Category Archives: philosophy

opinion is dynamic and relational

“Sixty percent of Americans approve of the indictment of former President Donald Trump, according to a new CNN Poll.” This statistic results from randomly selecting more than 1,000 Americans and asking them to express their opinions in response to a multiple-choice survey question. Every respondent provided an answer. One might therefore presume that (almost) all Americans hold private opinions about the indictment, and they are able to disclose those views–truthfully or not–when the phone rings with a pollster on the line.

Is that what the survey results really mean? Here are 13 hypothetical scenarios in which someone opines in favor of the indictment:

A reads online about the indictment and forms a private opinion in favor of it. A pollster randomly calls A (out of the blue) to ask about the indictment. A recalls and shares his opinion, because he wants to be sincere in a conversation with a courteous stranger.
A pollster randomly selects B, who is a Democrat. Despite privately believing that the indictment is a stretch, B says that it is fair. She feels fine about this deception because Trump is a threat to democracy, and a poll is a means to influence public opinion.
A pollster randomly selects C, who thinks: “The 34 disclosed charges are only valid if they relate to an undisclosed additional felony, but I assume that this felony is serious or else Mr. Bragg would not have sought the indictment, so I will say it is justified.”
When randomly contacted for the same survey, D thinks, “Trump: bad. Indictment: bad for Trump. Therefore, Trump’s indictment: good.”
A family member asks E what she thinks about the indictment, so she forms an opinion in favor of it and casually states her view, without much emotion.
F’s friend says, “About time, Trump got arrested.” F generally admires this friend and takes her opinions seriously. F hasn’t thought about this news otherwise. She expresses agreement.
G’s colleague says, “I can’t believe those radicals are persecuting Trump.” G is generally annoyed by this colleague but has not otherwise thought about the indictment. G forms a private view in favor of it.
H serves on the New York grand jury and is required to vote whether to indict on each of 34 charges. Based on extensive evidence and deliberation, but with decidedly mixed and sober feelings, H votes to indict.
I paints a sign that says “Lock him up,” drives to New York City, and waves the sign in front of the national media while Trump is being arraigned. This person sincerely believes that Trump is guilty of the disclosed charges and thinks it is important to persuade the public of his guilt.
J joins I, also holding a similar sign, but isn’t especially interested in the hush money case and actually believes it is weak. J mainly wants to be on TV.
K is a Democratic senator and former prosecutor who feels that the New York State case is legally weak, politically detrimental to Democrats, and polarizing. However, K faces a potential primary challenger from the left. K issues a press release defending the indictment and calling for calm while the legal process plays out.
L is a liberal pundit who interviews six legal experts about the case, recognizes significant challenges to a successful prosecution, but carefully develops the strongest possible argument in favor of indictment in order to counter editorials that seem biased against Alvin Bragg.
M is a reporter who wants to write an objective and balanced news account of the indictment. A reads the quotes attributed to Alvin Bragg in M’s article and forms the opinion that the indictment is justified.

Each of these scenarios involves a person opining in favor of the indictment, yet their meanings are quite different. In several cases, the opinion is clearly dependent on context and could easily shift.

In all these scenarios, the opinion is relational–that is, formed during a purposive interaction with other people. Only a few of the scenarios involve thoughts that remain private. The rest are statements expressed to someone else for a reason, and sometimes at a cost.

Even the private thoughts are responses to others’ previous statements. For instance, A could not form an opinion about the indictment directly, as you might form an opinion of cold rain falling on your head. He must have heard or read one or more descriptions of the indictment that were written by people with intentions–even if, like the reporter labeled M, these writers would deny any bias. A may have chosen to read a description of Trump’s indictment for some specific reason, or the news might have assailed A’s consciousness without being sought, e.g., in the form of a headline.

A common implicit model of public opinion assumes that many people individually form authentic opinions of issues and store them in memory. On this model, well-known problems, such as the influence of the precise wording or ordering of questions or the refusal of many people to answer specific items, should have technical solutions. For instance, CNN should have offered a “not sure” option to reveal how many people lack opinions.

