In this episode of Brokonomics, I'm joined by Aidan Paladino, an academic who has some words to say to the country on democracy. He argues that democracy as a system of government inherently leads to polarisation and to partisanship, and that once partisanship is selected, every subsequent vote becomes more polarized. In the long run, what you end up with is people who are heavily partisan, no matter what their personal beliefs may be.
00:00:28.880Now, as you are of course aware, democracy is the very best thing that humanity has ever invented.
00:00:35.260And if you doubt that, just watch any sci-fi programme for the last 30 years and you'll discover that the only reason you go to the trouble of conquering the immense difficulties of figuring out how to travel transgalactic spaces
00:00:46.940is that you can stand there wagging your finger at some tentacled mass explaining why they need to adopt democracy so they can have all their decision-making powers abrogated to San Francisco0.70
00:00:56.420and they can have gay rights pushed down their throat by an Andorian president.0.75
00:01:00.360However, I have found an academic who has some words to say to the country on this stuff.0.79
00:01:06.860So let's get to the root of this heresy.
00:01:15.480No, thank you very much for coming on.
00:01:16.600Now, you are, I can tell, a proper academic.
00:01:19.820And I know that because I've read your latest substack.
00:01:22.780And it's got things like confidence indicators or intervals.
00:01:25.860And it's got it's got it's got the stuff and it's got regressions and all the sort of stuff that I'd like to be able to pretend that I understand, but really don't.
00:01:33.620So I'm not going to try. But you clearly are a proper academic.
00:01:37.480But are you are you one of the sort of the new age ones who doesn't do it in academia?
00:01:44.260Well, I was in academia. I was a Ph.D. student up until about, I guess, nine years ago now.
00:01:50.540And I took a sabbatical from doctoral school because I was so burnt out from it.
00:01:55.220and but i couldn't not work at the same time and so my dad said well you're always talking to me
00:02:00.900about politics so why don't you go yell into the void of the internet about it instead and that's
00:02:05.520what i've been doing is basically talking about politics and and more particularly uh the
00:02:10.120intersection between politics and social science which is what my background is in uh specifically
00:02:14.480group psychology behavioral psychology and mass communication and that all lends quite well to
00:02:21.240politics yes i didn't intend to it for it to i was i my phd was going to be in a game studies
00:02:28.020of studying video games and how people interact with video games it's a very different sort of
00:02:31.980direction there even that got political exactly yeah yes and around that time is is when it
00:02:39.380started to get political so you know 2016 u.s election was a big change for everything in u.s
00:02:46.980politics and um the most recent article i've written talks a lot about that shift in part
00:02:51.860in at least the american political system but of course the americanization of britain is also
00:02:56.500a yankification has been occurring for some time as well of british politics well one of the things
00:03:02.280i kind of got from your your latest substack and actually i better get you to explain it in a
00:03:06.400minute is that um the system selects for a certain type of behavior so whether it's the
00:03:11.800amerification of politics or whether it's just that america is a slightly more mass democracy
00:03:15.980and therefore gets there slightly earlier, I suppose, is an interesting question.
00:03:18.840But why don't you take us through what you're working on at the moment?
00:03:22.940Because that was what really caught my eye and made me think we need to have you on.
00:03:26.820So basically, what I've proposed here is that democracy as a system of government
00:03:32.440inherently leads to polarisation and to partisanship.
00:03:36.980What we've found, I went through data that goes all the way back to the 1940s,
00:03:40.400up until the modern day, and basically, from the time that you cast your very first vote,
00:03:44.360you are selecting for partisanship. And once partisanship becomes selected, every subsequent
00:03:49.140vote increases partisanship every single act of voting. In the long run, what you end up with is
00:03:54.800people who are heavily partisan, no matter what their personal beliefs may be and how cool of a
00:04:00.060person they are otherwise. When it comes to engaging with democracy as a system, they only
00:04:06.000become more entrenched over time and very rarely do they shift sides. In addition to that, the other
00:04:11.400that increases along with partisanship is polarization on issues. And as issues become
00:04:15.760polarized, people start to see the world in completely divergent ways. You can give them
00:04:20.500the same article with the same information, for example, that Bush's statements on WMDs in Iraq,
00:04:26.220and then give them the Duflin report that says there were no WMDs in Iraq. And people who are
00:04:31.100partisan to the right read that article and were more convinced than before they had read it that
00:04:36.100there were WMDs in Iraq. And the same thing with Bush banning stem cell research for Democrats.
