Brandon Bartels
Some Insights from Political Science on Political Issues
The Conflicting Nature of the Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore
Decision
“Myth sustains mystique, which shelters an institution from the public eye and permits it to manipulate people. But if the mask of myth falls, people can see more clearly what is going on. If an institution's involvement in raw political decision-making processes becomes visible, people may develop contempt for it. In contrast, invisibility and distance from the mass public sustain myth and thus legitimacy.”
- Gregory Casey, 1974.
From “The Supreme Court and Myth,” Law and
Society Review 8: 385-419.
“Are we so highly political, after all? We've surely done other things, too, that were activist, but here we're applying the Equal Protection Clause in a way that would de-legitimize virtually every election in American history.”
- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,
2001.
From The Accidental
President, by David Kaplan.
“[T]he Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore did not have a debilitating impact on the legitimacy of the US Supreme Court. Perhaps because the Court enjoyed such a deep reservoir of good will, most Americans were predisposed to view the Court’s involvement as appropriate, and therefore dissatisfaction with the outcome did not poison attitudes towards the institution.”
- James L. Gibson, Gregory A.
Caldeira, and Lester K. Spence, 2003 (p. 555).
From “The Supreme Court and the
Supreme Court Decision-Making
The Attitudinal Model
“The Supreme Court decides disputes in light of the facts of
the case vis-à-vis the ideological attitudes and values of the justices. Simply
put, Rehnquist votes the way he does because he is extremely conservative;
- Jeffrey A. Segal and Harold J. Spaeth, 1993 (p. 65)
From The Supreme Court and Attitudinal Model.
Constraints on
Judicial Policymaking? The Founder of Judicial Behavior Weighs In
“Political scientists who have done so much to put the ‘political’ in ‘political jurisprudence’ need to emphasize that it is still ‘jurisprudence.’ It is judging in a political context, but it is still judging; and judging is something different from legislating or administering. Judges make choices, but they are not the ‘free’ choices of congressmen…. Any accurate analysis of judicial behavior must have as a major purpose a full clarification of the unique limiting conditions under which judicial policy making proceeds.”
- C. Herman Pritchett, 1969 (p. 42)
From “The Development of Judicial Research.” In Frontiers of Judicial Research, eds.
Joel B. Grossman and Joseph Tanenhaus.
Wiley and Sons.
Multiple Goals?
“For the Supreme
Court, many scholars have dealt with goal complexity by positing a single
dominant goal. The assumption that justices act solely on the basis of their
policy goals has advanced our understanding of the Court a good deal…. Yet
continued reliance on this assumption carries costs. Most important, it rules
out consideration of motivations other than the advancement of policy goals. If
those motivations are essentially irrelevant to Supreme Court justices, this is
not a problem. But if goals other than policy motivate justices in significant
ways, as I think they do, then the model of single-minded justices banishes
from analysis much of what is most interesting about the Court. How do justices
balance competing goals against each other? What conditions affect the relative
weight of various goals?”
-
From “What Judges Want: Judges’ Goals and Judicial
Behavior.” Political Research Quarterly 47:749-68.
Judicial Minimalism
“The analytical
heart of the current [Rehnquist] Court [Justices Ginsburg, Souter, O’Connor, Breyer, and Kennedy] has adopted no unitary ‘theory’ of
constitutional interpretation. Instead of adopting theories, they decide
cases…. In their different ways, each of these Justices tends to be
minimalist…. [They] seek to avoid broad rules and abstract theories, and
attempt to focus their attention only on what is necessary to resolve
particular disputes. Minimalists do not like to work deductively; they do not
see outcomes as reflecting rules or theories laid down in advance. They pay
close attention to the particulars of individual cases. They also tend to think
analogically and by close reference to the actual and hypothetical problems.”
-
Cass R. Sunstein, 1999 (p. 9)
From One Case at
a Time: Judicial Minimalism on the Supreme Court.
On Public Opinion and Citizen Sophistication
The Dilemma
“The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again. His thinking is associative and affective…. This may prove fatal to the nation.”
- Joseph Schumpeter, 1942 (p. 262)
From Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.
The Black-and-White
Model
“There is first a ‘hard core’ of opinion on a given issue, which is well crystallized and perfectly stable over time. For the remainder of the population, response sequences over time are statistically random…. Large portions of an electorate do not have meaningful beliefs, even on issues that have formed the basis for intense political controversy among elites for substantial periods of time.”