Some of the technical problems might result from a mismatch between the formulation of questions and the ways that people store their opinions. For example, I might have a strong, negative view of Donald Trump but no specific thoughts about the indictment. Then, when asked about the indictment, I could state a positive answer based on my hostility to Trump, a non-answer because I haven’t considered the indictment, or a negative response because (remembering a different stored opinion), I don’t trust the legal system. I would hold private opinions in my memory; the technical challenge is to describe them accurately using a standardized instrument.

Zaller & Feldman (1992, p. 586) argue that people generate potentially conflicting opinions on the same topic over time and store them all in their memory, retrieving a literally random one when asked about the topic. Then my real view is my whole set of relevant opinions, and the task is to depict that whole collection accurately. For instance, hard-core Democrats probably hold 95% anti-Trump opinions in their memories, but swing voters may be 50/50.

This model is fundamentally flawed if “opining” is an activity that people undertake in relationship with others for a purpose. In that case, an interview with a survey researcher is an odd kind of interaction that may not yield knowledge that generalizes to other contexts. Perrin and McFarland 2011 (p. 101) argue that “well-documented anomalies [in survey research,] such as question wording, question order, nonresponse, and even fictional questions on surveys … raise the possibility that responses are produced, not just evoked, by the artificial interaction between interviewer and respondent. Public opinion should be understood as collective, not just aggregated; dynamic, not static; and reactive, not unidirectional.”

Similarly, Paul Sniderman (2107, around p. 28) analyzes a survey respondent as a person in a conversation, and he applies the “maxims” that the philosopher H. P. (Paul) Grice found operative in ordinary conversations.

According to Grice (1967), when a regular conversation goes reasonably well, the speakers try to give relevant, sincere, and concise answers to questions and expect the same from one another. Thus, when a pollster suddenly calls you and asks what you think about the Trump indictment, you may try to give that person what they want: a concise and clear answer that is consistent with your real views. If you have no opinions, you may generate one to be helpful. You will also try to glean what you can from the interviewer, including any reasons that Trump may be guilty or innocent.

Rather than being manipulated by the question’s wording or holding soft and malleable opinions, you may instead be striving to agree–if possible–with your interlocutor, as you normally would with a friend. If the way a question is posed makes you think that Trump deserves to be indicted (even if that was not the pollster’s intention), you may agreeably opine in favor of the indictment. This behavior is not unreasonable; it reflects an effort to learn from the conversation. However, you might have reasons to distrust the pollster. You might believe that the media violates Grice’s maxims, in which case it may be attractive to give them an insincere response in return.

Again, an interaction with a pollster is a strange one, with no clear benefits for the respondent and minimal cues about the interviewer’s trustworthiness. Indeed, interviewers, who are paid phone-bank employees, are instructed not to disclose their own views, as normal people would. As Nina Eliasoph writes:

Research on inner beliefs, ideologies, and values is usually based on surveys, which ask people questions about which they may never have thought, and most likely have never discussed. … The researcher analyzing survey responses must then read political motives and understandings back into the responses, trying to reconstruct the private mental processes the interviewee ‘must have’ undergone to reach a response. That type of research would more aptly be called private opinion research, since it attempts to bypass the social nature of opinions, and tries to wrench the personally embodied, sociable display of opinions away from the opinions themselves. But in everyday life, opinions always come in a form: flippant, ironic, anxious, determined, abstractly distant, earnest, engaged, effortful. And they always come in a context–a bar, a charity group, a family, a picket–that implicitly invites or discourages debate (Eliasoph 1998 p. 18)

I agree with this line of argument, which suggests skepticism about survey research (even though I conduct and use such research).

I would add that each of our opinions also stands in relationships with some of our other opinions. As we opine during conversations with other human beings, we are more or less conscious that the various things we say (or privately believe) should fit together. Not only should each proposition that we endorse be logically consistent with the others, but they should tend to explain or entail each other.

