I have been approached
by a publisher about the idea of writing a popular guide to politics for new voters,
in time for the 2004 campaign season. I don’t know if this idea will come to pass,
but it’s interesting.
Perhaps the "ideal citizen" would make an
independent and informed judgment about each issue and also each candidate, and
then vote accordingly. But none of us has the time or energy to do this. Instead,
we use shortcuts to make our voting choices. The most common shortcut, I believe,
is to choose a political identity for oneself: for example, "liberal"
or "conservative," or something somewhat more complicated, like "pro-choice
conservative" or "social liberal/fiscal conservative." We then
learn how to identify the candidates who fit this label, based on clues in their
rhetoric and a few issues that serve as proxies. If we are better-than-average
citizens, then we choose an ideology in a provisional way, trying to stay open-minded
and to understand the merits of alternative views. But we still use ideology as
a cue. CIRCLE surveys show that people
who cannot place themselves on an ideological scale or identify the differences
between Democrats and Republicans also do not vote.
Thus I may propose
to write a book that begins with a quiz, designed to identify the reader’s starting
ideology or political identity. If a reader chooses "don’t know" as
an answer to any question, he or she will be sent to pages in the book that introduce
the relevant issue. Once the reader has completed the quiz and identified a provisional
ideology, the rest of the book will help him or her to (a) think critically about
the pros and cons of this ideology and (b) learn how to identify candidates who
espouse it.
check this out dude