Are Americans “Politically Sophisticated”?

I'm Will Howe, I'm Anthony Fowler and I'm Viola Judah and this is not another politics podcast. So maybe it's time to talk a little bit about how voters vote, how they decide whom to support, whom to oppose. This seems to be a recurring theme in our podcast where we talk about what voters know about the economy, what the voters know about politicians and their stance on different policies and how they translate what they know or do not know into whom they are supporting. How did this all start? How did political science get interested in this question and what was sort of the big impact to start thinking about these issues? A big place where this all started was at the University of Michigan in the 1950s, a group of political scientists who did something that political scientists hadn't done a lot before. They said let's actually go out and collect a lot of data. Let's run a bunch of surveys instead of just kind of pontificating from our offices about what we think we're going to actually find out what do people know, what do people think. This was in some ways this great scientific achievement, let's go to measure things that hadn't been measured in a really rigorous and systematic way before. And so we've decided, I didn't pick it. I want to say that I'm not the person who proposed this. I'm convinced that Will picked this just to just to rile me up. Yes. The thing that we're going to do today, which is different for a normal format, is we're going to talk about a classic, a truly classic. It's actually a chapter from an edited volume written in 1964 by Phil Converse. And if I just say Converse 1964, it's a political scientist, then it's exactly what I'm talking about. It's a chapter that has been extremely influential in the field of political science. It's shaped the way the generations of scholars have thought about things. And it has something like 11,000 academic citations, which is a crude way that we measure the impact of something, which is how many subsequent scholars have actually cited this in some way, in their own research. So that's going to be our tall task for the day, which is there's going to be a lot to say about it, but this very hefty influential, classic piece of political science research. It is hefty. I mean, the chapter runs north, you know, nearly 60 pages long. It covers all kinds of things ranging from conceptualizations about what political sophistication is to offering a set of findings about how people are or are not politically sophisticated in terms of their views about the positions that they hold their ability to reason from first principles. And in the background of all this, our concerns about democracy, you know, whether or not citizens are up to the task of keeping a democracy kind of alive and well. I mean, rereading it, you're right, like this is the first thing that we get assigned and or one of the first things that we get assigned in American politics seminars in graduate school. And so I hadn't read it in a while, but it is a tour de force. If it is, you know, I forgot to say what the title is, we should just say title is. It's not a modest title, right? It's the nature of belief systems in mass publics. So there it is. I mean, the nature of belief systems, I mean, it's it's it's professors to be a descriptive piece in which he's simply trying to step forward and to say we're going to take stock of what people know and how they reason if they reason. And it's about belief systems, the extent to which people's views are constrained, which for converse is the hallmark of political sophistication by which he means that your views on one issue are going to be connected to your views on another. And your views on one issue today are going to be connected on your to your views on that same issue tomorrow. And that there's this sort of hierarchical dimension, which is that there are these general abstract principles. It might be notions of equality. It might be notions of liberalism that inform the particular views that you have on individual policies. And these things hang together. Like what it means to have your ideological house in order is not that that you just sort of fire off at the hip or think imaginatively. And yes, I am for a woman's right to choose. And I also think that corporate tax cuts should be reduced to zero. That he'd say, "Wait, no, there actually is a kind of connection between those two issues." And that politically sophisticated person would see those connections and how you come out on one issue would inform how you come out on another. And you'd be reasonably stable over time in what your views are. That's what it means to be politically sophisticated. So he's postulating that right out of the gates. And it might be worth us lingering on that point. I'm really interested to hear what you guys think about. What do you guys think? Those are the right hallmarks, the right ways of characterizing political sophistication. You know, this converse piece that we're talking about was really the forefather of all of the subsequent things we've discussed on our podcasts where people say, "Oh, look, voters are idiots and therefore democracy is broken." And so just, you know, at the outset, my inclination is almost. My inclination is a skeptical one at the very outset, just because it already starts to sound like a pretty