They demonstrate that voters—even those who are well informed and politically engaged—mostly choose parties and candidates on the basis of social identities and partisan loyalties, not political issues. They also show that voters adjust their policy views and even their perceptions of basic matters of fact to match those loyalties. When parties are roughly evenly matched, elections often turn on irrelevant or misleading considerations such as economic spurts or downturns beyond the incumbents’ control; the outcomes are essentially random. [...]
Achen and Bartels argue that democratic theory needs to be founded on identity groups and political parties, not on the preferences of individual voters.
I’m not fully settled on how much weight to give to this perspective, but I think it’s important to remember the empirical facts of voting as it happens in the real world and not just the idealizations of social choice theory. Presumably this leads to a quite different notion of the optimal electoral system and the optimal series of electoral reforms.
(This isn’t meant to say that the social choice theory perspective and the points brought up in this post are unimportant. I just thought it was an interesting book and a good reminder to look at this whole other set of criteria.)
I just finished reading Democracy for Realists recently which argues that:
I’m not fully settled on how much weight to give to this perspective, but I think it’s important to remember the empirical facts of voting as it happens in the real world and not just the idealizations of social choice theory. Presumably this leads to a quite different notion of the optimal electoral system and the optimal series of electoral reforms.
(This isn’t meant to say that the social choice theory perspective and the points brought up in this post are unimportant. I just thought it was an interesting book and a good reminder to look at this whole other set of criteria.)
(The following summary [not by me] might be helpful to some readers not familiar with the book:
https://casparoesterheld.com/2017/06/18/summary-of-achen-and-bartels-democracy-for-realists/ )