What Do Politicians Think Motivates Voters?

Are we ready? Yeah. Okay. I'm Viola Giuda. I'm Will Howell. I'm Anthony Fowler, and this is Not Another Politics Podcast. So we just had a big election, and we talk a lot on this podcast about what explains election results and what drives, what motivates voters, what do they know, how do they behave. I usually defend the voters and say that they're perhaps more sophisticated and sensible and competent than people think. By usually you mean always. people think. We have a bell. We haven't done the bell in a while. I think that's the record. We defend the voter in the first 30 seconds. And I'd say that debate is unresolved in the literature. There's, you know, I think most academics disagree with me and think the voters are not very smart. Maybe it's worth soliciting some other views on this topic. We know what I think. We know what the academic literature says. Well, there's a live debate on whether or not Harris or Trump made a mistake in their understanding of the electorate and what could they have done differently. And presumably that matters a lot because if you have the wrong inference about voter sophistication, you're going to do a bad job campaigning. You're going to do a bad job. You're going to make mistakes. But there's a higher order possibility that politicians have a theory of what motivates voters about how voters think, about what kinds of considerations weigh upon voters, not issue by issue, but a theory of the mind. And then the question is, is that theory of the mind that politicians have, does it actually accord with what voters themselves think? And Viola, that's the sort of core motivation of the paper that we're going to look at today. And you talked to somebody who is investigating precisely that issue. That's true. I talked to Jack Lucas, who has a paper with 18 other co-authors titled Politicians' Theories of Voting Behavior. And in this paper, they do exactly what you just said. They are trying to understand what politicians in various countries think about their voters. What do they think motivates the voters? What do they think voters care about when they are looking at the platforms? And they also compare that to what the voters tell them of themselves, what motivates them. So they are trying to understand whether politicians have some consistent theory of voting behavior and also whether this theory is consistent with what voters think about themselves. and I think they get quite interesting results. You set out to study whether politicians have the correct theory of the voter. What do you mean by the theory of the voter? The first part is that political scientists have theories of how voters behave and why voters do what they do. Are voters policy-oriented or identity-oriented? Are voters retrospective or prospective? So that's the first part. The second part is that political scientists aren't the only ones who have theories. If you talk to politicians or you interact with them, or even if you pay attention to some of the things they say in interviews or speeches, you see that they too have theories of how politics works, including theories of how voters behave. behave. And so what we set out to do in this paper was to ask, what are politicians' theories of voting behavior? And more specifically, where do politicians themselves stand on some of the most longstanding and central theoretical debates in political science about voting behavior? So how do you go about studying this question? Well, the first step was to develop questions that captured debates about voting behavior in non-technical language. So we identified eight debates that we thought have been really central in the voting behavior literature for many years. And for each of these debates, we wrote a question. So if you'd like, I could give you an example of what those questions kind of sound like. Yes, please. So here's the first one on our list. Some say that voters make their decisions based on their policy preferences. Others say that voters' choices have much more to do with their deeply held partisan or other group identities. Where would you position yourself in this debate? What we're doing there is we establish the two poles of the debate, and the respondent then positions themselves on a 0 to 10 scale. So they have a lot of flexibility to put themselves strongly on one side or the other, or more moderately on one side of the debate or the other, or right in the middle in a kind of undecided position. So the purpose of these questions is to get people's theories of how voters in general behave. Once we developed these questions, we were very fortunate to be able to field them as part of a comparative project that's called Polpop. This is an international study of politicians. So in the end, we got answers to our questions from almost a thousand national and regional politicians in 11 countries. That's quite impressive. And if I remember correctly, you actually conducted face-to-face interviews with those politicians? Yes, these were all face-to-face interviews. It's kind of a distinctive approach. And I think it's a really cool approach. We meet with the politicians either in person or on Zoom, but in any case, face-to-face in the sense that we're seeing them as they complete the interview and the survey. And what's great about this is, number one, you know for certain that it's the politician and not an assistant who's doing the survey. And number two, even though you don't see the answers the politicians are giving, politicians tend to be talkers. And so they tend to add a little commentary as they go through the survey. They react to the questions. And it's really helpful for understanding how they're thinking about the questions and how they interpret the questions and how we should understand their responses. So you fielded these surveys to the politicians and to the general public in those 11 countries. What are the headline results? I suppose I'd say there are three headline results. The first one is that there's a lot of variation in how politicians respond to these questions. All eight of the questions we ask are genuine debates among politicians in the sense that we find politicians at every possible position in that zero to 10 response distribution on all of our questions. And so there's certainly some general tendencies, which I'll talk about more, but it's not the case that the politicians have all just converged on one side or the other side of any of these debates. Now, despite that general diversity of responses, the second headline finding, and I suppose the most important one, is that politicians tend in general to adopt positions on these theoretical debates that are, well, let's say not very optimistic about voters' capacities. Politicians tend to have a view of voters that's what we call democratic realist in character. We're borrowing here from Aiken and Bartel's book, Democracy for Realists. And this is a thin, minimalist view of voters, a view of voters who are focused on the short term, on single issues, who are not very knowledgeable, who are susceptible to what Aiken and Bartel's call blind retrospection, blaming politicians for things