The Democratic Dilemma:
Can Citizens Learn What They Need to Know?

By Arthur Lupia & Mathew D. McCubbins

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"Delegation is necessary for most any form of governance in the modern world. The democratic dilemma in THE DEMOCRATIC DILEMMA is whether delegation works satisfactorily in democratic practice -- democracy can't live without it; can a democracy live WITH it? McCubbins and Lupia subject this consideration to the most rigorous and imaginative analysis since Dahl's PREFACE. Drawing on rational choice theory, cognitive science, experimental methods, and just plain old fashioned common sense, they develop a tight and compelling argument about information, persuasion, institutions, and democratic performance."  Kenneth A. Shepsle, Department of Government Harvard University Cambridge, MA 02138

"In The Democratic Dilemma, Lupia and McCubbins set out a theory of information gathering, strategic communication, and decision making in organizations that provides a framework within which to discuss the functioning of political institutions when voters, bureaucrats, and elected officials all have limited information. Bringing together insights from cognitive science, game theory, and the economic theory of agency and delegation, their analysis sheds new light on the effectiveness of alternative electoral, legislative, bureaucratic, and legal systems in aggregating the information about individual preferences needed for informed political decisions."  Vincent Crawford, Department of Economics University of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive  La Jolla, CA 92093-0508

"The Democratic Dilemma does for modern democracy what Aristotle's Rhetoric did for ancient Athens. Lupia and McCubbins ask how persuasion is achieved in modern democracies, and they find their answer by analyzing the principles of how citizens think. Like Aristotle, they show that politics, choice, and persuasion in democracies depend upon these principles. Unlike Aristotle, they deploy modern cognitive science and a knowledge of democracies today. This combination of classic and modern insight results in a powerful and compelling book."   Mark Turner, Department of Cognitive Science, Case-Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.

This is a brilliant examination of a question integral to modern democratic theory, normative as well as empirical: How is it possible for citizens at large, given how little they characteristically know about politics and public affairs, to be capable nonetheless of making political choices approximately rationally? What sets this work quite apart is its unique combination of the deductive rigor of a rational choice approach with the hypothesis-testing power of genuine experiments mounted in both the laboratory and general population surveys.  Paul Sniderman, Department of Political Science Stanford University

 

  Download Adobe Acrobat versions of the full unpublished appendices Appendix Chapter 2 | Appendix Chapter 3 | Appendix Chapter 5

The Democratic Dilemma Experiments

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