Party On, Dudes!: Ignorance is the curse of the information age
Robinson, Matthew
"PARTY ON, DUDES!" BY MATTHEW ROBINSON Almost any look at what the average citizen knows about politics is bound to be discouraging. Political scientists are nearly unanimous on the subject of voter...
...This is one reason that public opinion can differ so widely from one poll to another...
...And, despite 12 years of anti-abortion administrations, Americans substantially underestimate the number of abortions performed ever year...
...But this presents a new problem: By writing the questions, pollsters are put in a position of power, particularly when those questions will be used in a media story...
...or "Speak softly and carry a big stick" More people knew that Pete Rose was accused of gambling than could name any of the five U.S...
...The elevation of opinion without con-text or reference to knowledge exacerbates a problem of modern democracies...
...population that is poor or homeless, and the percentage of the world population that is malnourished," they write...
...to each according to his needs" is part of the U.S...
...And here is the paradox in the Age of Polls: Pollsters and political scientists are still unclear about the full con-sequences of running a republic on the basis of opinion polls...
...or "Come up and see me sometime" than "Give me liberty or give me death...
...Almost six of 10 Americans (59 percent) think the president, not Congress, has the power to declare war...
...Media polls are typically searching in vain for hard-nosed public opinion that simply isn't there...
...Elites are committing the nation to major treaties and sweeping policies that most voters don't even know exist" Professors Delli Carpini and Keeter discovered, for example, that most Americans make fundamental errors on some of the most contested and heavily covered political questions...
...But in a knowledge vacuum, public opinion also becomes more plastic and more subject to manipulation, however well intentioned...
...Even on something as personal as health care, citizens display a striking and debilitating ignorance that quietly undermines many polling results...
...Lack of knowledge on simple matters can reach staggering levels...
...Studies by Larry Bartels at Princeton University show that mere name recognition is enough to give incumbents a 5-percentage-point advantage over challengers: Most voters in the election booth can't identify a single position of the incumbent, but if they've seen the candidate's name before, that can be enough to secure their vote...
...Is there any doubt that voters' knowledge, or lack thereof, affects the debate about whether to raise school spending to ever higher levels...
...As more time is devoted to media pundits, journalists and pollsters, and less to candidates and leaders, the effect is a negative one: Public opinion becomes more important as arbiter for the chattering classes...
...The only thing we have to fear is fear itself...
...As a blunt instrument, the pollster's questions fail to explore what the contrary data may be...
...When a polling question introduces new facts (or any facts at all), voters are presented with a reframed political issue and thus may have a new opinion.Voters are continually asked about higher spending, new programs, and the best way to solve social ills with government spending...
...Were Americans armed with strongly held opinions and well-grounded knowledge of civic matters, they would not be open to manipulation by the wording of polls...
...senators accused in the late 1980s of unethical conduct in the savings and loan scandal...
...In this sense, the unreflective reporting on public opinion about these policy issues is deceptive...
...63 percent knew the name "Bush...
...Yet the same period has seen increasing reliance on finely tuned instruments for measuring popular opinion and more vigorous applications of the results in policy making...
...Only 22 percent knew the correct answer: The plan would increase spending to $6,700 per recipient...
...More Americans recognize the Nike advertising slogan "Just Do It" than know where the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is set forth (79 percent versus 47 percent...
...Just over half (53 percent) correctly identified Alexander Hamilton as a Founding Father...
...senators...
...Worse, when the media fail to think critically about thelines of dispute on political questions, polls that are supposed to explore opinion will simplify and even mislead political leaders as well as the electorate...
...If they perceive that there are fewer abortions or lower taxes than there really are, these misperceptions may affect the kinds of policy prescriptions they endorse...
...But how does the knowledge base (or lack of knowledge) affect the results of a pollingquestion...
...According to a January 2000 Gallup poll, 66 percent of Americans could correctly name Regis Philbin when asked who hosts li'7ro Wants to Be a Mill/moire, but only 6 per-cent could correctly name Dennis Hastert when asked to name the speaker of the House of Representatives in Washington...