that are totally outside of the politician's control. And remarkably, we find that a majority of politicians in all of the countries we study fall into this democratic realist category. And then the third headline, I'd say, is that politicians differ quite dramatically from ordinary citizens in their theories of elections and voting. So what do voters think of themselves? The general public is much more evenly divided between democratic realists and a group that we call democratic optimists. And so unlike Democratic realists, the Democratic optimists, they think voters are much more policy oriented, much better informed, capable of sensible, clear eyed retrospection, capable of long term thinking. The general public is pretty much evenly divided between the Democratic realists and the Democratic optimists. I'll tell you a few of the largest differences and the most consistent differences across countries between politicians and citizens. And then we can go into the others as well, if you'd like. The biggest ones are unfair versus fair blame. And so this is the debate about blind retrospection versus clear-eyed retrospection. Politicians are much more likely than the general public to say that voters blame politicians for things that are totally beyond the politician's control. whereas the general public tends to be more on the clear-eyed retrospection side. So that's one big difference. Another one is short-term versus long-term thinking. Politicians are much more likely than the general public to think that voters are focused only on the short-term when they make their voting decisions. And a third big difference is about single-issue versus multiple-issue voting. The politicians tend to be more likely to say that voters just focus in on single issues when they make their decisions, whereas the general public is more inclined to say that voters are able to incorporate multiple issues into the decisions they make. So would you agree with a statement that, you know, all else equal, if we were to choose what kind of voters we would like to have, we would like to have those voters that you describe as voters falling under democratic optimism. We would like the voters who are forward-looking, who reward politicians for their actions and not for random behavior, who do focus on policies and not just blind allegiance to their party. Would you agree with this statement? And what do you make of the fact that politicians don't believe this is the case? So even if those voters indeed reward them for their behavior, politicians are unlikely to behave in a good way because they are unlikely to believe that they will be rewarded. it. On many of these debates, there's one side of the debate that is, I guess, the word optimism is appropriate, that people would hope that it is the case that voters behave that way. It's not universally the case. It's not clear to me, for instance, on retrospective versus prospective voting, that one side is the one we would hope for and the other side is the one we would not hope for. But certainly on something like knowledge versus ignorance, there is that clear sense to it. And we can actually see this because in our survey of the general public, we had two conditions. We asked half of the sample the exact same question that we asked the politicians, and the other half of the sample, we asked them about how they themselves vote, like as individual voters. And the difference between those, which we randomly assigned, of course, to the respondents, the difference between those is really in some ways a measure of social desirability bias, and in other ways a measure of how people hope voters behave because people want to see themselves in a positive light as voters. And so we do definitely see those trends that you described. The citizen respondents who answered the question about themselves to the politicians' answers about the voters in general, the differences are even more dramatic, much more dramatic, than what we report in the main text of the paper where we're comparing the identical questions being responded to by politicians on the one hand and citizens on the other hand. So who is right? Which of those three answers is the truth? Well, that's a great question. And I have what I think might be an unsatisfying answer, which is it depends which political scientist you ask, because we selected these eight debates to try to represent actual political science debates about voting behavior. And that means that different political scientists will interpret the results differently based on where they themselves stand in each of these theoretical debates. So Chris Akin and Larry Bartels, they might look at the politicians' theories and say, wow, they're pretty accurate in their views of voters. Whereas your podcast co-host, Anthony Fowler, might look at the same results and say, how could the politicians possibly think that? So it's going to depend on where the political scientist stands on these theoretical debates. Now, me personally, I suppose I incline a little more toward what we call democratic optimism in my theoretical approach and the work I've done on voting behavior. And so I'm inclined to say the politicians aren't so accurate. But that's just the view of one political scientist in this larger debate and perhaps the minority view. I'm not sure. Perhaps we should field these eight questions in a survey of political scientists sometime to understand where our discipline stands on these debates in the aggregate. But in any case, it really depends. And I think you'll take five political scientists out of the pool, and each of them will have a slightly different take on if the politicians are right or the citizens are right in their responses to these questions. I think the idea of running this survey among political scientists is a great one. You know, I am a theorist, so I would not run more surveys. I would just try to reason. And this is a particularly difficult one for me, because on the one hand, I would say the voters' theory of themselves should be the right one, because they know themselves. They have the most precise information, so that should be the right one. But on the other hand, as I mentioned before, it is really important for the politicians to get it right. If they get it wrong, they are not optimizing the way they run for election. It would be puzzling to me if we learned that politicians are wrong. But on the other hand, why would the voters be wrong? Why would they not know what they do? Yeah I agree with you that this is something you would think that politicians want to be sure to be very correct about You know this is something they might they strongly motivated to have correct theories of voting behavior But the problem is I think it just really hard for politicians to distinguish the signal from the noise on this stuff. It's hard enough for political scientists, and we have much more time and resources and training and capacity to really dig into the data than would the average politician. And they're hard questions to answer. And there's a lot of maybe motivation that people have not to necessarily update on the basis of the information they do get about election