Elite Political Ignorance: Law, Data, and the Representation of (Mis)Perceived Electorates

Abstract

It is common to think of political elites—candidates, legislators, party officials, and campaign advisers—as specialists in learning the preferences of voters. But recent studies find that political elites believe public opinion within legislative districts to be more conservative than it actually is, and that extreme candidates are more electable than moderates (despite compelling evidence to the contrary). Campaign staffers overestimate their candidate’s electoral prospects. Moreover, natural and researcher-designed experiments show that informing legislators about constituency preferences changes roll-call votes, as legislators recalibrate to better represent public opinion in their districts.

This Article introduces the problem of elite political ignorance to the legal- academic literature. We review political science findings on elite (mis)perceptions of voter preferences, and we explore the likely benefits and costs of reducing elite political ignorance. The immediate impacts would probably include better alignment between the roll-call votes of representatives and the policy preferences of their constituents; reduced political polarization; less racial discrimination by campaigns and representatives; and lower-cost enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. However, over time, a reduction in elite ignorance could also engender more severe and enduring partisan gerrymanders; greater political and demographic skew in the population of regular voters; more inequity in the provision of constituent services; and microtargeted campaigns that slowly erode democracy-sustaining norms and belief structures in the public.

We argue that most of the benefits of reduced political ignorance could be realized without incurring such costs if elites acquired better information about the distribution of voter preferences within districts, without learning the preferences of identifiable individuals. To this end, we propose that states (1) reduce the amount of political information in the official voter file, (2) adopt rules that make it somewhat more cumbersome for social media companies to develop and market political profiles of their users, and (3) enact campaign-finance voucher programs subject to an unusual disclosure rule, under which the state would conceal voucher-donor identities from the recipient and the general public, while revealing geocoded voucher-contribution histories.

Keywords: elections, perceptions of voters, information, campaigns, voter file, big data, social media, vouchers, campaign finance, alignment