The political process is often explained as voters having policy preferences and political entrepreneurs crafting policies to appeal to those preferences in order to win elections. But where do voters’ policy preferences come from? In Randall Holcombe’s recent book Following Their Leaders, the distinguished Florida State economist, former Public Choice Society president, and student of 1986 Nobel laureate James M. Buchanan makes the case that people form their preferences by following their elite political leaders.

Common good? / Early in the book, Holcombe explains the economics of politics in a way that will be familiar to political scientists and public choice economists but might be revelatory to outsiders. According to public choice theory, democratic outcomes tend to be unstable, and cycles back and forth between different policies become much more likely as the policy space expands. When a lot of voters with diverse preferences face a lot of options, no option is majority-proof; you can make any alternative lose a majority rule election just by changing the voting rule. That is, there is no rank order of policy preferences for electorates as opposed to individuals. Accordingly, and in contrast to traditional public economics, which sought to craft supposedly optimal policies to be implemented by disinterested philosopher-kings, public choice takes a more realistic view of politicians and the polity. After all, they’re only human.

Political institutions reward those who crave power or are at least willing to use it. As University of Chicago economist Frank Knight explained in 1938, “The probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tender-hearted person would get the job of whipping-master on a slave plantation.” To complicate matters further, there is no such thing as “the public good” independent of the preferences of those who form the polity.

But wait, there’s more: The direction of causation runs from party identity to policy preferences rather than vice versa. Voters adopt specific policy preferences because they are progressives, conservatives, liberals, or libertarians; they do not choose their identity because of their preferences. From this perspective, voting is much more likely to be expressive than substantive, and it has more in common with cheering on one’s team (and jeering its opponent) at a football game than making decisions at a grocery store. Holcombe’s argument that people form their preferences by following elites on “their side” suggests the football game analogy is even more apt: People are not just expressing themselves emotionally when cheering in the stands; they’re forming what will become essential parts of themselves by learning the songs, chants, and lore surrounding their team.

People form their political attachments like they form their athletic, artistic, and musical attachments. The most politically active are “hooligans,” to use Georgetown University philosopher Jason Brennan’s term from his 2015 book Against Democracy. Joseph Schumpeter’s characterization, “The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field,” is apt. Rather than being armed with preferences they seek to satisfy politically, they are ripe to have their preferences formed by political entrepreneurs.

Charitable voters / Campaigns, Holcombe argues, tend to be “devoid of specific policy suggestions.” The facts are much less consistent with the hypothesis that people vote instrumentally (to get policies they understand and want) and much more consistent with the hypothesis that people vote expressively for reasons that may be only loosely connected with policies’ actual likely effects.

Building on work by Gordon Tullock, Holcombe explains a seeming curiosity: People appear to be much more “charitable” and “generous” when they get into the voting booth than in most other contexts. The reasoning is straightforward: Because an individual vote will not affect the outcome of an election, one can behave “charitably” and enjoy the warm glow that comes with feeling like he has done something to help the less fortunate even though the vote will not affect whether something gets done. Furthermore, the beneficiaries may not be the people who need charity; consider the economic status of red-teamers sailing in “boat parades” and blue-teamers who receive federal forgiveness for their college loans.

Anti-Israel rallies on college campuses since the October 2023 Hamas massacre are broadly consistent with Holcombe’s analysis. Large crowds of passionate, keffiyeh-wearing college students gathered on college campuses to chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” even though many of them could not name the referenced river and sea. Likewise, in early 2021, protestors chanted “Stop the steal” as they tried to intimidate federal lawmakers into ignoring the outcome of a lawful election. It all calls to mind the Veep scene where Selina Meyer gets her supporters to switch from chanting “Count every vote!” to “Stop counting the votes!” after she realizes the uncounted votes favor her opponent.

Such activism gives us a front-row seat to top-down, elite-driven preference formation happening in real time. Elites, Holcombe argues, are positioned to control narratives: “Are demonstrations in the streets peaceful protests or civil unrest?” One group of my Facebook friends says one thing, another group says something else.

The state did not come about because people got together and agreed to submit to mutual coercion to provide public goods and then spread the message to other groups that joined them. It came about by conquest and bloodshed and needs to be understood in that context. Holcombe describes the truly revolutionary Enlightenment idea that governments should serve their people rather than the other way around. But merely espousing this view is insufficient to instantiate it, and what Holcombe argues about top-down preference formation is broadly consistent with what we know and understand about states, their origins, and their actions. Our preferences, Holcombe argues, tend to follow our “leaders,” which is “consistent with the endowment effect, the bandwagon effect, and attempts to minimize cognitive dissonance” much more than the thesis that we have preexisting preferences politicians seek to satisfy.

Holcombe’s argument will benefit from the deeper empirical research it will no doubt inspire. As a matter of public policy, he buttresses earlier arguments about why constitutional constraints matter and why price-and-profit-mediated market decisions are superior to vote-and-violence-mediated political decisions. With yet another contentious election now behind us, it’s an argument worth taking seriously.