outcomes. So imagine a case, for example, where a party runs a really identity-driven election campaign, and they lose the election. And then the identity kind of theorists in the party, they might say, oh, we need to update our theories. on the basis of this outcome. But we all know what's also likely to happen, which is the identity theorists might say, well, we didn't go far enough. We need to double down on identity appeals. You know, we didn't fully commit to the identity-based strategy. So this is a circumstance where I think the feedback mechanism is weak. The learning mechanism is affected by all sorts of heuristics and biases. And it's probably especially true if you're a politician who's surrounded by other politicians who tend to have the same kind of democratic realist theory of voting behavior. In those circumstances, it may be even less likely that you would look at an election outcome and move away from a theoretical position that you yourself have tended to hold and that you see your colleagues in politics also hold. So to the extent that they are wrong in their theories of elections and voting, those might be some of the sources of their mistakes. And I think we can see where those mistakes might come from, given the information environment they're actually operating inside. One thing that I found interesting is that you don't seem to find differences across countries. That it seems that politicians in all of the countries that you study think similarly about the voters and voters think similarly about themselves. And, you know, the countries you look at are European countries, if I remember correctly, with the exception of Canada. That's right, plus Canada and Australia and Israel. Yeah. So you might say, you know, in some sense, they are similar. You're not studying wildly different democracies. But on the other hand, you know, you have the Czech Republic, you know, and the Czech Republic used to be a communist country. And then you have Southern Europe versus Northern Europe. So you do have some variation and you would think there are historical reasons to expect that the answers would be different. Were you surprised by this finding and what do you make of that? Yes, I think we were surprised by that finding. The consistency is remarkable. Now, I should note that even though a majority of politicians in every country is in this democratic realist group, the proportion does vary quite a bit. So in Scandinavia and Denmark and Sweden, we find it's somewhere between, I think, 50 to 60 percent of politicians, whereas in Canada, it's over 80 percent. So it does vary across countries. But when you look at the variation, it's not obvious why the countries cluster together. I mean, why the countries with very high proportions of democratic realists are in that group, and there's not any obvious geographic clustering or institutional clustering there. So yeah, this is a bit of a puzzle. And I think it points to a story of how politicians come to develop these theories of voting behavior that's maybe separate from the specific electoral institutions they're operating within or the specific party systems they're operating within, because we see such consistency across, as you say, pretty diverse countries in terms of their institutions and party systems and so on. Can we use your findings to better understand some puzzling aspects of policymaking? Like I was thinking, maybe this can explain why voters are so disillusioned with the elites. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I think we probably can. I think your example is a good one. I mean, people find it easier to understand each other and to communicate with each other when they share the same theories of the world. So if you imagine I'm an ordinary citizen and I have regular standard issue Democratic optimist views, and I have an elected representative who's a hardcore Democratic realist. So imagine I go on social media or I go to a town hall meeting or something, and I'm expecting to hear about policy debates and plans for the future. And instead, what I get is my representative railing about how the other party is full of rascals and how the representative is the only one standing up for people like me and all these other groups are out to get me. Just sort of group-based social identity kind of appeals. I'm probably going to be, at best, a bit bewildered by this behavior. and maybe at worst kind of disillusioned by it. It's not clear. It wouldn't be clear to me in that case, why is this elected representative behaving in this way? And so we certainly don't think our findings are the only explanation for things like democratic dissatisfaction, but we do think they might be an overlooked part of the story. The other implication here that's, I think, worth considering is a kind of potential for a self-fulfilling prophecy sort of effect. Like if I'm a politician and I think voters are obsessed with the short term, well, maybe I'm only going to campaign on short-term issues. And maybe as a result of this, in my own small way, I'm helping to teach my constituents that that's what politics and elections really are all about. And so we know that elite cues are important. And you can imagine a scenario where a cohort of politicians with a particular theory of the world that's motivating how they campaign and how they communicate is also helping to shape citizens' expectations and citizens' ideas about what's really going on in politics and what politics is all about. Well, thank you, Jack. This was great. I appreciate you coming on the podcast. All right. Well, if it's Will's final podcast, I hope that this has been satisfactory, sufficiently interesting to justify such an important event. But thank you again. Really appreciate the interest. And it's fun to meet you. Hey, if you're getting a lot out of the research that we discuss on this show, there's another University of Chicago Podcast Network show that you should check out. It's called Big Brains. Big Brains brings you the engaging stories behind the pioneering research and pivotal breakthroughs reshaping our world. Change how you see the world through research and keep up with the latest academic thinking with Big Brains, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network. I want to talk about some of the questions in detail. They write the paper as if, you know, in a perfect world, all these answers would be 10 out of 10 or something like that. And that's not obvious to me. And I just want to linger on some of them. So, for example, one of them is about short term versus long term. Some say that voters are impatient and think about the short term when they vote. Others say that voters focus on the long term. Where would you position yourself in this debate? Yourself meaning, do you think voters are more short-term versus long-term, where zero is short-term and 10 is long-term? So there's an arbitrary zero to 10 scale. I guess one question is, is it obvious? What should the optimal number be? In a perfect world, should it be 10 where voters don't care? You mean we want all the voters to be forward-looking? They don't think at all about the short-term. Presumably we want