Popular Delusions: How Social Conformity Molds Society and Polit ...

One of the norms of most concern in this book is that good citizens should vote in an election. This is taught in school and the population is constantly reminded about it before a national election. In fact, this is such an important norm in a democracy that one can use the degree of an electorate’s adherence to it as an approximate measure of how successful a society is at getting people to follow important norms, given that people are fairly consistent in their behavior (the second principle). When voters go to the polls, one can apply the third principle to help explain what happens next. The voters who are motivated by conformity to vote will also be more likely make a conformist choice in deciding among candidates or parties for a given political office. For example, the voters may simply cast their ballot with the expected majority or vote the same way most of their friends and neighbors are voting. In these situations the norm is what most people are doing. That is, conformist voters are deciding what to do based on how they perceive the relative proportions of others’ behavioral choices; a greater proportion of people aligned with any one choice implies a greater likelihood of conformity in others with that choice. I elaborate on this point in much more detail in chapter 5.

Political Conformity

Beyond an application to voting behavior, what does a conformity model offer political science? And how does it differ from other explanations of political behavior, such as rational choice and political–sociological (social–structural) theories? Under sociological explanations of politics, I include those based on longstanding social, economic, and religious cleavages or social classes.

The conformity model starts out close to sociological theory because of the role of social groups in establishing and maintaining social norms and applying group pressure on individuals to make them conform. Often these groups are based on religious, ethnic, labor, or class identification.