Testing our own consistency is challenging because we do not have access to a database of all our stored opinions that we can audit for contradictions and gaps. On the contrary, a few of our own opinions are salient for us at a given time because of the situation we’re in, including what other people have recently said or asked. We lack the cognitive capacity to retrieve all the other things we have ever felt or said, some of which could easily be contradictory. Most of our own opinions lie beyond the illumination of the present.

It would be easier to achieve consistency if that were the only criterion for adopting a new view. We might then be able to retrieve our closely related existing opinions and reject any new idea if it conflicts with them. For example, I might hold a positive or negative view of Trump, and anytime anyone asks me anything relevant to him, I would decide whether it was good or bad for Trump and opine accordingly.

But that is the foolish consistency of a closed mind. Real people, confronted with the complexity and nuance of real issues, often endorse views that do not cohere so neatly, even in close succession. For instance, Jennifer Hochschild (1981, p. 252) describes a subject who is ambivalent about welfare policy because he believes in ideas of hard-work and independence but also that the rich are mostly un-deserving and that poor people need help. The various views that he shares with Hochschild may all be valid; it is only from the perspective of someone who wants this person to make a decision about welfare policy that they are even in tension. But this interviewee is not a legislator or referendum-voter who confronts a decision. The individual is describing many aspects of a complex situation.

Imagine that people can only recall and think about a few ideas at a time, and those ideas are completely relative to the context—for instance, dependent on how the interviewer has phrased the question. Then we are all blundering around in the dark. But that model does not fit familiar examples. Many people use a few closely related opinions as frequent reference points when they evaluate current events and issues. Some such opinions are invidious, such as racial bias against Alvin Bragg. But some are defensible and based in prior arguments and experiences. For instance, maybe the main flaw of current American politics is partisan polarization, and the Trump indictment will exacerbate the problem. Or perhaps Trump is a 21st-century populist authoritarian, and anything that checks his impunity is valuable.

General doctrines like these can operate as biases. Individuals who always return to a few premises make poor discussion-partners and may have trouble learning from others. Yet people with general views do not randomly select opinions from their stores of prior ideas. They hold organized bodies of thought that may have merit. And other cases reflect more responsiveness. For example:

A person is asked about the indictment of Trump, retrieves several previously formed opinions about the defendant, the US legal system, the relationship between prosecutions and elections, and the witness Michael Cohen and tries to construct a view that makes sense of these propositions.
A person (like G, above) reacts negatively to an annoying pro-Trump interlocutor and adopts a positive opinion of the indictment, but then she recalls that she generally opposes criminal prosecutions in comparable cases and decides to withdraw her view.
A person is not sure what to make of the indictment, reads several arguments on both sides, and remains uncertain but now holds a more complex view of the issues.

Speaking for myself … I recently encountered an argument that was new to me: the Sixth Amendment requires charges to be publicly disclosed at the time of arrest, which the New York prosecutors failed to do with Trump. That argument challenged my prior view of the case. I worked to incorporate it into my thinking. I struggled between: 1) “Good point; this case really is flawed,” and 2) “Since Trump can file a petition to get all charges disclosed, his constitutional rights are protected.” Whether my ultimate conclusion is wise or not, I was trying to reason based on inputs from other people.

I would not claim that any of these responses is typical. They involve the labor of forming and recalling one’s own views, absorbing others’ opinions, and trying to harmonize them, which requires some civic concern and some intellectual rigor and humility. We all often fail on those counts.

I would only claim that these forms of reasoning occur. Their very possibility implies that we may hold ideas that relate to each other, even as we interact with other people who have ideas of their own. This implies quite a different model of public opinion than the now-standard one, which envisions that individuals store lists of views in their private memories and reveal them–more or less honestly–when asked.

