
What Politicians Believe About Their Constituents: Asymmetric Misperceptions [pdf] - dangerman
http://stanford.edu/~dbroock/papers/broockman_skovron_asymmetric_misperceptions.pdf
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dbroockman
Author here. Not sure why this is showing up today but happy to answer
questions!

FWIW, we have data from 2014 across many more issues and the basic story is
the same. Haven't finished writing that up.

~~~
roymurdock
I think it would be fascinating to look at the dynamic of how young people
interact with an increasingly-old government today. Personally I don't know
too many people who believe in the system/even care enough to show up to
public meetings, write their representatives, or even vote for that matter.
Have these dynamics have changed over the years?

Is your research group working on anything in this vein?

~~~
hackuser
> how young people interact with an increasingly-old government today

Interesting. Is government, by which I assume you mean elected officials,
really aging?

~~~
mindcrime
There appears to be some reason to think so, although this article 100% up to
date:

[http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2013/01/average_age_of_members_of_u_s_congress_are_our_senators_and_representatives.html)

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Afforess
The best quote of the paper (pg 23):

> _Interestingly, the reason we uncover such striking misperceptions does not
> appear to be that politicians are reluctant to admit a belief that public
> opinion is not on their side – many do. Rather, it seems that the reality of
> where the public stands on these issues has such a weak influence on
> politicians’ perceptions of public opinion that two candidates coming to
> judgments about the same constituents largely fail to have much more in
> common than would two candidates picked entirely at random_

Basically, it is not that politicians intentionally mis-believe what their
constituents support (willful ignorance, etc), the problem is that politicians
are a poor representation of their constituents in general.

I've long maintained congress would be much more representative if eligible
citizens were randomly selected for 1 congressional term, like jurors are in
juries.

~~~
jgroszko
> I've long maintained congress would be much more representative if eligible
> citizens were randomly selected for 1 congressional term, like jurors are in
> juries.

And like jurors in juries, wouldn't we then be governed by people not smart
enough to get out of their congressional term?

~~~
dragonwriter
> > I've long maintained congress would be much more representative if
> eligible citizens were randomly selected for 1 congressional term, like
> jurors are in juries.

> And like jurors in juries, wouldn't we then be governed by people not smart
> enough to get out of their congressional term?

Now, I think that a by-lot Congress is a really bad idea for a variety of
reasons, but that's a moderately stupid argument when it comes to juries
(given that it assumes that _everyone_ is actively seeking to avoid jury
service, so the only people who actual serve are those who fail), and its even
stupider applied to Congress -- its relatively common for people to want to
have a say in the government of their country (to the point where already
wealthy people will sometimes spend many times the salary a member of Congress
earns per term on a campaign out of their own money), and shifting from an
elected to a by-lot Congress would reduce the political power of voters as
voters, increasing the delta represented by serving in Congress.

And that's even before considering that members of Congress are paid
substantially more than most workers; changing nothing besides the selection
method would make being selected for Congress not much different than winning
the lottery for most citizens -- only those who are both already wealthy and
politically disinterested would have rational, self-interested reason to avoid
service.

~~~
bsder
> that's a moderately stupid argument when it comes to juries (given that it
> assumes that everyone is actively seeking to avoid jury service, so the only
> people who actual serve are those who fail)

Overall, the problem is that the system bends to accommodate the judges and
lawyers, who get paid very well to be there, and abuses the jurors, who do
not. Why do I have get up at 6:00 AM just to sit around for three days while
you idiots figure out if you need me or not? This isn't rocket science, and
you all already have scheduled dockets.

The bigger problem with jury selection is that everything is trying to screen
out people who bring in _outside knowledge_. This actively screens for the
ignorant. I don't know if this is a good or bad thing, though. I suspect that
it's a good thing overall as the number of times you get someone smart who
recognizes a fault is probably far exceeded by the ignorant who _think_ they
know something false.

~~~
dllthomas
_" Why do I have get up at 6:00 AM just to sit around for three days while you
idiots figure out if you need me or not?"_

My wife was called for jury duty a couple years back. It was a drunk driving
case. During the preceding 12 months, she'd lost family in one accident
involving a drunk driver, and a close friend of hers was hit (thankfully, not
terribly injured) by a drunk driver in a separate accident. There was _no way_
they were going to let her on that jury - they were dismissing people for
_far_ less. And she had to go back three days.

Neither she nor I try to get out of jury duty - we view it as important and
want to do our part - but yeah it can get abusive in pretty stupid ways.

------
akouts
"both liberals and conservatives tend to overestimate how conservative their
constituents are, conservatives’ perceptions in this regard are exceptionally
strong – conservative politicians typically overestimate the conservatism of
their constituencies by more than 20 percentage points on these issues. This
difference is so large that ​ _nearly half of conservative politicians appear
to believe that they represent a district that is as or more conservative on
these issues than are the most conservative districts in the entire country_
​."

I heard a quote years ago that "reality has a liberal bias." Based on the
data...that appears true.

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NotAPerson
This might be an off topic question, but how do the results change (if at all)
when accounting for the age of the people involved?

That is, how do politicians do at predicting the opinions of people +/\- 5
years of their own age (which may be different than the total for the
district)?

I've always been curious if politicians are just "behind the times" (due to an
average age higher than the average age of constituents), leading to
systemically conservative views.