00:04:41.400after they read the article, they were a little bit more cautious on it, but they stuck to their
00:04:45.740original perceptions rather than coming to update it with the reality of the information. People,
00:04:51.160and they do this to avoid cognitive dissonance, which is a sense of psychological discomfort
00:04:55.660that's actually activated in some of the same areas of the brain as physiological pain.
00:05:00.860So of course, as animals, we want to avoid pain. And so to avoid pain, we avoid political reality.
00:05:06.860and that's how people end up perceiving things so disparately and by voting it just gets
00:05:12.460encouraged again and again to not update your perception of reality and instead to live in a
00:05:17.700parallel one so i'm as i'm as likely to avoid slamming my fingers in the drawer as i am having
00:05:24.920to accept a political reality that does not concur with my priors because it causes psychological
00:05:31.600pain which which my which my brain basically perceives as the same thing and therefore avoid it
00:05:36.860Yeah. I mean, it's, again, having to admit that you're wrong sucks. No one likes to do that. And to particularly something that they've invested effort, time, money into in particular, the more you've invested into something, the more difficult it is to accept that you were wrong in the past.0.85
00:05:51.920You either have to be wrong in the past or you're wrong now if the two things are dissonant.
00:05:55.520So your options there are to say, well, the present is false or the present is different than how it appears or to convince yourself that you really never felt that way in the first place.
00:06:05.220and particularly in the age of social media where people have all these statements that they've made
00:06:10.340for years and years supporting a candidate or supporting a party online and readily available
00:06:15.200I think it's even more difficult now to remove yourself and update your previous beliefs when
00:06:21.560it's all right in front of your own face and you're constantly reminded of things that you
00:06:24.680supported or believed in the past if they're just concordant with current beliefs. Okay so this
00:06:29.660polarization is very much a feature, not a bug of politics. Yes. I mean, you pretty much find this
00:06:36.100inherently with polarization. People have opinions towards politicians. And by polarization,
00:06:42.080it's often measured by things like, the president makes me angry. That's what's meant by polarization.
00:06:47.580So these emotional reactions to politics. And what specifically we find is that partisanship
00:06:53.120alone in and of itself is not enough to cause this reality warping. It requires both partisanship
00:06:59.080and polarization for people to start to read things in the antithetical way to what they've
00:07:04.200just read or been informed about. And it's why I'm sure everybody has this experience where you've
00:07:08.740talked to someone on the left, for example, and they have a completely different version of events
00:07:14.720that they are absolutely sure is the real way that things are, and that you're actually the
00:07:18.460lunatic and you're the one living in a parallel reality. And that's the inherent result of voting
00:07:24.680and participating in the democratic process well i don't know if i remember well i mean there are
00:07:29.780of course examples of that on left and right but the way that i got that the strongest was over
00:07:33.200the covid era where i remember speaking to people and um i i went to visit some some people that i
00:07:39.580knew who were sort of terrified of this and i had brought with me because i was in crusader mode at
00:07:45.380the time i'd brought with me with the government's own stats on how many people were actually dying
00:07:50.740of this thing and it's just saying look your your perception is wildly different to the government's
00:07:56.320own numbers and they were accusing and these were good and these are people i know well known for a
00:07:59.820long time and and and they were accusing me of of bringing them propaganda it's no it's literally
00:08:05.100the government's it's because and i could kind of see that the more effective my argument was
00:08:12.680they were recoiling as if i had hurt them yes yes because it's causing psychological pain
00:08:18.680psychological discomfort um to have to because you have to do something about it you have to
00:08:23.800alleviate the pain um that's our again our inherent desire is well i'm in pain i need to
00:08:27.920make this pain go away so you have a couple of options you can admit to or you can kind of erase
00:08:33.380the past and say you know maybe i was misled in the past but i'm right now or you were you're wrong
00:08:38.820now but right in the past that one's very unusual uh the most common way of dealing with it is to
00:08:45.540do none of those and just ignore the present information. It's wrong or it doesn't exist.