See also: individuals in cultures: the concept of an idiodictuon; Mapping Ideologies as Networks of Ideas; against the idea of viewpoint diversity. Sources: Perrin, Andrew J. and Katherine McFarland, “Social Theory and Public Opinion,” Annual Review of Sociology 2011. 37:87–107; Zaller, J. & Feldman, S. (1992), A simple theory of the survey response: answering questions versus revealing preferences, American Journal of Political Science, 36:3: 579-616; Sniderman, Paul M.. The Democratic Faith: Essays on Democratic Citizenship (Yale University Press, 2017); Grice, Paul, “Logic and Conversation” (1967), in Grice, Studies in the Ways of Words (Harvard, 1989), pp. 22-44; Eliasoph, Nina, Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Hochschild, Jennifer. 1981. What’s Fair? American’s Attitudes Toward Distributive Justice. Harvard University Press

against the idea of viewpoint diversity

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In “People deserve safety on college campuses, ideas don’t,” Andrew J. Perrin and Christian Lundberg make an important argument against the idea of viewpoint diversity. They write:

Emphasizing viewpoint teaches students to not bother separating ideas from the people who hold them. Viewpoint is a visual metaphor that attaches what a person believes to where they sit: Viewpoints are properties people own and express, not ideas to be evaluated. It’s a classic ad hominem fallacy that renders argument fruitless.

We all draw on experience, and our experiences are influenced by our social positions. That is why demographic diversity is intellectually valuable. If, for example, men monopolize the conversation, then issues and solutions that are more obvious to other genders will probably be overlooked, or, at best, underplayed. The fact that some individuals demonstrate exceptional insight into others’ experiences does not negate this point. (See “Dear Mrs Amartya Sen, men will never understand us.”)

However, the metaphor of a viewpoint makes people’s ideas look like automatic functions of their social positions. It overlooks the diversity and freedom of individuals in any given social group; it makes reasoning and argument look fruitless; it implies that incorporating individuals with additional viewpoints will automatically improve a group and should be the main goal; and it suggests that a critical assessment of an idea is an attack on the person who holds it. As Perrin and Lundberg conclude:

Settling for exposure to viewpoints — as if they were infections to which one might develop antibodies — places them outside the realm of argument and reason. We fail those on the political left by ignoring conservative arguments instead of engaging them. Meanwhile, conservative students learn that their ideas are something others should be exposed to rather than meaningfully engaged.

I believe that the metaphor of a viewpoint is deeply rooted, and that challenging it could be quite fruitful. Put more generally, the image of a point in space is remarkably widely used to define people and ideas.

The most familiar example is the left-to-right political spectrum, which allows a person, an opinion or position, or a party or movement to be located at one point on a straight line. People or ideas can easily be visualized as points in two-dimensional space if they are located along two axes at once. For instance, Americans have often been described as liberal versus conservative on economics and on race, as two separate dimensions. Three dimensions are harder to depict on paper or a flat screen, although a three-dimensional model can be rotated and presented meaningfully on a plane. In any case, mathematics allows adding more than three dimensions, even though we can’t picture them visually, by simply tagging a given person, idea, or party or movement with many variables at once. Prevailing statistical methods, such as factor analysis, treat people, ideas, or groups as points in many-dimensional space and envision differences as the distance between positions. Many models try to explain why a person occupies a given point based on other known information about the same individual, such as party identification or race.

If a model employs many dimensions, it can incorporate any amount of quantitative data about the people and ideas being studied. Since each person or idea has a good chance of occupying a unique position in multidimensional space, there is relatively little danger that individuals will be casually lumped together in large groups.

However, some kinds of information must be lost in a model based on points in space. First, this metaphor conceals the way that ideas may connect to each other. If respondents are asked many questions on a survey, standard statistical methods capture correlations among their answers but cannot detect logical relationships among any individual’s ideas. Does a person believe one thing because of another belief, or despite it, or as two disconnected ideas? The structure of individuals’ thinking—if there is any—is lost. In contrast, when we read an impressive political argument or speech, we are primarily interested in its structure: in why (or whether) each point implies the next, or qualifies it, or contradicts it. A metaphor of points in space makes everyone look much more simple-minded than any careful speaker or writer.

