Democracy is supposed to be rule of the people, by the people, and for the people. But in order to rule effectively, the people need political knowledge. If they know little or nothing about government, it becomes difficult to hold political leaders accountable for their performance. Unfortunately, public knowledge about politics is disturbingly low. In addition, the public also often does a poor job of evaluating the political information they do know. This state of affairs has persisted despite rising education levels, increased availability of information thanks to modern technology, and even rising IQ scores. It is mostly the result of rational behavior, not stupidity. Such widespread and persistent political ignorance and irrationality strengthens the case for limiting and decentralizing the power of government.

The Extent of Ignorance

Political ignorance in America is deep and widespread. The current government shutdown fight provides some good examples. Although Obamacare is at the center of that fight and much other recent political controversy, 44% percent of the public do not even realize it is still the law. Some 80 percent, according to a recent Kaiser survey, say they have heard “nothing at all” or “only a little” about the controversial insurance exchanges that are a major part of the law. The shutdown controversy is also just the latest manifestation of a longstanding political struggle over federal spending. But most of the public has very little idea of how federal spending is actually distributed. They greatly underestimate the percentage that goes to entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security, and vastly overestimate that spent on foreign aid. Public ignorance is not limited to information about specific policies. It also extends to the basic structure of government and how it operates. A 2006 survey found that only 42 percent can even name the three branches of the federal government: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. There is also much ignorance and confusion about such matters as which government officials are responsible for which issues. I give many more examples of public ignorance in my book.¹

Widespread ignorance is not a new phenomenon. Political knowledge has been at roughly the same low level for decades. But it is striking that knowledge levels have risen very little, if at all, despite rising educational attainment and the increased availability of information through the internet, cable news, and other modern technologies.

Rational Ignorance

Some people react to data like the above by thinking that the voters must be stupid. But political ignorance is actually rational for most of the public, including most smart people. If your only reason to follow politics is to be a better voter, that turns out not be much of a reason at all. That is because there is very little chance that your vote will actually make a difference to the outcome of an election (about 1 in 60 million in a presidential race, for example).² For most of us, it is rational to devote very little time to learning about politics, and instead focus on other activities that are more interesting or more likely to be useful. As former British Prime Minister Tony Blair puts it, “[t]he single hardest thing for a practising politician to understand is that most people, most  of the time, don’t give politics a first thought all day long. Or if they do, it is with a sigh…. before going back to worrying about the kids, the parents, the mortgage, the boss, their friends, their weight, their health, sex and rock ‘n’ roll.”³ Most people don’t precisely calculate the odds that their vote will make a difference. But they probably have an intuitive sense that the chances are very small, and act accordingly. 

In the book, I also consider why many rationally ignorant people often still bother to vote.⁴ The key factor is that voting is a lot cheaper and less time-consuming than studying political issues. For many, it is rational to take the time to vote, but without learning much about the issues at stake.

The Rational Irrationality of Political Fans

There are people who learn political information for reasons other than becoming better voters. Just as sports fans love to follow their favorite teams even if they cannot influence the outcomes of games, so there are also “political fans” who enjoy following political issues and cheering for their favorite candidates, parties, or ideologies.

Unfortunately, much like sports fans, political fans tend to evaluate new information in a highly biased way. They overvalue anything that supports their preexisting views, and to undervalue or ignore new data that cuts against them, even to the extent of misinterpreting simple data that they could easily interpret correctly in other contexts. Moreover, those most interested in politics are also particularly prone to discuss it only with others who agree with their views, and to follow politics only through like-minded media.⁵

All of this makes little sense if the goal is truth-seeking. A truth-seeker should actively seek out defenders of views opposed to their own. Those are the people most likely to present you arguments and evidence of which you were previously unaware. But such bias makes perfect sense if the goal is not so much truth as enhancing the fan experience. Economist Bryan Caplan calls this approach to information “rational irrationality”: when your purpose is something other than truth-seeking, it is often rational to be highly biased in the way you evaluate new information and also in your selection of information sources.⁶Unlike Caplan, I contend that widespread political ignorance would be a menace even if voters were always rational in their evaluation of what they know.

The problems of political ignorance and irrationality are accentuated by the enormous size and scope of modern government. In the United States, government spending accounts for close to 40% of GDP, according OECD estimates.⁷ And that does not include numerous other government policies that function through regulation of the private sector. Even if voters followed political issues more closely than they do, and even if they were more rational in their evaluation of political information, they still could not effectively monitor more than a fraction of the activities of the modern state. 

Increasing Knowledge through Education

The most obvious way to overcome political ignorance is by increasing knowledge through education. Unfortunately, political knowledge levels have increased very little over the last fifty to sixty years, even as educational attainment has risen enormously. Rising IQ scores have also failed to increase political knowledge. This suggests that increasing political knowledge through education is a lot harder than it seems.

Perhaps the solution is a better public school curriculum that puts more emphasis on civic education. The difficulty is that governments have very little incentive to ensure that public schools really do adopt curricula that increase knowledge. If the voters effectively monitored education policy and rewarded elected officials for using public schools to increase political knowledge, things might be different. But if the voters were that knowledgeable, we probably wouldn’t have a political ignorance problem to begin with. 

Moreover, political leaders and influential interest groups often use public education to indoctrinate students in their own preferred ideology rather than increase knowledge.  In both Europe (where it was established in large part to inculcate nationalism) and the United States (where a major objective was indoctrinating Catholic immigrants in true “American” values), indoctrination was one of the major motives for the establishment of public education in the first place. 

Even if public schools did begin to do a better job of teaching political knowledge and minimized indoctrination, it is hard to see how students could learn enough to understand and monitor more than a small fraction of the many complex activities of modern government. This is not to say that we shouldn’t try to use education to increase knowledge. Incremental improvements are probably possible. But if history is any guide, they are unlikely to be very large.