00:08:49.760And that's what you find most commonly. And I think everybody can probably relate to that in
00:08:55.480some personal experience they've had where just ignore, it doesn't exist, go back to whatever you
00:09:00.060were doing beforehand. And everyone is susceptible to this. It's not one political side or the other.
00:09:04.880yes um i i wonder if as an investor i'm somewhat insulated from that because if that is the human
00:09:16.040tendency but if you stick to it as an investor you lose all your money quite quickly if you can't
00:09:20.640update on the basis of new new information you kind of have to train yourself regularly to be
00:09:24.740able to throw out your priors but i mean presumably there are a proportion of people who can do this
00:09:29.700do do this. But I mean, you're talking about the mass of the voter base.
00:09:36.320Yes. So there's two mitigating factors. One is political knowledge. So people who are political
00:09:41.980junkies, they tend to be less likely to be misled by and believe falsities because they have a
00:09:46.940general kind of baseline, people who pay a lot of attention to politics. Now, I should say that
00:09:51.560there is people who are eligible to vote are actually less politically knowledgeable than
00:09:56.420those who are ineligible, at least in the United States, that's been found. So people who make
00:10:01.560voting decisions based on very little political knowledge, people, I guess, who are outside of
00:10:06.560the system. I mean, in this case, it was measured by people who were under the age of 18. So 17
00:10:12.360year olds had more political knowledge than did 19 year olds, for example, in the US. And that
00:10:18.160was over a long period of time to not just like one election cycle over decades. So political
00:10:23.720knowledge is a mitigating factor. People with a lot of political knowledge who are political
00:10:27.240junkies, they tend to not be misled as easily, although there are, you know, examples of that
00:10:32.160as well. And that's probably because of the other factor, which is need for cognition.
00:10:36.220Need for cognition is the desire or need to think deeply about things. And it's heavily
00:10:40.360correlated with intelligence, multiple forms of intelligence, in fact. So people who are
00:10:45.320low need for cognition, at least in some instances, are more likely to believe falsities because1.00
00:10:51.440they're dumb i mean that's it's honestly like there's no other way around it they're a bit dumb0.97
00:10:54.980people who are hiding for cognition on the other hand are able to discern these things1.00
00:11:00.620but there are plenty of very intelligent people who just get locked into a worldview and never
00:11:05.440change it yeah so like i said it's both it's it can't it's not just intelligence alone
00:11:10.620intelligence and uh being highly politically knowledgeable um however if you're extremely
00:11:16.420partisan and the situation is very polarizing, even the most intelligent and politically informed
00:11:21.920person can fall victim to these tendencies to avoid psychological pain. Yes. Do we think that
00:11:29.980this is a failure mode of democracy or is it a mechanism that actually helps stabilize it?
00:11:35.540Because what you're describing is basically sort of creating two ballasts on either side of the
00:11:40.880ship that are very difficult to update and very difficult to move, which means that you don't get
00:11:46.400any sort of rapid change? Yeah, well, you won't get rapid change with this because these tendencies
00:11:52.780last for a lifetime. So like I said, once you've cast your first vote, for the most part,
00:11:58.020whatever direction that has been in, and even in a multi-party system, whatever direction that has
00:12:02.120been in will be the direction that you will stay on pretty much for the rest of your life, with
00:12:06.500rare exceptions, for the rest of your interaction with the political system. As a result, yes,
00:12:12.640even in multi-party systems, there's a tendency towards bipolarity. It's just one or two parties
00:12:18.740usually end up being at the head of that ship. And it creates, like I said, this two parallel
00:12:23.380worlds. If there was more than that, I think it'd be more complicated. But like I said, even in
00:12:26.960multi-party systems, people tend to diverge one or the other for the most part. And yeah,
00:12:32.940it perpetuates the democratic process in that there's always another fight to happen. We've
00:12:37.940always got to go face face the enemy at the ballot box again and again in perpetuity you know at
00:12:44.420infinitum so if most people and i agree with you most people are low information or low salience
00:12:51.560whatever you want to call them voters what actually legitimizes democracy other than the
00:12:57.000fact that it's got all this psychological buy-in the thing that people mostly vote on is not policy
00:13:02.680because they tend to be very unfamiliar with policy, and not just policy, but basic positions.
