Or say it with Maryann Hanson: "Wake me up when this gets interesting."
Just a note on the recent spate of apparently contradictory polls. We’re seven months out from the election and, this far out, it’s only a tiny sliver of the population that’s paying any attention at all to the presidential election.
This truism is a function of a broader, deeper reality, one that political junkies like you and me have an extremely difficult time really accepting: normal people hate politics.
That’s not just my opinion: there’s a huge trove of academic research documenting this reality, much of it stateside. It’s a literature well summarized in this classic 2004 New Yorker article:
In election years from 1952 to 2000, when people were asked whether they cared who won the Presidential election, between twenty-two and forty-four per cent answered “don’t care” or “don’t know.” In 2000, eighteen per cent said that they decided which Presidential candidate to vote for only in the last two weeks of the campaign; five per cent, enough to swing most elections, decided the day they voted.
Seventy per cent of Americans cannot name their senators or their congressman. Forty-nine per cent believe that the President has the power to suspend the Constitution. Only about thirty per cent name an issue when they explain why they voted the way they did, and only a fifth hold consistent opinions on issues over time. Rephrasing poll questions reveals that many people don’t understand the issues that they have just offered an opinion on. According to polls conducted in 1987 and 1989, for example, between twenty and twenty-five per cent of the public thinks that too little is being spent on welfare, and between sixty-three and sixty-five per cent feels that too little is being spent on assistance to the poor.
Mutatis mutandi, you can be sure you’d find similar results in Venezuela.
The fact that you’re willingly, of your own accord, reading this blog places you in a tiny minority of freaks. Truly, we are the one percent.
That survey results are all over the place months and months before an election is neither here nor there. That a quarter of the electorate haven’t decided who to vote for is the opposite of surprising. Voters are low-information at the best of times, and seven months out is not the best of time. This is the reason we have campaigns – which, have you noticed, hasn’t actually started yet in Venezuela this year.
So let’s all take a deep breath. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. And it hasn’t even started yet.
What luck for rulers that men do not think.
Adolf Hitler
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/971.html
Evidently, Goebbels woke up from the dead and rated you down.
The GAS! It’s too damn high! I’m voting for the other ones!
If you think that gas is high, you’re breathing fumes….
I fall in the readership of this blog percentage, yet I admit on some elections I have made my final vote decision at the voting table once I was alone putting down my mark. But I don’t fool myself, only people who truly wonder which candidate will better improve a dire economic situtation will have doubts the day of voting. Others in dire situations will know exactly for whom to vote: people with economic difficutlies vote their pockets. You can take that to the bank, today, even before the race begins. If HCR doesn’t get into their “I can change your economic situation” top of mind, he’s going nowhere, because that’s where chavez has glued himself, through spits and lies, but glued, nonetheless.
–
I’m not so sure you’d find similar results in Venezuela. In fact, it is very difficult nowadays in Venezuela to avoid talking about politics when you are with a group of people. Sometimes I even get sick of it; everyday someone coming to me to talk about politics, or hearing someone in the Metro cursing Chavez or the opposition. I would say it seems quite the opposite, Venezuelans are way too much interested in politics, even pathologically so.
It is different to have a pathological need to do catharsis and talk (mostly yell) about politics that to actually care about it and find the information necessary to frame a sensible, rational opinion based on facts and your own hierarchy of values.
I think that most of the swing voters don’t see the election as the juncture that the typical antichavista sees . Whenever you say to the average Venezuela Han destruído el estado de derecho! No hay separación de poderes! Most of them think ¿Con qué se come eso?
In a country like Venezuela where most people are struggling to make ends meet, dont have proper basic public services is logical that the electors chose the candidate that they perceive will make their day to day life easier.
It is true that most people do not want to be interested in politics. But to paraphrase Trotsky, politics is interested in them. It touches them constantly – often to their injury.
My estimate is that the corruption and incompetence of the Chavez regime costs the average Venezuelan 20% of their income.
This includes not only money stolen or wasted by chavistas. It also includes
Lost employment and production at enterprises which they have seized and mismanaged.
Costs of crime which chavismo has grossly failed to address.
Damage to infrastructure and environment from chavista bungling (e.g. the Monagas pollution debacle).
Damage to health from chavista-mismanaged medical services (how many people have had health damage from “care” by Cuban “doctors”, or from understaffed hospitals where the nurses have not been paid?).
Lost oil revenue due to chavista mismanagement of PDVSA.
Disruption of the economy by currency controls and price controls.
If all this harm was inflicted in an identifiable daliy lump, there would be national outrage and Chavez would be lucky to escape with his life.
In a country where the state does not interfere with everything, does not seize and redistrbute most national wealth – the people have no reason to be especially interested in politics. But Venezuela is the opposite.
only 20%?
Only if you do not count lost opportunity.
This post reminded me of an article that I may have already posted, but that bears repeating, since it is OT (On Topic, this time):
http://news.yahoo.com/people-arent-smart-enough-democracy-flourish-scientists-185601411.html
I am reminded of a quote from Robert Heinlein:
“Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How’s that again? I missed something.”
Followed by:
“Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million
men. Let’s play that one over again, too. Who decides?”
