is far more prevalent on the right wing than the left.

Glenn Beck, on his radio show, says President Obama will find a gay, handicapped, black woman, who's an immigrant.... to be the Supreme Court nominee to replace Justice Stevens. She could be the devil, she can say I hate America, I want to destroy America. There is, in fact, no chance that President Obama would consider nominating someone to the Supreme Court who says she hates America; or that any of those demographics would actually be a defense if she had said she wanted to destroy America!

These attacks substitute attacks on the character of opponents for consider argument of any sort. They make opponents into villains to be destroyed, not opponents to be debated or listened to.Civility

It's tempting to issue another call for civil, respectful discourse, and to be sure, a measure of civility would be nice. But I have two concerns that suggest that civility may be over-prioritized. First, being too focused on civility can keep us from saying what we believe is right because we don't want to offend others. And second, all too often the accusation of incivility is used as a way of silencing people instead of listening to and considering their points. Incivility may even be a weapon of the weak, one of the relatively few resources the less-powerful have at their disposal to voice disapproval of the status quo,...Motivated ReasoningPeople learn and make decisions for reasonsTo match their friendsTo avoid cognitive dissonanceTo confirm biasTo expand their mindsTo be true and accurate, etc.Hot vs. Cold cognition

We know from lots of good research in political psychology that why people engage in political reasoning is very important to how they reason and what conclusions they reach. There are lots of reasons people may be motivated to reason politically, including- to match their friends', neighbors', etc., views, or even to oppose those views if they prefer;- to avoid cognitive dissonance, that is, to avoid the discomfort that comes with holding beliefs that contradict one another- to confirm their existing biases;- to expand their minds (a pro-intellectual state of mind);- to be true and accurate

Depending in part on the motivation, the emotional state people are in when they are thinking politically makes a big difference in what they think. Probably the most important facet of that emotional state is hot vs cold cognition. In hot cognition, people are emotionally aroused and likely to reason more automatically; maybe even subconsciously. In cool cognition, they tend to be careful and analytic. It's tempting to just say that cool cognition is better and leave it at that, but many of the ways we expect citizens to express themselves are quick and automatic! In fact, I'm convinced that most people's everyday political thinking is more hot than cold.So I want to raise a question: Is civility really the right value? As the wonderful political theorist Danielle Allen has pointed out, if we require civility and openness as the tickets to admission to deliberation, we've avoided doing most of the work involved!Goals for political voiceCivilityFranknessAccuracyThoroughnessI'd like to suggest therefore that emotion, frankness, self interest and group interest:are genuine sources of legitimate ideas and preferences. They are fundamentally public registers; they ought to be recognized in a public sphere, not just for normative reasons, as the political theorists tell us, but also for sociological reasons. These are the tools real citizens use to approach real problems; dismissing them as illegitimate only drives them underground and forces citizens to come up with new reasons to believe what they already believed anyway. Research some colleagues and I did showed that people do just that.In my First Year Seminar on Difficult Dialogues a few years ago, we came up with four goals for our conversations as we sought to have difficult dialogues on big issues. These were...YES, civility, but also...

From here, I want to look at some of the ways citizens engage in public discourse, including voting and public opinion.

The Semiotics of Voting What do we learn from voting? Voting is intensely public, but... The mechanics of voting are aggressively privateLet's start with the simplest act of citizenship, also the most individual, Voting. Voting seems very individual, indeed, we work hard culturally to make it individual, an interesting paradox. Consider a voting machine like the one here. To prepare for the most public of activities many citizens engage in, a voter entered a steel box, pulled a big red lever to close a curtain behind her, and expressed her will in enforced isolation. Even more modern machines like the ones we use today all feature physical barriers to separate citizens from one another. Voting in this way teaches voters that their vote is their individual property. Voting using a secret ballot provided by the government is an early 20th century innovation, one of several rationalizing reforms brought about by the Progressive movement. Like those other reforms, it made politics fairer but at the same time less exciting, which meant fewer citizens got involved or paid attention.

