Note: This is the second part of my interview with Ben Page. You can find the first part here.
Foreign Policy
Q: You touched on foreign policy before, but I wanted to treat it as a distinct topic. It sounds like you believe that foreign policy follows different dynamics than domestic policy, at the level of publics and their preferences and elites. I think it was Almond who originally said that this is a distinct area.
BP: Almond was an important figure, but his work on public opinion, I don't appreciate it a whole lot. He was writing in a Cold War context, and his main gripe seemed to be that the public was not going along with this Cold War sufficiently. Therefore the public must be stupid. I disagreed.
But it is generally true that opinion about foreign policy is different, for all the obvious reasons.
First of all, events abroad seem distant and complicated and maybe not important to day-to-day life. People have less well-formed opinions. But secondly, opinion is different because the state occupies a special position with respect to foreign policy. The president of the United States and the whole defense and military establishment have a degree of control over what's going on, and over information about it, that is just not present domestically. And that's why I always thought that manipulation of opinion is generally more feasible in foreign policy than domestic, because it's not uncommon for key elites to lie in a unified way. Like about the Tonkin Gulf incident, which was our main excuse for entering the Vietnam war. LBJ and others said that there had been two “unprovoked” North Vietnamese attacks on American destroyers, when there was no second attack at all. And the U.S. had provoked the first attack.
Q: At some point you started collaborating with the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. How did that shape your research?
BP: Well, that started in the fall of 1974, I think, when I was a new assistant professor at the University of Chicago with a rather modest salary and a cold house to heat. And so money was kind of central. They offered a nice honorarium for helping John Rielly with these studies every four years. But it was interesting too. And as you can imagine, I pushed some of my views on the studies. I urged that there should always be a final chapter in our booklets about the ways in which the elite sample disagreed with the public. There was often a big difference between the two. But so what? Rielly would say, the public is wrong, and they've got to be educated. I would say, oh, you know, there's a possibility the public's right, especially about that stupid Vietnam war. How about more democratic responsiveness?
For a number of years I worked away on those studies as a paid consultant, but then at a certain point, maybe when Marshall Bouton came, I began thinking, gee, there are a lot of good time series data here. And so I started writing. I wrote a descriptive piece or two about it and then Larry Jacobs suggested working together on foreign policy elites and the mass public. The great thing about the Chicago Council surveys was they used to have elite as well as mass samples, they asked them the same questions, and elites were categorized in several different ways.
Larry and I wrote an article on connections or non-connections between the views of average citizens, on the one hand, and the opinions (perhaps the actual policies, too) of foreign policy officials as the dependent variable. And it turned out that you couldn't predict very well at all what the officials favored by what the public favored. Other elites’ views were more closely connected to the officials’ view. Media figures seemed to matter a lot, and business people. That article was instrumental in getting me started with Marshall Bouton on the Foreign Policy Disconnect book. The key chapter is the disconnect chapter, which Larry Jacobs is co-author of.
There are two things going on in that book. First, it’s a mass belief system book. This is something that very few people seem to have picked up on. But the book pursues the idea of sensible but weak individual belief systems adding up to a strong collective belief system. The Chicago Council asked questions that nicely fit into causal diagrams: questions about the goals of foreign policy, questions about perceived threats, and country feeling thermometers, and a whole bunch of policy preference items. So basically in that book, one thing that's going on is showing, at least at a correlational level, a structure with substantial sensible connections between goals and policy preferences, with a lot of perceptions and country evaluations in between. And then the other thing was the disconnect part.
Q: Can you say something about that substantive part? What is the disconnect? The elites seem to be more hawkish and the public seems to be more dovish.
BP: There are a number of differences. One of them does have to do with wars and any use of U.S. troops in combat. The gap is smaller on bombings, military bases abroad, or covert actions, but anything that might involve a cost in American lives, the public historically has been much less enthusiastic about it. And I take the side of the public on that one.
There are other gaps on international trade, and I believe Donald Trump took big advantage of that. Both parties were out of touch with how most Americans felt about the impact of trade. Most were worried about jobs and wages being threatened by cheap imports. There was also opposition to illegal immigration (though approval of a path to citizenship.) Much later, Tom Ferguson and others (with me as a minor participant) showed that trade was a big factor in 2016 voting. The identity-politics interpretation of that election needs to be modified a bit.
Q: Do you think that foreign policy should be more subject to democratic control?
BP: I would say definitely yes. In my judgment, the public is more often right than the elites. But to make that work optimally, you've got to have good information about foreign policy and events abroad, and you have to reach the public with it. That's pretty hard to do.
Q: With Tao Xie you wrote a book and some articles about Americans’ views of China. What inspired that project and what did you find there?
BP: Both Tao and I were really concerned about US-China relations, because that is clearly the most important bilateral relationship in the world. There is a potential for terrible things to happen if the two countries stumble into a conflict. One of the things we were trying to do was to present the evidence from Chicago Council surveys, which indicated that the American public favored cooperation with China, not conflict. There was all sorts of hawkish elite rhetoric exaggerating the China threat. It's even worse today. But I think we succeeded pretty well at showing that the U.S. public wanted peaceful relations, at least at that time. I have visited China several times. When U.S. hawks keep talking about our supposed security interests in the South China Sea, I ask them how they would feel if Chinese warships were patrolling the Caribbean.
