Suchergebnisse

Professor Schlozman feels that unless one also assesses three long
memos that accompanied the report by the APSA's Task Force on
Inequality and American Democracy, one should refrain from
commenting. She accuses me in my response to the Task Force reports
(Bennett 2006) of "not bother[ing] to
read the full materials on which … [I comment]" (Schlozman 2006, 55). Schlozman indicates she'd be
"interested in … [my] reactions to the whole report instead of an
abbreviated version" (55). Since she asks, here goes.

The American Political Science Association's (APSA) Task Force on
Inequality and American Democracy (2004) asserts that inequality is
on the rise in the U.S., and democracy's future may be dim. These
assertions are allegedly supported by empirical evidence.

The topic of the democratic public's limited competence has preoccupied students of democracy for centuries. Anecdotal concerns about the problem reached their peak of sophistication in the writings of Walter Lippmann & Joseph Schumpeter. Not until Philip E. Converse's "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics" did statistical research overwhelmingly confirm the worst fears of such democratic skeptics. Subsequent work has tended to confirm Converse's picture of a tiny stratum of well-informed ideological elites whose passionate political debates find little echo, or even awareness, in the mass public. While a great deal of attention has been devoted to "saving" democratic legitimacy from such findings, the Converse-inspired work of John Zaller (1992) shows how fruitful Converse's basic ideas can be not only in analyzing real-world political events, but in pulling together & stimulating new lines of research into what moves the "creative synthesizers" of belief systems; into the factors that affect the small numbers of people who grasp such systems & attempt to transmit them to the public; & into the long-term psychological or cultural sources of the predispositions with which members of the mass public confront the resulting political messages. Adapted from the source document.

Over the course of his career, Murray Edelman made one of the few sustained attempts by a theoretically inclined political scientist to explore the effects of the public's overwhelming ignorance of politics. In his early work, he focused on political elites' manipulation of an ignorant public through the deployment of symbolism. In his later work, however, he suggested that even elites are the puppets of their ideologies. His early work has been well received; his later work has gone largely unremarked. The reason may have to do with the very thing that Edelman was, in his later work, addressing: the (populist) ideological biases of his politically elite (academic) audience. Tables, References. Adapted from the source document.