elitist argument to say, "Here's my very narrow definition of what it means to be a reasonable sophisticated voter." Now, it's funny to think about, you know, who is this ego maniac? Who thinks that he knows what, you know, what what it means to be politically sophisticated? So there's a little bit of that. Now, I know that the political science gods are going to smoke me right now because Phil Congress is one of the giants of the discipline. But already, I feel like before we even get into the evidence, I think, you know, that's that's my thought reading this piece is like, "Okay, this better be really good." That's my thought, because. Okay, so I think it really is good. I mean, it may well be a elitist, and in fact, it decidedly is both in its conceptualization and in the findings he presents decidedly so. But he has a real argument that we have to grapple with. So, I mean, does this survey, right, this survey shows that the views that you have on an issue at one period are loosely correlated with the views you have in another. And, curiously, that if you look over three periods of time, the views that you have two periods are out are correlated at the same level as the views you have one period out. Which, again, is if what you think is going on is that there's a trajectory or that people are learning or really reflecting on policy, that ought not to be the case. It ought to be those that are most closely proximate that you see higher correlations than when you go further apart. So that's one piece of evidence. Another piece is that the views that you express on one policy issue are loosely correlated with the views that you express on other policy issues. And I think here the argument flowing from his claims about what it means to be completely sophisticated is that, no, if you take a position on one issue that has implications for logically, for the position you ought to take on another and that you see those are weekly correlated, suggest that people aren't thinking things through. And then the third big piece of evidence is that notions of what it means to be liberal or what it means to be conservative when you engage people, they have very little to say about it. They don't really know what these things are. They take just a sliver of it and that those seem to weekly constrain the policy positions that people actually articulate. Okay, so let's take some of those. Can we take some of those in turn one at a time? The last one that you mentioned, though, which is I think the first one in the chapter, which is you ask people in a survey, what do you think of John F. Kennedy or what do you think of Richard Nick's other, what do you think, what do you think, and then, or what do you think of their Republican party? And then you see in some qualitative sense, do they seem to be making reference to an ideological dimension or do they seem to be saying things that are somewhat idiosyncratic? You know, I like him because he matches my ideology. He's a liberal and I'm a liberal, then that means you're politically sophisticated. Whereas if you say something like, well, I think he's I think he's a smart guy and I think I like his proposal on taxes or something that's less ideological in his mind. And then if you say something like, well, yeah, I think he's going to be good for small business owners. That's that's not very ideological that then you're kind of doing the group-based thinking. And then, you know, so I don't know. I mean, it's not it's not clear to me that sophistication means that you make reference to ideology explicitly when you're talking about politics. If anything, I would actually think that's a fairly naive person who says, oh, I like this person because I'm a liberal and I'm told that they're a liberal and therefore I'm supposed to like them. And I would actually think a much more thoughtful answer is a substantive one which says, you know, I, you know, I like what they have to say on some of these issues. They seem like a competent person to say, you know, so it's not obviously just that because you're a sophisticated reasonable voter, you're going to make reference to some ideological dimension. You're going to be talking about liberalism, conservatism, socialism, etc. But what he has in mind is not just that you reference liberal or conservative. It's that liberal and conservative has meaning for you. That you can articulate, that you can expound upon. It isn't just, well, I'm a liberal and he's a liberal and so there I go reflexively. It's, I'm a liberal. And as a liberal, I see a more capacious role for the state in attending to the welfare of average citizens. And then you start saying, oh, that's somebody who has a kind of a world view that then there's going to be a greater correspondence in our policy preferences as well. And so that's the stuff of somebody who is more sophisticated than is somebody who says, I like him because I think that the economy will do better. That that's, maybe you do, but based on what? And what does that come from? That's just sort of the sign of somebody who hasn't thought things through. Says converse. Maybe. I mean, that seems like a, that's to me that seems like a perfect good reason to vote for someone to say, I think the economy will do better under this particular candidate. That seems like totally reasonable. Just because someone doesn't use the particular