To be sure, some of us probably fail to connect our separate ideas in reasonable ways, but we cannot know how many from standard survey research. The metaphor of points in space is biased against detecting complexity of thought, if there is any (Levine 2022).

Importantly, large bodies of research based on this model find that people are not responsive to arguments, that their beliefs are either incoherent or driven by indefensible biases, that they supply reasons after the fact to rationalize what they already desire—in short, that anything remotely resembling a deliberative democracy is psychologically naïve. Paul Sniderman—who dissents in interesting ways from what he calls “the textbook view of citizens’ capacity to reason about politics”—summarizes the consensus of his fellow political scientists as follows. “Average citizens’ knowledge about politics and public affairs is threadbare; their political beliefs minimally coherent, indeed, often self-contradictory; their support for core democratic values all too likely to crumble in the face of a threat, real or imaginary” (Sniderman 2017, pp. 42, 107).

Factor analysis is a statistical technique. It is often described as scientific, where “science” means a cumulative, empirical research project of testing hypotheses with data. Famous contributors to the statistical study of political opinions and behavior who have used a point-in-space model are English-speaking social and behavioral scientists like Charles Spearman, who invented factor analysis, and Philip Converse and his colleagues, who pioneered academic political survey research with the American National Election Studies.

A strangely similar metaphor is also influential in a very different tradition: Continental European political philosophy. Until the late 1800s, the words “culture” and “religion” had made sense only in the singular. People either had culture or not; they were either religious or not. But Romantic-Era thinkers began to see deep plurality. There were many cultures, religions, and nations (or peoples), understood as distinct in fundamental ways. These thinkers imagined that individuals saw the world from the perspective of their respective cultures or religions. Two people from different cultures would behold a different reality, although people who shared a culture would share a common worldview. A word for everything that can be seen from a given point is “horizon.” Perspective, viewpoint, and/or horizon were keywords in the thought of Herder, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and many other highly abstract European philosophers.

Again, a person with a perspective occupies a point in space. This metaphor generates insights—there may be a French, or a modern, or a bourgeois perspective on certain topics—but it also obscures and creates conundrums. If people hold all their beliefs because of their fundamental perspectives or viewpoints, then a critique of any of their beliefs can be taken as an objection to the person and their right to speak. In that case, arguments about ideas can seem uncivil and even threatening.

Furthermore, if human beings are assigned to cultures on a “one-to-a-customer basis,” (Wolcott 1991, p. 247), and if each culture fundamentally shapes how all its members understand the world, then how can anyone know anything objectively, including the nature of other people’s cultures? Surely everything we think is relative to our perspective. Deep cultural relativism leads to basic skepticism or even nihilism, as Nietzsche most famously argued.

One way out is to argue that a fair institution is one that treats all cultures and religions equally and neutrally. For instance, the great American political philosopher John Rawls assumes “that a modern democratic society is characterized … by a plurality of reasonable but incompatible comprehensive doctrines” (Rawls 1993, pp. xvi, 59). Each of these doctrines determines each person’s values. Rawls concludes that a fair government must be neutral among these doctrines; indeed, he sees justice as fairness. Demands for “viewpoint diversity” on college campuses have a similar logic. However, critics have argued that neutrality is impossible (liberal institutions inevitably reflect specific values) and mere fairness among perspectives is an unsatisfactory account of justice.

Whether it is invoked in a statistical model or a work of political philosophy, a point in space from which one sees the world is a metaphor. It should not be taken too literally. We have other ways of describing the complexity of human interactions. We can model conversations as games with players and moves. We can envision ideas flowing through society on a hydraulic model, with pressure and viscosity (Allen 2015). Caroline Levine shows that literary writing often makes use of four forms—wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks—to represent social phenomena (C. Levine 2015).