Economists and political scientists work hard to figure out why an individual would spend any time, energy, or money to vote when the chance that her vote will be decisive is vanishingly small. The bottom line is: if most citizens decided whether or not to vote based on an individual cost-benefit analysis, far fewer would vote.Actual and Reported Voter Turnout, 1960-2008

These are graphs of voter turnout rates over the last half-century or so: the left is for presidential elections, the right is for off-year elections. The blue lines are the proportion of the eligible population who actually voted; the red lines are the proportion of people who said they had voted when they were asked by the American National Elections Study, a well-respected survey. I'll bet some of you are surprised that the rate actually hasn't declined as much as you might have expected once we account for the increasing number of ineligible voting-age people in the United States, and that's one piece of good news. Note that turnout in 2008 was the highest since 1960, and the increase wiped out all those years of hand-wringing about inadequate turnout. But what I actually want to call your attention to is the difference between the red lines and the blue lines.Vote Overreporting, 1960-20081960196219641966196819701972197419761978198019821984198619881990199219941996199820002002200420080510152025As you can see in this next graph,vote overreporting has bounced around between 12.5 and 22.5. so between an eighth and nearly a quarter of the population doesn't vote but lies to an anonymous survey interviewer and tells him or her that they did! Frankly this is more perplexing than the fact that people vote in the first place. This is what we call social desirability bias, the tendency to over-report doing things that are socially desirable. People likely over-report church attendance and safe sex practices, and under-report illicit drug use and prejudiced attitudes, as some other examples. In a recent survey of California non-voters, 93 percent of infrequent voters agreed that voting is an important part of being a good citizen and 81 percent of nonvoters agreed it is an important way to voice their opinions on issues that affect their families and communities.The question is this: why is voting socially desirable? Why over-report it at all? Of course I'm delighted that people are embarrassed enough to want to lie to the interviewer, but why not just vote to begin with instead of lying about it later? Most people who don't vote say it's because they forget or don't have time. I think it's a more interesting issue than that.

The Voting RitualVoting is the collective ritual by which we imagine ourselves as part of a public.We can't understand either voting or overreporting voting without a social and cultural component. None of us can hope to meet every other citizen with whom we share a political community, or even a significant portion of those citizens. We need a technology, if you will, a practice that allows us to imagine ourselves as part of a political community whose contours we cannot estimate. Voting is that practice--the collective ritual by which we imagine ourselves as part of a public/the people. I took this picture of a rural voter in the first free election in Zambia in 1991. I love the expression on his face, the care with which he deposits his ballot to join the stream of millions to be counted, by hand, in Lusaka.

So what is the public, of which voting reminds us we are part? Let me take a quick detour. The term democracy means rule by the people, but the people is the Demos: the common voice of the whole, not just a collection of the individuals. That's a publica collective, not just a collection, constituted by a common interest, technology, or idea. Citizenship is about participating in publicsabout being a public personwhich, in turn, constitutes and shapes those publics.

Norman Rockwell, Town Meeting I like to think about democratic voice by referring back to another of the images on my very first slide, Norman Rockwell's Town Meeting. Here an apparently working-class man is standing at a rail in some sort of public forum, presumably a town meeting. He is disheveled but determined; respectful yet confident. Hat in hand, he looks up, grasping the rail while a cadre of more respectable-looking folk, sitting down, gaze up at him as he prepares to make a point. The speakers mouth, along with those of everyone else portrayed in the painting, is closed, presumably in deference to an authority located outside the painting.

Town Meeting, and all the more so its more famous successor,

Norman Rockwell, Freedom of SpeechFreedom of Speech, in which the speaker appears more defiant and his audience has gained copies of the towns Annual Report, illustrate the ideals of defiance, individualism, erasure of class privilege, and communicative competence that run through common-sense ideas of deliberative democracy.Case 1: The Tea Party Movement, 2010-2012The Santelli Rant (February, 2010)

Genuine PopulismSympathetic MediaSponsorship MoneyI want to switch gears a little here and talk about two cases in current political life. The first of these is the Tea Party Movement that emerged in the wake of the Obama election and was widely credited with major influence in the 2010 midterm elections.

