“My black studies and philosophy of religion self is telling my political science self that political scientists don’t know shit about politics. If it weren’t so late in the process, I’d go so far as to say that the American Political Science Association should scrap its legitimacy theme for the September 2017 annual meeting and instead make the theme a discussion of the future of the field. Any field that can subordinate the study of race and the study of women domestically and internationally is a field living in a delusion. And I say this with love, not despair. Parrhesia isn’t easy to hear.”

I posted those words on my Facebook wall the morning after the November 2016 U.S. Presidential election, to a bevy of responses. Yes, they’re hardly what you’d expect for inclusion in a symposium on Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels’s Democracy for Realists. But I stand by them, developments in the wake of the Perestroika movement’s aftermath, this journal including, notwithstanding. To comment on Achen and Bartels, thankfully, is to address exceptions to disciplinary norms.

President-elect Donald Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton defied the expectations of millions, confounded Beltway pundits, made a mockery of pollsters, and called into question the validity and utility of political scientists’ prognostications and methodologies, qualitative and quantitative alike. Yet, in hindsight, all the signs were there that Trump could win in the Electoral College without having to carry the popular vote. And that’s exactly what happened.

Tensions across the United States regarding racism, sexism, chauvinism, income inequality, policing, and xenophobia had markedly risen. Truth and facts took a back seat to the rhetoric of retrieving a bygone Greatness the country had to recover. The opportunity for an authoritarian challenge to Establishment conservatism and liberal politics respectively was never riper. Trump brilliantly capitalized on it and the impact may be catastrophic.

Intuition and common sense have long been frowned upon in the discipline. The election results illustrated the costs of their absence and the need to reevaluate principles of democratic thinking. Although Achen and Bartels didn’t predict Trump’s electoral success, their book provides a rubric to explain the President-elect’s rise and appeal.

Democracy and freedom are twin concepts foundational to the idea of the American experiment. We shall discuss the first. Whether democracy currently exists or ever did in the American republic—or if there have been junctures where democracy has appeared, vanished, and reappeared—continues to be the subject of heated debates. Ta-Nehisi Coates aptly observes, “Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God. But democracy is a forgiving God and America’s heresies—torture, theft, enslavement—are so common among individuals and nations that none can declare themselves immune.” ^{Footnote 1}

For scholars arguing democracy in America began in 1776, discourse also rages over democracy’s constituent elements, the relationship between the state and its inhabitants, the role of the people in upholding state accountability, and mechanisms for producing responsive government.

Achen and Bartels delve into the meaning and efficacy of elections for late modern democracies. In particular, they describe the degree to which elections generate responsiveness from government and the extent to which a polity’s voters cast votes for candidates based on rationality, policy issues, and/or alternative metrics. While different states receive attention, the U.S. is their primary focus.

“Elections,” wrote Judith Shklar, in the essay “Alexander Hamilton and the Language of Political Science,” are “‘consequential rituals’; that is, they have very real political effects, not only on the ultimate choice of office holders, but also on their attitudes and conduct.” Once “you enter a ritual, you are going to speak its language.” ^{Footnote 2} Democracy for Realists tries to locate the language of the ritual and rationalizations of voters within the elections ceremony. The authors agree on the political consequences of elections, but call into question the realms that elections actually affect.

Against decades of findings by political scientists working in the areas of democratic theory and the empirical branch of American politics, Achen and Bartels reject both the view that rational voters go to the polls as a result of specific public policies and the belief that the people, be it through direct action or representation, have sovereign power in the demos. Tersely put: for Achen and Bartels, elections tell us a lot about voters’ relationships to political parties and partisanship, the social groups they belong, and the social identities they hold dear and very little about the most pressing topics facing a democracy. The zeitgeist right before an election, coupled with longer entrenched identifications, is vastly more important than issues campaigning in the years leading up to it. This conception of democracy “is less cheery than the romantic alternatives, and thus less appealing—at least initially” (p. 328). But, the authors suggest, it’s the correct one.

Democracy for Realists outlines the “folk theory of democracy” that’s duped citizens for generations insofar as it has falsely endowed the people with the belief that the state will reflect their political will and desires. There are two models of democracy within the folk theory. The first, the populist conception, has two forms: direct democracy and representative democracy. Leadership selection is the second model and retrospective voting—especially blind retrospection—its most noted type.