...Nearly one in five said they were "shocked and angry" by the revelation.Another 28 percent said they were "very surprised," and 17 percent were "some-what surprised...
...Fewer than half of voters could identify whether their congressman voted for the use of force in the Persian Gulf War...
...Another 19 percent wanted it to remain in effect...
...Barely one in three students knew that George Washington was the American general at the battle ofYorktown—the battle that won the war for independence...
...Public Opinion's pollsters then told respondents the true result of the GOP plan and explained: " [U]nder the plan that recently passed by Congress, spending on Medicare will increase 45 percent over the next seven years, which is twice the projected rate of inflation" How did such hard facts change public opinion about Medicare solutions...
...Constitution...
...Taxes for a four-person family earning $35,000 are 54 percent higher than most people think...
...Based on sheer numbers—in the absence of the rule of law and dedication to the Bill of Rights—there is enough support to put curbs on the free speech that most journalists (rightly) consider one of the most important bulwarks of liberty...
...For example, the most commonly known fact about George Bush while he was president was that he hated broccoli, and during the 1992 presidential campaign, although 89 per-cent of the public knew that Vice President Quayle was feuding with the television character Murphy Brown, only 19 percent could characterize Bill Clinton's record on the environment...
...When the media drives opinion by constant polling, the assumption of an educated public undermines the process of public deliberation that actually educates voters...
...Eleven percent didn't know they were in an HMO, and another 13 percent thought they were in an HMO but were not...
...Moments of change become opportunities for spin, not for new, bold responses to the exigencies of history...
...They might change their views if introduced to the facts...
...military cannot destroy even a single incoming missile...
...It's an opportunity for those asking the questions—whether pollster or media polling director—to drive debate...
...More Americans could identify comedian-actor Bill Cosby than could name either of their U.S...
...What's interesting is that although 70 per-cent of those polled said they were concerned about the possibility of ballistic missile attack, the actual level of ignorance was very high.The Polling Company went on to tell those polled that "government documents indicate that the U.S...
...Some 54 percent of respondents thought that the U.S...
...All of this would appear to be part of a broader trend of public ignorance that extends far beyond politics...
...Americans grossly overestimate the average profit made by Americancorporations, the percentage of the U.S...
...For elected leaders, voter ignorance is something they have to confront when they attempt to make a case for new policies or reforms...
...In her essay "Truth and Politics," historian Hannah Arendt writes: "Facts inform opinions, and opinions, inspired by different interests and passions, can differ widely and still be legitimate as long as they respect factual truth...
...Ninety percent know that Bill Gates is the founder of the company that created the Windows operating system...
...In many cases, voters can't even recognize the names of incumbents...
...The evidence shows that ignorance is being projected into public debate because of the pervasiveness of polls...
...This is the dirtiest secret of polling...
...Obviously, issues of privacy and government power are relevant here.Yet how can a poll about this issue make sense if the citizenry doesn't under-stand the scientific terms of debate...
...When asked in a June 2000 Washington Post poll how much money the federal government gives to the nation's public schools, only 31 percent chose the correct answer...
...As Hamilton put it, American government is based on "reflection and choice...
...Pollsters often try to bridge the gap in public knowledge by providing basic definitions of terms as part of their questions...
...People at this level of inattentiveness can have only the haziest idea of the policy alternatives about which pollsters regularly ask, and such ideas as they do have must often be relatively innocent of the effects of exposure to elite discourse," writes UCLA political science professor John R. Zaller...
...Just 30 percent of adults could name Newt Gingrich as the congressman who led Republican congressional candidates in signing the Contract with America...
...Nearly a quarter ofAmericans misidentified the coverage they had...
...Media polling that does not properly inform viewers and readers of its limitations serves only to give the facade of a healthy democracy, while consultants, wordsmiths and polling units gently massage questions, set the news agenda and then selectively report results...
...Only 22 percent said they were "not surprised at all" Finally, 14 percent were "skeptical because [they] believe that the documents are inaccurate...
...The story—if the poll is the story—is limited by the questions asked, the definitions supplied, and the answers that respondents are given to choose from...
