Attitudes toward Specific Processes
John R. Hibbing, Elizabeth Theiss‐Morse · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2002
We know Americans are not pleased with political elites, but neither do they want to shoulder the burden of participating actively in politics themselves. When we asked our survey respondents to place themselves on a spectrum running from direct democracy to institutional democracy, they put themselves right in the middle. They want to take decision-making power away from elected officials and give more of it to the American people, but they do not want to get rid of elected officials completely. The problem is that this simplistic process spectrum, which we employed in Part I, is misleading because each pole contains something the people do not like (see Fig. 2.1). The right-hand pole is attractive to them because ordinary people do not have to be involved, but, on the downside, existing political institutions and elites, with all the accompanying specialinterest-induced selfishness, are left to make the decisions. The lefthand pole removes all that diabolical, selfish elite influence but comes with a high cost of its own: Ordinary people are forced to become much more deeply involved in politics than they wish. Imagine, instead, that this spectrum is disaggregated into two separate components as shown in Figure 4.1. Here, one spectrum runs from selfish political elites dominating every political decision to selfish political elites having no influence at all (notice there is no indication of whom or what would take the place of selfish political elites).