00:13:08.680One of the more interesting facts that came out of this was that in 1992, basically, in total,
00:13:16.88035% of Americans did not know that Bill Clinton was to the left of George Bush. They didn't
00:13:24.640understand that the Republican Party was a right-leaning party. 35% either learned it or
00:13:30.220forgot or never learned it at all during that election cycle. You would think the most basic
00:13:35.280bit of information that voters would be aware of, they couldn't grasp or hold on to. So instead,
00:13:42.120because people don't understand policy either, generally speaking, something between 10 to 20
00:13:48.340to 30 percent of voters on any given policy issue either never learn it or will learn it and then
00:13:53.580forget it in any kind of election cycle. There was about nine different times that that was,
00:13:59.48010 different times that was tested in every single case um it occurred the same time people
00:14:03.500didn't understand what or they learned it and then forgot so it sort of it sort of sounds like
00:14:08.780that what you're implying is that is that public opinion is it's more that it's produced by the
00:14:15.580system rather than expressing it um yes it is it's a product of democracy itself so because people
00:14:22.600don't pay attention to policy where are they getting their cues from it turns out that the
00:14:26.620predominant and only real cue that voters base their opinions on is what I can best describe
00:14:31.160as vibes. So, for example, in the election between Al Gore and Bush, it was widely promoted
00:14:39.240that Al Gore was distrustworthy. He wasn't honest. He was insincere. And that was largely based on
00:14:44.400he ran, he did an interview or a speech where he talked about how his grandmother took the same
00:14:49.560arthritis medicine as his dog. That was not true, personally. It was not a real anecdote from his
00:14:56.060life it came from a house democrat study so it was like accurate information that the same medicine
00:15:00.860cost three times as much and was being prescribed to people and dogs however because he had lied
00:15:05.880about that it gave the um it gave his opponents the ability to just frame al gore as a dishonest
00:15:12.580liar and as a result that shifted massively favorable opinions towards bush and it not but
00:15:19.160they didn't believe that al gore was less credible they didn't believe that he was less intelligent
00:15:22.880They didn't believe he was less knowledgeable. They believed he was less honest. And that is what shifted opinions towards whether or not he'd be a good president. It's vibes and not policy. The vibe stuff is what gets votes.
00:15:35.120so i'm kind of thinking here that what what you're suggesting is that you know early donald trump
00:15:42.140in particular when he's in campaigning mode was actually a genius politician because he didn't
00:15:46.940try and do all the clever stuff he just came up with a nickname for people that was a bit cutting
00:15:51.740and a bit negative and actually that was not just a byproduct of his style that was actually doing
00:15:58.100the work oh yeah yeah you know sleepy joe or yeah all the other names he's got everybody
00:16:03.780Lil Marco. All those little names that can reduce a person down into a single descriptor,
00:16:11.180which is always negative. Yeah. I mean, that makes it much easier for the voting public to
00:16:17.140comprehend. They need soundbites because they can't, they don't have the time or energy to be
00:16:22.160able to, I mean, it is, this is a full-time job. Obviously you and I both do this as a job
00:16:26.320and most people do not have the time, energy, ability, whatever it is, what, or a combination
00:16:31.480of all of them to dedicate to doing this as a full-time job as a result they need soundbites
00:16:36.720they need little tidbits of information um and then it's a little bit absurd that we take people
00:16:42.060who we know are in a large portion incapable of learning these things for any number of reasons
00:16:47.920or forgetting them and then expect them to go out and make informed decisions that determine the
00:16:52.340fate of the country it kind of suggests that actually what we're doing is is it's much better
00:16:58.940off that you're not in academia that you're on youtube and i mean to relate a conversation i was
00:17:03.660having with carl the other day we were talking about running for parliament and and but it we
00:17:08.240what we came to is by god what if we actually win because we we'd be trading a quite a powerful
00:17:13.780position as an influencer for a position of no power whatsoever which is being sort of lobby
00:17:20.280fodder because it sort of suggests that actually the ability to express ideas clearly and simply
00:17:25.460and serve them up on a format which is low effort for people to get hold of
00:17:29.980is actually far more powerful than marching around in Westminster
00:17:35.000and waving order papers and all that sort of stuff.
