Jon Chait “disagrees”:http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/87547/the-irrationality-independent-voters with “my earlier post”:https://themonkeycage.org/2011/04/independents_are_not_a_confuse.html on political independents:
bq. This really seems to miss the point. Of course voting on the basis of economic growth in the two or three quarters leading up to an election plus military casualties is irrational. That’s Kazin’s point. The point that it can be predicted doesn’t make it rational. Short-term economic growth and military casualties are related to good governance, but only very, very vaguely. A poor economic manager may be presiding over a peak in the business cycle, or a good economic manager may simply have run into a recession beyond his control. That’s very common. As for casualties, a president may be continuing a war he inherited, or fighting a necessary war.
bq. Would Sides vote the way independents vote? Would he even want to be friends with anybody who did? I suspect the answer to both is no.
bq. Indeed, it’s pretty clear that independents don’t rationalize their votes on the basis of what drives them. They say they’re voting this way or that because John McCain is too mean, or because they think Al Gore wants to cut Medicare, or that Walter Mondale is a wimp. They may be trying to grope toward explanations for behavior that’s determined by factors they don’t consciously realize, but that’s irrational.
Kazin seemed concerned that independents were not paying attention to politics, were ignorant of political issues, and simply agreed with whatever talking points were offered to them in this one poll. To me, his concerns implied that there was nothing in particular underlying their choices in politics. I disagree that there is nothing underlying their choices. I don’t think his “point” at all anticipated the evidence I mustered.
But fundamentally Chait and I don’t disagree. I noted in my post that voting based on recent economic growth or military casualties wasn’t necessarily rational. Chait cites that portion of my post in his. Indeed, there’s a large political science literature debating what is or is not “rational voting.” Contrast “this book”:http://wikisum.com/w/Fiorina:_Retrospective_Voting_in_American_Elections by Morris Fiorina on economic voting with Chris Achen and Larry Bartels’ “paper”:http://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/chairs.pdf on the same subject. Within this debate, I’m more sympathetic to skeptics like Chait.
Chait also brings up rationalization. Here I agree as well. I think that many if not most people — partisans and independents alike — are making choices for reasons that they don’t fully understand, simply because a great deal of decision making is subconscious. So they say they voted because of X but in fact they may have voted because of Y, and they’ll never really know it. I wouldn’t want to over-generalize here either. Strategies for information-processing and decision-making will also depend on the task at hand and, in some cases, people might consciously reflect on choices. But I’m comfortable saying that conscious reflection is not the norm in political decision-making.
But ultimately, the prospect of rationalization doesn’t really speak to Kazin’s focus on independents. _Everyone_ rationalizes, not just independents. Partisans don’t say “I voted for Candidate X just because he was my party’s nominee.” They will tell you all the other many reasons why they think they voted for this person — the candidate’s views on issues, the opponent’s flaws, etc.
If we want people’s explanations of their behavior to match the actual causes of their behavior, then no one will ever be rational.
P.S. I am happy to be friends with political independents.
UPDATE: See also “Jon Bernstein”:http://plainblogaboutpolitics.blogspot.com/2011/04/economic-voting-is-rational.html.