What fish can teach us about democracy 📊 September 12, 2021
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- Abstracting the findings to our broader theory of public opinion, an ideal process of determining opinions would be more deliberative than survey-taking is today. You first have a pollster assess the idea of the public on an issue, then have the press disseminates the quantified will of the majority to the people, allow some time for community leaders to foster debate about the issue after receiving such information, then take a final poll of the issue to arrive at an informed measure of opinion. Preferably, the polls probe a range of attitudes about one topic, rather than just asking if people support or oppose a policy.
- modern political science nevertheless suggests that the rationality of America in aggregate is strikingly robust.
- Their work supports Aristotle’s theory that public opinion is wiser in aggregate than any individual person, who can fall prey to a lack of information and make an “irrational” decision about a policy that could benefit them. “Americans’ collective policy preferences are real, knowable, differentiable, patterned, and coherent,” the authors write. They are “generally stable; they change in understandable, predictable ways.”