them to put some weight on the short-term. What the optimal number is on this arbitrary scale seems to be not obvious. And then there's a question of, suppose it is true that voters are short-term. Does that necessarily mean that voters are unsophisticated or doing a bad job? It could be that voters are, in fact, they behave as if they are short-term because the politicians haven't offered them anything, any differences in the long term. Did Harris or Trump say anything really seriously about the national debt? Did they make any promises to do anything about that? And if not, why would I put any weight on that when I'm voting between them? I'll focus mostly on the short-term. And then you look at the results on this, that question in particular, just as one example, oh, they all look similar, actually. So the modal response among the politicians is a three. For the voters, the citizens, a modal response is also three, actually, but there's a lot more of the higher responses. So there are more five. Again, I don't really know what to make of a five, six, and seven. What's a good number? Do you think voters are doing a good job if you say five? They're like, they're kind of considering both short and long term, and that seems good. So maybe three isn't even that far from what you think a really good number would be. and I don't know. I just don't know what to make of this. I don't know. So even if you take them as given, it's just a question. For example, if you think about should you be egocentric or sociothropic, it's not obvious what we would want voters to be. I think either position is fine as long as we know what motivates the voters. And these questions were on a scale from zero to 10. So what do we make out of that if we see differences between voters and politicians? So I guess their answer would be, You know, they are sort of like drawn from a similar population. So, Exante, we don't have any reason to believe that politicians would be, on average, more optimistic or pessimistic. But even if you assume that they come from different distributions, you know, what you want to look at is the variance. Do those distributions look the same? It's just how they shifted a little bit, or is it that we have less variance in responses? And one thing that stuck out for me is that the distribution of the answers of the politicians is much more concentrated. It seems like politicians think very similarly about the voters while voters have very heterogeneous theories of their own minds. It depends on the question and the country that we're talking about. There's a lot of places where they don't look especially different. But where there are differences, it's because almost always the answers of the politicians are single peaked and concentrated around a particular value. And the voters are more evenly distributed across the full distribution. One question is why would we expect politicians to have good information on these questions? I mean, these are active debates within political science. We can't agree amongst ourselves. I hope nobody reads this paper and thinks, oh, these must be the right answers because the politicians, they're the ones. They're reporting out. I mean, it's true that the politicians have a lot at stake in it. Exactly. Let's defend the politicians a little bit. Their jobs depend on getting the right answer. However, how would they know? Like for some of these things, the behavior is just observationally equivalent. So if I think about the prospective versus retrospective question, I'm not really even sure how much is at stake here on this question. But some say the voters make decisions based on candidates' policy commitments and promises for the next term. Others say that voters base their decisions on rewarding or punishing their elected officials for how well they performed in the previous term. Those are very difficult to distinguish between. If I look at actual voting behavior, if I voted— Empirically, it's hard to say. Empirically, exactly. Empirically, if I see voters voting against Trump in 2020 because they were unhappy with how the last term went, are they doing so because they're thinking about the future and they think Trump would be a worse president than Biden? Or are they doing so because they're punishing Trump for bad behavior in the previous term? It's impossible to distinguish between those stories and it doesn't really matter. Yeah. It is a subtle and it's a fine distinction. I mean, it's clear conceptually, but it's asking the survey respondent to draw a very fine distinction. And one thing that may be going on here is the reason why their answers among voters are sort of spread out is that they don't need a theory of the voter in a way that the politicians need it in order to actually figure out how to run a campaign. I mean, another possibility for that is they're introspecting. the citizens are introspecting and thinking about themselves and thinking, no, are they doing it because they're selfish? Or they care, you know, I'm just joking. But I mean, it could be there is in fact a lot of variation in how people think about these things themselves, voters. And so the citizens, you're giving these varied responses. And the politicians, they're just going off of stereotypes. What's that? Why stereotypes? Yeah. What do you mean? Well, they have their hunches about what motivates voters. I mean, I guess the other question is, should we even trust politicians to give honest answers to these questions? That's another question. But suppose they are giving honest answers for a second. It could just be based on – I mean, how would they have better information? How would they have better information that we have on these questions? So here's one. I mean, there's a key – one of the areas where you see a big difference is on the single-issue voting or multi-issue voting. Politicians are much more likely to say that the electorate consists of single-issue voters. But they're also more likely to hear from those single issue voters, right? Exactly, exactly. I mean, you know that if you cross certain lines on certain issues, they're going to come for you. The electorate is going to come for you. And so when the politicians are being asked this question, that's how they're responding. And accurately so. I mean, they're right to respond in that way. It's just a function of who they hear from. Or more precisely, which kinds of voters are going to have this biggest impact on their chances of securing re-election? I think you might be right that when voters are asked this question, even though they are asked to opine on a general voter, not on themselves, not on how they make decisions, but how voters make decisions, I think it's very likely that they just introspect and they say, hey, that's how I make decisions. I think it's hard to avoid that. Like I don't have a theory of an American voter. I have a theory of my own mind. So I think that explains this distribution And basically on almost every question it a nice normal distribution for the voters Politicians are responding to I think a question about the median voter or whoever the voter is that they need to secure in order to win elections. So