What Is Political Sociology by Clemens Elisabeth;

Author:Clemens, Elisabeth; [Clemens, S., Elisabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2016-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

Rational Apathy

Recognizing the many ways in which the interests, preferences, and organizational capacities of democratic citizens are shaped by social processes that often go unrecognized, one is left with a troubling question. Are there good reasons that democratic citizens opt out of democratic participation? Are voters correct in believing themselves to be relatively powerless? In Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America, political scientist Martin Gilens takes on this issue armed with an impressive alignment of survey data and legislative votes across an impressive range of issues including foreign policy, social welfare, economic policy, and religious issues (2012: 101).

Gilens' findings are sobering for anyone who hopes that the presence of formal democratic institutions guarantees that policy will be responsive even to the “median voter,” much less the full range of public opinion. Instead, he finds a “complete lack of government responsiveness to the preferences of the poor [that] is disturbing and seems consistent only with the most cynical views of American politics” (2012: 81). This lack of influence extends to the preferences of a large swathe of the electorate, suggesting that legislative responsiveness is often restricted to those who are most advantaged, consistent with the “power elite” models of the political system that will be discussed in the next chapter. There is some support for claims of democratic responsiveness, particularly in that policy proposals adopted close in time to elections tend to match public opinion more closely. Gilens also finds that gridlocked or divided governments do less, but what they do is more responsive to voter preferences as expressed through public opinion surveys (2012: 211).

Note, however, that Gilens starts with the assumption that all voters have preferences that can be linked to the policies actually under consideration by Congress; this is baked in by the methodology of public opinion surveys that form an important component of his data for analysis. Yet, if we recall John Gaventa's puzzlement over the “quiescence” of Appalachian miners despite their everyday experience of exploitation and oppression (chapter 1), preferences themselves are problematic. In a great many circumstances, people who “should” make demands – at least in the opinion of outside observers and experts – fail to make those claims on the political system and, in some cases, reject those claims when made for them (see chapter 5 on the Tea Party as policy feedback). Such failures to understand and advance one's self-interest seem desperately at odds with the assumptions of rational voter models. But they pose questions that have provoked important new lines of sociological research.

Just as research on revolution has turned to specific organizational settings or patterns of interaction as sources of mobilization, students of democratic politics have also come to see political behavior as emerging from modes of interaction and the accumulation of experience. At the individual level, the puzzle is how to explain how individuals come to understand their interests and to understand some problems – but not others – as targets of political action. For Nina Eliasoph (1997),

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