Oh, now this is quite fascinating.
Apparently there was a study done about whether the actual prevalence of particular opinions matched the perception of a given group about those opinions - that's probably not actually all that unusual, really. But doing that when the given group in question is politicians themselves, and finding that even Democrats tend to overestimate the prevalence of conservative opinions, suggests all sorts of interesting things about why our politicians vote the way they do.
Particularly when all sorts of liberal policies lose consistently despite polling quite well among the electorate. This suggests that's because our politicians literally don't realize how many people actually do like these policies.
It's not a complete answer, and I'm sure that - as usual for most issues - the real truth is more complicated than that. But it's still a very interesting data point.
No comments:
Post a Comment