Once again, Conor Clarke has kindly responded to my defense of polls (here and here), as well as those of Mark Blumenthal and Ed Kilgore. At the risk of belaboring this subject, I’ll offer a few more comments on some of Clarke’s points.
bq. Producing information isn’t free. A dollar that the New York Times spends on a poll is a dollar that it isn’t spending on a Baghdad bureau or a congressional beat reporter. Well, that’s not really how tradeoffs work. But the general point — you have to measure something against its opportunity cost — is one I agree with and one that is relevant here. So one question to consider might be this: Could the resources that the Times and the Post spend on polls be better spent elsewhere?
If the prestige press were to focus on The Important Stuff, then I can think of lots of things that should go on the chopping block before polls. How about, say, a “satiric” video by the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza and Dana Milbank talking about the beer summit and joking frattily about how Hillary Clinton should drink “Mad Bitch beer” and har-dee-har-har. (The video seems to have disappeared, which tells you something.[1]) Moreover, some of the pollsters who are most concerned with the abuses of polling that would also concern both Clarke and me actually work for the prestige press, including Gary Langer at ABC and Jon Cohen at The Washington Post. I want them to keep their jobs, and not just because I went to graduate school with Jon. Polls are expensive but I can think of a lot of things more expendable.
bq. I am happy concede John Sides’ empirical point that there’s little evidence that politicians are “buffeted to and fro by the winds of the capricious public,” as expressed in polls. I am also willing to concede that politicians do in fact use polls “to find out how best to sell their ideas.” But I’m not sure what this proves. If politicians become more adept at selling their ideas to the public, does that benefit the public? That sounds like a question with a complicated answer. On the other hand, I feel reasonably confident saying that it is not the purpose of the media, at least as traditionally understood, to provide a consulting service by which politicians can hone their rhetorical skills.
No, this use of polls doesn’t benefit the public. Which is why I wrote, “Of course, Luntzian wordsmithery is hardly good news for democratic accountability.” But what’s clear is that there is no one-way street between polls and the actions of political leaders. And if leaders use their own polls to develop strategy, then, as Clarke suggests, that’s all the more reason to have media polls as a means of accountability.
bq. John Sides also has a lot of helpful stuff to say about information cascades, but I’m not sure what to make of his conclusion — namely, that “the role of polls [in influencing future polls and outcomes] is unclear.” I agree that it would be difficult to prove how a poll in the present affects a poll in the future. (Or at least I’m not sure how you’d ever tease causation away from correlation.) But it would surprise me if they did not. We all have preferences for all sorts of things that are popular — neighborhoods, fashions, music and so on — which will in turn make them more popular. These preferences are endogenous or interdependent or whatever you want to call them. I think it would be strange to discover that political preferences are any different. (A sidenote: One quality of many situations in which choices are interdependent — in which my choice depends on your choice and your choice depends on Michael’s choice so forth — is that they have multiple equilibria. The mere fact that we all end up living in neighborhood x or drinking at bar y or supporting candidate z is not evidence that we are best off doing so.)
Absence of evidence (of information cascades brought on by polls) is not evidence of absence. But there are lots of reasons why polls don’t shape preferences. I’ve already noted that most people don’t really follow politics closely enough to know what polls say. (There are exceptions of course, which can motivate the strategic behavior that others brought up in response to my original posts and which Clarke describes in the sidenote. But this behavior is relatively rare.)
This is why it’s unlikely, despite what Chris Good suggests, that the new poll on beliefs about Obama’s birthplace will create a sudden cascade of “birthers” in the general population. To be sure, opinions are often endogenous. But Clarke’s examples actually illustrate my point: in fashion and music — as in politics — the _mechanism_ that shapes opinions is rarely polls. For example, I don’t decide what to wear based on polls. I decide what to wear mostly because of social norms, the choices of peers, what my wife says, images and messages in the media, etc. The same is true with political opinions, which are shaped by preexisting norms and values, by social networks, by media content, by major news events, etc. Those are the factors shaping opinions, not polls per se.
bq. On the affirmative case for polls: Sides and Blumenthal both point to the value of accountability. in Sides’ words, “we should know whether policymakers and policy are acting in accord with public opinion.” Ack. I feel a bit dense saying this, but I really don’t understand why we should want to know this at all…I can’t figure out why any individual should care about how well policies line up with aggregate preferences.
bq. A related point: I am happy to concede…that politicians might be influenced by polls. But even if you could prove that polls helped bring political behavior more in line with public opinion, I wouldn’t totally know if that were a good or a bad thing. The wooly-headed paternalist in me thinks that the public doesn’t always know what’s best for itself. And the hard-headed-fan-of-The-Myth-of-the-Rational-Voter in me thinks that the incentive structure in democracy leaves something to be desired. It seems to me that the best case for democracy is a moral one (“people deserve a system that takes their preferences seriously”) and not an instrumental one (“democracy will produce the best policies”). So while I’m happy to celebrate elections as a check on political power and a moment of collective expression, I’m less eager to celebrate polls as a tool for relentlessly enforcing the public will. (Of course, the fact that the two sides of the previous sentence are in obvious tension makes me realize that I need to think about this more.)
I agree with Clarke the purpose of democracy is not to blindly enact the majority’s will. As I said before, “This does not mean that policy must always agree with the majority’s position. Accountability is not plebiscitary democracy, and fidelity to the majority is not the only or best criterion for evaluating policy.” Simply _learning_ what the public thinks (to the best of our ability) does not imply _acting_ as the public wishes. Clarke seems to endorse this ideal: “people deserve a system that takes their preferences seriously.” So I think he’s supplied the answer to his question about why should we care what the public thinks. We shouldn’t have to wait for an election to allow preferences to be known. Lots of important stuff happens in the interim.
fn1. UPDATE: A Washington Post spokesperson says: “Kris Coratti, Director of Communications at the Post: “The video was a satirical piece that lampooned people of all stripes. There was a section of the video that went too far, so we have removed the piece from our website.” But Media Matters managed to get it.