The argument in Frustrated Majorities is simple: even with majority elections, politicians will sometimes cater to intense minority views in their single-minded pursuit of winning votes. As Professors Davis, Gåddie, and Goidel note in their thoughtful review, although the idea that issue intensity influences politicians is widely considered, my book aims to fill out the theoretical story with a mathematical model and complementary empirical evidence. Importantly, the model helps us understand that politicians sometimes choose to side with an apathetic majority over an intense minority when the minority is either too small or insufficiently intense. Only under specific conditions of size and intensity do politicians choose to frustrate majorities.
I am grateful for the important questions and opportunities for future research Davis, Gåddie, and Goidel identified in their careful read of the book. Two stand out. First is the assumption that candidates know with certainty the policy position of voters. This assumption was useful in the book to show that candidates will sometimes choose to frustrate majorities even when they know with certainty that the majority holds a policy preference contrary to the candidate’s proposal. The book does not, however, explore a setting where candidates are uncertain about what voters want or, as suggested is possible by Davis, Gåddie, and Goidel, where voter intensity is easier to observe than policy position or where politicians infer position from intensity.
These settings each deserve careful treatment. The book’s result that politicians choose to frustrate majorities, however, does not depend on asymmetric information; even with full knowledge of both the intensity and issue position of the electorate, candidates sometimes side with a sufficiently intense minority. This suggests that asymmetric information about issue position rather than intensity would not alone change the electoral incentives that generate frustrated majorities. It might change the dynamics of costly signaling and political participation, however, especially if candidates believed intensity and position correlated in the population. How politicians think about the correlation between intensity and issue position strikes me as an important empirical question.
A second issue unaddressed in the book is what to think about welfare if costly signals have unmodeled negative externalities; for example, political protests turning violent. Although I do not necessarily think that frustrated majorities are a good thing, my book does present a utilitarian welfare analysis suggesting that, in some situations, costly signaling and frustrated majorities can maximize social welfare. Negative externalities of costly individual actions, however, would decrease the net benefit of candidates learning what voters care about in this welfare analysis. To remain efficient, the benefits of policy for the intense minority would need to be relatively larger than without the negative externalities.
I am grateful for the thoughtful review by Davis, Gåddie, and Goidel. I am also grateful for the questions the book prompted, many of which connect to the meaning of democracy and thus our evaluation of the functioning of the American system. Democracy’s Meanings and Frustrated Majorities each add to the discussion of what democracy is and how to evaluate its operation.
