From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Feb 18 2003 - 10:39:42 MST
On Tue, Feb 18, 2003 at 09:03:05AM -0700, estropico@virgilio.it wrote:
>
> “In an age of political passivity, why were so many moved to march on this
> issue?
Another interpretation is that people are passive as long as the
policies are regarded as acceptable or tolerable, but become active only
to ensure that policies they concider unacceptable are not passed.
See http://www.reason.com/rb/rb020503.shtml for an interesting analysis
of the Hibbing/Theiss-Morse study
(http://csab.wustl.edu/workingpapers/Theiss-Morse.PDF) of how much
participation people want:
"Americans favor what Hibbing and Theiss-Morse call "stealth democracy."
That is, they want to elect people they believe are sympathetic to the
concerns of ordinary people, but do not want to invest any time in
studying policy issues. The chief reason most Americans bother with
politics at all is because they feel like that's the only way to stop
special interest groups and politicians from playing them for suckers.
Hibbing and Theiss-Morse believe that the decline in trust of government
has actually boosted American political participation over what it would
otherwise be. It's intriguing to look at historical voter turnout in
U.S. presidential elections over time. "
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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