I have to say, one disappointment in my career has been that the foreign policy side of my research doesn't seem to have had much resonance with the American politics audience. American politics scholars who are interested in policy, almost always it's domestic policy. And these days, it's usually some sort of social policy, not economic policy or class politics. So the China book, I won't say it vanished without a trace, but it's not a comet in the sky.
Class and Inequality
Q: The last big topical area I wanted to talk about is one that goes back to the beginning. It’s inequality. In 1983, you wrote a book called Who Gets What from Government? There you pushed hard that we need to focus more on inequality. Was that unusual at the time?
BP: It was certainly countercyclical, because Ronald Reagan had just been elected president. And in fact, I wrote a good part of that at the Hoover Institution, which I took great pride in doing. I had a fellowship to Hoover. We were just entering the years when the facts about inequality were starting to get really grim. So that was an important motivation. But I am not sure that book got a lot of attention.
Q: Can you say more about that book?
BP: One thing that goes through my work is some attention to economics. I'm not well trained in economics, but I've picked up at least some of the rudiments and the lingo. In this case, a lot of that book was based on public economics of the sort that I learned up in Madison when I was at the Institute for Research on Poverty with people like Garfinkel and Danzinger. Eugene Smolensky was especially important because he had led one of the biggest efforts to figure out the total impact of government on individuals, particularly the impact by income level. How does the government change people's total incomes, taking account of taxes, spending, regulation, and everything else? And so I did my best to bring together the economics of all of it and put it into a picture about what the net effect of government was in the United States.
And the main conclusion was, there was not much net redistribution of income. The so-called “post-government” income distribution was not very different from the “pre,” even when you accounted for all sorts of things that are hard to measure. I imagine that story might be very different in parts of the world, particularly the social democracies of Europe. Later, in What Government Can Do with Jim Simmons, we did a follow-up that emphasized the positive: policies that make a difference.
Q: There's some debate about this – the distinction between pre-tax and transfer inequality and post-tax and transfer inequality.
BP: For sure. You have to put quotation marks around this, because pre-tax-and-transfer income is hugely affected by government actions of all sorts, like market regulation. The very existence of corporations depends on state charters. There’s the money supply, macro policy. I think that Joseph Stiglitz and Robert Reich are particularly good at making that point in a couple of their books, which go into detail about all the ways that “pre-government” does not exist. And the problem with “post-government” income is you can't measure many of the important things that government does. How do you decide who benefits from military spending? If you're far on the left, you might say the owners of capital benefit, especially during the Cold War when you're combatting communism. Or you might say, it's a public good. Everybody benefits equally. Maybe people benefit in proportion to income. It's a very messy business.
Q: Jumping ahead a little, you wrote a book with Larry Jacobs entitled Class War. This was about American's perceptions of inequality and what they want the government to do about it. I think you called Americans conservative egalitarians.
BP: That was Larry’s phrase. He wanted to speak to a broad audience, and that's good. Larry thought of the survey, organized it, got the money to pay for it, and played a big part in all the data analysis and writing.
Q: How would you describe the conclusions of the book?
BP: There's an old idea about Americans’ abstract ideological conservatism but operational liberalism. And I would say that might be a better description of what we found. When it comes to concrete policies, Americans were pretty redistributive on most issues, whether it's education, public schools, Social Security, Medicare, or taxing the wealthy more. Within limits. But they didn't much like the abstract idea of redistribution.
I think a nice summary of this point is there is an old poll question about whether you favor or oppose redistribution of wealth through heavy taxes on the rich. And by the time we did our survey, it was up to 52 percent in favor, which we took as really amazing news because the last time it had been asked – which was quite a while before – it had been a rather small minority, 35 percent, I think. It appeared to us that people were reacting to increased inequality by thinking more about redistribution. But since that time, that particular abstract item about “redistribution” through “heavy taxes” on the rich has stayed about the same, only a narrow majority pro. Other survey items show big majority support for concrete measures like progressive income taxes, closing loopholes, increasing corporate taxes, taxing really large estates, and so forth.
Q: I thought one of the interesting findings was you didn’t find large differences between Democrats and Republicans.
BP: That's right. We may not have presented the data as clearly as we should have; even back then, there were some pretty substantial differences. But I would say the overall picture was correct and is still correct. Rank and file Republicans really like Social Security. They like Medicare. They favor expanding Medicaid, even in red states that have referendums. Public education, too. The places where there are the biggest partisan disagreements may be Obamacare and taxes. It’s easy to forget that the sharp party polarization we have now is more an elite than a mass phenomenon.
Q: Would you say this work fits with your previous work on responsiveness? That Americans are getting what they want in terms of redistributive politics and in terms of concrete social policies?
BP: Interesting. I don't think you can tell very precisely. But it's true that most of the policies people favor are fairly close to what we have. But they want quite a bit more.
Q: Martin Gilens wrote a very influential book called Affluence and Influence that looked at inequalities in representation and responsiveness. You ended up collaborating with him. How did you get into that project?
BP: A very happy collaboration. It started because of Larry Bartels. I would call Larry the number one leader in turning American political science toward issues of economic inequality. And Theda Skocpol and Larry Jacobs put together the APSA task force on Democracy and Inequality. That had a big effect. But Larry and Marty had already done their early work. Larry had a conference at which I heard Marty present, and I thought this was really interesting stuff. And then when he wrote the Affluence and Influence book, I reviewed it before publication for Princeton and of course I said, Oh yeah, publish this. But I also concluded that there might be more in there than some readers were going to get out of it, because it's a fairly heavy-duty, complicated book.