buzzwords that we think they should use doesn't mean they aren't ideological or they don't have values that they care about, right? Somebody might say this candidate just seems like an honest person and it seems like they have the right values and they, they may not even know the term with, with a term liberal or conservative means in this particular context, but they know that But I like what that person has to say. - So I think I disagree with just his definition, converses definition of political sophistication. If you ask me am I liberal, am I conservative? I think I will tell you something, but it's not because I truly finally understand the world and can place myself in this ideological line. And that's why I suddenly realized that, you know, I should vote one way or another. It's just I had some set of beliefs. I instinctively felt that some policies were good for me or for the world and some policies were bad. And then once I became more educated and I realized there is this sort of, you know, line that people tend to put themselves on and I try to fit myself there. So this this worldview came later, but I don't think this worldview made me a better voter. - You know imagine somebody who watches a political debate and pays attention to a campaign and reads news articles. They're they're gonna weigh all these competing considerations and they're gonna decide which candidate they believe is better for them. They might be perfectly well informed. They might have lots of well thought out views on lots of different issues and they might have no idea what it means to say that you're a liberal versus conservative versus libertarian versus something else. And yet they still have decided that on net they prefer this candidate over another one. To say that that person is unsophisticated or non-ideological strikes me as not even unfair to that person. And when in fact, I mean, most of us, it would be ridiculous to say, I mean, none of us make a devoting decision by saying, okay, I know that my ideology score is a negative 0.7 and I know that Elizabeth Warren is negative 1.2 and nobody does that. Of course, what you do is you actually listen to what they have to say and you try to weigh competing considerations and think about which candidate you think is gonna be the best job. And then this whole ideology thing is something that political scientists talk about later when we're trying to come up with a simple parsimonious explanation for how people behave. There's one other point that I wanna make which might be a recurring point. What if you're a moderate? And in fact, we know from, we have lots of good evidence now that suggests that most Americans are ideologically moderate, at least relative to the political politicians that are typically running for office. They're ideologically between them. And so what are you supposed to do when they say, which candidate do you prefer? Well, you're gonna talk about, you might talk about other non-ideological things like which candidate do I think is the most competent person, which person, and it's not because I don't care about policy, you know, like the left right policy dimension is just that I'm kind of in between the candidates on that. And so it makes sense for me to decide based on something else. So I can see in our conversation that my role is to champion converse. So I'm gonna take you in there, right? 'Cause look, his primary intention is not to figure out how people cast votes. That's not what he's looking at in the main. What he's looking at primarily is the constellation of people's views on policy issues and the extent to which they are consistent over time. They're correlated with each other and they link up to higher notions, higher architect in one's belief system about, and they could be liberalism conservatism, they could be notions of egalitarianism, individualism, any number of things. A thing that he shows is that kinds of people who behave in the way that he says are politically sophisticated, you guys don't like that definition, but the kinds of people who do behave in that way, it's a small segment of the public tend to be better educated, tend to have more knowledge about facts, which is further evidence that this is consistent with somebody who's being considered in their judgment. And it's perfectly fine to be moderate on a particular policy issue, but if you're moderate on one issue and you're extreme on another and you're bouncing all over the place, right? Then he would say, since I'm walking arm and arm with him, I will say that's on average a sign that somebody hasn't actually thought things through. I mean, it could be in principle, we could imagine a really imaginative person who says, well, I changed my mind all the time. I think I see all the intricacies of one issue and how it distinguishes itself from another issue and therefore that's right, nothing's correlated with anything, but that's the sign of just how deep I am in my thinking. And he's saying, not so much, I don't buy that, not on average, you might find such a person, but not on average. The person who behaves that way is somebody who's just shooting from the hip. - I'll try something. Will you're gonna be our research subject just for a moment? You imagine that you're a subject in the American National Election Study and I come along and I say, Professor Howe, what do you think