My conversation with Andrew Gelman inspires me to elaborate my position on politics:
Policy wonks talk about political ideologies as sets of value weights to use in policy tradeoffs … I’m suggesting instead that “Politics Isn’t About Policy.” In large polities, the main function of our politics in our lives is how it influences the way others see us; its influence on us via policy is far weaker. But it looks bad to admit we do politics to selfishly show off, instead of to help society make better policy. So we are built to instead talk, and think, as if we do politics for its influence on policy; we are build to be self-deceived about how politics matters to us.
Modern political science does a pretty good job understanding the behaviors of politicians and bureaucrats, given how the public behaves; we fail most in understanding how ordinary folks relate to political processes. And our best hope for doing better there is, I think, the idea that we are executing strategies that evolved long ago among our distant ancestors.
Our ancestors argued beliefs and negotiated actions in groups ranging from size two to a hundred. No doubt they evolved to adapt their behavior to the size of the group, at least within this range. And for the largest groups, the main payoffs from their arguing and negotiating behavior was not via influencing the resulting group beliefs and actions, but from how their words and deeds influenced how others thought of them. This is all the more true for modern group sizes, and I suspect our strategies are adaptive enough to emphasize impression management even more for larger groups. Continue reading "Political Signaling Theories" »
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