I think it's not surprising that their answers are more concentrated. Although their answers don't match the median of the citizens' responses. They don't, but also, again, because maybe there's reason for that. I know if you think about single issue versus multi-issue, perhaps those who are single issue voters care more about certain issues. So it could be they're weighting things not by the median, but by their electoral incentives. Exactly. I think it's a very interesting question. But it could also be just biased information. Like the people who write letters to them are the crazy people. It could be. So, you know, I was really torn between two interpretations. On the one hand, I think they can't be systematically wrong. Like their livelihood depends on being right. But on the other hand, I don't know, given that the distributions were different from the distributions of the voters. They were more cynical in some sense. I don't know if I'm willing to say they are more correct. Do we want to call this, are we living in an equilibrium? It's hard to see how this state of the world is sustained. The politicians are systematically wrong in their evaluations of an electorate. That should open up all kinds of opportunities for challengers to step in and to say, no, I see actually what motivates voters, and I'm going to run a campaign that's consistent with those correct views, and in so doing, I'm going to win. How can we sustain the state of the world? Like, what's a model that you'd write down that would allow for this? But, you know, it's actually interesting. So one question that's a little bit different, that has a little bit of a different flavor, is this question about fair and unfair. So there's a question whether voters are fair in evaluating politicians. Here you see, you know, quite a bit of difference. voters think they are reasonably fair and politicians think voters are reasonably unfair here you know like it's sort of like this question bypasses your question now because we could live in a world in which voters think they are fair and politicians are unfair and still that doesn't affect the electoral chances of the politicians but i thought this was an interesting thing to focus on because i don't know i think it speaks maybe to the motives for forming certain beliefs Like if you're a politician, you want to excuse your failures. Or you're held responsible for all kinds of things that you don't think you had anything to do with. And you focus on that, even if it's not. This comes back to the question of how seriously we should take any of these answers, perhaps. What if they're just giving self-serving answers? All of them. It could be any of them. It could be the citizens are self-serving and saying we're always fair. And the politicians are self-serving and saying they're always unfair. But what do you mean self-serving? When you say self-serving, what do you mean? I'm like self-serving and it says, like, I want these researchers to know that and I want the world to know. It could be that. Or it could be you convince yourself, you trick yourself. But suppose you yourself are an extremist and your views are out of touch. And we know that's true for many politicians. I don't know for how many in this particular sample. You don't say out loud, I know my views are extreme and out of step with my electorate. You say, oh, the voters, they don't really even care about ideology anyway. They're kind of dumb. They don't pay very close attention. All they really care about is, you know, you say things like that to make yourself feel better and maybe even start to believe it. I don't know. But that's certainly what you would tell a researcher who came and asked about your voters. You wouldn't say, oh, yeah, my voters are totally reasonable. They're totally fair. And I'm really out of step with them. And they should probably vote me out of office. There are any number of ways you could spin. So let me give a nicer version of the version that you just gave, which is that it isn't that I'm trying to justify my extremism by talking about the foolishness of the electorate. It's that I see a key role for me to lead and to take hard positions that are objectively correct. And I don't see myself as slavishly attending to the policy preferences of an electorate. And that these answers then flow from that basic disposition, which is a friendlier version of the politician. It's suggesting it's not denigrating an electorate for the sake of denigrating an electorate. It's saying that politicians have a responsibility to own the positions that they take and not just see them as extensions of an electorate. And that's what's being made manifest here in these answers. I think there's an even nicer interpretation. So it's very likely that voters are fair on average, meaning on average they tend to reward those who deliver and tend to punish those who don't. But of course, on individual basis, there are politicians who just get unlucky. They are hit by some shocks that make voters update negatively about them, perhaps not in a justified way. So from the perspective of one individual, you might feel like this is not fair. But from the perspective of the voters, they might feel like on average they are doing the right job. Now, this is like how we live our lives. We know, for example, a publication process might be on average fair. But of course, on individual basis, our papers get rejected. And that seems like unfair thing. For me, I think when I focus on this question, at least that would be the imputation. But I think that's still interesting. If you create this disconnect between the politicians and the voters, I can see how the cynicism of the politicians might lead them to responses when they campaign or when they do policymaking that are not optimal for the voters. So why is it that again, I'm stuck on this. Why isn't the headline point to take away from this paper is that politicians misunderstand the core evaluative criteria that voters bring to bear when thinking about policy and that that presents a huge opening for a new class of politicians to step in and to push out the old class? This is not unlike the conversation we often have about extremism and polarization. There's all these extreme candidates, extreme elected officials. We have pretty good evidence that more moderate candidates would in fact do better. And yet none of them are running what's going on. And one of the answers we discuss often is the moderates aren't even willing to run at all. There are other potential explanations there. But this seems similar to that. This seems like, yes, there is an opening, in fact, that if there were politicians who – And I mean, I think even if you think back to some of these recent elections that we've had in the U.S., it is the case that politicians tend to think pretty little of the electorate. And the voters are aware of this and the voters don't like this. And in some cases, the voters even are voting against candidates because they know that the elites despise them. So I would disagree here in the sense that I don't know whether we can draw this conclusion from this paper. Like we do see some difference between