Expecting More Say
A Study of American Public Attitudes
on the Role of the Public In Government Decisions

Conclusion

The findings of this study point to a fairly clear answer to the question of why the public continues to be so dissatisfied with the government, despite the good economy and the absence of any significant threats to the US. The answer Americans give is that they do not believe the decisions made by the US government are pareto-optimal -- i.e. they are not prompted by what is best for the public as a whole. As Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wrote, "Americans hate politics as it is now practiced because we have lost all sense of the public good."94

Americans perceive that government decisions are driven by the self-interests of elected officials and political parties which respond disproportionately to those parts of the public with the financial means to gain influence, primarily through making campaign contributions. Most Americans do not feel they are part of those sectors of the public to which elected officials pay attention, and these feelings of marginalization are historically quite high. Even more dramatic, most Americans believe that most of the decisions the government makes are not the decisions that the majority would make.

To offset these influences, an overwhelming majority believes that the views of the majority should have much greater influence over government decisionmaking. A strong majority expresses more confidence in the public’s judgment than in the judgment of Congress, despite the fact that there is substantial evidence that the public underestimates itself. Notwithstanding, widespread doubts about the reliability of polls, a strong majority feels policymakers should pay close attention to polls.

Asked to choose between the models of elected officials as trustees who act on their own sense of what is best or of delegates who follow the public’s views, the public clearly favors the delegate model. This does not mean the public wants policymakers to abdicate their role in the policymaking process. The majority does think policymakers should consult their own senses of what is right, and the public recognizes policymakers have essential information on some issues that the public does not have. But this does not mean the public is ready to sign a blank check whenever policymakers can claim there is specialized information involved in a policy issue. Policymakers are expected to try to determine what the majority would do if it had the information that policymakers have. Essentially the public would like to see policymakers internalize the public’s values in their decisionmaking process -- to consult their own sense of what is right, but ultimately give precedence to the views of the majority.

So why do Americans favor a greater role for majority opinion? Clearly, Americans have been taught that the democratic process is more likely to produce outcomes that are fairer and more protective of the rights of the people. Their biggest complaint about the US government is that the disproportionate influence of special interests creates unfair outcomes at the expense of the majority.

But Americans’ support for majority influence is also derived from a more complex belief. They believe that such influence produces a fairer distribution of resources. They also believe that a decisionmaking process shaped by the majority produces greater resources. The disproportionate influence of special interests is seen as creating distortions in the collective decisionmaking process that leads to suboptimal outcomes. Americans have seen non-democratic countries economically underperform democratic countries -- the most notable case being the economic failure of the Soviet Union. Americans doubtless see a relationship between the widespread government corruption of developing countries and their poor economic performance. The uneasiness about the influence of special interests in the US is probably rooted in a fear that it too is a form of corruption that potentially can choke off the vitality of the US economy, as well as contribute to a maldistribution of resources.

American culture also has been significantly influenced by the belief that decentralized markets have a certain self-regulating wisdom. Again, seeing the failure of the centralized planning approach of the Soviet Union augmented an already-existing suspicion of the idea that the elite knows best. Support for the influence of the broader public is enhanced by the belief that markets tend to become most efficient when they are not centrally controlled but are driven by the judgments of all participants -- be they consumers or investors, be they large or small.

Confidence in the judgment of the public extends to other areas as well. For example, if charged with a crime, most Americans would prefer to put their fate in the hands of twelve ordinary citizens than in the hands of a judge, despite the judge’s years of experience in jurisprudence.

The public’s higher confidence in the public than in the elite is reflected in the response to a quotation presented to respondents in an October 1992 poll for the National Cultural Alliance: "Democracy cannot be served by supermen, but only by the unwavering devotion and goodness of millions of little men." Eighty-three percent agreed with this statement.95

In summary, the idea that Americans evaluate government purely in terms of how well it gratifies their own needs is too narrow. Americans also think in terms of whether the government decisionmaking process is legitimate in the sense that all citizens have an equal capacity to influence the government, whether the decisions made are the decisions that the majority would make and whether the decisions made serve the interests of the public as a whole. Despite the extent to which the US government arguably gratifies the public’s needs, an overwhelming majority believes that the government is falling short in these other, more subtle dimensions and that the antidote to this shortfall is for the values and sensibilities of the public to have more influence.