The key issue in Venezuela isn’t about having an opinion regarding politics, but in the willingness to talk to a stranger regarding their political opinion. Thanks to Chavez’s industrial-strength narcissism, politics permeates absolutely every aspect of Venezuelan society, and most importantly, every aspect of Venezuelan media. It’s simply impossible not to have a political opinion in Venezuela, and it requires a conscious and monumental effort to avoid hearing about politics in Venezuela.
So it’s not so much that there are too many undecided in Venezuela, is that what they want is for EVERYONE to just shut the f**k up already about politics and just do their jobs.
(NOTE: I’m not saying that people here shout STFU. I’m saying that way too many people in Venezuela are just sick and tired of seeing politics “hasta en la sopa” and wish to go back to the times when ignoring everything about politics and politicians was a valid option.)
Yup, which leads huge swathes of the electorate to simply turn off, ignore all political messages, and just ignore the whole thing.
Yes, more than that. Aside from the shouting and stress, some people actually
learn something. Kuroneko, would you not agree that often you hear some
half-formed, poorly developed opinions..
Holy crap: “Only about thirty per cent name an issue when they explain why they voted the way they did.” Then…why?
Mutatis mutandi, you can be sure you’d find similar results in Venezuela.
A 1-percenter who disagrees. People in the US don’t care about politics anymore than people in the UK and other parts of Europe. Only a third, if that, of the population in advanced countries take part in elections regularly, hence the term “democratic deficit”.
That ain’t the case in Venezuela, therefore you just can’t extrapolate what happens “stateside” with what’s happening down south, anymore than you could compare “real races” between the two, anymore that you can wish for a 100% participation in Venezuela, i.e. let’s entertain el pajazo mental de que todos los ninis van, de repente y tal, a interesarse por la politica, por que HCR les habla bonito.
But I’m digressing, so long as common folk feel that there’s danger in answering frankly to political preferences questions, Venezuelan polls will continue to be useless anyway.
Sorry, guys, but you are a little bit too Anglo-centric (or rather US-centred).
Take a look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout
Look at the list: Germany, Sweden, Chile, Czech Republic, Brazil, etc…
Look where the UK is. Then the USA.
But yeah, people everywhere vote mostly with their guts. Still, the level of political discussion is quite different in all those countries.
Kepler:
The major difference between the sets of countries you mentioned is voting system: the US and the UK utilize single-member districts, whereas proportional representation is used to elect representatives in the lower house in Germany, Brazil, Czech Republic. Several studies have shown that the presence of proportional representation is a predictor of much higher levels of voter turnout because of the non-competitiveness (caused by gerrymandering) of many districts in the single-member district voting system.
Watch out with the generalisations, David. Quite a great deal of authors find electoral systems to be a very poor variable when it comes to explaining voter turnout, especially in Latin America (Blais & Dobrzynska 1998, Pérez-Liñán 2001, Fornos et al. 2004, Blais & Aarts 2005, Kostelka 2011).
Let’s say you’re right. Let’s say Venezuelans are THREE TIMES as likely to have a basic grasp of politics as Americans: that’d be a huge, huge disparity. 300%!
You’re still looking at 67% of Venezuelans having really no grasp of politics.
It’s one of those obvious facts that only looks curious from your own set of biases as a political junkies: vast majorities pretty much everywhere aren’t interested in politics. It’s just like that.
Did I hear an echo? Ha.
I thought I heard a who?
Yes, we are “political junkies”, Thanks for your
occasional injection of logic.
Francisco,
we are obviously political junkies, the absolute extreme. There are lots of Venezuelans, as Chigüire Bipolar has reported, that’d rather be left alone with their polarcita, their chama and the beach.
I didn’t say Venezuelans grasp politics even a tiny bit better than US Americans. Still, there is a much stronger involvement, even if it is fully emotional, to one or the other political actor. Venezuelans are not interested in knowing about the actual ideologies or real plans of their politicians, but in a feudal, personalized way they go bananas for their chosen party and their “hombre”.
How can I delete one account? I opened this up because I didn’t see what was going on with the registration. En fin…I am Kepler.
Mire, mister compusabio, hay que cambiar su email y/o su apodo. Una vez hecho, la próxima vez, verá Ud. que el “Join the Fray” se recordará de su último cambio. In sum, kiss Prokaryote goodbye.
No! I am Kepler!
HalfEmpty lies! I am Kepler!
Sybil, is that you?
Wait, does that mean I’m not normal? I’M NOT NORMAL?!?!?!
The answer is: Revel in your difference.
I bet if you measured political interest in NAZI Germany it was off
the charts too.
When you have radical players like Chavez people have a
keen understanding that more than just which school their
kids go to school is at stake, but maybe their physical well being.
and that of their families.
When people make comparisons between knowledge of and interest in politics, it would be wise to keep in mind that in Venezuela, the Government plays a much larger and more direct role in the daily lives of Venezuelans than it does in the U.S.
Simply put, in the U.S. it is easier to ignore government than in Venezuela. Here, we tend to get bitch-slapped by some manifestation of government on a regular basis, or it is a source of largesse, or it simply necessary to comply with regulations. As an example of what I mean: In Venezuela, it took me many trips and many hours of my time to obtain a driver’s license. In the U.S., it only took 20 minutes… and that was a state, not federal government agency. So, the Venezuelans spend a vastly greater percentage of their time interacting with the Government.