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Summary
Summary
Why democracy is the most effective form of government despite irrational (and sometime oblivious) voters and flawed (and sometimes inept) politicians.
Voters often make irrational decisions based on inaccurate and irrelevant information. Politicians are often inept, corrupt, or out of touch with the will of the people. Elections can be determined by the design of the ballot and the gerrymandered borders of a district. And yet, despite voters who choose candidates according to the boxer-brief dichotomy and politicians who struggle to put together a coherent sentence, democracy works exceptionally well: citizens of democracies are healthier, happier, and freer than citizens of other countries. In Democracy Despite Itself , Danny Oppenheimer, a psychologist, and Mike Edwards, a political scientist, explore this paradox: How can democracy lead to such successful outcomes when the defining characteristic of democracy--elections--is so flawed?
Oppenheimer and Edwards argue that democracy works because regular elections, no matter how flawed, produce a variety of unintuitive, positive consequences. The brilliance of democracy, write Oppenheimer and Edwards, does not lie in the people's ability to pick superior leaders. It lies in the many ways that it subtly encourages the flawed people and their flawed leaders to work toward building a better society.
Author Notes
Danny Oppenheimer is on the faculty at UCLA with a joint appointment in Psychology and the Anderson School of Management. Mike Edwards founded and regularly contributes to Leftfielder.org, a blog on politics and media.
Reviews 2
Publisher's Weekly Review
As Churchill famously asserted, "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." Princeton professor Oppenheimer and Leftfielder.org founder Edwards provide a succinct brief in support of these words, with the first half discussing the flaws of American democracy and the second defending democracy as practiced today. Unfortunately, the authors set the bar low by comparing democracy to various authoritarian systems, and not to representing the needs and interests of the electorate. In a basic methodological flaw, they apply insights from social psychology to the political realm without enough care. For example, they write of the "wisdom of crowds" in, say, guessing the number of candies in a large jar-the average estimate is often spot-on-and apply this to voters picking the supposedly right candidates. More seriously, they pay only glancing attention to voter apathy and the corrosive influence of big money on the electoral process. Though Oppenheimer and Edwards provide fascinating, and adequate, evidence that democracy works because it "encourages the flawed people and their flawed leaders to continually work toward building a better society," they fail to make the case that it "works so well." Agent: James Levine, Levine Greenberg Literary Agency. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Choice Review
Reflecting the backgrounds of authors Oppenheimer (psychology and public policy, Princeton Univ.) and Edwards (a blogger), this book is imbued with pop psychology, social science scholarship, and a dedication to vanquishing a straw man. Some 200 pages later, the authors remain firmly convinced that Churchill was right--democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. The main thrust of the book is the claim that from the individual irrationality of voters (who are here shown to be often uninformed, inconsistent, and impetuous) comes something resembling collective rationality; random errors cancel each other out, imperfect memories are aided by information-sipping heuristics, and, if all else fails, bureaucrats will find a way to produce a "smoothly functioning society." The book offers a dizzying array of brief references, from the economic policies of Stalin in the 1920s to Shane Battier's status in 2009 as the most efficient team player in the NBA. Hard to categorize, the book will be of interest to political theorists who like a lot of data with their epistemology, or to students of elections who appreciate tangential digressions with their statistics. Summing Up: Recommended. Undergraduate collections. D. Niven Ohio State University
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments | p. ix |
I Democracy Is Crazy | p. 1 |
1 Don't Know Much About ... Well, Anything, Really | p. 9 |
2 "We the People" Are Irrational | p. 39 |
3 Electoral Madness | p. 61 |
4 Too Many Voices | p. 97 |
II Restoring Some Sanity | p. 119 |
5 Procedure, Process, and Prophecy | p. 133 |
6 Letting Off Steam | p. 151 |
7 Overcoming Our Weaknesses | p. 177 |
8 Throwing the Bums Out | p. 203 |
Conclusion: The Means Justify the Ends | p. 223 |
Index | p. 235 |