And I thought, how about repackaging some of this and extending it a little bit and writing an article? So I suggested that to Marty and he was happy to work together on it. And I think that our “Testing Theories” article does seem to have been very helpful in getting the main ideas out. Including ideas that may not have fully entered the professional discourse about interest groups. To me, the interest groups findings are among the most important. That's the main thing we added in the article that was not already in the book: using Marty’s interest group data to put interest groups – especially business groups – clearly into the causal picture of influences upon policy.
Q: You found that economic elite domination and biased pluralism are better explanations for policy than majoritarian electoral democracy or majoritarian pluralism. One interesting thing for me was that you returned to these classic debates from the 50s and 60s about pluralism and elitism.
BP: Yes. Those debates had been on my mind ever since the 1950s. As I may have mentioned, back in my Stanford graduate student days, Schattschneider and McConnell were very important influences on me, the idea that was later called biased pluralism. But I also was paying attention to C. Wright Mills, and later Domhoff, and the structural and instrumental Marxists, and Ferguson. I've always suspected that there is an important part of American politics where they get at what's happening. The question in my mind has always been, how big a part? To me the work with Marty made significant progress on the question of how much, and I was surprised to find not only substantial power by organized groups and the wealthy, but also no detectable influence at all by average citizens.
Q: That seems to go against some of your earlier work. Was it just difficult to measure some of these things, the interest group influence, in the past? You have some clever ways that you do it in the article and in the book with Gilens.
BP: Nobody I know of had done a multivariate study of policy making that included public opinion and affluent opinion and interest groups. It seems an obvious thing to do. And the data are not that difficult…Well, I started to say that, but it took Marty ten years to put together his dataset! But in principle, not so hard once you see his clever way of estimating the opinions of the affluent based on polls’ imperfect, top-coded measures of income. But the interest groups, it's quite amazing to me that looking at only maybe just fifty prominent interest groups, his data reveal the big impact of corporations and business-oriented groups. And it's pretty interesting that mass membership groups like unions and AARP and so forth, which most people have always thought of as powerful, as a collective whole exert only about half as much influence as business.
Q: You have another project that got at the influence of the elites that you started with our colleague, Jason Seawright, along with Larry Bartels, which analyzes the opinions of the super-rich. That's considered a group that's really hard to study. How did you get the idea that we can study this group, we can figure out what they think about things. And you did two separate projects on that, right?
BP: The answers to how we thought of it and how we did it are very different for the two projects. The first project was the so-called SESA (Survey of Economically Successful Americans), a survey of multi-millionaires in the Chicago area. I think it's quite important to distinguish those multi-millionaires from Marty's affluent people and also from the billionaires that we studied later. The SESA multi-millionaires were about ten times as wealthy as Marty’s affluent, and in turn the poorest billionaire was about 100 times as wealthy as a typical SESA multi-millionaire. The economic interests of the multi-millionaires and billionaires are pretty similar to each other, but substantially different from those of the affluent. The political power of each of the three groups may be quite different from the others’.
SESA was a pretty simple idea. Once we were thinking about how powerful the wealthy are, one of the first questions is, let's at least find out what they want from government. And there weren’t any data. I'd worked at NORC and I knew they were really good at sampling special populations, and I knew that they did the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), which oversamples the top one percent of wealth holders for economics purposes. With help from a lot of people including Christopher Jencks and Eric Wanner I managed to get some money and rounded up the whole NORC team that had been doing the field work for the SCF. This was a real coup. Cathy Haggerty and the rest are absolutely great professionals. We made a very serious effort to draw a random sample of truly wealthy people. That's extremely difficult, very expensive. We ended up with only about 100 usable cases. It was supposed to be a pilot study for a national survey, but we couldn’t get the money for the national study. That's still true today. I believe that if you want to know about the policy preferences of multimillionaires, SESA is still essentially the only place to look.
Q: How would you characterize their policy preferences?
BP: We focused on economic and social welfare issues. The multimillionaires were very conservative on almost everything. The one that was so striking to me was that for them the most important problem facing the country was the deficit. At the time of that survey there were a lot of people out of work, and I would have thought if you're going to pick an economic problem, joblessness would be higher. It was far higher among the mass public.
But another very striking one concerned whether we should spend “whatever is necessary” for really good public schools. That seems to me to go right at to heart of the equal opportunity idea. That is supposed to be America, great public schools. Everyone gets a chance. But only something like 26 percent of these multi-millionaires said spend whatever is necessary, whereas in the general public, it was more like 60 or 70 percent. There were quite a few very large gaps like that.
Q: There's an idea in The Rational Public about parallel publics. And I know you can't assess this, you don't have time series data on millionaires and billionaires, but do you think they're a non-parallel public? Like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line, the rich are different than you and me.
BP: Hard to tell. As a general matter, the parallel public idea may need revising. But conceptually, if you think of the average person out in one position and the average multimillionaire starting in a different position I think it's perfectly possible that they both then go up together or go down together, keeping the same distance between. Maybe. It's hard to know. But I suspect that these rich/not-rich opinion differences go back quite a way in time. On the other hand, there is evidence that corporate leaders in the fifties were much more tolerant of social welfare spending and the regulation of business. I don't know whether that would show up in the private preferences of business people. It's an interesting question. There could have been non-parallel change.
Q: You did another project on billionaires, the next level of wealth, with Jason Seawright and Matthew Lacombe. Again, you tried to study what their preferences are.
