By Ryan Job
David Moscrop’s Too Dumb for Democracy? Why We Make Bad Political Decisions and How We Can Make Better Ones has a tempting title for political junkies. A blurb on the back cover reads, “Brexit. Trump. Ford Nation. What’s going on?”
Moscrop wants to explain this mess and provide some solutions. He holds a PhD in political science and writes for publications including Maclean’s, The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail and the National Post—pretty big hitters in the media landscape.
But alas, all is not well in Moscropland. All is not terrible, but all is certainly not well.
The author splits his book up into three parts: Part one deals with “the citizen decision-maker;” part two with why we make bad political decisions; and part three looks at how we can make better ones.
Part one is very thorough. The discussion is a mix of psychology, the history of democracy, and how good political decisions are all about process. He gives his definitions of “rational” and “autonomous” decisions: A rational person can give reasons for their decisions. An autonomous one knows their motivations.
In part two, the author explains how our evolution and environment make good political decisions hard. For example: Our brains have developed for a much slower world than ours—one of hunter-gatherers—and there is just too much information coming at us too fast.
Some topics here will already be familiar to readers: We tend to reject information that goes against our personal experience, and partisan media confirms our biases.
Others might be less well-known. Moscrop cites a study on how we form our political identities and make decisions. According to the study, we start with a decision already made and work backwards to justify it—so the process isn’t as logical as some like to think.
Now we get to part three: How do we do better?
Readers may be disappointed to learn likely the most crucial part of the book—how we can make better political decisions—takes up just 43 pages of 228. For a book that dedicates half of its tagline to the subject, that’s not a lot.
Of course, if you think really hard on your own, you could probably think of some solutions.
But the reality is most people—like the author himself says—aren’t in a position to think that deeply about politics. People are busy and overwhelmed with daily life, and these are complex issues.
Including more solutions and cutting down on other sections could have made this book more useful.
Still, Moscrop is a smart guy—one can tell that much from this read. He knows what he’s talking about. But there’s a pretty persistent writing problem here: too many words.
For example:
“But our failures are not caused by the ideal of self-determination; they are caused by our failure to organize and decide in a way that commits us to linking self-determination to a process of decision-making designed to produce rational, ethical, inclusive, trust-building, and legitimate outcomes, and by our failure to then commit to building individual and institutional capacity to support that endeavour.”
This is about the worst it gets, and it takes a while to understand even in context. It’s the passage where the PhD comes out the most—you could have plucked this right out of a doctoral thesis. Even throughout the rest of his book, Moscrop is nearly always a little too wordy to be impactful.
At best, that’s the only problem with this language: It’s ineffective. At worst, it’s another betrayal of the same point mentioned just a few paragraphs ago—people are busy and overwhelmed, and politics is complex.
But it doesn’t always have to be this complicated. Politics will always be complex, but insisting on discussing everything in this verbose way only makes politics less accessible.
It’s not that Moscrop can’t write more concisely. One look at the author’s Twitter reveals much snappier writing. Of course it does—Twitter limits posts to 280 characters. He should have applied those same skills to his book.
A related problem: The book is really, really theoretical.
Anyone who reads the back cover and expects a book filled with practical insight into newsworthy bad decisions like Trump and Brexit will be disappointed. Moscrop only touches on these briefly.
Most of the time, the most concrete and grounded it gets are dinner table analogies, where each fictional guest represents a model of thinking: Norman is a “motivated reasoner,” Sarah and Paul are the “elaboration likelihood models,” Stella is a “social intuitionist,” and so on
These are fine, but they’re dry. It would be much more engaging to learn through real-world examples and case studies.
Too Dumb for Democracy? is still an interesting book. Readers will find insights here. But it’s hard to recommend it to anyone but dedicated political theorists. The dense writing, focus on problems instead of solutions, and lack of concrete examples hold this book back. It could have been so much better.
rjob@academic.rrc.ca
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