homepage of brittany wright…

It sounds very attractive when you word it like that, but entrepeneurs are in the business of risk, not governing. I’m not sure I’d like to live in a society that based policies on speculation. It might be exciting, I suppose, but judging by the number of failed entrepeneurial products vs. successful ones, not very productive. Time for a new analogy.

There is something to be said for taking leadership on a policy position in the hope that the same thing that convinced you will be rational enough for others to understand (or at least to tolerate, which in practice is how much of the eighties reforms were accepted by the ACTU for example).

If your policy is based on speculation, or some fundamental belief that others don’t share, you are going to have to work harder (and rightly so).

On your second point, the issue is not just the rightness of the decision, it is the nature of the authority a government possesses. I think democratic government places some hard-to-define limits on the use of power, irrespective of how right a leader is convinced that he or she is. It’s a check against hubris, as the PM noted was necessary when the government won control of the Senate. We’ll see about this time next year whether they overstepped the mark with unpopular policies like IR reform and privatising Telstra.

It seems to me that there is a tension between the notion that taking into account citizens’ preferences when making decisions is unnecessary, since the government may simply be voted out at the next election if its decisions don’t sufficiently reflect these preferences, and the reality that elections are a very poor means of ensuring that governments decisions do reflect citizens’ preferences - voters must assess a government’s performance overall and relative to other parties, even if they strongly disagree with particular decisions it has made.

And then there is the separate question: even if there are “clear and persistent majority views that suffer from none of these weaknesess”, why should these views be given any weight at all if they are quite independent of what is in fact the best decision to make, on a consequentialist account of the merits of decisions? The fact that most people believe that moral proposition X is true does not imply that it is in fact true.

The first question is harder. Given regular elections, governments need to take public opinion into some account, but clearly they can and do ignore public opinion on some issues, and get away with it. But I think you are asking a normative rather than an institutional or empirical question. In line with the original post, if I was in government I would give fairly low normative weight to public opinion that was clearly based on factual error, was likely to be a ‘non-attitude’, was real but not deeply held, or contradicted other clearly held views (eg want less tax and more spending). But I do think that where there are clear and persistent majority views that suffer from none of these weaknesess the fact that it is a majority view would count in its favour, and this should not be lightly ignored.

But I hesitate to make this any kind of iron rule. There is something to be said for the analogy with entrepreneurs in markets, that you can persuade people by showing them that it works, even if they would not have believed it before. In his Age article the other day, Fraser noted that some now-popular immigrant groups probably would not have been allowed to settle in Australia if it had been put a referendum, and this is probably true of other social reforms that were ‘ahead’ of public opinion.

To what extent do you think that governments, once elected, should take account of the preferences of their citizens in making decisions?

Is this required for the form of government to constitute a democracy? Or is it merely sufficient that the citizens elect the government for a given period of time?

“You both seem to agree that people don

“B. That Australians have the time and mental energy to devote to having issues X, Y and Z explained to them.

This isn’t Andrew’s position at all, he didn’t state any conclusion about the intelligence or otherwise of the populace.

The post related to whether policy makers ought to rely on the results of public opinion polling in forming policy. Andrew seems to take the view that they should not when it comes to specific matters because respondents will happily give answers to pollsters, even when they don’t know much about the specifics, haven’t thought about it much and haven’t formed a solid opinion:

“Not only do people lack factual information, but they freely express