the answers of the voters and the answers of the politicians. but we don't know who is right, who is wrong. And we just had a discussion about like what might explain those discrepancies and maybe both are right in some sense. I am a little bit reluctant to defend the voter and her rationality than be sort of like eager to say, ah, politicians are just not rational. They are just leaving something on the table. Like I think if you look at the countries, so maybe we should mention the countries that were covered in this survey. So there were Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Israel, Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland. Many of these countries have different institutions. In many of these countries, I think the campaign system is very different in the US. So like the stories that we tell about the US is that moderates don't want to run because it's very expensive to run. And it's a very, very unsatisfactory job, unsatisfying job, because you have to spend most of your time fundraising and so on. But I don't think this is true in many of the countries that are here on the list. I would be reluctant to just assume that they are out of touch. I don't know, but I don't have data. What you said earlier was you were reluctant to say who was right and who was wrong, but there are electoral rewards associated with alignment. I'll say who's right. You will. You're going to jump in with that. And I'm going to ask you to take a position too. Are you ready for it? Okay. Answer this question. Zero to 10 scale. Some say that voters care more about the ideas parties stand for than about the party leader's character and competence. Others say that voters care about leaders' qualities more than the party's platform. Where would you position yourself in this debate? Where zero is they care more about ideas and 10 is they care more about the qualities of the leader. Okay. So I'm going to duck out of this question. I want to because it's conflating two things. It's one, do you look to party versus person or do you look to whether or not there are issues? You can look to the person and say this person has a bundle of issue commitments. The question probably could be worded better. I agree. There's a lot in there. But you still got to give an answer. Zero to ten. You're a respondent here. What do you think? You're an expert political scientist. I am an expert political scientist. What do you think? I think they got it right. Where do you think? Who said the politicians did? Yes, they got it right. So just to reveal the picture to the listeners. So the distribution of answers among the voters is, you know, pretty, like, even similar to uniform, I would say, with the exception of the extreme answers. And politicians say seven, basically. Seven out of ten, where ten is they care about leaders and zero is they care about ideas. So let's just, let's ask the question a slightly different way. Do you think in any of these countries, if you just flipped the platforms of the parties but kept the leaders' individual characteristics and qualities the same, do you think the voters would change who they vote for or do you think they would continue voting for the same? Oh, they would respond to that. I think no one is saying that they don't care about the positions at all. But here I'm going to bring the U.S. Like how many times we've heard those narratives of voters voting for Trump saying, oh, he says all those things about immigration on the staff, but I don't... Okay, let's talk about the U.S. for a second. Now, maybe you have to set aside Trump and Harris and everything you think about them. There's a new candidate who has all the same personal qualities as Trump, except he's running as a Democrat and he's adopted all of the policy positions of Harris. And there's a new candidate who has all of the personal characteristics as Harris, but she's running as a Republican and she has adopted all of Trump's policy positions. I think a lot would have changed. How do you think the election would go? What would change? I don't think a single thing would change. Hardly anything would change at all. So you think people in the U.S. voted the way they voted because of policies, not because of – and you're contradicting yourself a lot because we had this conversation where we said, Kamala Harris was just an unattractive candidate. Although most of that was about her ideological extremism. That was most of what we talked about in that conversation. It wasn't her speaking style. It wasn't... But I'm just empirically when I look at how people vote it seems obvious that they put almost all of the weight on policy and very little weight on character, other qualities. You're positing that the politicians are wildly wrong on this, how they answer this question. They must be. They're giving this high up. I'm asserting that they're wildly wrong. Okay, so let's take that a step further and to say, okay, so what is the opening for the Fowler campaign in Switzerland, recognizing that there are all these Swiss politicians who are saying it's all about me and my rhetorical ability and my fashion sensibilities that is what's keeping me in office. And is the opening then, you can then step in there and start talking about issues and win on that. Assuming your position, your policies are popular. Aligned with, yes. So if you had a bunch of modern positions, you would focus on the issues. If you didn't have popular positions, if you had mostly extreme positions, you would avoid talking about issues. And then when asked about it, you'd say, oh, voters don't really care about issues anyway. It's really more about my personal characteristics and my style and my family and the quality of my TikTok dances and whatnot. And so that's what our campaign is going to focus on. So how are we living in this world where they're all so wildly wrong? This doesn't make any sense. Because they're giving self-serving answers because they're... But they have so much incentives to be right. Yes. Like you always say voters are rational. and they think and they are careful. Why do you think politicians who have all the incentives and they have a lot of resources to get it right, why do you think they don't? I think they probably know. If you really press them, they probably know deep down that the issues do matter a lot and the policy platforms matter a lot, but they don't want to say that. Not in this context? Not in this context. Perhaps because they themselves don't have popular policy positions That could be one answer. It could also be their beliefs are wrong and they'll never be corrected because they never, I mean, they don't have access to good information. They only hear from the crazy people that scream at them. And they don't, you know, but, and maybe they're, you know, they're not invested in doing careful studies on this question. They're just, you know, they're happy they're still in office. Most politicians are pretty electorally safe anyway. They're not at serious risk of losing their jobs. and they're happy to continue. That's only because the word isn't out, that they all have a theory of the voter that massively wrong on some core issues Or