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THE KNOW NOTHING VOTE
People respond to surveys all the time, even on subjects about which they know absolutely nothing

Take the question of whether so-called intelligent design—the idea that life is too complex to have developed by chance—should be taught in public schools along with Darwin’s theory of evolution. This was a hot issue in Ohio last year, notes Bishop, a political scientist at the University of Cincinnati. A poll conducted by Zogby International for the Discovery Institute, an intelligent-design advocacy group, found that nearly two-thirds of Ohioans supported teaching both Darwin’s theory and the scientific evidence against it. Another spring 2002 poll, conducted for The Cleveland Plain Dealer by Mason-Dixon, a Washington-based polling organization, produced a similar result.

But in a September 2002 survey by the University of Cincinnati’s Institute for Policy Research, 84 percent of Ohioans said they knew little or nothing about the concept of intelligent design. Why did Ohioans, apparently so ignorant of the subject, seem so well informed about it in the earlier polls? “Leading questions” in the case of the Zogby survey, says Bishop. The Plain Dealer poll, though free of advocacy, “educated” respondents about the idea of intelligent design before asking their judgment about “equal time.” “Unsurprisingly, given the fairness framing of the issue,” says Bishop, most respondents chose the “teach both” option. [Keep Reading]

• SEE ALSO: INFORMED PUBLIC OPINION ABOUT FOREIGN POLICY:
  The uses of deliberative polling (THE BROOKINGS REVIEW)
  
  

A WORLD ON THE EDGE
Is the current formula for universal free markets and democracy spurring ethnic violence around the world?
by Amy Chua

Nearly two-thirds of the roughly 80 million ethnic Filipinos in the Philippines live on less than $2 a day. Forty percent spend their entire lives in temporary shelters. Seventy percent of all rural Filipinos own no land. Almost a third have no access to sanitation. But that’s not the worst of it. Poverty alone never is. Poverty by itself does not make people kill. To poverty must be added indignity, hopelessness, and grievance. In the Philippines, millions of Filipinos work for Chinese; almost no Chinese work for Filipinos. The Chinese dominate industry and commerce at every level of society. Global markets intensify this dominance: When foreign investors do business in the Philippines, they deal almost exclusively with Chinese...

Each time I think of Nilo Abique—he was six-feet-two and my aunt was four-feet-eleven—I find myself welling up with a hatred and revulsion so intense it is actually consoling. But over time I have also had glimpses of how the vast majority of Filipinos, especially someone like Abique, must see the Chinese: as exploiters, foreign intruders, their wealth inexplicable, their superiority intolerable. I will never forget the entry in the police report for Abique’s “motive for murder.” The motive given was not robbery, despite the jewels and money the chauffeur was said to have taken. Instead, for motive, there was just one word—“revenge.”

My aunt’s killing was just a pinprick in a world more violent than most of us have ever imagined. In America, we read about acts of mass slaughter and savagery—at first in faraway places, now coming closer home. We do not understand what connects these acts. Nor do we understand the role we have played in bringing them about. [Keep Reading]

GIVE AMERICANS THE RIGHT TO VOTE!
A Brief Review of “Shoring Up the Right to Vote for President: A Modest Proposal” by Alexander Keyssar

Though attention soon shifted elsewhere in all the excitement at the close of the 2000 election, when Republicans in the Florida legislature threatened to select the state’s presidential electors, it came as a shock even to many knowledgeable observers that Americans do not possess a constitutionally guaranteed right to vote for president. Article II, Section 1, of the Constitution leaves it up to each state’s legislature to decide how the state’s delegates to the Electoral College (which actually elects the president) shall be chosen. Keyssar, a historian at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, urges enactment of a constitutional amendment to remedy the defect. [Keep Reading]