-
Philip E. Converse, 1964 (p. 242, 245)
From
“The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.” In Ideology and Discontent, ed. David Apter.
The Ambivalence Perspective
“Response variation
is rooted in an important substantive phenomenon, namely the common existence
of ambivalence in people’s reactions to issues…. Even when people are
temporally unstable, expressing completely opposing positions at different
times, they may still…be expressing real feelings, in the sense that they are
responding to the issue as they see it at the moment of response. Although the
perceptions of the issue may change over time, the responses they generate are
not, for that reason, lacking in authenticity.”
-
John R. Zaller, 1992 (p. 75, 94)
From
The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.
Top-Down, Value-Driven Models of Attitude
Constraint
“[People possess] an
integrated belief system which should permit them to link abstract principles
to specific applications…. Although it may be true that most individuals do not
exhibit perfect consistency from one concrete issue to the next, it is likely
that most members of the mass public are capable
of deducing logical issue positions from more abstract beliefs. Thus, when
parties or candidates talk of the need to treat the disadvantaged more humanely
and compassionately and deduce that more lenient welfare policies are,
consequently, preferable, our data show that many individuals are fully capable
of understanding the logical argument which is being offered.”
-
Mark A. Peffley and Jon Hurwitz 1985 (pp. 885-86)
From
“A Hierarchical Model of Attitude Constraint.” American Journal of Political Science 29:871-90.
The
“Citizens frequently
can compensate for their limited information about politics by taking advantage
of judgmental heuristics. Heuristics are judgmental shortcuts, efficient ways
to organize and simplify political choices, efficient in the double sense of
requiring relatively little information to execute, yet yielding dependable
answers even to complex problems of choice…. Insofar as they can be brought
into play, people can be knowledgeable in their reasoning about political
choices without necessarily possessing a large body of knowledge about
politics.”
-
Paul M. Sniderman, Richard A. Brody, and Philip E. Tetlock,
1991 (p. 19)
From
Reasoning and Choice: Explorations in
Political Psychology.
“If we believe that
well-informed voters make the best possible decisions, then the fact that
relatively uninformed voters can emulate them suggests that the availability of
certain types of information cues allows voters to use their limited resources
efficiently while influencing electoral outcomes in ways that they would have
if they had taken the time and effort necessary to acquire encyclopedic
information.”
-
Arthur Lupia, 1994 (p. 72)
From
“Shortcuts versus Encyclopedias: Information and Voting Behavior in
Review 88:63-76.
“People often have
only incomplete information. Fortunately, reasoned choice does not require complete
information. Instead, it requires knowledge:
the ability to predict the consequences of actions.”
-
Arthur Lupia and Mathew D. McCubbins, 1998 (p. 6)
From
The Democratic Dilemma.
Problems with Heuristics
“In the very process
of communicating information to citizens, esteemed leaders may sometimes (and
perhaps unwittingly) exacerbate an already pervasive problem of mass publics:
chronic mental laziness. For some people, what should be the absorption and use
of two relevant pieces of information—who conveys the message and the content
of the message itself—stops with the messenger. Thus, when asked to recall the
message even after a brief interlude, these individuals cannot.”
-
James H. Kuklinski and
From
“On Hearing and Interpreting Political Messages: A Cautionary Tale of Citizen
Cue-Taking.” Journal of Politics 56;729-51.
What do people want from government?
"It often seems as though the demands made by the public are unrealistic. Citizens decry pork-barrel politics in general but are delighted when their own representative is successful in playing the game. They hate negative campaigning but are taken in by it. They complain because politicians do not listen to them and in practically the same breath complain that politicians are captives of polls and lack the backbone required to demonstrate true leadership. People become angry with politicians for not balancing the budget but do not want to pay the price in higher taxes, reduced services, or both, to do so. If people would take their citizen responsibilities seriously and be reasonable, according to this view, then many of the problems facing the nation today could more readily be solved by politicians who, after all, are supposed to be responsive to public desires."
- John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse,
1995 (p. 11).
From Congress as Public Enemy.
“The last thing people want is to be
more involved in political decision making; they do not want to provide much
input to those who are assigned to make these decisions; and they would rather
not know all the details of the decision-making process. Most people have
strong feelings on few if any of the issues the government needs to address and
would much prefer to spend their time in nonpolitical pursuits.”
- John
Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, 2001 (p. 1-2)
From Stealth
Democracy.