Historical arc; Not worried about whether it's genuineThree legs of the stool: populism, media, money

Lots of discussion of racism in the TPM, and it's there but it's not the whole story. TPM is a cultural phenomenon, clearly related to race (and gender) but far from only about those.

My research team has been fielding several polls to understand who Tea Party supporters are, and I want to give you some interesting snapshots. I should also credit the company who does my polling for me, Public Policy Polling of Raleigh, which lets us do very high quality research for reasonable prices.

Anecdotal evidence from TPM protests suggests that racial animosity is certainly part of the mix of tea party culture that coalesced during the summer of 2010:

Felt Similarity to Clinton vs. Obama

My research group carried out a poll of North Carolina and Tennessee registered voters in June, 2010. One of the questions we asked was how similar the voters felt to presidents Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama. As you can see, there are significant differences, white voters across the board see themsleves as more similar to Clinton than to Obama, while African Americans feel the opposite. (I haven't included the Bush figures here, but for African Americans the similarity was 8%.) Looking particularly at the differences between Clinton and Obama, I think it's clear that race plays an important role in political identification in these data.Strong support for the TPM

Logistic regression model including demographic controls. All independent variables scaled 0-1. Standard errors in parentheses.* p < .05, ** p < .01However, my research group's analysis of polling data suggests that the cultural identification with the TPM is certainly not all about race. Indeed, we found four cultural dispositions consistent with TPM support in NC and TN in 2010: authoritarianism, libertarianism, nativism, and ontological insecurity, and all of them were stronger predictors than the felt-similarity question above. Let me walk through each of the cultural dispositions and explain them to you.

((EXPLAIN THE CATEGORIES AND IDEAS HERE))

Interestingly enough, after the 2010 election these cultural dispositions remained strong, but political positions got much stronger, which suggests that people learned political ideas from their cultural involvement in the movement.Tea Party nostalgiaWe don't just want to go back six or seven years. We want to go back 200 years, to where our country as founded and say it was working great then, let's go back to those values!

Laura LongRaleigh, NC Tea Party organizerI was interviewed on WPTF by Bill LuMaye about our research on the Tea Party, and discussed the nostalgic imagery of the movement. The station brought on a Tea Party activist afterward, who acknowledged the nostalgia: We want to go back 200 years, to where our country was founded and say it was working great then, lets get back to those values! (--Laura Long)

The nostalgia is often about founding-fathers, but it's also often about a lost great generation. The fact that these two are conflated serves to build an argument that it is the only in the current generation that America has departed from the founders' vision.Identity: What kind of citizen are you?Of the following groups, please tell me which group you like the least:

- The Ku Klux Klan- Gay Rights Activists- Nazis- Atheists-CommunistsFiguring out what motivates tea party movement support required that we go beyond the basic questions, though, since TPM supporters weren't all that different from other conservatives on most of the basic measures. We theorized that TPM support was about an identity: it was about feeling part of a group. We decided to ask a tricky question by presenting a list of groups that some people dislike and asking our respondents which single one they liked the least. You can imagine my office voice-mail when that survey went in the field! You mean I have to decide if I like Nazis or the KKK less?! But I think it's a really interesting question because it forces people to make choices that they likely haven't thought about before to engage in hot cognition that is probably similar to their everyday political reasoning.Which of these groups do you like least? by Tea Party attitudeKKKGay Rights ActivistsNazisAtheistsCommunists0.00%10.00%20.00%30.00%40.00%50.00%60.00%19.09%19.70%25.15%20.00%16.06%49.29%5.41%26.50%11.68%7.12%41.89%10.81%25.00%16.22%6.08%PositiveNegativeNo OpinionAs you can see, TPM supporters were relatively divided among the five groups, while those who were negative were far more likely to choose the KKK and the Nazis. Those with no opinion of the tea party were somewhat more similar to the negatives than the positives.Using surveys for public voiceSurvey questions that are too specific encourage respondents to think they are making simple choices, leading to unrealistically cold cognition

Vague or uncomfortable questions force citizens to choose who they are and what they stand forThis is an example of using surveys to evoke hot cognition: to get people thinking as they might in a real-world political situation.