of Donald Trump? What do you say to me? - Oh, I have so many things to say. - Please do not say all of them here. - I would say, first the first couple sentences that pop into your head. The first couple is that he's a populist who has had a profound impact on the trajectory of the Republican Party and who is in the policy positions he takes in some ways is traditionally conservative. - Oh, this is not. This is not your-- - This is not your life. - It's right. - Your life for the sake of the show. What you would say, what I would say, I'll say what I would say is he's an old senile idiot who's a blowhard and a narcissist and I, you know, and of course, I mean, of course like there's things you can say about his policy positions and his ideology, but the first 10 things you would say, probably have nothing to do with ideology. - Oh, gee, so fair. - And then how can you be saying, I'm an unsophisticated, non-élogical voter because the first 10 things that popped in my head weren't ideological? - That's right. So I think a lot, I mean, a lot of hinges, this isn't a question about the particular findings of one study, it has to do with the technology they're deploying, which are these surveys. And are we tapping into in these surveys their true views, right? Or are we selling them short somehow, right? And that's, I mean, this is something we've talked about on the show as well. It's like, what are we actually learning from what people articulate in the context of a survey? But I guess what I'm standing up for in this context is the notion that one's ability to see connections across issues is evidence on average of how much you've thought about it. - Okay, so let's talk about that. So let's talk about the issues for a second. So that's another big part of Congress analysis, which is let's look at how people respond to these different issue questions, these different policy questions. Most of them are kind of binary questions. You support something or oppose something. And we're just gonna see how correlated they are. And it turns out that for congressional candidates, you get very high correlations, right? So today, if you ask congressional candidates about their views on gay marriage and about their views on, you know, whether we should raise or lower taxes, there'd be a very strong correlation. But if you ask members of the general public, there's a weaker, it may be still a positive correlation, but a weaker correlation. He calls that constraint and the implication is that because that the public is less constrained in their positions that they're in some ways they're less ideological and they're less sophisticated. I don't buy that either. So there is, of course, I mean, for some policy areas, there are logical connections between them. There are logical connections between how much we tax, how much we spend, and how much deficit, and how much debt we kick on. Those things are all related to each other. And so it would be unreasonable to say we should spend more tax less and also, you know, reduce the debt. But to say that I think I support gay marriage, but I think we should have, you know, lower taxes. That's a perfectly reasonable set of positions that a perfectly sensible, reasonable person could have. I don't feel comfortable saying that they're unconstrained because they have their policy preferences happen to not be correlated in the same way that congressional candidates positions are correlated. By the way, I mean, if you're going to pick a set of completely crazy people, let's pick congressional, like to benchmark the public against congressional candidates, like, yeah, that doesn't make any sense. Those people are not jealous. Okay, so this is why the paper is like a triple threat. I mean, it is true, right? It is true that, I mean, that's a good example. You can rationalize taking the two positions that you've articulated in all kinds of ways that somebody, by his own definition, would be seen as being kind of politically sophisticated. But it's also true that seeing very little relationship between those issues might be evidence that people are just kind of providing an answer that's just really nilly, right? That's possible. But that's why he then comes in and says, but your views that you have over time, we don't see stability there either. The views that you are expressing on one particular issue don't seem to be correlated with some higher notion. And again, I mean, this is his kind of language, some ideological category. And the kind of person you were describing for the most part isn't coming forward and articulating a view that rationalizes their position across these two issues. And meanwhile, there are other issues that are logically connected, right? Your views about the debt and your views about taxes ought to be correlated. They ought to be linked. And if they're not, that's a sign that something is a raw. - These changes in people's views over time that converse documented. That was, I think, the most convincing evidence in my mind of some sort of lack of sophistication voters. - I'm going to go back to my refrain for one second, which is what if you're a moderate? And in fact, lots of people are moderates. I mean, the fact that lots of people are moderates could explain most of these findings, right? So suppose you're being asked a bunch of these binary questions, like, you know, should