Intuitive Political Theory: People's Judgments About How Groups Should Decide

Abstract

Societies must make collective decisions even when citizens disagree, and they use many different political processes to do so. But how do people choose one way to make a group decision over another? We propose that the human mind contains an intuitive political theory about how to make collective decisions, analogous to people's intuitive theories about language, physics, number, minds, and morality. We outline a simple method for studying people's intuitive political theory using scenarios about group decisions, and we begin to apply this approach in three experiments. Participants read scenarios in which individuals in a group have conflicting information (Experiment 1), conflicting interests (Experiment 2), and conflicting interests between a majority and a vulnerable minority who have more at stake (Experiment 3). Participants judged whether the group should decide by voting, consensus, leadership, or chance. Overall, we find that participants prefer majority‐rule voting over consensus, leadership, and chance when a group has conflicting interests or information. However, participants' support for voting is considerably diminished when the group includes a vulnerable minority. Hence, participants showed an intuitive understanding of Madison's concerns about tyranny of the majority.

Who Should Get a Say? Race, Law Enforcement Guidelines, and Systems of Representation

“…As such, our research is consonant with the literature on political tolerance, which highlights that people tend to sacrifice generalized norms when informed of the precise groups that will benefit or be harmed by a decision (Grant & Rudolph, 2003; Petersen, Slothuus, Stubager, & Togeby, 2010). It also aligns with recent work suggesting that citizens may be more inclined to move away from majority‐rule procedures when vulnerable minorities are involved (DeScioli & Bokemper, 2019).…”

Culture, Status, and Hypocrisy: High-Status People Who Don’t Practice What They Preach Are Viewed as Worse in the United States Than China

“…The actions of high-status people, such as leaders, do not always align with how they present themselves publicly. The current research adds insights into the political debates on followers' capacities to hold leaders accountable for their actions (Bøggild, 2020;DeScioli & Bokemper, 2019). A deeper understanding of the cultural roots of social status may help global audiences look under the hood of different attitudes toward social elites' norm violations.…”

Input from Whom? Public Reactions to Consultation Measures

“…This article set out to explore citizens’ ‘intuitive political theory’ (DeScioli and Bokemper, 2018) around questions of consultation and representation. To do so, it employed an original survey experiment designed to compare how individuals react to granting input and policy influence to different (sub-)groups of constituents.…”

“…Studying reactions to different consultation procedures thus gives us an opportunity to better understand citizens' 'intuitive political theory' (e.g. DeScioli and Bokemper, 2018) as well as the potential influence of these intuitions on patterns of unequal representation (e.g. Soroka and Wlezien, 2008).…”