Behavioral and Social Science 50 Years of Discovery (1986) / Chapter Skim
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Public Statistics and Democratic Politics
Public Statistics and Democratic Politics
Pages 111-128
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From page 111... ...
Numbers and Decisionmaking
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From page 113... ...
This invites inquiry into the ways in which this particular nation's "number system" advances or retards democracy, informs or distorts civic discourse, helps or hinders political participation. For just as public statistics are not neutral with respect to the everyday politics of group interests, so they are not neutral with respect to the principles and practices of democracy.
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From page 114... ...
In this chapter we take the simpler route of concentrating on two central issues: accountability-how public leaders are held accountable for their performance in office; and representation how diverse interests are represented in setting the political agenda. DEMOCRATIC ACCOUNTABILITY The centrality of the concept of accountability in democratic theory derives from the observation that democracies no less than other forms of government have public officials with immensely more power than average citizens.
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From page 115... ...
Voters in the United States give more weight to negative or positive trends in national economic conditions than to changes in their own economic circumstances. The most extensive development of this finding is offered by Roderick Kiewiet, who concludes (1983:1311: "Changing perceptions of the national economy account for a considerably larger proportion of the swing in support for the incumbent party from good years to bad than do changes in personal economic conditions." This research finding is important in the present context for what it indicates about the function of national statistics in implementing democratic accountability.
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From page 116... ...
A weakened party-electoral system combined with a crowded and complicated issue agenda is not conducive to democratic accountability. Against this background, it is all the more important to understand whether numeric descriptions of major social conditions and trends can improve the reasoning capacity of modern democracies.
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From page 117... ...
This is because the heavier the chandeliers produced, the more a factory gets since its output is calculated in tons." Our interest is not in this well-known flaw in command economics, but in the implications for democratic accountability. If the number system is systematically manipulated so that personnel and policies are presented to the public in the most favorable light, we have little warrant for claiming that public statistics enhance democratic procedures.
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From page 118... ...
The monthly statistical reports of the Crop Reporting Board of the Department of Agriculture, for instance, have such high credibility that hundreds of thousands of dollars change hands through the commodity markets as soon as the data are released. But even if we accept that professional control over national statistics can largely eliminate fraud and greatly lessen bias in the most important of our social and economic indicators, other issues remain.
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From page 119... ...
nuclear weapons appearing in two publications: the officially produced Defense Department ~4nnucz1 Reportfor the Fiscal Year 1985 and a privately sponsored report of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Nuclear Weapons Databook. The official publication consistently underestimates American resources in a manner, Bundy argues, designed to make the "Russians look big" and the "Americans small." This is the success indicator issue stood on its head, similar to when police departments inflate crime statistics to justify larger budgets.
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From page 120... ...
This last point we briefly return to in the concluding section, after reviewing the second of our two major issues connecting national statistics with democratic theory. REPRESENTATION OF DIVERSE INTERESTS As a document in democratic political theory, the Constitution's genius is in its provision for the representation of diverse interests in political decision circles.
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From page 121... ...
In recent decades the effort to formulate a democratic theory has emphasized participation as opposed to pluralism, and in the process generated a critique of conventional pluralist theory. This critique holds that pluralism has not offered a satisfactory account of nonparticipation in democratic politics, too readily attributing low levels of participation to presumed citizen defects such as apathy or ignorance.
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From page 122... ...
The nation's number system uncovers social conditions and popularizes them as statistical descriptions: proportion of the population below the poverty line; incidence of child abuse; persistence of structural unemployment; addictive behavior and its social costs; the differential in infant mortality between whites and nonwhites; the gap between male and female wages in similar occupations. The transformation of politically unnoticed social conditions into visible statistics puts issues on the political agenda that would otherwise be ignored.
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From page 123... ...
generalizes these observations when he writes that "facts and figures" assist those political interest organizations "weak in grass-roots political resources." Information "may give an advantage to the weak, whose case, if strong and technical, can count for something." This is not a trivial observation when examined in the context of the effort through He history of democracy to establish equal civil and political rights in the face of inequalities in resources that different social interests bring to the political arena. In democratic theory as well as actual practice, organization is most often promoted as the corrective when economic inequalities are reproduced as differential opportunities for political participation.
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From page 124... ...
More than any group in American political history, Hispanic-Americans have turned to the national statistical system as an instrument for advancing their political and economic interests, by making visible the magnitude of the social and economic problems they face. In the processes by which groups are formed and diverse interests are represented in democratic politics, public statistics are not an unmixed blessing.
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From page 125... ...
For technical as well as bureaucratic reasons, statistics lag behind the dynamic patterns of group formation and change resulting from immigration, internal migration, transformation in the occupational structure, and new levels of social consciousness. Insofar as politics is organized by the numbers, there will be a tendency to overlook more recently established social conditions in favor of those already reflected through the statistical system.
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From page 126... ...
The present inquiry has emphasized the importance of close attention to the nation's number system by professional statisticians and social scientists. Assuring the integrity of numbers involves continuous improvements in measurement, revisions in concepts as social conditions change, and the highest standards of statistical interpretation, analysis, and reporting.
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From page 127... ...
In addition, this chapter benefited from We Social Science Research Council's Conference on We Political Economy of National Statistics. A slightly modified version is included in a volume based on that conference, which gave me access as well to the editorial advice and sharp editorial pens of William Alonso and Paul Starr.
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From page 128... ...
1877 Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Eighth Annual Report. Cited in James Leiby, Carroll Wright and Labor Reform: The Origin of Labor Statistics.
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