BP: You asked how I got the idea to do it. For that one, I did not get the idea. That was 100 percent Jay Seawright, who came up with this clever notion that, well, it seems impossible to do survey interviews with billionaires. And we can't even do a national survey of multimillionaires. That’s just too hard and expensive. But what about the web? Maybe we can study billionaires on the web. I figured, perhaps that could be as good as a survey. If billionaires drop little comments about a lot of different issues, maybe to reporters or in casual statements that are recorded, maybe we can ferret out the policy preferences of billionaires.
But our number one finding turned out to be that most of the wealthiest one hundred U.S. billionaires didn't say anything at all in public, anything specific about policies. That was very striking to me. I had had the same image of billionaires that I think a lot of Americans do, that they're all like Warren Buffett or Bill Gates or Bloomberg or Soros. There is in fact a handful of four or five billionaires who talk about public policy all the time. And our image of billionaires is probably very much influenced by them. But when we studied all the top 100 billionaires, 94 or 95 percent of them were very different from that. They didn't talk about specific policies. And that even included big issues like Social Security and all the many kinds of taxes.
Q: How do you explain that?
BP: I think one factor is that talking about that stuff makes enemies. Anyone who's got stockholders or consumers of their products or other reasons to not want to upset people, it's probably wise to just not say anything. Particularly since there are indications that the policies most billionaires want are really very different from what most Americans want. So they would offend a lot of people if they spoke up. They just stay quiet and try to buy politicians. Stealth politics.
Core Ideas and Their Reception
Q: What are the ideas you consider to be your best or the ones you're most proud of.
BP: I think the most important one is that collective public opinion is worth paying attention to, and that U.S. officials should pay more heed to it. The reception of the idea? I can't express a whole lot of optimism. I think of Larry Bartels. I have forgotten how this came up. I asked him, “How many people do you think believe the main thesis of The Rational Public?” And he said, “Well, it's been cited a lot.” Then a long pause. And then he said, “But I'm not sure I know anybody who actually believes it.”
Q: Do you think there are ideas that have been neglected or misunderstood?
BP: As I mentioned, the foreign policy stuff I think has been neglected. That may have to do with the structure of the discipline. Many foreign policy scholars are off doing grand theory, of joining think tanks and advising the establishment. And mainstream political science seems not to care a whole lot about U.S. foreign policy.
I also wish more people got into the second half of Marty’s and my Democracy in America? book, where we lay out a very ambitious menu of democratic reforms. Some people active in politics have paid attention to that, and that's been nice. But most political scientists don't seem too much interested in how to reform the American political system, which I think badly needs reforming.
Q: Can you discuss a couple of the reform ideas you had?
BP: Starting from my premise that I want the system to be more democratic, more responsive to the public, some of the problems are pretty obvious, like voter suppression and in general, unequal representation in voting and elections. And there's a family of fairly easy ways to fix that if anybody wants to do it. Likewise the number one problem, money in politics.
Then there are some institutional problems. One of them, the whole voting system of single-member districts and winner-take-all politics, I think has turned out to be a disaster for the United States. What happens is you get a lot of one-party districts where there is no competition and no great need to appeal to ordinary voters. We would be stuck with a lot of those heavily one-party districts even if there were no partisan gerrymandering, because of geographical clustering by groups with distinct party affiliations. In those districts, the dominant party can nominate a lunatic and still win. There are a set of reforms that would aim at getting rid of that. Start with ranked choice voting. Eventually go to multimember districts, which would deal with the two-party oligopoly problem, which I think has become very serious for the United States. Relying only on two parties has the problem that if one of them goes crazy, politics doesn't work very well. That's the way I see American politics today.
Then institutionally, the U.S. Senate is a problem because it doesn't represent the country fairly. It's just terrible, the whole two senators-per-state thing, which means that one person in Wyoming gets about as much Senate representation as 68 people in California. The House of Representatives is a mess too, both because of the bad electoral system and because of one-party rule of the House, which destroys deliberation and distorts outcomes. Many odd things can happen as a result of one-party rule.
That's a quick run through. But there are a lot of reforms needed. I think Marty and I did pretty well at exploring the problems and discussing possible solutions.
Q: We talked about this a bit, but are there any other important issues about which you’ve changed your mind?
BP: Let me see if I can get this right. I have definitely changed my mind about the extent of democratic responsiveness, less so than might appear to the eye, but importantly so. And I changed my mind about the causal structure of policymaking in the United States.
Q: And the change was that elites and interest groups have much more influence than you previously thought, right?
BP: Yes. Even though McConnell and Schattschneider were huge in my graduate training, I never used to have quantitative data to study their ideas. Maybe that's what it boils down to. It's the Law of the Hammer. If you invest in learning survey research, you're going to keep hammering everything with survey research, and maybe neglect things that can't be surveyed.
The Research Process
Q: That's a good segue. I wanted to ask about your research process. How do you formulate research questions? Where do you get inspiration from? What leads you to do the projects that you do?
BP: I think the external environment just has to be important. For me, the Vietnam War was huge. The rise in inequality beginning in the late 70s was really important and has continued to be important right up to now. The foreign policy conflicts of the day, more generally than Vietnam; US-China relations.
One way of answering the question is that a lot of my research ideas grew out of my normative beliefs. They concerned something I was worried about or wanted to see made better, like American democracy. And it seems to me you could argue that for studying American politics, democracy and material inequality are really good central themes, because they speak to things a lot of people care about. A number of my research projects flowed naturally from that.