Indeed, we live in a period of fascination with networks: electronic, neural, social, semantic, and many other kinds. This means that we have powerful new techniques for analyzing networks, and many recent studies apply these techniques to people and ideas in ways that offer insights about politics.

This is why I have been working with colleagues to replace the metaphor of points in space with one of networks. I have introduced the technical term idiodictuon for the network of ideas that each individual holds, where the connections among ideas are reasons.

In this model, when people discuss issues, they are sharing ideas and connections that others may choose to incorporate into their respective idiodictuons. Whether we encounter another person’s ideas depends on whether we are connected to that person in some kind of social network. Human beings who discuss within a network of relationships form a phylodictuon (a shared network of ideas, including ones that conflict).

It is generally good for a phylodictuon to encompass diverse ideas and ideas from diverse people (which are different matters), yet the job of a wise community is to improve its collection of ideas and how they are organized, not merely to ensure that all available ideas are included. As Perrin and Lundberg write, “Confronting serious ideas means that while every person deserves safety on campus, no idea does; all ideas deserve the respect that a real stress test brings.”

Sources: Perrin, Andrew J. and Christian Lundberg, “People deserve safety on college campuses. Ideas don’t,” The Boston Globe, March 29; Paul M. Sniderman, The Democratic Faith: Essays on Democratic Citizenship (Yale University Press); Peter Levine, “Mapping ideologies as networks of ideas,” Journal of Political Ideologies, 2022, DOI: 10.1080/13569317.2022.2138293; Harry F. Wolcott, “Propriospect and the acquisition of culture., Anthropology & Education Quarterly 22, no. 3 (1991): 251-273; John Rawls (Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Danielle Allen, “Reconceiving Public Spheres: The Flow Dynamics Model,” in Allen and Jennifer S. Light, From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in a Digital Age, University of Chicago Press, 2015, pp. 178-207; Caroline Levine, Caroline, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton University Press, 2015).

a Heideggerian meditation

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(This is the third in a series; see also a Hegelian meditation and a Husserlian meditation.)

This is a breath: in, out. Then another. It has a certain mood, first a bit anxious, then more relaxed.

What is going on here–really going on? People have disagreed, but they tend to use the same vocabulary even when they espouse incompatible theories. Their keywords include: subject, object, language, world, mind, nature, freedom, and necessity.

Just for example, perhaps some of the material called “air” is filling lungs while brain cells are generating a subjective impression of relaxation and suggesting the words “to breathe.”

This vocabulary seems to miss or obscure what it is happening here. The experience is not of oxygen; it is of breathing, which is intrinsically an activity with purpose and value. Being there (Dasein) always comes in a mood; affect is not merely added on. But the mood can shift, and the activity can change the mood. Unconscious, hurried respiration can become meditative breathing.

Dasein unfolds over time and is aware that it must end one day. It has not chosen to be but has been thrown into the world–obliged to breathe, to have a mood at each moment, to experience time, and to adopt a language with a history. Yet Dasein can choose to become aware of its temporality, its mortality, its concerns, and its attunements to the world.

Being-there with a breath affords these insights. Letting it be-there without the usual vocabulary of philosophy and science can show Dasein what it authentically has been and is.

So: what mood is there with this particular breath? If it is anxiety or boredom, that is real. Accept it, and then change it.

what if political parties structure our thinking for us?

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Presumably, each person should hold a structured set of political opinions. For instance, if you want more government spending without any new taxes, you should be OK with deficits (unless you dispute that deficits will result). If you want a specific right for yourself, you should support the same right for other people, because fairness demands equal protection (unless another worthy principle overrides that conclusion). If you think individual liberty is a high priority, you should oppose censorship (unless you think restricting speech is necessary for a different reason). Each of your beliefs should predict several others, forming a tight network.

In the early 1960s, Philip Converse argued that most Americans’ beliefs were hardly structured at all (Converse 1964). Knowing what a person believed about x would not help you predict what that person believed about y.