Whereas the populist model emphasizes forward-looking issues the people wish implemented, the retrospective model relies on backward-looking assessments of incumbent political leaders’ policies to determine if citizens will continue advocacy of them or end their support. Despite the divergent frameworks, the models align through the centering of policy as the medium to base electoral decision-making. Achen and Bartels strongly disagree with each. They argue we must abandon, in a felicitous phrase, the illusion of the “divine right of the people” (pp. 18–20).

Their account of twentieth and twenty-first century social scientific studies on electoral democracy is thoroughly researched. Their examination and subsequent rebuttal of various leading democratic theories considered integral to contemporary research is often compelling. Furthermore, their case studies—on droughts, floods, shark attacks in New Jersey during the Woodrow Wilson era, the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s different Presidential campaigns and the New Deal, Hitler’s election, the religious affinities of voters in the election of Kennedy, Alberta’s Social Credit Party, and economic voting among others, documented in eleven chapters —help bolster Robert Dahl’s assertion sixty years ago in A Preface to Democratic Theory that “[w]e expect elections to reveal the ‘will’ or the preferences of a majority on a set of issues. This is one thing elections rarely do, except in an almost trivial fashion.” ^{Footnote 3} Achen and Bartels have done their homework.

However, their conclusions on the political knowledge of the electorate are unpersuasive and at times troubling; unpersuasive since they grossly underestimate the depth of voters’ comprehension of campaign issues and troubling, not because they’re wrong, but rather, due to episodic utilizations of what Harry Frankfurt calls bullshit, ^{Footnote 4} which undercuts several of their accurate common sense deductions that peers in the field are incapable of explaining. Additionally, Achen and Bartels fail to make a crucial distinction thinkers including Hannah Arendt and C.L.R. James underscore: rule versus governance. ^{Footnote 5} A critique of the divine right of the people holds only when presenting the people as aspiring to rulership. But in a framework of isonomia, whose literal meaning “equality under the laws” and unconventional translation is “no-rule,” the people aren’t seeking sovereign rule. ^{Footnote 6} President Barack Obama reinforced this in his address to the 2016 Democratic National Convention: “We’re not a fragile people. We’re not a frightful people. Our power doesn’t come from some self-declared savior promising that he alone can restore order as long as we do things his way. We don’t look to be ruled.” ^{Footnote 7}

The people aspire to govern in multiple manners from the bottom up for, as James remarks, ^{Footnote 8} we are all political cooks. Elections, then, aren’t frivolous exercises. They are moments of complementarity, from the top down, where the people aim to gain government responsiveness. Achen and Bartels deftly probe the reality of responsiveness to the people’s wishes at the expense of ignoring the vital daily democratic acts of citizens, polity inhabitants, and their attendant knowledge of politics.

Finally, the exploration of groups and social identities is the most provocative facet of Achen and Bartels’s study. The authors openly admit to drawing upon scholarship in sociology and psychology that’s decades old in those fields yet outside the purview of much political science. They’re wise to employ this research into their own agenda. Alexander Wendt’s Social Theory of International Politics transformed the discourse on international relations largely through building on earlier debates in sociology and philosophy. Achen and Bartels may very well have the same transformative effect in the corridors of democratic theory. They show how our group affinities and longstanding identities forge dogged beliefs that significantly impact our electoral decisions. We should take this claim seriously.

What’s missing from its otherwise persuasive assertions is a framing through the optics of what black feminists term intersectionality. ^{Footnote 9} Achen and Bartels, for instance, attribute the partisan realignment among southern whites in the second half of the twentieth century to changes in a shared group “(white) southern identity,” not mutations in political parties’ racial policies, especially surrounding civil rights (pp. 307–9). It’s an untenable conclusion, as group identity shouldn’t be decoupled there from party politics and ideology. The same point on intersecting variables is relevant when evaluating other examples throughout the book. Intersecting group and social identities matter.

Democracy for Realists is a monumental work whose ripple effects will resonate within and beyond the field for years to come. It succeeds even when one’s unsure of its claims. That’s the hallmark of a classic.