(Page 4 of 40) - Macro-Politics: The Dimensions and Dynamics of Public Opinion authored by Stimson, James.

any chance of reaching the voters, who by and large are not listening very
carefully.) The number that voters can take into mind in making their
voting decision is small. And the tightest constraint of all of these forces is
the number of issues that can be decided by the outcome. Although election
winners can and do claim that everything they stood for was endorsed by the
fact of their win, objective observers, who serve as referees in this process,
rarely concede that anything has been decided. It is quite impossible that
this channel could carry numerous messages.

This abstraction about candidates, voters, and messages comes to

ground in the party system. If the voter’s decision is between exactly two
parties and their nominees—as it normally is in the United States—then
it becomes very hard to imagine how we would settle multiple unrelated
controversies with one vote. We could claim to have settled them, but
for that claim to have reality, it would have to be the case that voters
weighed each matter separately, came to a conclusion, and factored all of
these inﬂuences into the single vote. The problem is that the mechanism of
choice—a single vote cast for one of two candidates and parties—does not
permit the expression of multiple and conﬂicting views.

A single vote is binary, a “bit” in information theory. A bit is the

smallest possible unit of information. It can carry the summary result of a
mix of considerations, but it cannot convey the considerations themselves.
Think of voting as a censoring process. You can have independent views on
multiple controversies. And if the issues are truly independent, the candi-
dates also will have multiple views on multiple controversies. Consequently,
as the number of issues goes beyond say two or three, it becomes exceedingly
unlikely that either of two candidates will have the same mix that you have.
The voting process doesn’t allow you to divide your vote in proportion to
the number of issues on which you agree, voting say 2/3 vote for candidate
A with whom you agree on two issues and 1/3 for B, who lines up with your
views on the third. That is the nature of censoring, forcing an expression
into a form that may not carry all of the original information.

A multi-party vote also is a censoring process, even a pretty extreme

one, but it allows more than a single bit of information. Imagine a stan-
dard European party system that divides along two axes, one left-right as in
the United States and the other along religious lines, clerical versus secular.
Then you can have at least four parties who represent the possible combi-
nations of the two dimensions, left-clerical, left-secular, right-clerical, and
right-secular. Choosing one of the four now carries two bits of information