Political Participation and Heuristics

In the assigned chapters of Schudson’s The Good Citizen, the importance of the citizenry’s interest in the political realm is argued to be central to the participation levels that are associated so closely with an “ideal” democracy. Schudson states that in the earlier days of the United States political participation was based on party loyalty, community affiliation and monetary benefits for the voters. This system fostered widespread interest in the occurrences of elections, not because of genuine passion for the political principles, but because they appealed to a personal and self interested facet of the voters’ lives. Therefore, it is no wonder that when the nature of elections and politics overall changed from this model to one of information based campaigns, ideological platforms, and voting as a civic duty, voter participation dropped substantially.

What concerns me about this model is that citizens are seemingly only interested in the national or local leadership to the extent that it entertains them (or pays them). While I find this model deeply upsetting, I do believe that psychologically it is true that people will focus most on what renders tangible benefits to them over things that only offer less visible, long term benefit. However, I think that this situation inevitably begs the question; can we find a happy medium between these two political environments? One where citizens are interested enough to participate but informed enough to vote intelligently? Is there a way to reconcile the community based enthusiasm of 19th century elections with the rationality and principle of modern elections?

I believe that in some ways our current political system is trending toward this middle ground. While many, and even most, political scientists decry the current political environment and would certainly disagree, I believe that the today’s political realm is combining ways to inform citizens quickly and ways to keep this information entertaining. I believe that this is accomplished largely through the influence of social and political heuristics. Psychologists and political scientists alike have argued for the usefulness of heuristics in political campaigns because of their ability to use a voter’s emotional and circumstantial thought processes to inform them of a candidate’s traits or political stances without significant effort on the part of the voter. Some common heuristics that are salient to the political realm are party affiliation, religion, and even seemingly minor qualities such as accent or clothing. These characteristics have been shown in various studies to actually lead voters to vote on rational ideological lines that are consistent with their own beliefs, even after barely following a campaign. This can be connected to Walter Lippmann’s theory (also discussed in Schudson) that voters are inherently emotional , and that the best way to reach them is to use experts to appeal to this emotional nature in their distribution of information.

Therefore, I believe that even though our media sources are overcome with sound bites and descriptions of fashion choices over policy choices, our political environment has found ways to cope with the emotional and self interested nature of voters. While the system is not nearly perfect, I believe that it is making strides in the right direction.