Maybe this outcome shouldn’t be so surprising. The Natural Environment Research Council, which oversaw the competition, had informed participants that final authority to name the ship was vested in its chief executive, not the people. The NERC had expressed a preference for an “inspirational,” environmental science-y choice. Your “Shackleton.” Your “Endeavour.” And so on.

But the government’s position also seems like a cruel bait-and-switch—a case of elites eagerly leaning in to hear what the people have to say, and then leaping back in horror. Wasn’t it just yesterday that Johnson was asking, in announcing the contest, “Can you imagine one of the world’s biggest research labs travelling to the Antarctic with your suggested name proudly emblazoned on the side?” Did he not mean it when he said that “this campaign will give everyone across the UK the opportunity to feel part of this exciting project and the untold discoveries it will unearth”?

What happened to disapproving of what you name your boat, but defending to the death your right to name it? Is democracy a lie?

The soul-searching, the cries of tyranny, are already underway in the British press, albeit with a healthy dollop of mock outrage mixed in. (After all, the country has a very real, very high-stakes vote on whether to stay in the European Union coming up in June.) Johnson should “accept the will of the electorate and bow to the name Boaty McBoatface,” The Times declares. “Present the people with an idol, then smash it before their eyes,” muses Stuart Heritage at The Guardian. “Soon they will learn that resistance is futile, and the state’s power is absolute.” Anticipating the government’s resistance to Boaty McBoatface back in March, the journalist Ross Clark observed, “Our leaders, of course, love democracy—until it comes up with an answer different to the one they were expecting.”

But is the Boaty McBoatface Affair really a perversion of democracy? What if it’s actually a manifestation of how democracy tends to work in practice?

In their new book Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, the political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels gather an array of recent social-science research to challenge what they call the “folk theory” of democracy—the popular conception that “what the majority wants becomes government policy.” Abraham Lincoln’s vision of a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” may be rousing, they write, but it’s not realistic. Most voters have neither the time nor inclination to pay close attention to politics. They support parties and candidates based not on specific policy issues or coherent ideological reasoning, but rather on their social identities, partisan loyalties, and immediate circumstances—things like their race or religious affiliations, the political party they’ve backed since childhood, and the state of the economy at the time of the election.