((SEE SLIDE))

Opinion ChangeMost opinion change is via cohort replacementIndividual opinion change:Not very commonMotivated ReasoningBayesian UpdatingInferred JustificationContact/ThreatSymbolic Manipulation

Case 2: Same-Sex Marriage

Let me turn, then, to another area of current interest, the question of allowing same-sex marriage.

Another interesting puzzle on public opinion research:- Don't know's here- Amendment 1, one week before, analysis from PPP:

Lack of voter understanding about how far reaching the amendment is continues to be the biggest obstacle for those hoping to defeat it. 55% of voters in the state support some form of legal recognition for gay couples in the form of either marriage or civil unions to only 41% completely opposed. But at the same time 55% of voters plan to support the amendment that would prohibit any legal recognition for same sex couples while only 41% are opposed....The more voters understand the full implications of the amendment the less likely they are to support it, but the clock is ticking.

Hot vs. Cold Cognition in Same-Sex MarriageHow motivating are generic beliefs?

This is an important analysis, but in hindsight I think once again they missed the hot cognition piece: even if people say they support legalized same-sex unions, they may not really be thinking about that when they vote. It's a cold-cognition question when voters are more likely to use hot cognition.

Here's another example. Two of my graduate students analyzed a survey where half the respondents were asked whether they supported allowing gays and lesbians to marry a partner of the same sex and the other half whether they supported allowing two men to marry each other or two women to marry each other. The difference was small but significant, and the students called this, colloquially, the you want to put what where? objection to same-sex marriage.

Public and Non-Public Opinion 136 Focus groups Winter 1949-50 West Germany Guilt, the Jews, Democracy, etc. Fascist attitudes unsettlingly close to the surfaceAs useful as the surveys and opinion polls we use are, they aren't actually public opinion. They're private opinion added up. Public opinion is a feature of a public, not of a collection of individuals. Publics are made when people communicate, whether actively (in a discussion) or passively (as an audience). Like the secret ballot, there is a semiotics to polling toowe learn lessons about how to be a citizen by participating in, and reading the results of, polls. But thinking about public opinion suggests that we consider real publics opining about real situations, and that's the next project I want to talk about.

Sixty years ago,in the immediate wake of the second world war, a prominent team of refugee social scientists known as the Frankfurt School returned to Germany from exile in the United States. The most prominent member of this team was the philosopher and sociologist Theodor W. Adorno, and the group was aiming to become the intellectual foundation of the new Federal Republic of Germany. The United States High Commissioner for Germany was already conducting polls that showed the Nazi ghost banished and Germany ready to re-enter the community of nations. Understandably, given their recent experiences, the Frankfurt scholars were skeptical. As a sympathetic politician, Franz Boehm, wrote at the time, opinion polls show what we flaunt like a courtier before the official public, ..., as if they expressed what we actually mean even though they are really only the things we say when wearing our Sunday best. Particularly when you want to know how people react to sensitive topics like the question of postwar German guilt, examining the fundamentally public nature of public opinion is crucialthe messy collection of half-formed opinions and dispositions that are in the air.

If the idea that we can get better public opinion information from groups of people than from isolated individuals seems strange to us, it was not always that way. The ideas of systematic sampling from the population, of asking a set of closed-ended questions according to a rigid schedule, and of seeking to insure that those questions are asked of citizens in isolation from their normal environments, these were all developed in the first half of the 20th century, closely tied to the secret ballot, in the hopes of understanding how everyday people thought about matters of public interest, a goal at which they have proved mightily successful. But communication is never purely one-way. Pollsters learn what citizens think, but in turn citizens learn how pollsters and other political actors think they should think!People learn practices from discourse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLQbHYLNvG8

Of course you can learn anything you need to know about American politics by watching the West Wing! Here's my favorite example of this principle.

Technologies and the rules of listeningJust as radio, the long-playing record, and eventually the iPod changed music itself by changing the rules of listening, the representative public opinion poll changed the rules of opining and thereby opinions themselves.Polling and the Choice-Making Citizen Without polling, opining means deciding an issue is important, finding an audience, and actively expressing a view.

