sunstien

There seems to be a consensus emerging that California’s initiative process is broken.   Access to the ballot is too easy (you need the signatures of 5% of the voters in the last gubernatorial election to get on the ballot).  The initiative process is vulnerable to unreflective emotional appeals (initiatives dealing with children do particularly well).  Many people blame the initiative process for initiating an era of ballot box budgeting where citizens appropriate public funds to specific policy areas through the initiative process.  Proposition 98, passed in 1988, calls for 40% o the state’s budget to go towards education.

At the same time, California voters passed Proposition 13 in 1978 which reduces property taxes and significantly raises the bar on the legislature’s ability to raise new revenue.  As a result of Proposition 13, the legislature requires 2/3ds of the California voters to agree on most tax increases.  The result, some would argue, is a state that has no restrictions on spending, but serious limits on the ability to raise revenue.

It’s easy to fault an “ignorant” electorate who doesn’t understand the broader implications of increasing spending but lowering taxes.  But recently I’ve been interested in the ideas of deliberation scholars like Diana Mutz and Cass Sunstien who argue the need for cross-cutting social networks in Democratic societies.    Cross-cutting networks allow people to engage in discussions where they are able to vet ideas and develop a broader sense of the possible unintended consequences of their policy positions.  The more we retreat to homogeneous ideological networks, the less likely we are to get this necessary check on our world view.

Sunstien argues that the Internet, particularly blogs and social networks, reinforce homogeneous groups that reinforce their pre-existing world view.  As we move our public conversations to what Anthony Downs refers to as “sought for” mediums of information like political blogs, listserves, and Facebook groups, we get less of our information from:

“unchosen serendipitous, sometimes disliked encounters with diverse ideas and topics,” as well as “shared communications experiences that unify people across differences.” Public spaces such as city parks and sidewalks provide the “architecture of serendipity” that fosters chance encounters with a “teeming diversity” of ideas.

So let me throw out a preliminary discussion question: functioning deliberative democratic systems are more likely to occur in places with a vibrant “architecture of serendipity.” In other words, the key to a vibrant functioning California is more places where people of different political orientations can have “accidental” conversations about politics.   Is our problem that the Interned allows up to retreat to our “warm corners of rectitude” where the correctness of our views can be mutually reinforced? If this is true, how to we encourage more “serendipitous” conversations about politics? Or should we just sit back and enjoy the polarization?  How do we encourage “serendipity” online?  StumbleUpon for everyone!

Discuss.

Chris Lydon has a great interview with Cass Sunstien on his new book with economist Richard Thaler called Nudge.

Their core argument is that the conventional view of economists and political scientists that we calculate costs and benefits in making decisions and choose those paths that maximize our utility is flawed. Sunstien and Thaler suggest that we have both a reflective rational brain and an impulsive emotional brain that often overwhelms our rational tendencies. For example, people often overemphasize recent events when assessing risk (think of fear of shark attack after the movie Jaws) Sunstien and Thaler invite us to consider doing social science by assuming that the impulsive emotional brain is making decisions. Sunstien uses the example of Homer Simpson trying to buy a gun and hearing about a three day background check and responding to the clerk “but I’m angry now!”

The idea that we are persuaded by emotional appeals might be nothing new for sociologists steeped in frame analysis. But in political science and economics, this is indeed a revolution. In popular parlance, Frank Luntz’ successful re-framing of the estate tax as the “death tax” is a classic example of the effect of the emotional brain at work in making policy assessments.

Sunstien and Thaler advocate the idea of constructing “choice architectures” that take people’s irrationality into account and creates policy systems that make people more likely to engage in beneficial behavior. A policy design in this vein is an automatic “opt-in” to a 401K plan that is voluntary because it can be opted out of but starts with an automatic withrdawal for retirement as a default rather than expecting people to deliberately put aside money for retirement.

Austin Goolsby, Obama’s chief economic adviser, is an adherent of this type of behavioral economics. It is a subtle change in our public policy approach, but has a great power to create effective outcomes. I do wonder if it’s smart politics to say that the public is irrational and thus we should structure policy to work again the public’s worst impulses.