Converse’s article has been cited more than 12,000 times and has generated a large literature. Some studies have confirmed his basic finding (e.g., Kinder & Kalmoe 2017). Some use different methods or datasets to challenge his conclusion by finding structure (e.g., Boutyline & Vaisey 2017 or Levine 2022). Some have contested Converse’s interpretation. For instance, maybe people are ambivalent about issues, holding views on both sides. A multiple-choice survey misses their ambivalence and gives a misleading impression that people are inconsistent when they really feel conflicted (Zaller & Feldman 1992).

There is also a line of research that finds that most Americans (Achen & Bartels 2016, p. 268; Sniderman 2017) and Europeans (Galina 2023) hold structured political beliefs, but their structures come from the leaders of their political parties.

It may not be self-evident what a conservative or a progressive party should think about each new topic, from COVID vaccination to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to bailing out a bank in Silicon Valley. But parties do form views, and their voters generally follow suit. Most people’s lists of issue positions mirror those of their party’s leaders. A given person’s ideas may or may not cohere, but they probably correlate closely with the positions of that person’s party.

I do not think that this research settles the empirical issues. The reality is complicated, with many dynamics at work. There are methodological challenges, such as the limitations of surveys that I mentioned earlier. And it’s not completely clear what causes what. (Maybe party elites are affected by their grassroots members or by some third force, such as celebrities.) Nevertheless, I believe there is at least some important truth to the theory that parties organize people’s thinking for them–or, I should say, for us. As Paul Sniderman puts it, “parties organize the choice environment” for voters “and define what goes with what” (Sniderman 2017 p. 71).

How should we assess this situation? Is it good or bad, and does it require some kind of remedy?

One way to think about those questions is to choose a model for understanding political parties. Here are three, amongst others:

Activists and leaders of political parties are highly interested in issues. Most people defer detailed consideration of issues to the leadership of their preferred party. That makes good sense, in the same way that it’s often wise to delegate a decision to a committee of passionate volunteers. Supporters of a party can assess its general direction and use “voice” (becoming involved in the party’s decisions) or “exit” (leaving the party or just voting for a different one), if they are dissatisfied (Hirshman 1970). Perhaps a given political system needs more voice–more participatory opportunities within each party–or more viable parties, so that voters can exit more easily. But we should not be worried by the general finding that people take their cues from party leaders. People are wisely delegating the nitty-gritty work of political analysis to those who enjoy it most. Voters are learning from the more extensive thinking of party leaders.
Party leaders are politicians, defined as people who want and pursue political offices for themselves. They will choose positions on issues to improve their chances of winning. Their self-interest is not shared by ordinary people, who want good outcomes. Insofar as people take their cues from party leaders, they are being used as means to the politicians’ personal ends. In a better democracy, more of us would exhibit individual structures of ideas, and political leaders would have to cater to our views, not the reverse.
Parties basically reflect social interests. In a given system, there may be a party for the farmers, for the urban middle classes, for the observant Catholics, and for a linguistic minority. In the USA, the electoral system forces the concatenation of interests into two umbrella parties, but they are basically coalitions of such interests. Therefore, voters will primarily seek a party that protects the interests that they consider most important (not necessarily material ones). However, a party must also take positions on many other issues. Leaders choose positions that maximize their party’s political appeal and leverage so that they can protect the voters’ core interests. Voters assess parties as tools for protecting their interests, and as long as they are basically satisfied with a given party, they will mimic its specific issue stances.

I think the truth is some mix of these ideas, depending on the political system. After all, countries differ in respect to how many parties they have, whether and to what degree their major parties are ideologically or demographically distinguished, whether coalitions are built inside parties or among them, whether parties exercise discipline over politicians, to what extent intellectual work is conducted inside the parties compared to other sectors of the society, and which kinds of people constitute the party “elites.” (In the USA, official members of the party committees are less influential than nominally nonpartisan pundits and celebrities.)

