Welcome to the Politics Guys interview, conversations about American politics, economics, history, and culture with authors and researchers from across the ideological spectrum.

I'm Michael Barronowski, a political scientist at Northern Kentucky University.

My guest today is Vanderbilt University political scientist Larry Bartels.

Dr. Bartels has been a leading scholar in American politics for decades. He's a co-director

of Vanderbilt Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation,

a past vice president of the American Political Science Association, and a fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social

Science, and a member of the American Academy of Political and Social Science,

and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

He's written countless academic journal articles and a number of books, including

Democracy for Realists, Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, which he

co-authored, sorry, with Christopher Aachen.

It was a book that generated a lot of commentary and discussion in the political science world and beyond.

And so I was very pleased when Dr. Bartels agreed to come on the show and talk with me about it.

So Larry Bartels, welcome to the show.

Thanks. Thanks for having me.

You know, I thought maybe we could start by talking about sort of our

traditional common view of how voters in a democracy act, something that you've called

the folk theory of democracy. So could you tell listeners a little bit about what that folk

theory of democracy is? Yes. We about what that folk theory democracy is?

Yes.

We call it the folk theory because it's not quite the vision of democracy that you read about in Aristotle or Rousseau or contemporary political theorists, but a set of ideas less formally

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