As Churchill* once said: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

The tool of a Kenyan plot to take over the US Government

This article in The Boston Globe makes the argument that democracy is actually damaged by the way that people respond to being contradicted by evidence (they dig in rather than adapt to it). It uses this satirical post from The Onion to make the point that the virtue of open-mindedness isn’t a universal one;

Spurred by an administration he believes to be guilty of numerous transgressions, self-described American patriot Kyle Mortensen, 47, is a vehement defender of ideas he seems to think are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and principles that brave men have fought and died for solely in his head.

Kyle Mortensen would gladly give his life to protect what he says is the Constitution’s very clear stance against birth control.

“Our very way of life is under siege,” said Mortensen, whose understanding of the Constitution derives not from a close reading of the document but from talk-show pundits, books by television personalities, and the limitless expanse of his own colorful imagination. “It’s time for true Americans to stand up and protect the values that make us who we are.”According to Mortensen—an otherwise mild-mannered husband, father, and small-business owner—the most serious threat to his fanciful version of the 222-year-old Constitution is the attempt by far-left “traitors” to strip it of its religious foundation.”

The wider article is based on the notion of information ‘backfiring.’ This is the phenomenon that you will be familiar with: if someone has a factoid within a strongly argued argument authoritatively contradicted, it often leads to the host opinion being held more – not less strongly.

One of the key factors here, according to this article, is the question of self-esteem:

“Nyhan worked on one study in which he showed that people who were given a self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new information than people who had not. In other words, if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are.”

Personally, I’m particularly wary of this article precisely because it seems to confirm almost every prejudice that I’ve aired on this blog and elsewhere in recent years. It gets worse as well:

“A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong.”

The solution that we’re offered here is also an interesting one: Raise the ‘reputational cost’ of peddling disinformation. Here’s a thought experiment for you: What if we could actually make it very difficult for pundits or politicians to get away with exaggeration of misinformation? Would the result be a better type of politics? This is a question that we’ll be returning to shortly as part of the Political Innovation project.

But here’s a wider point: Does this article show that a more informed public =a poorer democracy? I’d say that it doesn’t, and that this is a category error. A more informed and fanatical public may result in poorer politics, but it’s perfectly possible to insulate democracy from politics to a degree. That fact that we aren’t doing so as much as we used to doesn’t alter the core argument here.

There are also many issues that haven’t slipped into the culture wars and on which The Daily Mail hasn’t got around to terrifying people yet. The design of hospitals, schools and housing schemes – the whole question of co-design is one obvious one. Even issues which – to the cognoscenti are politically charged ones – what is the best structure of ownership and control for public services – is one that a broadly selected citizens jury could be consulted on fruitfully.

The question of presentation and framing is the one that democrats need to focus upon.

*My certainty about that opening quote being attributed to Churchill will only increase the more you insist that it was actually John Maynard Keynes wot said it.

Ryanair: Business model coming to your town hall soon? (Click for pic credit)

Nick Clegg has gone on the attack. His target is the London Borough of Barnet’s easyCouncil model of service provision.

There are a number of ways of portraying Barnet’s idea, but I’ve not seen many that appear to be very kind. As a Barnet resident who has to use Ryanair in his line of work, I should probably leave it to others to comment on the politics behind this - I suppose the most neutral one would be to call it a freemium service.

I’ve posted on ‘cognitive polyphasia’ before (broadly, it’s the phenomenon where voters want Scandinavian welfare systems on US tax-rates), and this idea seems to be another attempt by politicians to get the public to believe that they can have the best of all worlds.

Barnet’s approach – like Ryanair’s – appears to be based upon the idea that a service can be packaged as being more attractive than it actually is – hardly a revolutionary concept in politics.

I doubt if Barnet will be as brazen as Michael O’Leary’s outfit are either. Ryanair tell us that you can fly to Perpignan for only £5. But then, once you start buying the ticket, you find that the figure multiplies if you want optional extras.

Optional extras include the right to stay out of prison for tax-dodging, or the right to pay for your ticket with anything other than a fairly exotic credit card as well as other more commonly requested premium services such as the option to have luggage with you.