we raise the minimum wage to $12 an hour? And suppose your position really is, like at $12 an hour, that's roughly maybe, I don't know, maybe that's maybe should be 11, maybe speak 12, maybe 12, 50, maybe 10, 50. I don't know somewhere in there. Suppose you really are kind of a moderate and that's roughly your position. On one day, you might say yes. On another day, you might say no. And does that mean that you're unsophisticated or unreasonable? No, it means that the question just happens to kind of put you right at a point where you're just about indifferent between the two options. - But your objection is a measurement. Objection, not a conceptual one. You are taking to task, not just the use of surveys, but the crafting of certain kinds of questions that disadvantage of moderates. And I think you're exactly right on, according to the test that he's putting forward. But if you were to use, let's say we came forward and we simply asked people, what do you think they know? wage out to be. And the moderates were free to say whatever they wanted. And then we asked them, you know, two months later, what do you think the minimum wage ought to be? With that kind of question that gets around the subjection that you have, if you, if you saw a weak correlation between one's answer, some day I say $12 or other times I say $37 and other times I say we ought to eliminate the minimum wage, that would be, no, wouldn't that be a sign of somebody who hasn't thought it through, most likely, that isn't a sign of somebody. And then of course these people can change their minds, obviously, but yes. I mean, I suspect what you would find if you did that. And as far as I know, nobody has done exactly that exercise, that been interesting thing to do. I suspect you would find that yes, people vacillate a little bit, but people are dramatically more sweetly. Right. Hey, if you're getting a lot out of the research that we discussed on this show, there's another University of Chicago podcast network show that you should check out. It's called capital isn't, capital isn't uses the latest economic thinking to zero in other ways that capitalism is and more often than not isn't working today. From the debate over how to distribute a vaccine to the morality of a wealth tax, capital isn't clearly explains how capitalism couldn't go wrong and what we can do about it. Listen to capital isn't part of the University of Chicago podcast network. Anthony, what is the finding that convinces you that people are not politically sophisticated? What's the fact that you say, okay, you got me. Well, are you asking me hypothetically, what could they show me that would convince me? I think is that the version of the question that you want to ask? Yeah. Okay, I haven't seen it yet. I haven't seen the really convincing evidence. Let me flip it around for a second and tell you, there's lots of evidence that I've seen in the other direction that convinces me that while voters are certainly not ideal in the sense that they're not embodying the perfect ideal of democracy, they are still behaving reasonably and they're sensible in the care about policy and they're not driven purely by identity and they're ideologically moderate. I mean, there's a lot of evidence that we could put forward on that front. One other form of evidence just comes from aggregate election outcomes. So we see in the aggregate, ignoring what you see in the survey data, in the aggregate, it looks like on average competent candidates do better, ideologically moderate candidates do better, experience candidates do better. It looks like voters respond to performance in the ways that you might expect an effort. So all of those things reassuring me, even if it is true that there's some number of voters who are kind of unsophisticated and hyperpartisan or say crazy things in surveys, it turns out to not matter a whole lot when we think about the overall health of democracy. And that's something that, you know, that converse and the rest of the Michigan school did not do much of. They did not spend a lot of time, but how do we square what we're seeing in the surveys with what's happening in aggregate elections? So to flip that around, I mean, does it try to better answer your question, Bill? If you showed me convincing evidence that, in fact, better candidates don't do better in elections, that the parties could completely change their policy proposals, and they would still get the exact same people voting for them, because people don't really care about policy, and they just vote for the same party in some kind of naive way. If you showed me that politicians don't ever have any incentive to work hard or to moderate their positions and so forth, you know, I mean, all of those things would be, then that would be, okay, that would be pretty troubling evidence. And I would say, yes, I'm really worried about this. And converse was right, and maybe democracy is doomed if you show, you know, but that's not what the evidence looks like. You know, because I liked this question of what evidence would convince you, but in a sense, we should perhaps stop asking this question, because what matters is the outcomes. So why should we spend our time really trying to devise this perfect test that probably doesn't exist of whether the voters sophisticated or not? Instead, we should be looking at do elections seem to be