A sustained Mandarin-Citizen gap over time in many places around similar things

From Most Americans Reject Race-based College Admissions from Minding the Campus reporting on some recent Pew Research. I am less interested in the particulars of Affirmative Action than I am about a broader phenomenon of which this is an instance - the divergence in opinion on select issues between the broad public and the mandarin class of establishment thinkers. From the article.

A large majority of Americans—73 percent—say that neither race nor ethnicity should be factors in deciding which students are granted admission to colleges and universities. Only 7 percent think race and ethnicity should be major factors, and 19 percent favor allowing them to be light factors. The survey was conducted by Pew Research Center in January and February of this year.

Every major racial or ethnic grouping rejects admission by race or ethnicity, but the largest such rejection come from white Americans—78 percent, compared with 65 percent Hispanics, 62 percent blacks, and 59 percent Asians, surveying only Asians who speak English.

73% oppose affirmative action in education. Yet if you were to do the same polling among journalists or academics or among government workers or among establishment politicians of both parties I would wager you would likely find 73% support for affirmative action. Interestingly, the Pew research shows a substantial rejection of affirmative action by all races.

So how come, after forty years and more, affirmative action remains alive and well when 59-78% of the population reject it? It is not even close. Of course the answer is that affirmative action is supported by the Mandarin Class even though it is roundly rejected by the citizenry.

I first noticed this democracy deficit in the 1970s in Britain when I came across research in England showing that some very large proportion of the citizenry supported capital punishment while a similar very large proportion of the Mandarin Class as reflected by the positions of Conservative and Labour politicians rejected capital punishment. I think it something like 80% of the populace supported capital punishment and 80% of politicians rejected it.

As so often happens, once you see a pattern, you begin to see it everywhere. The capital punishment divide in Britain existed on the Continent as well. Citizens strongly for it, Mandarin Class strongly against it.

Over the years I have seen many such gaps. Usually they are similar across countries but not always.

In most countries, school choice is more widely supported by citizens than by the Mandarin Class and establishment political parties. Citizenry are usually much more constrained in their support for abortion than the Mandarins. Foreign wars, the same.

Citizens will often indicate an equal commitment to high taxation of the wealthy as shown by the Mandarin Class, but that consensus is usually undermined when you look at what citizens think of as an appropriately high level of taxation. In other words, citizens usually are uncomfortable with the idea of taxes on income being much more than fifty percent whereas the Mandarin Class are still quite enthusiastic at 60%, 70%, 80% and higher.

Religion is another, at least in the US, where there are huge gaps between the Mandarin Class and the citizenry. Corporal punishment for childhood misbehavior another. I am not arguing one side or the other on any one of these particular issues. What is striking is the gap between the Mandarin Class and the citizenry.

You can call this a democracy deficit, as it is. But for it to exist most places around similar topics, and often even to the same degree is somewhat perplexing. These are countries which are, granted, basically some form of representative democracy, but the details in their political differences are pretty material.

It is a pretty surprising phenomenon which I think is real but which I don't really have a good understanding why it should be the case.