Then on top of that, there's the state of the discipline at the moment, and what questions people are debating. As I mentioned, Larry Bartels really got us going on unequal representation. Again there is a data and methods point. Larry figured out a way to show that senators were paying more attention to higher income people. Just as Marty devised a great way to study unequal influences on policy making.
Q: Do you have an approach to methods when you're thinking about projects?
BP: I would say within the limitations of my training, it's a pretty eclectic, multimethod model. Despite my ineptness as an archival researcher (I was a babe in the woods at the LBJ Library), I have a big respect for history. Partly from being a history major. Partly because with American politics, you're stuck with one case. Variation over time is one of the best things you have for understanding macro aspects of that case. But you also need to put the U.S. into a world comparative-historical framework. So history, I think, is crucial. Most of my work has always been quantitative, and fairly simple quantitative. I didn't have super statistical training. I picked up a little along the way. But I definitely believe in multimethod research. By one person if one person can do it, or by many people with a division of labor – but paying attention to each other.
Q: As a scholar whose work has focused so much on opinion polling, how much do you worry about declining response rates? Where do you see the future of public opinion research?
BP: Ah. I am pretty sure the future does not hold a whole lot of personal interviewing. And probably not a whole lot of telephone interviewing, either. Both of those are extremely expensive now because of the problems of low response rates and great difficulty with sampling. I think the future probably lies with sampling from paid panels and interviewing online. The technology is getting pretty good. The crucial thing is to get a representative panel, and that's not so easy. Just as a small example, if you want to include a representative set of affluent people, you're going to have to oversample them. And realistically, you are going to have to offer them a fair amount of money, more than just $10 or $20, to be part of a panel.
Q: Do you have any unusual work habits that enabled you to be so productive?
BP: I’m a morning writer, and when I have a big project going, I probably write for at least three or four hours every morning. But that's intermittent. It's not all the time. When you say I've done a lot, it's interesting to think year by year. I don't think I've been unusually productive on an annual basis. I've just been at it for a long time and started fairly early. My first articles were with my graduate teachers Dick Brody and Ray Wolfinger. I have kind of plugged along ever since.
Q: How do you follow politics? What kind of reading habits do you have?
BP: They've changed over time, but most of my life I've been like Noam Chomsky, somebody who reads the New York Times regularly but often gnashes his teeth while doing it. I get furious at the thing, but it's still the best we've got. And I read The Washington Post a fair amount. The Wall Street Journal. And the New York Review of Books and The Nation. Now Flipboard for the gist of news. Heather Cox Richardson. The Righting, to keep track of what right-wingers are saying. I used to watch network TV news, but these days I don't find much on TV that seems worth it except some documentaries. Oh, I've got one for you that might be unexpected. In the fifties and into the sixties, I.F. Stone’s Weekly was my favorite publication. Really wonderful stuff, given my interest in U.S. foreign policy. Izzy Stone dug deeply into the underside of bad things the U.S. was doing abroad.
Q: You said that one of the things that drives you is a normative view of politics. Are there any normative theories that have been particularly important for you?
BP: In my case, at least, my normative positions didn't flow out of a great philosopher or something like that. I belatedly found some philosophers who seemed useful. But my biggest value is majoritarian democracy, with a high degree of material equality coming in second. In other words, political equality and economic equality. There aren't that many theorists who really take those positions. I found Rawls annoying, several British economists better. When I looked hard for past advocates of majoritarian democracy, I may have missed people, but except for bits by Lincoln I had to go all the way back to James Mill – much more majoritarian than his son John Stuart. More recently, John Dewey on providing good information to the public. Jane Mansbridge has been important to me, for sure, with her on-the-ground view of democracy. The later Dahl. Social choice theorists, especially Amartya Sen. Sen’s 1970 Collective Choice book may be one of the best works on democratic theory ever. Difficult but deep.
Q: So you said your own kind of normative views would be a kind of majoritarian democracy.
BP: That's the prime thing. While ensuring protection of minority rights. How to protect minority rights is a conundrum. Our solution of relying on the Supreme Court has been far from perfect.
Q: Your “majoritarian” democracy sounds sort of like the “populistic” democracy that Riker argued against.
BP: You're definitely right about that. Don't get me going on Riker. I think his argument that democracy is impossible because of Arrow-type preference cycles is wrong-headed and harmful. Sen explained why theory does not mandate such worries. (The universal domain condition ignores the existence of society, which tends to harmonize individuals’ preferences.) Mackie showed that, according to the best available data, real-world cycles are not common.
Q: I agree that in political philosophy and political theory there aren't a lot of majoritarian democrats out there. There are a lot of liberals, but making that kind of case for democracy is unusual. There are two cheers for democracy, but not three cheers.
BP: It’s hard to find three cheers for democracy among elites.
Q: What did you think about Dahl’s work on democracy?
BP: Robert Dahl’s work was a big influence on me, both to emulate and to react against. Most of my research in some sense responds to him. His Preface to Democratic Theory is marvelous. It helped me see that I was a majoritarian democrat, not a Madisonian pluralist like the early Dahl. Even though Ray Wolfinger – a very smart student and disciple of Dahl – was my teacher, I rejected the Who Governs message that all is well because widespread participation means plenty of people power. I liked the later Dahl, as of 1970 or so, especially his advocating more government responsiveness to ordinary citizens. Dahl’s and Lindblom’s emphases on undemocratic biases in the system (especially business power) were also welcome, but they seemed belated. I had heard that story elsewhere and already believed it. But of course you could say I was belated too, at least in published work.