working on average? Do better politicians are reelected and worse politicians voted out of office? I think to me, this is the central question and not the question of how do we actually sort of adjudicate between those two counts voters are sophisticated, and voters are not? So I want to stand up for Congress again. That's all I'm doing today. So part of the critique that's being offered here is the suggestion that he wrote the wrong paper. He's not asking the question that you guys think he ought to be asking, which I have to do with one's ability to cast the right vote, or he's looking at within people's heads individually, and that's not where the action is. I think part of the critique I'm hearing have to do with what people did with these findings, going forward, that they drew a set of conclusions that shouldn't be drawn. And to which I guess I would say that what he's doing in this paper is a really big deal, and then he's actually much more nuanced than we're giving him credit for it. He comes down in a hard way and says, here's exactly what I mean by sophistication, but he walks through precisely what he means by it. You may not like that definition, but then it's incumbent upon you to come up with a different definition about what then political sophistication is, and how might we measure it? But by his own definition, there's a reasonable correspondence between what he's saying at the front end and the measures he puts forward going on the back end. There's a whole question about how that translates into behavior, and there he has much less to say, and people have run with his findings in ways that weren't constrained, right? That we're really problematic. But that's a critique of the subsequent studies, not of Converse 1964. As a piece of scholarship that's saying, are people person by person organized in their thinking? Because I think that that's a sign of how considered their views are. There's not much evidence of that when you measure it in these kinds of ways. That's a big deal, no? I'm not so willing to give him past. I think he could have written the paper that said, you know, here's some interesting correlations. It turns out that these correlations across issues are much stronger for elites and for congressional candidates and for members of the public. Isn't that interesting? Let's think of, here's five reasons why that might be the case. Let's think about why that might be the case. That paper, that chapter does not get 11,000 citations going forward. Instead, he chose to wrote the provocative version of this study, which is look at all these idiots who are unconstrained and their thinking isn't organized. They basically don't even have any meaningful ideology. They don't even have any meaningful policy. They're non attitudes that these people have. That's why this is such a famous piece. Yes, people have run with it and yes, people have done crazy things, but he's responsible for that. He came out and said these things. He said that he was measuring whether people were constrained and sophisticated. He said, "Oh, look, they're not." That just doesn't follow from the evidence that he showed. So I'm blaming him to some extent for the way that people have run with this. Maybe there were even career mode career incentives to do that, but I think that set us down a pretty bad path in my opinion. Can I give you my bottom line and then I will run? Because I have to run. Bill, what's your bottom line? Sorry for that. My bottom line is that like movies, you should read papers when they come out because when you read them, you know, 50 years later, they feel differently. So my example is pretty woman. I'm so pretty woman for the first time. I guess 20 years after it came out and did not, not so pretty, so reading converse in 2021. Okay, so joking aside, I want to say. I think I'm with Will in a sense that I appreciate the novelty. And I appreciate also that perhaps it was harder to measure the other thing that we want to measure. So the impact of, you know, the economy and whatever happens to us on how we vote. And perhaps it was even harder to immediately think that this is the right thing to measure. So I completely appreciate the novelty, but definitely the ideas aged quite a bit in my mind, so. Bye, guys. I'm going to throw something out there. Maybe, you know, this is a personal detail that maybe we shouldn't be talking about to publicly, but you and I wrote a paper we submitted to a journal. We got refer your reports back. We got a rejection just just a couple weeks ago. It was very recent, very fresh in our minds. And we know one of our anonymous referees actually told us without seriously engaging with our paper or our findings in any really meaningful way or giving any specific critiques about what we did wrong, they just said, your study just can't be right. That's what they said to us. Your study can't be right. And the reason it can't be right is because if it were right, that would mean that converse as well. Yeah, they actually wrote this and they're referring. That was that was kind of that was the, the, the, the, the, the fronts of their critique of our paper. So this, this thing really does have legs. This converse converse from day to 64 is so dogmatic in the minds of any photo scientists that a new finding that goes against it is rejected out of hand as if, as if this was, you know, Newton's