...Even when polling covers subjects on which a person should have direct knowledge, it can yield misleading results because of basic ignorance...
...Yet when people believed they were in a much-maligned MARCH/APRIL 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 69 HMO (even when they actually had another kind of insurance), their perceived satisfaction with their health care was lower than that of people who believed they had non-HMO coverage (even when they were in an HMO...
...Take, for instance, the results of a survey taken by The Polling Company for the Center for Security Policy about the Strategic Defense Initiative...
...Six months after the GOP took congress, 64 per-cent admitted they did not know...
...Modern-day radical egalitarians journalists and pollsters who believe that polls are the definitive voice of the people—may applaud the ability of the most uninformed citizen to be heard, but few if any of these champions of polling ever write about or discuss the implications of ignorance to a representative democracy...
...military had the capability to destroy a ballistic missile before it could hit an American city and do damage...
...In the frenzy to judge who wins and who loses, the media erodes what it is to be a democracy...
...Naturally, when practical-minded Americans look at political issues, their perceptions of reality influence which solutions they find acceptable...
...Do you agree or disagree that it should be repealed...
...But for the media, ignorance isn't an obstacle...
...and they do not know how their congressmen vote on even quite salient policy questions...
...Because polls have become "players in the political process," their influence is felt in the policy realm, undercutting efforts to educate because they assume respondents' knowledge and focus on the horse race...
...After looking at the carnage of polls that test voter knowledge rather than impressions, James L. Payne concluded in his 1991 book The Culture of Spending: Surveys have repeatedly found that voters are remarkably ignorant about even simple, dramatic features of the political landscape.The vast majority of voters can-not recall the names of congressional candidates in the most recent election...
...For instance, in 1995, Grass Roots Research found that 83 percent of This article is adapted from Mobocracy: How the Media's Obsession with Polling Twists the News, Alters Elections and Undermines Democracy, by Matthew Robinson...
...Asking an evaluative question seems pointless...
...The average American citizen not only lacks basic knowledge, but also holds beliefs that are contradictory and inconsistent...
...Some political scientists charge that American ignorance tends to help institutions and parties in power.That is hardly the active vigilance by the citizenry that the founders advocated...
...More than one in three were clueless about the division of power set forth in the U.S...
...Political scientists Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter studied 3,700 questions surveying the public's political knowledge from the 1930s to the present.They discovered that people tend to remember or identify trivial details about political leaders, focusing on personalities or simply latching onto the policies that the press plays up...
...The common ground needed for compromise and peaceful action is eroded because the discussion about facts and the parameters of the question are lost...
...The Wall Street Journal editorial page provides another example of how ignorance affects public debate...
...Thirty-five percent ofAmericans believe the president has the power to adjourn Congress at his will...
...Americans 1111 1111 often "project" power onto institutions with little understanding of the Con...
...What's interesting is that there was no such thing as the 1975 Pub70 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • MARCH/APRIL 2002 lie Affairs Act...
...The next generation of voters—those who will undoubtedly be asked to answer even tougher questions about politics and science—are hardly doing any better on the basics.A 2000 study by the American Council ofTrustees and Alumni found that 81 per-cent of seniors at the nation's 55 top colleges scored a D or F on high school—level history exams...
...Yet 99 percent of college seniors knew the crude cartoon characters Beavis and Butthead, and 98 percent could identify gangsta rapper Snoop Dogg...
...Esoteric information...
...Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and facts themselves are not in dispute...
...MARCH/APRIL 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 71...
...Another 20 percent didn't know or refused to answer...
...they are wildly wrong about elementary facts about the federal budget...
...Almost half (49 percent) think he has the power to suspend the Constitution (49 percent...
...Only 27 percent correctly said that the U.S...
...Only 42 percent could identify Washington with the line "First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen" Only a little more than half knew that Washington's farewell address warned against permanent alliances with foreign governments...
...Ideas are no longer honed, language isn't refined, and debate is truncated...
...That is simply unknown...