Q: Was that consistent throughout your career, that you were a majoritarian democrat?
BP: Always. Yes. I'm enough of a democrat that I favor going along with the public even when I disagree with it, which I think is unusual. In talking to Larry Bartels, he says, Well, if you were going to do what the public wants, there's this issue and that issue, especially various social issues, in which you would come up with terrible results. And my answer to that is, if so, let's figure out ways to do some educating and get the public to take positions that are more what we like. Social movements can do that. The Civil Rights Movement was an amazing example of that. The gay rights movement, too, in a very different way, was quite an amazing example of persuading people. So I believe that the government should generally do what the public wants. I also believe that over time, it's important to help make progress in the public’s thinking about some matters.
Q: Achen and Bartels recently wrote a critique of what they call the folk theory of democracy where politicians respond to the public and the public punishes them retrospectively. They argue instead that democracy is driven by various group affiliations, whether partisanship or something else. How important is that critique?
BP: Well, at best retrospective voting is going to be a crude instrument of democratic control. Chris and Larry certainly offer some striking examples of it going awry. But I am not sure how typical that is. More importantly, when retrospective voting goes wrong, you want to think about how much we should blame a failure of capacity in the public versus how much results from a bad information system. The media often over-hype the dangers of shark attacks. And they often encourage economic myopia by emphasizing short-term economic events.
As to group-based voting, we have known since the Columbia studies of the 1940s that many people vote in accordance with their social group memberships. And since the Michigan studies of the 1950s we have known that party loyalties play a big part. To me, the biggest questions concern, to what extent and when do these cues constitute useful shortcuts to voting in accord with people’s needs, values, and policy preferences? I am inclined to see party ID largely in V.O. Key’s terms, as a standing decision about policy. And I like Paul Sniderman’s similar view of social group loyalties as useful cues for group members who share common values or interests. Neither cue is totally reliable, but both can sometimes help low-information voters.
American Politics Writ Large
Q: I have some questions on American politics writ large. A lot of your work obviously address these larger issues of the nature of elections, public opinion and equality. I was just curious about some big debates about American politics like Louis Hartz's view of America as essentially a liberal country.
BP: The Hartz view looks odd in retrospect. I would counter by saying, I like Tocqueville a lot better because Tocqueville at least wrote 100 pages or so about slavery. And he painted a mostly accurate and fairly friendly picture of the (white, male) democracy of Jacksonian America, even though he was an aristocrat. I would say that Hartz was an elitist. His cheerful, liberal vision of America does not seem to me to be a very accurate one.
Q: Rogers Smith wrote this famous piece pushing back on that kind of liberal vision. And I think the trend today is to focus on gender and racial inequalities as a fundamental part of American culture and experience.
BP: Yes, a useful trend. You can’t understand American politics without understanding something about slavery. That's the primordial curse of the country, and we're living with the consequences still. I think that's absolutely right. I may be saying this from the narrow perspective of an old white male, but I've never been quite as pessimistic about gender inequality, because I have assumed we are going make relatively quick progress on that. Women’s equality seems so obviously sensible to so many people. Good grief, women are the majority. I may be a wishful thinker, but I can't imagine a high level of sexism lingering on for very long. But unfortunately, racism I don't see as going away nearly as quickly.
Q: Another figure you've mentioned a few times is Schattschneider. What do you take away from him?
BP: To put it simply, the heavenly chorus does indeed speak with an upper-class accent. I think Schattschneider’s right about that. Partly due to the time at which he worked and the methods that were available, he didn't get very far in proving it, though. Schattschneider pointed his finger at narrow “scope of conflict.” In some ways, though, Grant McConnell did more solid work on low-visibility ways in which elites can subvert the democratic process. His agrarian case studies are really something. I did look back at Schattschneider’s tariff book one time and that's a very entertaining book, but the Smoot-Hawley tariff was a pretty unusual spectacle in which greed and corruption were easier to see than perhaps at any other time in American politics. Hard to argue it was typical.
Q: The last couple of decades, the big trend in American politics has been polarization. Has it impacted the way you think about US politics?
BP: That is definitely one of the most important things that's changed in American politics. There are much higher levels of polarization. I think the Poole, Rosenthal, and McCarty work on roll-call voting in Congress is very important. I am not sure anybody's done a very good job of explaining the rise in polarization, however. I have some notions, but not a whole lot of evidence.
In any event, when you put that polarization together with U.S. institutional structures, that's when you get really awful outcomes. I think Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein were among the first to point out just how awful it is when one party is extreme and obstructionist, and you have a separation of powers system in which all it takes is controlling one veto point and such a party can stop everything. That's a major problem for the United States. When I was talking about reforms, the democratic reforms I mentioned should help a lot with that.
Q: Having observed American politics for several decades, do you see any breaks, any moments where American politics qualitatively changed?
BP: Mostly I see a slow, steady decline since the early 1970s, related to increases in inequality of income and wealth. Those, in turn, probably followed in large part from the increasing weakness of labor and the increasing power of capital due to more and more low-wage competition from a globalized labor market. And increased capital mobility. On the capital mobility front, Jeffrey Winters’ Power in Motion book was a path-breaker.
But I suppose some particular events punctuated these gradual trends. I would single out the 1994 Newt Gingrich election, after which a major U.S. political party began saying and doing unusually extreme things. Gingrich made Ronald Reagan look like Dwight Eisenhower. And then the 2001 accession of China to the WTO, which unleashed a flood of cheap imports. Nice for consumers, but bad news for many Americans’ jobs and wages.