As usual, empirical evidence is relevant to our political judgments, but it is insufficient. What should we do if “parties organize the choice environment”? Sniderman clarifies the empirical literature and offers some important normative guidance. But his argument makes me want to think harder about how specific parties in specific political systems play their structuring roles and whether their approaches to choosing and combining positions are acceptable.

References: Achen, C. H., Bartels, L. M. (2016), Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government; Princeton University Press; Boutyline, A., & Vaisey, S. (2017), Belief network analysis: a relational approach to understanding the structure of attitudes, American journal of sociology, 122(5), 1371-1447; Converse, P.E. (2006) The nature of belief systems in mass publics, Critical review 18.1-3 (2006): 1-74; Kinder D.R. & Kalmoe, N.P. (2007), Neither liberal nor conservative: Ideological innocence in the American public, University of Chicago Press; Gallina, M (2023), Solving the (false) dilemma: an ecological approach to the study of opinion constraint,” Political studies; Hirschman, A. O. (1970), Exit, voice and loyalty: responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press); Levine, P (2022), Mapping ideologies as networks of ideas, Journal of Political Ideologies: 1-28. Sniderman P.M. (2017), The Democratic Faith: Essays on Democratic Citizenship (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), Zaller, J. & Feldman, S. (1992), A simple theory of the survey response: answering questions versus revealing preferences, American Journal of Political Science, 36:3: 579-616

the design choice to make ChatGPT sound like a human

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Elizabeth Weil provides a valuable profile of the linguist Emily M. Bender, headlined, “You Are Not a Parrot, and a chatbot is not a human. And a linguist named … Bender is very worried what will happen when we forget this.”

This article alerted me (belatedly, I’m sure) to the choice involved in making artificial intelligence applications mimic human beings and speak to us in the first-person singular.

For instance, since I’m living temporarily in Andalusia, I asked ChatGPT whether I should visit Granada, Spain.

The first sentence of its reply (repeated verbatim when I tried again) was a disclaimer: “As an AI language model, I cannot make decisions for you, but I can provide you with information that may help you decide if Granada, Spain is a destination you would like to visit.”

On one hand, this sentence discloses that the bot isn’t a person. On the other hand, it says, “I can provide …” , which sure sounds like a person.

Then ChatGPT offers a few paragraphs that always seem to include the same main points, conveyed in evaluative sentences like these: “Granada is a beautiful city located in the southern region of Spain, known for its rich history, culture, and stunning architecture. It is home to the world-famous Alhambra Palace, a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the most visited attractions in Spain. The city is also known for its vibrant nightlife, delicious cuisine, and friendly locals.”

My initial amazement at ChatGPT is wearing off, but the technology remains uncanny. And yet, would it look less impressive it gave more straightforward output? For instance, imagine if I asked whether I should visit Granada, and it replied:

The computer has statistically analyzed a vast body of text produced by human beings and has discerned several patterns. First, when human beings discuss whether to visit a location or recommend doing so, they frequently itemize activities that visitors do there, often under the categories of food, recreation, and sightseeing. Second, many texts that include the words “~~Grenada~~, Granada, Spain” also use positive adjectives in close proximity to words about food, sights, and outdoor activities. Specifically, many texts mention the word “Alhambra” in proximity to the phrases “UNESCO heritage site” and “world-famous,” paired with positive adjectives.

This would be an impressive achievement (and potentially useful), but it would not suggest that the computer likes ~~Grenada~~, Granada wants to help me, or knows any friendly locals. It would be clear that people experience and judge, and ChatGPT statistically models texts.

We human beings also draw statistical inferences from what other people say, and perhaps we even enjoy the Alhambra because human beings have told us that we should. (See “the sublime and other people.”) But I really did see a peacock strutting past palms and reflecting pools in the Carmen de los Martires this morning, whereas ChatGPT will never see anything. Why try to confuse me about the difference?