...Similarly, on nearly all 10 measures studied by the center, those HMO enrollees who thought they had a different kind of insurance gave satisfaction ratings similar to those who actually had those other kinds of insurance...
...Only 2 percent said it was too low...
...The nonpartisan Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC) found that how people rate their health care is attributable to the type of plan they think they are in, more than their actual health insurance.The center asked 20,000 privately insured people what they thought of their coverage, their doctor and their treatment...
...Six of 10 Americans said that the GOP's proposed Medicare spending was too high...
...In other words, they are generally incapable of rewarding or punishing their congressman for his action on spending bills...
...Hi ho, Silver...
...military could not destroy a missile...
...When the citizens of a republic lack basic knowledge of political facts and cannot process ideas critically, uninformed opinion becomes even more potent in driving people...
...Here are just a few examples from LosingAmerica's Memory: Historical Illiteracy in the 21st Century, focusing on people's lack of knowledge about our First Citizen—the man whose respect for the laws of the infant republic set the standard for virtue and restraint in office...
...And when it comes to actually explaining the ideas that preserve freedom and restrain government, the college seniors per-formed just as miserably...
...Ignorance can threaten even the most democratic institutions and safeguards...
...Only 22 percent of these seniors could identify the source of the phrase "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" (from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address...
...Forty-five percent think the communist tenet "from each according to his abilities...
...If poll respondents lack a solid grasp of the facts, surveys give us little more than narcissistic opinion...
...56 percent ofAmericans could not name a single Democratic candidate for president...
...And six in 10 think the chief executive appoints judges to the federal courts without the approval of the Senate...
...stitution or the law...
...the number of undecided voters rises.The mere practice, in polling, of naming the candidates yields results that convey a false sense of what voters know When Harvard's "VanishingVoter Project" asked voters their presidential preferences without giving the names of candidates, they routinely found that the number of undecided voters was much higher than in media polls...
...they cannot use the labels "liberal" and "conservative" meaningfully...
...Another 29 percent said it was about right...
...Nearly one in four (24 percent) said they wanted it repealed...
...Indeed polling and the media may gain their ability to influence results from voter ignorance...
...And 75 percent think it guarantees a high school education...
...The cost of voter ignorance is high, especially in a nation with a vast and sprawling government that, even for the most plugged-in elites, is too complicated to understand...
...Political scientists continue to debate the role of ignorance and the future of democracy when voters are so woe-fully ignorant.As journalist Christopher Shea writes,"Clearly, voter ignorance poses problems for democratic theory: Politicians, the representatives of the people, are being elected by people who do not know their names or their platforms...
...Beyond simply skewing poll results, ignorance is actually amplified by polling...
...Not only are polls influenced, shaped, and even dominated by voter ignorance, but so is political debate...
...Political scientists are nearly unanimous on the subject of voter ignorance...
...More people had heard of John Lennon than of Karl Marx...
...Perhaps the most amazing example of the extent of ignorance can be found in Larry Sabato's 1981 book The Rise of Political Consultants...
...Constitution...
...Forty-two percent think it guarantees health care...
...pparent ignorance of basic civics can be especially dangerous...
...Here is a small sample of what Americans "know": Nearly one-third of Americans (29 per-cent) think the Constitution guarantees a job...
...Almost one in four (24 percent) said it would keep spending the same.Another 25 percent didn't know...
...Their findings demonstrate the full absurdity of public knowledge: More people could identify Judge Wapner (the long-time host of the television series The People's Court) than could identify ChiefJusticeWarren Burger or William Rehnquist...
...Polls force people to say they are leaning toward a particular candidate, but when voters are asked the more open-ended question "Whom do you favor for the presidency...
...Once center researchers adjusted for incorrect self-identification, the differences between HMO and non-HMO enrollees nearly vanished...
...But for 43 percent of those polled, simply asking that question was enough to create public opinion...
...Fifty-seven percent didn't know what should be done...
...Although only 10 percent admitted to not knowing the correct answer, fully 60 percent of registered voters claimed they knew, but were wrong...
...they do not know which party controls Congress...