Q: Do you have any views on American exceptionalism? Are we different than other places?
BP: The phrase has been used in a lot of different ways. But the core idea that the United States may be different from other places has something to it. I think slavery is number one. I can't think of any other advanced country that has such a terrible problem that resulted from large-scale slavery. So that's one unique feature.
Another feature that's really unusual is the weakness of organized labor. And that has roots, as everybody knows, that go back a long way and partly have to do with ethnic divisions, including slavery, and sometimes with deliberate efforts to divide the working class. Those are two big features that are different from almost every place else.
The third big feature that’s not quite unique, but it's pretty unusual, is the number of veto points in the system. There's a piece in the American Political Economy volume that shows a comparative table. The US has more veto points on policy than any other country in the table, and quite a few more than most. And then related to that are our rules and institutions. Some of them really are quite unusual. There exist several other more or less two-party systems, but winner-take-all, single member districts, I believe, are pretty peculiar to the U.S. They have quite pernicious effects, especially now. I don't know whether that's exceptionalism, but it says the US is different.
I believe you can't even talk about such matters without a comparative context. One of the things I regret is not having better comparative training, despite travelling a lot and taking those undergraduate courses. I wish I had had better training in modern comparative politics and had done more work in it.
Q: Were there any projects you wish you had done but didn't get to or that you would like to see others do?
BP: Probably the main projects would be comparative studies of the same kinds of things that I've been interested in in the U.S. case. I really believe you can't understand our country well without knowing things about other countries. An interesting example of that would be the power of the wealthy. I remember giving a talk at APSA summarizing our work about wealthy Americans. I suggested that wealthy Americans may have more political power than wealthy people in other countries, and as far as I'm concerned, nobody really knows about that. But several prominent comparativists said things like, No, no, it's just not true. In Sweden, rich people have a huge amount of power. They just have different preferences. They'll do things for workers, whereas American capitalists won’t, at least at this point in history. If I were doing one new project right now, I think it would be a cross-national study of the wealthy in politics. I’m glad others are starting to do it.
This idea about changing elite policy preferences also seems pretty interesting. Do you know the American Amnesia book by Hacker and Pierson? That one is different from their other work, in that it’s earlier history, focusing on the fifties and talking about how we've forgotten – that’s the amnesia part – that Republicans and business people used to go along with Eisenhower Republicanism, substantial social spending, high taxes on the rich, etc.
And to me, an interesting question is, you mentioned the parallel public idea, an interesting question is whether the rich in the United States have gone off in some different direction while the rest of us were staying fairly stable, or whether the rich always wanted reactionary policies, but they didn't have the power to get them because unions were stronger. Pre-globalization, they also didn't have as credible a threat of leaving the country to get cheap labor abroad. That would be interesting to find out, but it would be tough to do. I don't know how you would tell for sure what they were all really thinking back then. Though Mizruchi and others have found clues. Archival work on their letters and diaries can help.
Collaborators and Students
Q: You've co-authored a lot of publications. Could you talk about the people you’ve collaborated with and why you seek out collaborators?
BP: I've been really, really lucky with collaborators. It's been a central feature of my work. It started in graduate school when as a student, I wrote a short piece with Ray Wolfinger about party identification. Just conventional wisdom, it wasn't very innovative. Then I wrote two or three articles with Dick Brody that reflected my thesis and our election project. From then on, I definitely recognized the value of collaboration. If I were speaking to students or young faculty today, I'd say picking collaborators is one of the biggest things. It's not quite like picking a life partner, but it can be almost as important as a close friendship. I'd say, try to learn as an apprentice if you can. Try to get attached to a project. Keep your individuality, make sure you do something innovative and different, but also learn from a project. Think about collaborating with a teacher or a colleague. At Northwestern I’ve collaborated with quite a few students and I’m very happy about that.
Q: How does the research and writing process work when you collaborate with someone?
BP: In various ways. Usually, the initial idea and quite a bit of the writing have been mine, but in between, much or most of the data collection and data analysis has been done by others – by collaborators or RAs – with varying levels of interaction or supervision by me. I guess this follows the natural science model of a laboratory team. The upside is efficient division of labor and multiplied capability. The downside can be loss of intimate knowledge of data. There are advantages to the loner style of doing all of one’s own work on one’s own computer.
In recent years, I honestly have to say I've been mostly a free rider. Like with Jeff Winters on oligarchy. And Marty Gilens. Marty spent, I believe, ten years or even more with a bunch of research assistants at UCLA putting together his amazing data. And then he spent a lot of time analyzing it, and he wrote his book. And so then at the last minute, I hop aboard and say, Hey, Marty, let's write an article that looks at all this in a little bit different way, and add a few analyses of the following kinds. So for that, collaboration was amazingly quick and efficient. In the case of The Rational Public, I think I mentioned that Bob Shapiro was crucial in organizing and managing this huge data collection effort, and he contributed a lot of ideas and writing, too. I should probably have been the junior author.
In almost all cases, I think it's true that I've provided a lot of the words. I love the English language, and I studied both Latin and German, which helps you be aware of the roots of English. I’m afraid we all fall into jargon, but I try really hard to write clearly. And I write fairly fast, so that that's a part that I played in pretty much all of my collaborations. But there have been variations in exactly who does how much data gathering, and who does how much data analysis and thinking and writing.