00:17:37.780Well, it's always a huge problem of being able,
00:17:40.240particularly for people in politics directly,
00:17:43.040to be able to communicate information to the voters
00:17:45.340because they have this tendency to stick with whatever they originally thought
00:17:52.000I mean, this was a huge problem, actually, which election cycle was. Was it 1992 as well? One second. Oh, yes. What was the actual 1997? So the 1997 general election, because Labour and the Tories had switched sides in terms of their position on, you know, whether they should integrate with the European community, what would the precursor to the European Union, there was the British public was moving away from favorability towards integration.
00:18:20.580And so because the conservatives had also moved away from being favorable towards integration at the time, the whole John Major's whole campaign there was to try and inform the public that, look, the conservatives are against integration.
00:18:34.840It didn't work, though. People maintained at the time in 1997, there was a significant portion of the public that continued to believe that labor was against integration rather than the other way around.
00:18:46.940So you find this in all kinds of different political environments and contexts, not just in the U.S., but in the U.K., in the Netherlands.
00:18:55.020And in my article, I talk about a lot of it, but it's so consistent.
00:18:58.760People can't learn new information either very well.
00:19:02.420In fact, it's been a problem with when newspapers make updates to articles, people will remember whatever they read first.
00:19:09.100And people will continue to do whatever they did first.
00:19:12.040Very common example, it's often people will say, my whole family votes this way.
00:19:15.880so I vote this way and that's whatever you've always done is what you will continue to do
00:19:20.640very hard to break out of that yes and I know you went back to 19 whatever it is you went back to
00:19:26.260but is is it is this a fundamental truth of human nature or is it perhaps the case that with
00:19:32.980social media which is much less friction involved in getting hold of it I mean you you can consume
00:19:39.860your news in whatever format you want when you're sat on a bus you can pull up your phone if you
00:19:44.340want to watch a half hour lotus eater segment or a 90 minute brokonomic segment or a 30 second
00:19:49.920tiktok you can be served up in a relatively low friction way is that is that helping to dissolve
00:19:54.400any of this do you think i'm not really sure because you the people who are going to be
00:19:58.900interested in consuming that content in the first place are the politically involved people who are
00:20:04.120interested in political knowledge and that is a certain subsection of the population there's
00:20:08.900some stuff that, sure, has very broad appeal. People are obviously interested in the daily
00:20:14.640news cycle to a certain extent, just wanting to know what's going on in the world. But the people
00:20:21.420who are interested in politics to the degree that they will sit down and watch even a 30-minute
00:20:25.240segment, let alone an hour and a half, are typically the people who are already high
00:20:29.100political information and therefore less likely to be susceptible to this stuff. And also probably
00:20:34.500a little higher iq a little bit more at least need for cognition i need to want to think about
00:20:39.400things yes so unfortunately it's our audience echo chambery there yes indeed but it that isn't
00:20:45.620it becomes a bit of a maybe not echo chamber filter bubble people who select for it are already the
00:20:50.280people to be who are less likely to be susceptible to this stuff so is this why political systems
00:20:55.500in the west keep on evolving into uh basically technocracies and there's this kind of layer of
00:21:01.740administrative governments because if you if if the signal if there's more noise as a signal going
00:21:07.500on in the electoral base as a whole you can't really do it through the political system you
00:21:11.760have to extract it away to the courts and the compliance and you know bank of england makes a
00:21:16.740whole bunch of decisions and you basically just push it out of the political arena i mean i think
00:21:21.500it has to sort of logically because people don't know anything for the most part i mean these are
00:21:26.620what i'm talking about the statistics here these are broad national level statistics and surveys