...This is one of the strongest reasons to question the effect of polls on representative government...
...Political science professor Rogan Kersh notes,"Public ignorance and apathy toward most policy matters have been constant (or have grown worse) for over three decades...
...Ignorance of basic facts such as a candidate's name or position isn't the only reason to question the efficacy of polling in such a dispiriting universe...
...In an era when Americans have neither the time nor the interest to track politics closely, the power of the pollster to shape public opinion is almost unparalleled when united with the media agenda...
...One simple science-related question that has grown to have major political importance is whether police ought to genetically tag convicted criminals in the hopes of linking them to unsolved crimes...
...Fully, 84 percent of Americans are willing to "turn to the government to require that the news media give equal coverage to all sides of controversial issues...
...but it wasn't clear that voters connected the name to George W Bush...
...In September 1997, the Center for Media and Public Affairs conducted one of the largest surveys ever on American views of the Fourth Estate...
...Is it correct to say that Americans oppose or sup-port various policies when they don't even have a grasp of basic facts relating to those policies...
...With most voters unable to even name their congressperson or senators during an election year, the clear winner is the establishment candidate...
...Absent from most polling stories is the honest disclosure that American ignorance is driving public affairs...
...In other words, should police track the DNA of a convicted burglar to see if he is guilty of other crimes...
...But this, too, can be misleading...
...Only about 9 percent could describe in their own words what a molecule is, and only 21 per-cent knew what DNA is...
...Clearly "opinion" isn't the appropriate word for the melange of impressions and sentiment that is presented as the public's belief in countless newspaper and television stories...
...Polls are leading to the democratization of ignorance in the public square by ratifying ill-formed opinions, with the march of the mob instigated by an impatient and unreflective media...
...Pollsters assume and often control the presentation of the relevant facts...
...In 1986, the National Election Survey found that almost 24 percent of the general public did not know who George Bush was or that he was in his second term as vice 68 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH/APRIL 2002 president of the United States...
...That's hard to say...
...Fewer than half of adults (47 percent) can name their own representative in Congress...
...In a 1996 study by the National Science Foundation, fewer than half ofAmerican adults polled (47 percent) knew that the earth takes one year to orbit the sun...
...If ignorance is rife in a republic, what do polls and the constant media attention to them do to deliberative democracy...
...Media reports during the 1995 struggle between the Republicans in Congress and the Clinton White House continually asserted that the public strongly opposed the GOP's efforts to slow the growth of Medicare spending.A poll by Public Opinion Strategies asked 1,000 Americans not what they felt, but what they actually knew about the GOP plan.Twenty-seven percent said they thought the GOP would cut Medicare spending by $4,000 per recipient...
...The responses were interesting...
...It turns out that most college seniors—including those from such elite universities as Harvard, Stanford and the University of California—do not know the men or ideas that have shaped American free-dom...
...Self-expression may work in NEA-funded art, but it robs the political process of the cornmunication and discussion that marries compromise with principle...
...A 1998 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press showed that Matthew Robinson is managing editor of Human Events...
...But instead of just taking their opinions and impressions, the center also looked at what coverage each respondent actually had...
...As intelligent and precise thinking declines, all that remains is a chaos of ideologies in which the lowest human appetites rule...
...Just three weeks before the 2000 election, 14 percent of voters still hadn't made up their minds...
...Basic ignorance of civic questions gives us reason to doubt the veracity of most polls...
...It is like the marionette player who claims (however invisible the strings) that the pup-pet moves on his own...
...Reporters often claim that the public supports various policies, and they use such sentiment as an indicator of the electoral prospects of favored candidates...
...those polled underestimated the average family's tax burden...
...Citizens were asked: "Some people say the 1975 Public Affairs Act should be repealed...
...More people knew who said "What's up, Doc...
...Polls—especially in an age marked by their proliferation—are serving as broadcasting towers of ignorance...
...Seven-in-10 back court-imposed fines for inaccurate or biased reporting.And just over half (53 percent) think that journalists should be licensed...
Vol. 35 • March 2002 • No. 2
