Are People's Political Views "Fixed" or "Plastic"? Posted by Shadi Hamid

Sabeel Rahman, a PhD candidate at Harvard and one of the sharpest observers of American politics I know, sent out an excellent email to a list I'm on, which zeroes in on what he calls the "fundamentally different 'political ontologies'" of Obama and Clinton. It's a really interesting analysis, so I asked him if I could post it on Democracy Arsenal. He said yes, so here it is:

One of the central differences is that these two candidates have fundamentally different "political ontologies"--assumptions about how politics works.  As such, there is a real substantive difference embedded in all the rhetoric about who is or is not a "change agent"--and our gut reactions over who we tend to support has a lot to do with who we think has the right unstated assumptions about politics.

The most basic assumption in politics is whether or not we take people's political views to be fixed or plastic.  Thus, there is one camp--let's call it a Schmittian approach to politics--where people's views are taken to be fixed.  When this is the case, politics becomes more about the battle "between friend's and enemies" (in Schmitt's language).  As a result, there are only two real strategies available to generating political victory and/or social change.  First, you can completely reject everything about your enemies, and whip up support among your friends--a sort of rabid partisan strategy.  Second, you can engage those who disagree, but since their views are fixed and not really open to reconsideration, such engagement means bringing them on board by giving them some of what they want.  This is a strategy of least-common-denominator centrism--or "triangulation" in its negative sense.

If you take views to be fundamentally plastic, however, you now are playing a very different ballgame.  Politics now becomes an effort in persuasion.  And persuasion requires (a) bringing those who disagree on board--not by accepting their policy views in a transactional sense, but by engaging in good faith their core disagreements; and (b) seeking to allay those concerns by offering an alternative approach to the given issue. 

If you accept a deliberative approach to politics, there is a second set of assumptions that you have to make about how to persuade those who might disagree.  First, there is a strategy which says "successful policies drive changes in principles".  Second, there is a view that instead it is by arguing for broad principles first that you bring people on board, which then opens up political space to begin experimenting with different policies.  This approach has the virtue of not pegging the value of these principles on the ultimate success of an ex-ante determined policy, of defending a principle on its own merits.

This is obviously a very very rough schematic, but it lays out some basic questions that have major implications for how a campaign would be run, and how one would approach the actual task of governance:
1) Do you think that people can be convinced to change their minds politically? 
2) If you believe that ideational change is possible, what is your assumed mechanism for ideational change? From policies to principles? Or from principles to policies?

I think that there are good arguments to support any of these different "political ontologies" or models of politics, but not every model is appropriate at all times.  And the two candidates right now are offering very different political ontologies, so part of the choice here is who you believe has captured the dynamics and potential of the current moment most correctly. Depending on what you think of Hillary, she either represents a Schmittian triangulation approach to politics, or a deliberative policy-first approach.  Obama, I think, is attempting to make a deliberative principles-first model work.

Comments

[Dan Kervick]

This is a very worthwhile topic of discussion, but as a former philosophy professor, I must register a small objection to yet another instance of researchers in the social sciences or humanities employing pretentious-sounding philosophy terms like "ontologies" when they appear not to understand what these terms mean, and where less pretentious language would be both more accurate and more readily intelligible. If one wants to talk about different assuptions about the way politics works, why not just use an expression like "different assumptions about the way politics works."

Much the same thing has happened recently with the term "epistemology", which is now sometimes inaccurately and unnecessarily wrenched away from its established uses to mean little more "a style or manner of thinking."

[William Fettes]

Yeah, I agree with Dan. The use of ontology there is a bit discordant. When I did my major in Philosophy I was taught that ontology meant the most fundamental building blocks of an explanation. To ask ontologial questions, or to speak of the ontology of a philosophical school, is to look at depth of their intellectual foundation. So you can look rather Libertarian being about free market, which is at the rhetorical level, you're really look at the underpinning methodological individualism behind it.

In this case, the PhD student is not really comparing ontologies, he or she is looking at the ways two politicians of a similar political outlook have quite different views as the modalities of voting preferences and their instrumental strategies to gain a winning polity out of that view. It's an important discussion, but it isn't ontological.

[robertdfeinman]

This is an issue of psychology, not philosophy. There has been some experimental evidence that those who are socially conservative also tend to be rigid (or dogmatic, if you prefer) in their political thinking as well.

Those who are "liberal" are more willing to examine viewpoints other than their own. Whether this causes them to change their mind about things is another question. Personally when I see examples of a changing attitude taking place over time (say smoking) I attribute it more to those who held the older viewpoint dying off and being replaced by those with the newer attitude.

If you are interested in the relationship between conservatism and dogmatic closedmindedness you might want to read psychologist Robert Altemeyer's free, online book at TheAuthoritarians.com

He does find some weakening of dogmatic attitudes when people get exposed to new experiences (say meeting actual gays in school).