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Chapter 5 What Is It Like to Be a Citizen?
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C H A P T E R 5 What Is It Like to Be a Citizen? How does the individual citizen experience the political world from the inside? We don’t view ourselves as mere preference containers for a focus group. We flinch at the idea that we are spectators. Yet we don’t see ourselves as engaging in straightforward self-rule. I think that our self-conception as citizens provides raw but necessary data for a theory of citizenship. For an imperfect analogy, consider the strangely compelling question: “What is it like to be a bat?”1 You are to imagine not what it would be like for you to be a bat, but what it is like for the bat itself. A biologist can know everything there is to know about the morphology and structure of bats. This knowledge may draw from scholarly literature , microscopic evaluation, and extensive fieldwork. But there remain facts about the bat’s conscious life that will elude the biologist. What’s it like to have a bat’s sensory states, to have echolocation-based sensations? My claim is not that the mental life of the citizen is as mysterious as a furry flying creature without the usual senses. Still, available philosophical and empirical viewpoints can miss the subjective character of the experience of being a citizen. Only this perspective can understand the participant attitudes that feel very real to us and that testify to the irreducibly moral dimension of political decision making. Take resentment . The experience of being unjustly treated in a democracy is distinctive , because the citizen is quite literally surrounded by individuals who have put one in this plight. The attitude is characteristically directed at an agent, not an abstracted set of rules. It is evidence of wrongdoing and makes possible expressions that would be inappropriate to feel toward a machine, like disapproval. Only an individual who has acted unjustifiably is the right target of this kind of treatment. The two preceding chapters have argued that the citizen in democratic theory holds “one thought too many,” but empirical research suggests citizens having few thoughts at all. The philosopher-citizen and the superdeliberator can seem grotesquely ideal when placed beside empirical accounts of the citizen. Public opinion scholars have long painted a grim picture of the political knowledge of citizens, who hold policy convictions plagued by inconsistency, even incoherence. They do not know much about the candidates for whom they vote, and even less about the underlying policy issues.The first systematic surveys of the mental lives of 126 • Chapter5 ordinary citizens accused them of being “relatively invulnerable to direct argumentation” and “characterized by wishful expectation rather than careful prediction of consequences.”2 The average citizen spends far more time and energy deliberating about the next car purchase than on the next election. Political scientists have documented elections where voters held representatives accountable for shark attacks, droughts, and other natural disasters.3 The view of citizens that emerges is miserly—unwilling or unable to devote their cognitive resources to politics. To bring out this gap between normative and empirical democratic theory, I first engage with empirical research on the citizen’s reasoning processes.4 I challenge the most optimistic available response to our cognitive shortcomings. We are both resource bounded and knowledge bounded. The usual heuristics offered by political scientists are seriously defective. They propose that citizens rely on informational shortcuts that are morally irresponsible. I argue that this literature relies on a deeply unappealing conception of citizenship. If we reconceive the role of the voter in explicitly moral terms, this approach offers no satisfying response to the cognitive defects of citizens. But there is a grain of truth in this approach—one that has been neglected by normative democratic theorists. It is unavoidable for decision makers to rely on heuristics when they reason about complex decisions. The task for a democratic ethics of belief is to provide citizens with heuristics that reduce the cognitive burden while respecting the moral obligations to attach to coercive, termshaping decision making. A livable ethics of belief designed for the office of the citizen cannot afford to ignore our known cognitive infirmities. Hardware, Not Software Democracy increases the responsibility—and sense of responsibility—of the ordinary citizens. –Henry Sidgwick5 The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field....[She exhibits] a reduced sense of responsibility, a lower level of energy of thought and greater...