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From the working paper:
Politicians are much more likely to erroneously believe that their constituents are more conservative than they actually are than to erroneously believe that their constituents are more liberal than they actually are. As demonstrated by the loess curves, candidates generally overestimate the degree to which their constituents hold conservative views on these issues and by more than 10 percentage points. The preponderance of the politicians in our sample – more than three-fourths – consistently underestimate support for and overestimate opposition to these policies among their constituents. Put differently, for the typical politician to believe that these policies command majority support, it appears that public support would need to pass a threshold of close to 60%.
While they did not specifically look at opinions on marijuana legalization, I think the research is highly relevant to the marijuana reform movement.
One of the issues they found politicians constantly underestimating their constituents’ support for is same-sex marriage. Popular opinion of same-sex marriage has tended to closely mirror that of marijuana legalization. Not only has the overall level of support for both issues been similar for years but the partisan and generational crosstabs are nearly identical.
It is probably safe to assume that even in states where a majority of voters now support marijuana legalization, most of the elected representatives are either unaware of this fact or haven’t truly internalized this information. They are probably greatly underestimating the popularity of the idea.
This a serious problem for the movement as it tries to get state legislatures to adopt marijuana reform laws. Assuming the working paper’s conclusions are correct and apply to this issue, it is likely support for marijuana legalization will need to poll above 60 percent before it would stand a good chance of being adopted by a state legislature.
However, this also points to a clear opportunity for the movement. In many states, regular people no longer need to be convinced that legalization is a smart move– the issue already has majority support. The movement could make big strides by simply showing a rather small number of politicians this is really what their constituents want.
Highly coordinated constituent outreach campaigns can be very effective at causing politicians to rethink where their voters stand on an issue.
8 Comments
Why would politicians make such an error? It’s because of the prevailing conservative bias of the media, despite the complaints from crybaby conservatives of a liberal bias. Studies have shown that Republican politicians are over-represented in the broadcast media, even in periods when Democrats control both houses of Congress and the White House. They are given much more opportunity to present their spin.
The print media have long had a conservative editorial slant.
So many reasons why; media bias is just one. Here’s a few more: 1) when politicians cross right-wingers, they make life miserable; when they cross left-wingers, nothing happens; 2) the money is on the right; being on the left takes money away; 3) because the electoral and leadership money system is what it is, both parties tend to be further right than a lot of their voters and pick candidates who tend toward the right; 4) media bias matters most because Democratic politicians seriously believe that the media represents the voice of the informed voter in civic dialogue; Republicans know better.
I think it’s debateable how much politicians underestimate the liberal views of their constiuents. Too much effort goes into managing the questions on polls and other ways of narrowing the frame of debate.
But the people who have bought and paid for the services of the politicians do not have such illusions. That’s why you get politicians like Obama and Blair who use the language of liberalism to co-opt such messages. Look all over Europe and at some of the elected officials they’re tagging as “liberal”, “socialist” or “left”. Same in Egypt.
They want to redefine what “left” is…mainly to influence younger generations who are not aware of the social and economic struggles of the past.
Here’s an interesting link, to which one might offer a snarky, “No, they don’t.”
http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2020487915_apcolegalizingmarijuanaun2ndldwritethru.html
So, any state legalizing MJ is simply, legislatively extricating it’s own state/local enforcement mechanisms from the issue. A state then doesn’t either assist or oppose or interfere with anything the Feds choose to do in enforcing Fed laws and policies. One could call it passive resistance at the state level, but it’s not even that, and no treaty is breached.
Am I off base in this?
Good points.
We can always pull out of those treaties and we should–though I suspect that it was the US that pushed the creation of those treaties.
They make this error because people don’t write and express their views to their elected official. Emails and letters and phone calls actually matter. If you’re cynical about that, then just write to annoy them. Give them heck about them tossing your fellow citizens in jail for growing a frigging plant. But write, because it really does have an effect.
I think it’s more likely that academics/pundits don’t properly define the word constituent.