4.Study: Conservative Legislators Live in a Fantasy World of Make-Believe

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This blog has long maintained that conservative politicians and their typically Christofascist puppet masters live in a fantasy world detached from objective reality.  Now, a new study suggest that such is in fact definitely the case with conservative - read Republican - legislators believing that their districts support far more reactionary policies than is actually the case.  Its a phenomenon here in Virginia that I suspect tracks directly to The Family Foundation and its insidious network of extremists who through threats and intimidation control the Republican Party of Virginia and distort the reality of the views of most Virginians (e.g., 90% of Virginians support LGBT workplace nondiscrimination protections, yet thanks to The Family Foundation's efforts, the GOP kills these measures ever year).  The Wonkblog looks at the study findings.  Here are excerpts:

Last year, a group of political scientists took a random sample of state legislators and asked them a slew of questions, most of which boiled down to: “What do your constituents think about policy?” Do they support gay marriage? Do they support Obamacare? Do they support action to combat global warming?

Broockman and Skovron find that legislators consistently believe their constituents are more conservative than they actually are. This includes Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. But conservative legislators generally overestimate the conservatism of their constituents by 20 points. “This difference is so large that nearly half of conservative politicians appear to believe that they represent a district that is more conservative on these issues than is the most conservative district in the entire country,” Broockman and Skovron write. This finding held up across a range of issues. 

Liberal legislators consistently overestimate opposition to same-sex marriage and universal health care, but only mildly. Conservative politicians are not even in the right ballpark.

Is it just that legislators don’t talk to their constituents? Nope. Broockman and Skovron tried and failed to find any relationship between the amount of time legislators spend in their districts, going to community events, and so forth, and the accuracy of their reads on their districts. And this bias afflicts not just their view of their constituents, but their positions generally.

[T]he data holds against a battery of robustness checks the authors threw at it. The finding on conservative legislators in particular is so large that it’s hard to imagine any subsequent research would completely overturn it. But if the findings hold, they suggest both that epistemic closure on the right is real and affects state-level policymaking, and that there is a systematic bias against liberal policies at the state level.

While it is disturbing to realize just how out of touch GOP legislators have become, it is nice to know that my belief that these people are in a fantasy world appears to be accurate.