Some random theorizing I was doing today in the wake of some political discussions.

Two statements that I think are indisputably true:

(1) In any democracy, some small subset of the citizenry will be better informed about politics than the rest of the population. Following Popkin, we could call them high-information and low-information voters. Here I will call them normal and sophisticated voters.

(2) The cost of obtaining political information has shrunk dramatically in the past 15 years. Anyone interested in politics can easily obtain a wealth of official information, news reporting, commentary, and political analysis.

One statement that I believe to be true, but I’m not certain about:

(3) Sophisticated voters are more likely than low-information voters to think strategically about politics. That is, when a normal voter watches a political debate, they are more likely to only think about what the candidates are saying. A sophisticated voter is more likely to think about why they are saying what they are saying.

Three plausibly-testable hypotheses that may follow from the above the statements:

H1. The proportion of sophisticated voters in America is growing.

H2. The relative level of sophistication among even normal voters is growing.

H3. The sum total of political media is increasingly geared toward sophisticated voters.

I propose all of this because I’m finding myself continually to be in conversations with people I would usually consider to be normal voters, who are expressing strategic reactions, rather than face-value reactions, to political events. I was discussing the GOP field of candidates with several such people last week, and I was struck by the degree of strategic analysis they were bringing to bear on the conversation. When I asked them what they thought of the candidates, they didn’t respond by telling me what they liked or disliked about Romney, Perry, or Cain. Instead, they told me what they thought were the causes of Cain’s rise in the polls and how the other candidates should perhaps respond. When I asked about their opinion of the president, they didn’t give me an opinion of him, they gave me a dissection of what variable are going to affect his re-election, and what strategy he should use between now and then.

This, I thought, was remarkable. In essence, they were no longer thinking like common voters; they were thinking like amateur campaign managers. That’s something I would usually associate with sophisticated voters. So what is going on here? Of course, it’s always possible that I’m just seeing this wrong; my supposed former-normal voters were actually always sophisticated. But I don’t think that’s the case. My hunch is that there’s a pretty clear causal chain here: the small but growing number of sophisticated voters are hungry for lots of political information of the strategic variety; the cable news shows and internet content is providing that for them as a market-response; however, this is having an affect on the broader media environment, making it geared more toward sophisticated strategic information than regular old reporting of the facts. As a result, any normal voter who meets a certain baseline (i.e. consumes any political news) is being turned into a sophisticated voters.

A couple of caveats for clarification. I’m not sure that my conception of the “sophisticated” voter necessarily means that voters are getting smarter, or more consistently ideological. I’m not making the case that there are more ideologues. It just strikes me that more people are now in tune with the strategic goals of political debaters, and are evaluating what they see within that frame. I don’t think that has anything to do with political knowledge. Second, I’m not claiming that this is affecting all voters; the large swath of voters who collect almost zero political information on a regular basis shouldn’t be affected by this. Second, I’m not sure how deep this goes: it may just be the case that it’s only happening in DC, or among already-sophisticated voters. But I don’t think that matters. Any expansion on this dimension strikes as both interesting and consequential.

So what are the consequences? One is that I think there is an eventual tipping point at which the theatrical aspect of politics gets worn away, simply because they aren’t enough voters left to fool with it. We seem to already be approaching something like that in the Senate, where an increasing number of voters have a decent-enough grasp of the rules to demand that their representatives take full advantage of them and play hardball. Similarly, I think more and more people are understanding events like debates as strategic opportunities rather than information-distributing events. I don’t think this is a bad thing; wiping away the veneer of political discourse and reducing the game to interests and institutional rules is not inherently a bad thing. It might generate cynicism, but it would be cynicism as the cost of reality. And I’ll take realists over romantics every day of the week for my electorate.

A second consequence that occurs to me is that as a greater percentage of people become sophisticated observers of politics, something strange happens to those who remain normal voters: they may become self-conscious of their position as non-sophisticates, or at least as outside of the political conversation. If everyone with an even passing interest in politics becomes a strategic thinker, and the media increasingly plays to that reality, and the discourse of sophisticated politics becomes a discourse of strategy, I would think that political discourse would become both (a) more noticeable to the normal voter; and (b) simultaneously more distant. It would be like if the number of people in your community who spoke a foreign language suddenly increased substantially, both face-t0-face and in the news. It would have to become noticeable. I have no idea what the upshot of this is, and even less of an idea of whether it’s a good or bad thing.

Anyway, still thinking this through. Any feedback would be appreciated.

References

Samuel Popkin, The Reasoning Voter (University of Chicago Press), 1991.