There’s a paper from ten years ago, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens”, which says that public opinion has very little effect on government, compared to the opinion of economic elites. That might be a start in figuring out what you can and can’t do with that 40%.
...But one example that comes to mind is this paper, “Testing theories of American politics: Elites, interest groups, and average citizens.” The basic idea of the paper was they were trying to see what actually predicts what ends up happening in society, what policies get passed. Is it the view of the elites? Is it the view of interest groups? Or is it the view of what average citizens want?
And they have a kind of shocking conclusion. Here are the coefficients that they report: Preference of average citizens, how much they matter, is 0.03. Preference of economic elites, 0.76. Oh, my gosh, that’s so much bigger, right? Alignment of interest groups, like what the interest groups think, 0.56. So almost as strong as the economic elites. So it’s kind of a shocking result. It’s like, “Oh my gosh, society is just determined by what economic elites and interest groups think, and not at all by average citizens,” right?
Rob Wiblin: I remember this paper super well, because it was covered like wall-to-wall in the media at some point. And I remember, you know, it was all over Reddit and Hacker News. It was a bit of a sensation.
Spencer Greenberg: Yeah. So this often happens to me when I’m reading papers. I’m like, “Oh, wow, that’s fascinating.” And then I come to like a table in Appendix 7 or whatever, and I’m like, “What the hell?”
And so in this case, the particular line that really throws me for a loop is the R² number. The R² measures the percentage of variance that’s explained by the model. So this is a model where they’re trying to predict what policies get passed using the preferences of average citizens, economic elites, and interest groups. Take it all together into one model. Drum roll: what’s the R²? 0.07. They’re able to explain 7% of the variance of what happens using this information.
Rob Wiblin: OK, so they were trying to explain what policies got passed and they had opinion polls for elites, for interest groups, and for ordinary people. And they could only explain 7% of the variation in what policies got up? Which is negligible.
Spencer Greenberg: So my takeaway is that they failed to explain why policies get passed. That’s the result. We have no idea why policies are getting passed.
Yes, I did read the paper. And those are still extremely small effects and almost no predictability, no matter how you graph them (note the axis truncation and sparsity), even before you get into the question of “what is the causal status of any of these claims and why we are assuming that interest groups in support precede rather than follow success?”
There’s a paper from ten years ago, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens”, which says that public opinion has very little effect on government, compared to the opinion of economic elites. That might be a start in figuring out what you can and can’t do with that 40%.
Note that’s also a way of saying the economic elites had little effect too, in the “Twice nothing is still nothing” sort of way: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/spencer-greenberg-stopping-valueless-papers/#importance-hacking-001823
7% of the variance isn’t negligible. Just look at the pictures (Figure 1 in the paper):
Yes, I did read the paper. And those are still extremely small effects and almost no predictability, no matter how you graph them (note the axis truncation and sparsity), even before you get into the question of “what is the causal status of any of these claims and why we are assuming that interest groups in support precede rather than follow success?”