With polling, the pollster decides what issues are important and delivers the audience; expressing a view means making a selection among pre-determined choices.Imagine a world without public opinion polling. Without polling, opining means deciding an issue is important, finding an audience, and actively expressing a view. It is a difficult, time consuming, but potentially very rewarding, proposition.

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With polling, the pollster decides what issues are important and delivers the audience; expressing a view means making a selection among pre-determined choices.

Polling shapes opinions Wisian Americans

Dating and life satisfaction

Invasion of Pago PagoHere's an example. In 1988 the General Social Survey included Wisian Americans, a fictional ethnic group, in a list of ethnic groups and asked respondents their opinions of these groups. About 40% of respondents offered an opinion! If you ask college students how satisfied they are with life before you ask them how often they have a date, their answers are not correlated; if you reverse the order, they're strongly related. And if you ask people their opinions on the American invasion of a fictional placesay, pago pagomany will give you an answer. Even though the questions are fictional, the answers are notthey're hot answers that express attitudes toward invasions, other races, and life satisfaction because of genuine beliefs and emotions!

By the way, there are also probably lots of things many of us have opinions about but have never been asked about.

Like radio, records, and iPods, this is not just a bad thing. Without polling having an opinion is largely an elite affectation; the ideas and views of everyday people go unrepresented. Polling democratizes opining the same way the iPod democratizes listeningchoices that have effects.

Low-Attention ListeningI don't think it's just a generational difference that leads me to say that listening to Rihanna or Lady Gaga on an iPod while jogging or mowing the lawn takes virtually no cognitive effort and transforms listening into an entirely passive activity, albeit an enjoyable one. This listening technique, in turn, encourages Rihanna and Lady Gaga, to make music that suits low-attention listening.Low-Attention Citizenship

Likewise, answering a public opinion poll takes little cognitive effort and transforms opining into an entirely passive activity. It also encourages pollsters, the media, and politicians to produce politics that suits low-attention citizenship. In place of an active, imaginative, expressive citizen, we become choice-making citizens whose principal task is selecting among the preordained options presented.

Of course, this pattern is far from monolithic, and many citizens crave and actively look for ways to express and discuss ideas and views in publics. Many of these publics are technologically mediatedthat is, the discussions don't take place in a real space at all, but on talk radio, television, the internet, in newspapers, and so on. Many of these spaces, particularly cable television, talk radio, and internet blogs, are so intensely partisan that they offer little hope of hearing or speaking to someone who disagrees. (This is not necessarily bad, by the way, but it's clearly important.)Late 20th-Century Technologies

Most technologies introduced since the mid-20th-century have tended to individualize: citizens are offered myriad opportunities not to interact with one another, or to choose very carefully with whom they interact.The Daily MeInternet audience targetingMass availability of video recordingProliferation of channelsCitizens can tailor the information they get to their pre-existing preferencesThese are all ways of reinforcing what Nicholas Negroponte calls the Daily Me: a technologically insulated world that allows us to avoid the mess and discomfort of honest disagreement.Access to DisagreementMost people know someone they disagree with, but...Most people don't talk about politics with people they disagree with, and...Even when they do, they distrust the motives instead of considering the ideas.

The decreasing likelihood that people will incidentally encounter opposing views is a serious problem for any kind of democratic citizenship.

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The media environment is certainly a major culprit in this process, as recent polling on factual knowledge among different news audiences has demonstrated.

Note too Gordon Gauchat's finding: more-educated conservatives have less trust in science now than before because political identity is as important as education

Contrarian thoughts on American democracyDemocracy is inherently a representative processWhat is to be represented in democracy is the demos the collectivity of the people, not just a collection of peopleRepresentation is generativeCulture (sometimes) trumps structureCivility is overratedAudience fragmentation is really, really bad

Thank youNeal CarenGordon GauchatLindsay HirschfeldKate McFarlandSally MorrisJeffrey OlickEliana PerrinJ. Micah RoosSteven TepperRobin Wagner-PacificiSusan Wilker

UNC Department of SociologyUNC Institute for Arts and HumanitiesNational Endowment for the Humanities