Four Provocations for Info Politics Research
At a recent convening of centers in the new Knight initiative, I was asked to give a set of provocations for the field. This is what I presented on 12/16/19 — it is a set of comments prepared for delivery, designed to be provocative:
- Why does the field narrowly pursue epistemological questions related to democracy, instead of questions about identity, values, norms, and social solidarity? And, with what consequences?
To-date, the field — and this group in particular — has very narrowly pursued research questions and empirical studies related to the informational basis of democracy. But are these the right questions to ask?
We have all probably attended dozens of conferences on fake news since 2016, but how about conferences on race and ethnicity? You can count them on one hand. And yet, as the best book on the 2016 US presidential election concludes, John Sides, Lynn Vavreck, and Micahel Tesler’s Identity Crisis:
“There is no easy way to determine whether attitudes toward blacks, immigrants, or Muslims, or a more politicized white identity was the ‘most important’ factor…..But the overall pattern is clear: whites’ attitudes about race, ethnicity, and religion came to play a larger role in 2016 than other recent elections.”
This captures the fact that there are fundamental debates not about policy, but about what is the legitimate character of the ‘people’? What groups of people should legitimately wield cultural, social, political, and economic power in American public life?
As Sheri Berman made the point to me last year at a conference on populism at Wisconsin, America has only been a multi-cultural democracy with the passage of the Civil Rights Acts in 1964 — that means a bit over fifty years.
As a field, we too often have an easy nostalgia about American democracy and tell ourselves a story about some purer era we have supposedly lost.
Even more, social sorting into partisan camps has now given us clear lines of demarcation on social groupings and affiliations.
Social affiliation, social solidarities, and partisanship are the key drivers of politics, not information about policy.
And our field has been woefully inadequate at addressing the communicative aspects of social identity. Even more, we have largely ignored the ways that identity shapes epistemology — that social identities come prior to what people evaluate as true or false. Not to mention civic moral evaluation — what is right and wrong (not just what is factually correct or not.)
As an example from my own work — most political ads are not about policy information at all. They are about creating lines of social, cultural, and economic division.
To adequately address these questions would require a new focus for our quantitative and qualitative methods, blending content analysis that codes for identity-based appeals with interpretative approaches.
2. Why does the field focus narrowly on the public and not elites?
This relates to the first point — as Sides, Vavreck, and Tesler fundamentally show, elites are drivers of politics. They make racial and ethnic identity salient as a matter of politics, or conversely, they make ideology or policy salient. As Rogers Smith has argued, elites create lines of social demarcation.
Our field has very narrowly focused on mass attitudes and mass opinions, not the elites that are the drivers of much of politics. 2016 is more of a story of a failure of parties — as Julia Azari has pointed out, we are in an era of strong partisanship and weak parties. Weak in the sense that Trump could win a primary, strong partisanship in the sense that these loyalties mattered more than anything else in the end come the general election. How do we work at creating institutionally stronger parties, and better elites who do not prey on social division, should be key questions for the field.
And, we need to consider the role of information in this. Do we need to work more to promote intra-, not simply inter-, party/social group debates? How do we strengthen accountability in a world of the eroding legitimacy of institutional parties and information providers? A key question left unanswered by John Keane’s idea of monitory democracy is who actually has the legitimacy to monitor and for and among whom?
3. We need to get beyond declaring that information matters and consider when, why, and how information matters.
We tend to assume that information for the mass public is not only the driver of politics, but that given enough good information people will somehow arrive at the right conclusions — which, to be frank, I think comes with a deeply liberal/left bias in the field. You said to be provocative, right?
But I think the better set of questions is when, where, how, and why information matters in representative democracy.
This is not to say that information does not matter — it does. But how much information do people actually need in a representative democracy? And how much of it has to be good to actually matter? And what does ‘matter’ actually mean? In a system where parties aggregate preferences, arguably any set of discernible pieces of information about policy don’t really matter. If you know where Republicans and Democrats generally stand, that is likely enough to make an informed choice in an era of social sorting and ideological cohesion. In this light, straight-ticket voting is not a normative concern. Nor is the growing nationalization of politics. It simply lends coherence to people’s partisan choices.
I would look not just for informed opinion itself, but for not being informed’s consequences. Does the erosion of legitimacy of the news enable elites to get away with more or provide them with capacities to act they otherwise would not have had? Or, perhaps a more informed and engaged public simply leads to more hobbyists in politics, which Eitan Hersh argues undermines representative systems. These are the questions we should be asking. We need to expand our outcome measures. Does misinformation lead to the erosion of norms, or demagoguery, or the perception that the other side is not legitimate? Let’s focus less on electoral outcomes, and more on the body politic.
4. What should our concerns over democracy be? Let’s lay our own normative commitments bare.
As a field, we have privileged policy information over identity I think because it is easier. It is politically neutral — at least ostensibly. It shores up the legitimacy of the press. It enables us to talk about politics without talking about partisanship, race, ethnicity, and gender. It enables us to smuggle our values into social science.
I think this is the wrong move. Our concern about information only crested in the wake of 2016 Brexit and the US presidential election. Just as our concerns over micro-targeting and ads did the same. Smuggling our values in through research concerns means we are failing to own our politics. Guess what, others will have no problem calling us out and politicizing us. I think we should do it on our own terms.
I, for one, think we need to do two things. First, we need less of a focus on the informational basis of democracy — which ultimately I think is a narrow concern. Think Brexit in 2019 — even without a mythic and hyped Cambridge Analytica, people still voted to leave the EU. The Left seems to think that if people were only enlightened by information, they would vote differently. They have failed to understand that questions of identity, the legitimacy of social groups, the character of nations, and culture are actually what is at stake. These are not problems that can be reduced to the quality of information — at least primarily.
I think at a bare minimum we need to foster a commitment to continuing to play the electoral game. I would focus more on questions of norms — we need to be invested in electoral processes, in fairness, in equality under the law, and a legitimate opposition. As Nancy Rosenblum has argued, there is an ethics of partisanship — and it is grounded in the legitimacy of the other side. I think this is under threat.
Second, to the extent that we are going to be political, we have to own our politics. No more smuggling values through thinly veiled research questions that have deep partisan implications. If we as a field decide to defend democracy, multiculturalism, and equality, then so be it.
