This chapter focuses on academic models of collective choice. It discusses voting models and models of social choice to show that the link between instrumental preferences and collective choice outcomes is broken once one recognizes that the political preferences of citizens and voters are expressive, so do not represent the outcomes they most prefer. The models themselves are not wrong, in that they describe the way that expressed preferences are aggregated to make collective decisions. But the interpretation of the models often is mistaken. There is no clear relationship between outcomes of collective decision-making processes and the outcomes that would be preferred by those whose preferences are being aggregated.

One motivation for this volume is to question the way that academic models of the political process depict preference aggregation and public policy formation. More significantly, this analysis has implications for democratic political institutions. There is an illusion, promoted by the political elite, that democratic oversight of government can control its power and direct it toward the public interest, but the powerless cannot control the powerful, even if the powerless far outnumber the powerful. The ability of constitutional constraints to limit government power and direct it toward the interests of the masses is also questionable, because those constraints must be enforced. If public policy is designed and implemented by the political elite, ultimately the power of government can be controlled only by a system of checks and balances that enables some of the elite to control the power of others. Democratic institutions can play a role in determining who holds political power, and constitutional constraints can play a role if there are institutional mechanisms to enforce them, but without a system of checks and balances that enables some elites to control the power of others, democracy and constitutional constraints are ineffective.

The idea that the political preferences of citizens and voters are expressive rather than instrumental is well established, and lays a foundation for understanding why citizens and voters adopt the policy preferences offered to them by the elite. Voters realize that no matter how they vote, election outcomes will be unaffected. When they make choices in the market, they get what they choose. When they make political choices, what they get is unaffected by what they choose. Thus, voters may vote for outcomes they would not choose if the choice were theirs alone. The distinction between instrumental and expressive preferences, discussed in this chapter, lays a foundation for the material that follows.

The idea that citizens and voters adopt the policy preferences offered to them by the political elite meets with resistance on several grounds. Academic models of political processes tend to assume that citizens and voters have preferences, and that parties and candidates adjust their platforms to appeal to their preferences, rather than that people’s preferences are derived from the platforms offered to them by the political elite. Through introspection, people also resist the idea that their own policy preferences are formed this way (although they are more willing to accept the idea that other people adopt their expressed policy preferences this way). This chapter looks at preferences in general to discuss the way that advertising can alter preferences, the way that people are influenced by the preferences of their peers, and the way that producers can create wants that affect consumer preferences. If preferences can be altered for people’s instrumental choices, it is more likely that they can be altered for expressive choices, when what people choose does not affect what they get.

Anchor preferences represent the political identify that people adopt. They tend to anchor on a party, an ideology, or a candidate to form their political identity. Most public policy preferences people hold are a derivative of their anchor preferences. They adopt the policy preferences of their anchors to minimize cognitive dissonance, and to economize on the gathering of information that will have no instrumental value to them anyway. Many policy issues are complex, with compelling arguments for different policy positions. Choosing an anchor for their political identity and then deriving policy preferences from those offered by the anchor maximizes the utility that people get from their expressive preferences. The masses adopt the policy preferences of the elite – of those on whom they anchor. They follow their leaders.

The well-established concept of expressive voting concludes that the public policy preferences people express are likely to differ from their instrumental preferences, but the literature on expressive voting has not developed clear conclusions about how people form their expressive preferences. An extensive literature on preference formation helps to answer this question. Because there are no instrumental consequences from the political preferences citizens hold, the utility they get from those preferences comes solely from their having and expressing them. People have a status quo bias, and are prone to value the preferences they have because of the endowment effect. People adopt preferences to minimize cognitive dissonance, and often yield to peer pressure when choosing the public policy preferences they express. There is a bandwagon effect, and people’s policy preferences are affected by the mass media. This chapter goes beyond just saying that expressive preferences differ from instrumental preferences by explaining why they differ.

People who hold political power must convince the masses that they have the legitimate authority to exercise it. They use patriotism and propaganda to persuade citizens that they have a duty to their fellow citizens to obey government mandates. The elite argue that the obligation to comply with the government’s rules amounts to a social contract, even though that term is reserved for academic use. This chapter uses social contract theory to explain how the messaging of the political elite creates citizen compliance, and how the elite are able to use this to their advantage. Social contract theory depicts the social contract as a way to escape from a prisoners’ dilemma, making everyone better off. This chapter uses that framework to show how the elite benefit from propagandizing the masses to believe that they have an obligation to abide by the rules designed by the elite.

If the goal of the political elite is to amass power, this chapter examines policies that maximize political power. Power maximization does not have specific policies associated with it, but is a process by which the elite encourage the masses to give them more power. Political platforms tend to be vague, offering the message that things are not as good now as they could be, but if you give me more power, I will make things better. People see problems and demand that the government should do something, which gives more power to those who already hold it. The chapter discusses the appeal of populism, which is based on the idea that the system is run for the benefit of the elite, and if the populist politician is given power, things will change to benefit the masses. However, the result is to replace one set of elites with another. Policies that maximize political power are those that create dependence on the political elite. This can occur by expanding the welfare state; by giving regulatory, tax, and other benefits to rent-seekers; and by creating apprehension about potential domestic and foreign threats to people’s well-being.

While the policy preferences of the masses are purely expressive, the political elite actually make public policy, so the preferences they act on do have instrumental effects. If the masses adopt the policy preferences of the elite, that points to the question of what public policies the elite advocate to the masses. In the same way that economists simplify the motivations of firms to say that firms are profit maximizers, the political elite are power maximizers. That motivation starts with the recognition that politics is adversarial. In elections, some people win while others lose. The same is true in public policy issues. Some win while others lose. The motivation of the political elite is to keep the power they have, and to gain more. In most societies, the political elite is not a monolithic entity. Rather, there are competing members of the elite, with competing public policy ideas. Thus, the masses have a choice of anchors, but once they choose an anchor, most of their policy preferences are derivative of their anchors.

For most of human history, societies were divided into the rulers and the ruled. Citizens were subjects of their governments and were obligated to obey the orders of their rulers. Enlightenment ideas changed the way that citizens viewed their relationship to government. The view that citizens were subjects of their governments and obligated to serve their governments was reversed, so people increasingly thought that government should serve its citizens rather than the other way around. Democratic political institutions that increasingly were adopted as a result can act as a constraint on those who hold government power, but they also convey legitimacy to the exercise of that power. Democratic political institutions create the illusion that the political elite are accountable to the masses. Meanwhile, the masses, who have an incentive to be rationally ignorant about public policy measures, adopt their public policy views from those offered them by the elite.