You have to keep your wits about you to ensure that you don’t bump the price up by accidentally ordering any unwanted additional services from their badly-designed website. Other elements of their service are also deemed to be non-essential. The options to change reservations for example – are prohibitively priced, leaving you with little option but to re-book.

And the coup de grâce comes from Ryanair if you do have cause to complain about the service: By accepting our inflexible terms, you helped us to provide you with the thing that you said that you wanted the most: A very low headline price.

It appears that Barnet want to appeal to the kind of cognitive biases that many commercial companies appeal to. They want to be able to appeal to the consumer reflex that will pick the lowest price. It’s a variation on the ‘stealth-tax’. Again, politicians have long beleived that totemic pledges demonstrably delivered can trump good governance with the electorate.

As Jean Baptiste Colbert put it, “The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to get the most feathers with the least hissing.”

Now it all appears to be about a stealthy withdrawal from the elements of public service that we may have always taken for granted – offering the absolute basics but charging for ‘optional’ extras.

It will be interesting to see which services this approach will apply to. There are services that councils have to provide, despite themselves: Services that they would be electorally able to withdraw from – services that central government requires them to deliver, but ones that mainly benefit groups that are not electorally decisive.

It may be the case that this approach allows some councils to ‘tick the box’ in cases like this.

Politically, it may be expected that some Conservatives will want to re-cast public service in order to make private alternatives attractive. My worry is twofold:

• that this will accelerate the degree to which local authorities only serve electorally active sections of society – particularly the active middle class that don’t rely too heavily of social services
• that voters may come to regard local government in the same way that regular users regard Ryanair?

Being a politician is a good deal harder than most of us realise. Recent posts here about cognitive polyphasia remind me that being a politician involves squaring a number of unsquareable circles. Here’s the RSA’s Matthew Taylor on cognitive dissonance and the rose coloured mirror. People – the voters (trans: you and I) don’t recognise the point at which our stated view of the world conflicts with reality.

Matthew’s post makes the point that we tend to err on the side of the argument that says that we – personally – view ourselves more positively than we view others.

I think that there is another issue that is worth bearing in mind here: The public generally seem to underestimate the degree to which every one else agrees with them. That old fallacious chestnut, the ‘silent majority.’ In a very good post a while ago about how far the public want politicians to obey public opinion rather than to primarily exercise their judgement on our behalf, political blogger Tom Freeman made the following observation:

“I’d expect a very strong correlation between thinking one’s own views are in the majority and wanting government to follow public opinion.”

This point is well illustrated by one of the best political uses of the web that I’ve seen: the clever, late, Chris Lightfoot‘s opinion-plotting application. Do it if you get the chance – the resulting graphic is the most valuable output of the whole thing. It’s very good because it tells us a great deal about democratic politics. The lessons include…

1. Almost no-one agrees with you about very much, even though you think they do
2. When politicians don’t say what you’d like them to say, they may be doing it for a good reason. They’re not saying anything that many people agree with. But they may also be saying something that can generate agreement from the group that they currently fear the most
3. Unelected individuals – given the power to legislate – are unlikely to be any more repressive than elected ones: In fact, probably quite the reverse is true.

The ‘everyone agrees with me’ fallacy is – I suspect – one of the biggest causes of disillusionment with government by the elected, and the perceived disconnection between politics and the general public. The recurring question is often ‘why can’t they do what we want them to do?’ Sadly, the answer is that they often try to do exactly that – and if you are prepared to follow the logic of representative democracy, they really shouldn’t be doing so in the first place.

And if this point needs making more forcefully, there’s a nice site here that offers a range of graphical representations of the recent US election results. Browsing through them, it becomes clear that the outcome of votes is significantly more granular than the headline figures. A 10% ‘swing’ can mask millions of voters that swung in the other direction. And even the solid red or solid blue areas are “70%+” – there are very few places where ‘everyone’ votes the same way, though a lot of the commentary I’ve heard and read simplifies matters to leave us with this impression.