Q: You mentioned graduate students and you've trained a lot of them. Do you have an approach to teaching grad students and mentoring them?
BP: Definitely. Lots of two-page papers that I scrawl on with red pen. (Or now, with Word’s track changes.) Apprenticeship is key. Very important is the experience of being a research assistant. Besides that, almost every year I would approach at least one graduate student and ask about possibly writing something together, generally with me as junior author, because it seems to me it's important not to abuse the authority of the professor’s position. But I would say things like, this is a great seminar paper. I bet it could be turned into an article, if you just followed this outline. If you did this, this and this. How would you feel about taking me on as a junior author?
But you asked a general question about training. I would say that for me, teaching students about my own research has been the most rewarding thing. Because if we open up we can tell the students a whole lot of things about how research is done, things that they're not going to read anywhere. Like my little story about Marty, how we got together, and how we ended up on the Jon Stewart show, which my kids tell me was the high point of my career. I also make clear that students’ critiques of my own work will be better received than mindless praise.
Connections to the Outside World
Q: Do you have any thoughts about non-academic work or work that speaks to the lay public about research. You've written some pieces. You were on the Daily Show.
BP: The Daily Show was certainly fun. But I would say that the over-all picture has been a little disappointing because given my normative motivations, I really should have become a big-time public intellectual. And obviously I have not. I think a fair amount of that is just lack of the right skills. It's also a personality issue. Controversy gets attention. Some people just love to get up there and argue with somebody else. A lot of the best public intellectuals relish the idea of engaging in noisy debates. But I dislike conflict. I want to sit down and mull things over, or talk things through with a couple of colleagues.
Q: There's a criticism of political science that we are too disconnected from the real world. We haven't had so much impact. Michael Desch just wrote a piece on the irrelevance of political science that was mostly about foreign policy. Do you think we're too disconnected or have too little impact?
BP: I guess one thought I have about that is I've been disappointed in how few political scientists that I encounter really care about public policy, which I think of as the main dependent variable we've got, whether it's declaring war, or passing spending bills, or regulating, or whatever. I think the main job of political science should be trying to account for those things.
We haven't talked about political psychology much, but to me, it's clear that my path diverged from the individual behavior people fairly early. I've done a little work on individual behavior, but it's usually in the context of inputs coming from somewhere in the environment, and/or about opinion outputs affecting policy. I'm not against political psychology, but in my conception of political science, you really want to have a lot of people who are paying attention to policy.
Q: Have you had much contact with politicians or policy makers over your career?
BP: Very limited. I got to know some people on Bernie Sanders’ staff at a certain point and gave them some talking points. I met Hubert Humphrey very briefly long ago. And I shook hands with Lady Bird Johnson in the summer of 1964, when I was a volunteer in the early stages of the War on Poverty. All in all, not a lot of contact.
That leads to another reflection, which is, I don't think the discipline really encourages it. I think the roles of public intellectual, advisor, policy influencer, those things are really important. But we’re taught to do objective scholarship and do our research and not get too caught up in public debates. As a grad student, I was told, “Don’t ever go beyond your data.”
Progress and the Future of Political Science
Q: If you look at where the field of American politics was when you started out and where we are now, has there been progress?
BP: Definite progress. We know a lot more than we used to. Experiments have helped a lot with those cognitive processes that we failed to untangle with surveys. Archival and observational research are back. Some of our knowledge has actually cumulated.
Q: Do you think there are places where that we’ve neglected, that we could have made more advances, that we should have studied?
BP: When I was a graduate student, people were very explicit about power. Dahl was having arguments about power with community power people like Floyd Hunter. And C. Wright Mills was very explicit about who had the power. It seems to me that subsequently we're fallen a little short on studying power questions.
Q: American politics is the subfield in political science that's considered most methodologically advanced, particularly in terms of quantitative and formal theory. Is that mainly a good thing or have we lost something?
BP: I think it's mostly good. As admitted before, I was a graduate student in a time when good quantitative methods were not really part of graduate training, and I had to audit sociology
classes and econometrics. Auditing is seldom satisfactory. It's hard to make yourself do all the homework. So the long and short of it is I didn't get really good quantitative training. And on the math side, I always loved math and I think I had pretty good mathematical intuition. As a grad student, I don't know why, but I audited an advanced analysis course. That’s one of the best courses on any subject that I've ever had. I also picked up some linear algebra, which is very helpful for understanding statistics and game theory. But I never got the skills to actually model, and it would have been nice to have those skills. I think it's good to have them.
I think you could say the same thing about political science that Hossenfelder and others say about physics, that it's pretty important not to get confused about the difference between your mathematical model and reality. A lot of physicists followed the wrong path by thinking: ooh, this planetary-system model of the atom is the way the atom really, truly is. And it turns out, maybe not. It's a great model that accounted for most of what we knew in 1900, but in reality there was a lot more to be learned. And that happens all the more in political science, where models usually have less explanatory power. Dealing with messy human behavior, there are tradeoffs between, on the one hand, you want to be concise and simple, and a fairly simple model can often get at a big part of reality. But at the same time, you don't want to pretend there isn't more reality. Other methods may be needed to illuminate it.
Q: On a final note, you’ve had a long and prolific career. It seems that you keep pushing yourself into new areas and learning new things. What keeps you going?
BP: Curiosity is one. Enjoying research and writing. And I’m still fundamentally motivated by those normative things. I would love to do something that would actually help make the world better. It is hard to argue that I have done that so far. Maybe sometime. Never give up hope!