~~~
dbroockman
Their age doesn't predict their accuracy. With that said, I like the idea of
asking how they think various age groups think. Maybe they think their
district is not as young as it is, maybe they think younger voters are more
similar to older voters than they are, or maybe both.

~~~
NotAPerson
> Their age doesn't predict their accuracy.

I was actually asking about the case where the demographic they're predicting
the opinion of is age restricted -- are they good at predicting the views of a
particular age range, even if they're not good at predicting the overall
opinion?

My question was just about restricting the age to be near theirs.

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bsder
It's kind of fascinating that the liberal assessments seem to reflect reality
much more closely.

Why?

Conservative politicians don't have a good reason to be wrong. In fact, it's
quite the opposite, the better at estimating who your constituents you are,
the more likely you are to be reelected.

I'd guess probably error bias. As a conservative, if you overestimate the
conservatism of your district, you're not likely to lose many votes
(especially in a gerrymandered district). Whereas, if you overestimate the
liberalism of your districts, the conservative element will punish you
horribly.

Whereas, as a liberal, you have to be more in tune to a broad spectrum of
issues in both directions or a challenger can carve off a chunk of your votes.

~~~
SteveLAnderson
I think you make an interesting claim in your comment - that right wing voters
are more likely than left wing voters to vote against (ie, punish) someone. I
agree with you, since in my experience right wingers are more reactionary than
left wingers, but I wonder if there's any data on that.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
It's not that right-wingers are innately more reactive than left-wing voters.
It's that left-wing voters are only now getting genuinely angry about being
told, for the past four decades, to just shut up and take whatever the
Establishment gives us.

Consider the current two Presidential primaries. Among the Republican Party,
there's a contest to see who's the most conservative, and candidates are
competing to come up with a platform that appeals to the party base. Among the
Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton is presumed to be the obvious, inevitable,
_entitled_ winner, and so there's a deliberate attempt to _suppress_ actual
competition for the nomination, _most especially_ competition from the
insurgent left-populist Bernie Sanders.

~~~
SteveLAnderson
I do think that right wing voters are more reactive. They tend to see/hear
something, and that something becomes the most important thing. That's why
Rep. McCarthy's statement on the Benghazi hearing resulted in him losing his
opportunity to become speaker. If that had happened 6 months ago, it wouldn't
have been a problem because the right wingers would have moved on to something
else.

Left wing voters more often are in it for the long haul. They cringe when
someone says something stupid, but they don't react with pitchforks and
torches.

That's why there's never been a left wing Rush. It just doesn't work.

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PaulHoule
It's always struck me that conservatives expect to be listened to in the US
while liberals expect to be ignored.

~~~
chongli
Conservativism is born of ambiguity intolerance. One of the defining
characteristics of ambiguity intolerance is a need for certainty.

As for why liberals expect to be ignored? I'd reckon that has more to do with
history and a general sense of malaise and pessimism toward our intractable
situation.

~~~
hackuser
The malaise and pessimism might be what makes it intractable. Liberals in the
prior generation made sweeping changes, in women's and minority rights, for
example.

------
SteveLAnderson
This paper appears to use the term conservative to mean right wing. That's
incorrect. You can be left wing and be a conservative; in fact, it's rather
common in American today.

Looking the three perception statements on page 11, agreement means you agree
to some rather radical change. A true conservative would disagree with all
three questions due to that. Compared to the true conservative, a conservative
right winger would be more likely to agree with the last, and a conservative
left winger would be more likely to agree with the first two; however, they
might not support any of them because they might be too radical. For example,
I know many left wingers that support health care reform but don't support
socialized medicine, so they'd likely disagree with "Implement a universal
healthcare program to guarantee coverage to all Americans, regardless of
income".

That leads to issues with the results. If a conservative left winger says no
to the first two, s/he appears more right wing than s/he is.

On the other hand, if they are using conservative correctly, then it appears
they are using liberal incorrectly. Liberal isn't the opposite of
conservative. Radical is the opposite of conservative. There are radical right
wingers that support same sex marriage who come to that idea from
libertarianism.

The charts on specific questions are great, because they remove the
terminology issue I'm raising, but when they identify the politician as
liberal or conservative, it comes right back.

I'm sure the authors know this stuff better than I do, so I suspect I'm
misunderstanding their work.

I know one of the authors posted here; I'd appreciate if he'd or someone else
could clarify what I've got wrong.