maybe it massively right and that why they being re Yes right that right So what we don know here is You think they all have really attractive personal characteristics I mean, attractive is in the eye of the beholder. But, you know, when I think about the other country that I know, yes, the personality of the leader matters. And it's the same part. It's the same two parties more or less the same two kind of positions more or less for the last 20 years in Poland. and the fluctuations really are the fluctuations depending on whom you put up front, whether it's someone who's competent, who appeals to people. And I'm not saying that now if you flip them but keep the issues, I'm not saying issues aren't important, but conditional issues having, let's say parties have already fixed issues. Whom you put forward, how competent this person appeals, how they can speak about the issues and convince the people that those are the issues they should be focusing on, it seems, I mean, it seems very, very important. You'd go for that. conditioning on the issue positions that these competence matters as well. I do. Competence matters. That's competence matters. That's why it's not a zero. A lot. I think, you know, if I don't think it matters that our position is anti-abortion, our position is, I don't know, immigration reform, and this person has no charisma and no, nothing to show competence. I think most voters will excuse a lot of personal shortcomings if they agree with a candidate on the policy. And I just don't think the weight they... I mean, they put some weight on it, obviously. On the margins, if you're really moderate and you're almost indifferent on policy, then you might vote for the candidate that you think is more competent or more honest and so forth. But I don't think that's a lot of people. And I think if you played out... Do we have a person on the show that voters vote based on the picture? Based on? The picture and whether someone has a handsome picture or not. We have discussed this. So we have discussed this. Those effects are pretty small. So there are some voters on the margin. But I think you play out my thought experiment for this recent presidential election. Maybe a few percent of people switch who they vote for. The vast majority of which party, which platform they vote for. The vast majority of people vote for the policy platform they're more aligned with. But, you know, you ask what's at stake with this paper. And I think it's actually a lot. And this is just one paper. And, you know, it's just like one set of surveys. of course it can answer the question that we are after. And maybe, yeah, maybe we could polish the questions a little bit more. But I think if you think about just the exercise that they were after, when we talk about campaigns, when someone wins or loses, what we have is we have some surveys of, you know, what's your policy position, a median voter? Where would you want the politician to be? And we look at the manifestos of the politicians, of their platforms, and we try to make sense of that. But what they say is like, hey, instead of just looking at policy positions, let's just think about what motivates voters. Like, are they really thinking about policy positions in the first place? Are they thinking about the characters of the politician? Do they think about the short-term gains? Do they want to have some appeal to their own welfare versus the welfare of the society? I think those are really important questions. Why? And why are they important? Yeah, yeah. Well, I don't know what actually would happen in equilibrium if we all had answers to these questions. But in an ideal world, you would think that if politicians know what motivates voters and if what motivates voters is something that's good for the voters, you would like politicians to respond to that. Do they want to have an active government, a passive government? You can think of many, many different questions that usually I don't think we focus on when we just talk about campaigns. So both of these things sit outside of the paper, but that might be like possibilities. But the paper was going in that direction. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The follow-on might look at how do these answers correspond to electoral outcomes? That's one possibility. And the other one is, how do these answers correspond to how one governs? What issues a politician chooses to prioritize? How she behaves in office. And it may be that there's a, the theory of the mind that the politician carries forward about the voter systematically informs how she actually governs. Maybe, maybe, we don't know. We don't know. This may, or not, right? We don't know. So there's nothing in this paper that pins that down, but it's a possibility. But I think it's the step in the right direction. Here's an extension or an alternative version of the paper that I think would be kind of interesting. It doesn't answer all these questions, but one version would be you do, instead of just a straight 0 to 10, you do one of these conjoint experiments where you ask voters, you know, imagine two candidates with the following characteristics and positions and so forth. And you could have a lot of these features in the conjoint, right? One candidate wants to put a lot of emphasis on long-term problems like pension reform and infrastructure resilience and debt. And the other politician wants to focus on current problems like unemployment. So you could have lots of things like that. And you would infer how much voters care about these things and trade off these things by what the effects of those different treatments were. and then you describe that exact experiment to politicians and ask them to predict the various effect sizes and just see how close they are. See, do they even get the right signs? And what's their, you know, that's the kind of thing that you would think politicians should be good at because they should be able to think about what the marginal effect of different actions is on their chances, on their vote shares and their chances of being reelected. So that's a closer connection to the kind of thing that really matters for the incentives of politicians. And I think I would be more interested if I saw a really big disconnect there. I think we probably still would find a disconnect, but it would be – that would be more interesting, a more interesting quantity to be able to say. Because it would be easier to interpret the meaning of it? I think that's right. You know, what voters – and this isn't even just what voters say. This is what voters reveal their preferences to be based on how they make these trade-offs. In a conjoint experiment. In a conjoint experiment somewhere artificial. But, you know, and then you could find – you know, we could find out – for example, we could even include pictures and attractiveness. and we could include different kinds of ads. How much does wearing the better suit matter versus having the more popular policy position matter? Suits matter. Suits matter a ton. That's why we're all wearing suits today. I don't know. I'd be interested in the results of that study. And if I found a big disconnect, I would think that