Political science seems to be going through a phase of questioning the rationality of voters.
The two major theories of public choice -- Median Voter theory[1] (political parties take positions that appeal to the median voter) and Investment theory of Party Competition[2] (parties take positions most beneficial to their donors), both assume emotions (irrationality) of voters to be small. In the current political climate -- while it seems that the explanatory power of emotions seems to have gone up, it isn't clear why.
This sounds very similar to the debate in economics around Efficient market hypothesis[3] and the emergence of behavioral economists.
While it is seems easy to attribute things to emotion, we might miss other explanatory variables underneath. A great sound-bite from Thomas Ferguson who first proposed [2]: "The electorate is not too stupid or too tired to control the political system. It is merely too poor."
The two major theories of public choice -- Median Voter theory[1] (political parties take positions that appeal to the median voter) and Investment theory of Party Competition[2] (parties take positions most beneficial to their donors), both assume emotions (irrationality) of voters to be small. In the current political climate -- while it seems that the explanatory power of emotions seems to have gone up, it isn't clear why.
This sounds very similar to the debate in economics around Efficient market hypothesis[3] and the emergence of behavioral economists.
While it is seems easy to attribute things to emotion, we might miss other explanatory variables underneath. A great sound-bite from Thomas Ferguson who first proposed [2]: "The electorate is not too stupid or too tired to control the political system. It is merely too poor."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_voter_theorem [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investment_theory_of_party_com... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis