The Professor Will See You Now: democratic realism

4 min read30 January

In an occasional series, Professor Philip Cowley offers a political science lesson for The House’s readers. This week: democratic realism

We know a lot about what voters think of MPs. Much of it is not very positive. But what do MPs think of voters?

Perhaps they take the view that voters are terribly well-informed about politics; that voters eschew the short-term and think about policies that will pay out in the long-term; or that voters think about the wider interests of the country rather than just looking out for themselves. They might think that the electorate have realistic expectations about what can be achieved by government, alert to the trade-offs and compromises involved in politics.

Or maybe they don’t.

Like many of the most famous political quotations, there is no evidence that Winston Churchill ever actually said that the best argument against democracy was a five-minute conversation with the average voter. But you don’t have to hang around politicians very long to hear people express similar views.

Some fascinating new research just published in the American Political Science Review examined the views of around 1,000 politicians, in 11 countries, and found that they were more likely to be sceptical about voters’ capabilities and attitudes than optimistic. Many politicians had what the authors of the research describe as a “thin, minimalist, relatively pessimistic view of voters’ capacities”.

Some 73 per cent of respondents to their survey fall into a category they called “democratic realists” – inspired by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels’ Democracy for Realists, a book that should be on everyone’s reading list. There was a much smaller group of politicians who could be classified as “democratic optimists” (16 per cent). The remainder were undecided or inattentive.

The size of this pessimistic group varied considerable by country. Top of the pessimistic list was Czechia, where 83 per cent of politicians held such views. Bottom was Denmark (54 per cent). But a majority of politicians held a pessimistic view of voters in all 11 countries studied. Even in Denmark, democratic realist politicians outnumbered optimists by about 2:1. In Czechia, it was 10:1. The UK was not one of the 11 countries – a point to which I am going to return shortly.

The project also asked samples of voters the exact same questions, revealing that the electorate held a somewhat more optimistic view of their own capabilities. They were noticeably more likely than politicians were to be democratic optimists (34 per cent), although even among the electorate democratic realists were the single largest category (38 per cent), along with higher numbers who were undecided or inattentive. And while these numbers also varied from country to country, politicians were more likely to be democratic realists than voters in every country in the study.

These broad categories were drawn from eight questions tapping into central debates about electoral behaviour. Politicians and voters didn’t differ on everything. Both, for example, saw voters as not especially knowledgeable about politics, with politicians no more likely to hold that view than voters (a finding that surprised me).

But on some questions the differences were stronger: politicians were, for example, more likely to think voters were short- rather than long-termist in their thinking and were more likely to think voters focused on single issues. These questions produced clear differences, fairly uniformly across countries.

The findings are the latest to come out of a well-established, cross-national project called POLPOP, run out of the University of Antwerp. It looks at how politicians see the world, comparing it to how voters do. The UK has not been one of the countries studied. Until now.

The UK-arm of POLPOP is launching this year (and here I declare an interest). Invitations to participate in the next wave of questions will be arriving in inboxes shortly. Please participate, whether realistically or optimistically.

Your further reading for this week:
J Lucas et al, Politicians’ Theories of Voting Behavior, American Political Science Review (2024); C Achen and L Bartels, Democracy for Realists (2016)

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