Democracy for Realists assails the romantic folk-theory at the heart of contemporary thinking
about democratic politics and government and offers a provocative alternative view grounded in
the actual human nature of democratic citizens. Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels deploy a
wealth of social-scientific evidence including ingenious original analyses of topics ranging
from abortion politics and budget deficits to the Great Depression and shark attacks to show
that the familiar ideal of thoughtful citizens steering the ship of state from the voting booth
is fundamentally misguided. They demonstrate that voters¿even those who are well informed and
politically engaged¿mostly choose parties and candidates on the basis of social identities and
partisan loyalties not political issues. They also show that voters adjust their policy views
and even their perceptions of basic matters of fact to match those loyalties. When parties are
roughly evenly matched elections often turn on irrelevant or misleading considerations such as
economic spurts or downturns beyond the incumbents' control the outcomes are essentially
random. Thus voters do not control the course of public policy even indirectly.