was really troubling. For example, I think you would find that suits don't matter very much and that policies matter a lot. And I think you'd find that voters care both about short-term and long-term and exactly how that shakes out, I don't know. If you found a huge disconnect, if the politicians thought, oh, voters don't put any weight on these long-term things, even though they do, I would think that's really interesting. That's a dilemma. And I'd want to investigate that further. And I think that would be... What's the action that would follow from that? Not more study. Like what is, let's say you saw... Well, you could then, yeah, you could then inform the politicians. You could say, we actually did the experiment and here's what we found. and you could see, does that change their behavior in any way? But that would be interesting too. I mean, I guess you're saying that even if we find the disconnect, you say that wouldn't change anything because that would mean that, yeah, I'm getting this vibe from you that you think, even if we believe the answers, these are honest answers revealed after a lot of introspection and we find a disconnect, you feel like there's nothing to do with it? No, no, no. I'm not suggesting there's nothing. I'm just trying to get clarity about what it is. Is this a story – we've lifted up two possibilities. Is this a story about who is potentially electorally vulnerable because they misunderstand the people that they claim to represent? Is this a story about the models politicians have in their mind about voters that inform their governance and that if they had different models in mind, they would govern very differently? And maybe this is my bottom line. I think I am – the move this paper is making, which is innovative, it's really interesting, is to say let's stop thinking about politicians as themselves, just bundles of policy positions or voters that way either. that these are creatures that bring to bear all kinds of evaluative criteria when they think about policy. And let's investigate whether or not politicians have a reasonably accurate view about what motivates voters, not how they represent in terms of their policy positions, but how they think about policy. That's interesting. I mean, and they appear to both have a kind of model in mind and that it doesn't perfectly align with the electorate. And then the question is, what do we do with it? And all of this paper is about establishing the fact that they do have a model in mind, it doesn't perfectly align with voters. So then what? What does that set in motion? And that's what I want an answer to. I think you're really right about one thing, that it's important and the paper doesn't even attempt to look at this. It's important to distinguish whether they are wrong about the voters or whether when they respond to those questions, they think about the voters that are important for them. Not like this entire discussion. Exactly. For example, you can ask a question, do Americans care about democracy as a whole? But you can, as a Democrat running now against Donald Trump, you can think does the swing voter care about democracy more than something else? And I don't know what those politicians have in mind when they are answering these questions. And I think they might have those swing voters, those voters that are more interested in politics in mind and not the voters as a whole. And I think that's important to establish in the follow-up research. That's a strange bottom line. That's a good motivation for my conjoin, I think, because the conjoin at least makes the quantities comparable, right? It's that we're asking about the marginal effect of these actions. So I guess I'll make that my bottom line, which is, I mean, I think this is really interesting. I think it's great that they went and collected all this data. They talked to leaders from all these countries. I think the general topic is really fascinating. I've raised a lot of concerns and criticisms, but the thing I would like to explore more are the actual implications of this. Is it true? Can we get better evidence on some of these questions? Do politicians have wrong beliefs about these things? And would their behavior change if you gave them better information? That's pretty interesting. And that seems possible to me. It seems possible that politicians are systematically misinformed about the state of democracy and the level of sophistication among voters. And if you gave them better information, they would actually run better campaigns and work harder and do a better job and offer more appealing positions. But they only talk to party insider kind of people who work on their campaigns and crazy people who call their offices and yell at them. And so these beliefs never get corrected. So that sounds like an interesting follow-up. I think that would be kind of fun. We've alluded to this a few times in this recording, but this is your last recording with us, at least for a little while. You're going off to your new exciting job. Do you have a bottom line on this podcast? Should we leave the room? No. So we've been doing this for how many years now? Four? We started in 2020. That's right. Is that correct? 2020. Yeah. I don't know. Yes, it is 2020. Maybe even 19. I don't know. I think we decided to start it, and I think the first episode aired in 2020. That's right. We started recording in the fall of 2019, and it started airing in the very beginning of 2020. So we have really a full four years of doing it. And none of us thought when we were signing up that we were going to be doing, yeah, for five years. Yeah, so none of us thought that this was, we'd be going this long. And I'll say. I don't know. I'll say I'm not going to be on the show, but I'm going to be a listener of the show. And I'm really delighted that this is going to be carrying forward and that our dean, Ethan Bonono Mosquito, will be coming on. He's going to be terrific. And I have at once learned a ton about our home discipline by virtue of having read these various papers. and then talk to the two of you. It's been a source of great joy for me. And I wish we, I guess my only request would be as you go forward, could you open up phone lines? Because then I can call in. Yeah, because I was thinking, I would love that. You can always call in. Yeah. And like, Ethan, what are you saying? Yeah, yeah, I want to be able to do that. I want to be able to do that. But this has been really, this has been a source of great joy. And I've changed my mind about a bunch of things. about, sure, about our discipline, but also about politics. I've learned a ton from you guys. So thank you both. I'm glad we did this at the end because we would have been emotional throughout if we had done this at the beginning. But we're going to miss you a lot, Will, on this podcast and in general. And that was your idea. The podcast was your idea. You started it. You invited both of us to it. So we are grateful for that. And now I will cry. thank you well we'll miss you thanks for listening to not another politics podcast our show is a podcast from the Harris School of Public Policy and is produced by Matt Hodup thanks for listening Thank you.