00:21:30.420on in aggregate people can't if if in 1992 the american public 33 percent of them 32 percent of
00:21:38.480them excuse me did not know that george bush was to the right of bill clinton then um there's
00:21:46.280again like a third of the populace how can you expect them to have any sort of opinion that is
00:21:51.460informed in any way on details and specifics on on bureaucracy and administration and it's just
00:21:57.600impossible. That's why it has to be someone's job. And unfortunately, once it becomes embroiled in
00:22:01.440bureaucracy and administration, it also becomes opaque and very difficult to then, for those who
00:22:08.040are interested and do want to know, find out what's going on or have any say in it. So what
00:22:13.980are you saying? Are you saying that the system, the democracy is broken? Or are you saying that
00:22:18.480democracy is simply optimizing for different function, which appears to be stability over
00:22:23.800time without having to make much change you know it wants to be the crocodile it wants to go
00:22:27.420300 million years without ever needing to evolve
00:22:30.220I mean I don't advocate for democracy personally I'm a monarchist so which I think is a more stable
00:22:37.600system yeah but uh in terms of democracy there is a stability to it however in that you know
00:22:43.740these things stay stable over time you stick with your vote you stick with your your party and your
00:22:47.360guy however because of the inherent polarization and partisanship that democracy produces this
00:22:52.980means that the populace is perpetually at war with each other, which is not stable. And particularly
00:22:59.240in recent years, I think in part because of the advent of social media has exacerbated this
00:23:04.420because it's in everyone's faces all the time in a way that it used to maybe only be during
00:23:08.440election cycles, is that people feel that they are at war. I mean, for years and years, people
00:23:14.080like Tim Pool have been saying there's going to be an American civil war. I've heard people say
00:23:17.360there's going to be a British civil war for a while now as well. And a lot of that tension is
00:23:23.580built up because of democracy as a system, because people form marching lines, and they're very
00:23:29.520unlikely to change them. Yes, I suppose there is a way of looking at democracy, which is to say
00:23:34.820it's a proxy for a civil war. We used to actually have the civil war. And largely, it was the biggest
00:23:41.420side one. But if you have a democracy, you can do away with all the bullets and stuff, and you can
00:23:45.800just cast ballots and this and the biggest side still wins and but you didn't you didn't have to
00:23:49.820go to the bother of getting shot so it's a kind of version of that but what I wanted to ask is
00:23:54.600I certainly agree with all of this when it comes to a mass democracy the only thing I'm wondering
00:23:59.360is we what is the problem is the problem the mass bit or the democracy bit so as a thought experiment
00:24:05.640let's say the democracy didn't work where we all voted straight up to the national level
00:24:10.400what if the way democracy worked is we voted for our local councillors on local things that we
00:24:16.860could actually have you know even low information voters can understand if their if their streets are
00:24:21.500clean or not and if there's potholes and if the bins get collected and then the local councillors
00:24:26.180vote for the county councillors and the county councillors vote for the you know whatever the
00:24:30.420MPs and the MPs vote for you know whatever you you tear it up so that oh that as you go up the
00:24:36.720layers you're moving up the um information level or the iq level whatever it is of the people could
00:24:42.680that work i think that's a more that's probably more likely to get positive change to society
00:24:50.340in particular however though people are low information voters even at the local level
00:24:55.360and protect maybe actually i think far currently they're far more likely to be unknowledgeable at
00:25:01.640the local level if you enjoyed that content and of course you did because you are a smart person
00:25:06.880why don't you go over to lotus eaters.com where you can watch the whole episode for a little as
00:25:12.080five pounds a month which really is not much money at all and you get loads of really good content