Professor Philip Cowley. This week: democratic realism. We know a lot about what voters think of MPs. Much of it is not very positive. But what do MPs think of voters? Perhaps they take the view that voters are terribly well-informed about politics; that voters eschew the short-term and think about policies that will pay out in the long-term; or that voters think about the wider interests of the country rather than just looking out for themselves.
They might think that the electorate have realistic expectations about what can be achieved by government, alert to the trade-offs and compromises involved in politics. Like many of the most famous political quotations, there is no evidence that Winston Churchill ever actually said that the best argument against democracy was a five-minute conversation with the average voter. The remainder were undecided or inattentive. The size of this pessimistic group varied considerable by country.
Top of the pessimistic list was Czechia, where 83 per cent of politicians held such views. Bottom was Denmark 54 per cent. But a majority of politicians held a pessimistic view of voters in all 11 countries studied. Even in Denmark, democratic realist politicians outnumbered optimists by about In Czechia, it was The UK was not one of the 11 countries β a point to which I am going to return shortly.
The project also asked samples of voters the exact same questions, revealing that the electorate held a somewhat more optimistic view of their own capabilities. They were noticeably more likely than politicians were to be democratic optimists 34 per cent , although even among the electorate democratic realists were the single largest category 38 per cent , along with higher numbers who were undecided or inattentive.
And while these numbers also varied from country to country, politicians were more likely to be democratic realists than voters in every country in the study. These broad categories were drawn from eight questions tapping into central debates about electoral behaviour.