laws. And, and that is nonsense, right? Obviously, he's not Newton laws. I would also say like in a variety of ways, this article is chapter has not been good for political science. Some having to do with the fueling of the irresponsible claims about the relationship between what goes on in individual minds as we understand them and the health of democracy. That, that space is really kind of a mess in our, in our discipline. And also, I think anytime some subfield has a set of deities that limits and constraints and undermines the production of new knowledge. And that's really a problem. What I was struck by rereading this though was how the writing didn't strike me as dogmatic. It was actually really thoughtful. And then it was worth rereading. So I come out differently than Violet. in that it's not that I don't think I updated my views about these particular issues, having reread it, but I came away thinking that this was not a gimmick of a paper or a paper that was just designed to kind of generate a bunch of publicity, short-term publicity that would map into Converse's own short-term career incentives. This is something to reckon with. - So, Converse and the rest of the mission of school, they did some great things for the field. They did make an effort to systematically collect data on the information the voters have and the positions they have, and they are probably responsible for rigorous, careful quantity of analysis being such an important part of political science if they accept that it is. So, they deserve a lot of credit. At the same time, for all the reasons we discuss, they deserve a lot of blame for saving us off on some of these what I think of as a long pause. And there are a bunch of different directions we could have gone after this. We could have said, you know, Converse had some really provocative findings and let's go back to the beginning and think about, is that really the right way that we should conceptualize sophistication? And let's think about different ones or is that really the right way to measure these things? Let's come up with better measurements and that's not really the way that we went. Instead, there were lots of kind of copycats, right? There were lots of people who were like, this is, I'm gonna run with this. I'm gonna, you know, we're gonna replicate this, but we're gonna do it on a bunch of new issues. And we're gonna, you know, you get to sit in your ivory tower and you get to analyze the data. And you can say, look at how stupid the voters are. They don't have the same opinions that I think they should have and therefore democracy is broken. That's a ridiculous argument. But I think in a world in which Converse had written this slightly differently, maybe this is less famous and less impactful, but the field as a whole was better off because we're set off in a slightly better, more thoughtful direction. I mean, I kind of wonder, like what was going on? Did he think he was launching a thousand ships? Or was he asked to write a chapter for an edited volume? In the way that you get asked to write a chapter for an edited volume and you think, all right, I'll put together my thoughts as best I can see them, right? - I'm sure you're right. I'm sure they did not, at the time, think about like, they are launching, they are starting this thing. It's gonna last for a hundred years and, you know, I even wonder the thing I like to think about is the day when, you know, I imagine there was some phone call between, you know, Incas Campbell and Anthony Downs or some of these important people. And they were like, what question should we ask on this survey? And it was somebody have the idea like, why do we ask people what party they identify with? - Right. - And that might even just been like a throw away off-handed, that's a reasonable thing to ask. - And we've been stuck with it ever since. - Somehow the way they phrased that question and the way that that became the object of investigation. I mean, that's something we've talked about a little bit on this podcast, but in a lot of subfields of political science, the object of investigation becomes how people answer the survey question. Rather than like, let's actually try to understand like, what people are thinking and what motivates them and what determines, you know, what influences their behavior and their thoughts. Instead, it's like, you know, there are people who say they are experts on party ID, like meaning the NES party ID question. And that's the thing, they really, you know, anyway, that's another rant for another day. But yes, I'm sure they made lots of decisions that turned out to be very consequential. That at the time, they had no idea what they were doing and that was not their intent. - They were looking over, I think, I mean, if we want to be generous, we'd say, they're looking over at their shoulder and reacting to a bunch of kind of armchairing elections who are just holding forth. This is what I say, this is what I think. - And they want to say, no, you don't get to do that and call yourself a social scientist. - And it's very important. - That is what it's supposed to be. - That's a great experience. - Yeah. (upbeat music) - Thanks for listening to not another politics podcast. - Our show is a podcast from the Harris School of Public Policy and is produced by Matt Haudab. Thanks for listening. (upbeat music)