Irrationality in politics

Our political beliefs are based in part upon irrationality. That’s the message I take from a new NBER paper (an early version of which is this pdf) by Ebonya Washington:

Conditional on the number of children, parenting an additional female child increases a [Congressman’s] propensity to vote liberally on women’s issues, particularly reproductive rights. Such a voting pattern does not seem to be explained away by constituency preferences, suggesting not only does parenting daughters affect preferences, but also that personal preferences affect legislative behavior.

This is because having daughters makes men more sympathetic to feminism, and having sons makes them less so.

But this is irrational. The sex of one’s children (at least in the US) must be irrelevant to the question of the legitimacy of abortion rights. Rationality requires that decisions be not affected by irrelevant facts.

And if Congressmens’ view are formed irrationally, how much more likely are the views of ordinary voters to be irrational? Could it be that my anti-authoritarian views owe less to the evidence than to the fact that my dad went to prison when I was young? Are most political beliefs mere rationalizations of views which are acquired through non-rational processes? Does it matter if they are? What role should “rationality” play in politics?

The work of George Lakoff has some bearing on this. As I understand it, though, much of his work is about “how” rather than “why”; how conservatives and liberals think in different frames, rather than why they became liberals or conservatives in the first place.

Comments

[Marcin Tustin]

I doubt it does matter if representatives' views are irrational, as long as they are good representatives of those they represent. Even the birth of a daughter changing the irrational views, irrationally, should not be a matter of concern unless the difference with the nearest alternative was their view on women's rights.

[Robert Schwartz]

It is fallacious and reductionist to attribute ideas to personal characteristics. I think, that Lakoff evidences a particullary egregious use of pop-psychology to "market" political ideas. In doing that he commits the same sins as the person who says that liberals are idiots or conservatives are violent.

Even if some yet unkown science were able to establish that certain personality types were limited by some biochemical mechanism to understanding or holding certain classes of idea (e.g. A strict fatherist is biologically incapable of believing that it takes a village), it could not prove or disprove the validity of ideas.

However there is no such science. There are a multitude of personality types and a multitude of ideas. There is no a priori reason to believe that any one personality type is limited, ipso facto, to any class or type of ideas. Furthermore, using ideas to type personalities is purely ad hoc and does not resemble science, although it does greatly resemble marketing. (Nurturing Parents prefer mini-vans).

As George Will said: "Professors have reasons for their beliefs. Other people, particularly conservatives, have social and psychological explanations for their beliefs."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36777-2003Aug8.html

[Chris Bertram]

So people have sets of beliefs, and they update those beliefs in the light of new information. People with experiences of type F are more likely to update their beliefs one way because of the information they're exposed to. People with experiences of type M will tend update their beliefs in another way.

Unless you're willing to damn people quite generally for updating their beliefs in the light of their (differing) experiences, it looks like your claim of irrationality is, well, irrational.

[chris]

Chris - for such updating to be rational, the experiences must be relevant. And the mere fact of having a son or daughter is irrelevant to the rights or wrongs of abortion, or to the fact of your constituents' preferences on the issue. It's no more rational to become more anti-abortion because you've had a son than it is to do so because you missed your bus this morning.
I'm not even sure that it's rational for a Congressman to become (say) pro-abortion because he heeds (say) his feminist daughter's views. Why should he give more weight to his daughter's opinion than to the opinion of an equally reasonable feminist who's no relation?

[Chris Bertram]

But the research didn't say that people had different beliefs because of the "mere fact" that they had a child of one sort rather than another. It said that there tended to be a correlation between their having a child of a certain sort and having certain beliefs.

What next? "Research shows that policemen and social workers tend to have different beliefs." ?? Well they would, wouldn't they, because they are exposed to different evidence. This case is no different.

[Dander]

A cynical Darwinian explanation would be that the congressmen (or rather their genes) are ultra-rational.

Being the father of a daughter would naturally incline you towards granting her the right to abort unwanted or potentially damaged foetuses. You don't want your daughter to waste the handful of offspring opportunities that she has on projects with poor odds.

A son, on the other hand, can give you lots and lots of grandchildren. Sure, some of them will be low-quality but cost of fathering - and then leaving - a child with poor odds is low. The trade-off between quantity and quality is weighted far more towards quantity for a son than for a daughter.

[dsquared]

the mere fact of being arrested for a sex offence shouldn't affect your opinion on retributive sentencing, but it does rather have the effect of making you think about aspects of the system that might not have occurred to you before. I am with Chris B here; I don't understand the sense in which you're using the word "rational".