What Politicians Believe About Their Constituents: Asymmetric Misperceptions [pdf]

I was actually asking about the case where the demographic they're predicting the opinion of is age restricted -- are they good at predicting the views of a particular age range, even if they're not good at predicting the overall opinion?

My question was just about restricting the age to be near theirs.

My wife was called for jury duty a couple years back. It was a drunk driving case. During the preceding 12 months, she'd lost family in one accident involving a drunk driver, and a close friend of hers was hit (thankfully, not terribly injured) by a drunk driver in a separate accident. There was no way they were going to let her on that jury - they were dismissing people for far less. And she had to go back three days.

Neither she nor I try to get out of jury duty - we view it as important and want to do our part - but yeah it can get abusive in pretty stupid ways.

On (1), the mental model I have is more like an understanding of who the super-intense supporters are. 90% of people might say they support background checks for gun purchases, but it's the 10% who support it who are voting on the basis of that issue, in part due to organizations like the NRA. I think our findings are consistent with that, in the sense that politicians seem to believe they don't need to learn what public opinion is in order to get re-elected; they can focus on other forms of information-gathering.

On (2), I suspect there is something there, but it's hard to make sense of Democrats from that angle, as Democratic primary voters, for example, are more liberal than the average person, yet Democratic politicians don't seem to see their districts as more liberal than they are. My guess is the key group is something more like "the people who choose to write in and go to meetings."

Looking the three perception statements on page 11, agreement means you agree to some rather radical change. A true conservative would disagree with all three questions due to that. Compared to the true conservative, a conservative right winger would be more likely to agree with the last, and a conservative left winger would be more likely to agree with the first two; however, they might not support any of them because they might be too radical. For example, I know many left wingers that support health care reform but don't support socialized medicine, so they'd likely disagree with "Implement a universal healthcare program to guarantee coverage to all Americans, regardless of income".

That leads to issues with the results. If a conservative left winger says no to the first two, s/he appears more right wing than s/he is.

On the other hand, if they are using conservative correctly, then it appears they are using liberal incorrectly. Liberal isn't the opposite of conservative. Radical is the opposite of conservative. There are radical right wingers that support same sex marriage who come to that idea from libertarianism.

The charts on specific questions are great, because they remove the terminology issue I'm raising, but when they identify the politician as liberal or conservative, it comes right back.

I'm sure the authors know this stuff better than I do, so I suspect I'm misunderstanding their work.

I know one of the authors posted here; I'd appreciate if he'd or someone else could clarify what I've got wrong.

  Step 1 - From the district lists randomly select a small number of electors. 

  Step 2 - Sequester the electors.

  Step 3 - The candidates present their proposals, background, arguments, counter arguments.

  Step 4 - Electors listen, meditate and cast a secret vote.

  Step 5 - Eliminate the candidate with the lowest number of votes.
 
  Step 6 - Repeat from Step 3 until one candidate has more than 51%.

  Step 7 - Dismiss the electors.

  - No need for expensive campaigns. Takes money out of politics.

  - The "Trial" can be televised. People would get involved on what is going on.

  - It reduces the need for tactical voting. Electors can vote for their first-choice candidate without fear of wasting their vote.

  - Lesser-known candidates would have better odds of winning.