Francis Fukuyama on whether America's democracy is decaying
The Gray Area with Sean Illing
00:00
The Power of the Median Voter
In many issues including some of the most socially divisive ones like abortion and so forth it turns out if you look at poll data that 70% of Americans actually have a weekly held view. At either extreme you got 20% or 15% that were really convinced at the opposite extremes and they tend to get over represented in the system. There's this other problem of aggregation that's made particularly salient by social media, the rise of social media today. I think that this is kind of the frontier of public participation because obviously you need to get this kind of public input but on the other hand we've created these technological means and we've empowered so many people that it becomes a kind of unmanageable
Play episode from 18:24
Transcript