Shortcomings of Information Shortcuts

Some scholars argue that voters don’t need to know much about politics and government because they can rely on “information shortcuts” to make good decisions. Information shortcuts are small bits of information that we can use as proxies for larger bodies of knowledge of which we may be ignorant.

In Chapter 4 of my book, I discuss many different types of shortcuts and explain why they are usually not as effective as advocates suggest. Shortcuts can indeed be useful, and political ignorance would be an even more serious problem without them. But they also have serious limitations, and sometimes they make the problem of ignorance worse rather than better. The major flaws are that shortcuts often require preexisting knowledge to use effectively, and many people choose information shortcuts for reasons unrelated to truth-seeking.

Perhaps the most popular shortcut is “retrospective voting”: the idea that voters don’t need to follow the details of policy, but only need to know whether things are going well or badly. If things are looking up, they can reward the incumbents at election time. If not, they can vote the bums out, and the new set of bums will have a strong incentive to adopt better policies, lest they be voted out in turn.

Unfortunately, effective retrospective voting requires more knowledge than we might think. In order to reward or punish incumbents for their performance, it’s important to know what events they actually caused, and which ones were beyond their control. Studies show that voters routinely reward and punish political leaders for events they have little control over, particularly short-term economic trends. Incumbents also get rewarded or blamed for such things as droughts, shark attacks, and victories by local sports teams.

The second common shortcoming of shortcuts is that we often choose them for reasons other than getting at the truth. For example, some argue that “opinion leaders” are useful shortcuts. Instead of learning about government policy themselves, voters can follow the directions of opinion leaders who share similar values but know more  than the voters themselves do. Unfortunately, if we look at the most popular opinion leaders, most of them are not people notable for their impressive knowledge of public policy issues. They are people like Rush Limbaugh or Jon Stewart, whose main asset is their skill at entertaining their audience and validating its preexisting biases. Because there is so little incentive to actually seek the truth about political issues, it is often rational for “political fans” to choose their opinion leaders largely based on how entertaining they are, and whether they make us feel good about the views we already hold. When we choose information shortcuts in this way, it increases the likelihood that they will mislead rather than inform.

In the book, I also criticize arguments that voter errors caused by ignorance can cancel each other out through a “miracle of aggregation,” thereby creating collective wisdom out of individual ignorance. Such a happy outcome is theoretically possible, but highly unlikely in the real world.⁸

Foot Voting vs. Ballot Box Voting

There is no easy solution to the problem of political ignorance. But we can significantly mitigate it by making more of our decisions by “voting with our feet” and fewer at the ballot box. Two types of foot voting have important informational advantages over ballot box voting.  The first is when we vote with our feet in the private sector, by choosing which products to buy or which civil society organizations to join. The other is choosing what state or local government to live under in a federal system - a decision often influenced by the quality of those jurisdictions’ public policy.

If you are like most people, you probably spent more time and effort acquiring information the last time you decided which car or TV to buy than the last time you decided who to support for president. Is that because the presidency is less important than your TV, or deals with less complicated issues? More likely, it’s because when people choose a TV, they intuitively realize that the decision is likely to make a difference, whereas ballot box decisions are highly likely not to.

The key difference between foot voting and ballot box voting is that foot voters don’t have the same incentive to be rationally ignorant as ballot box voters do. In fact, they have strong incentives to seek out useful information. They also have much better incentives to objectively evaluate what they do learn. Unlike political fans, foot voters know they will pay a real price if they do a poor job of evaluating the information they get.

That doesn’t mean that foot voters are always well-informed or perfectly unbiased. Far from it. But, on average, they do a much better job than ballot box voters do. In the book, I discuss some dramatic cases of foot voters acquiring and effectively using information even under highly adverse conditions.⁹ For example, millions of poorly educated and sometimes illiterate African-Americans in the early 20th century Jim Crow South determined that conditions were relatively less oppressive in the North (and also in some parts of the South compared to others) and migrated accordingly. This, despite the fact that southern state governments deliberately tried to keep them ignorant by impeding the flow of information about opportunities in the North. Foot voting certainly did not solve all the problems of oppressed African-Americans in the Jim Crow era. Nothing could in a society as racist as early 20th century America. But it did significantly improve their situation. And it is an important example of how foot voters can effectively acquire and make use of information even under highly unfavorable conditions.

The informational advantages of foot voting over ballot box voting strengthen the case for limiting and decentralizing government. The more decentralized government is, the more issues can be decided through foot voting. It is usually much easier to vote with your feet against a local government than a state government, and much easier to do it against a state than against the federal government.

It is also usually easier to foot vote in the private sector than the public. A given region is likely to have far more private planned communities and other private sector organizations than local governments. Choosing among the former usually requires far less in the way of moving costs than choosing among the latter.

Reducing the size of government could also alleviate the problem of ignorance by making it easier for rationally ignorant voters to monitor its activities. A smaller, less complicated government is easier to keep track of.

Foot voting has downsides as well as upsides. In the book, I cover several standard objections, such as the problem of moving costs, the danger of  “races to the bottom,” and the likelihood that political decentralization might harm unpopular racial and ethnic minorities.¹⁰ Each of these concerns is sometimes a genuine problem. But I suggest that each is a less severe challenge than commonly believed. For example, moving costs can be reduced by decentralizing to lower levels of government or to the private sector, and such costs are in any case declining thanks to modern technology.

Conclusion

Political ignorance is far from the only factor that must be considered in deciding the appropriate size, scope, and centralization of government. For example, some large-scale issues, such as global warming, are simply too big to be effectively addressed by lower-level governments or private organizations. Democracy and Political Ignorance is not a complete theory of the proper role of government in society. But it does suggest that the problem of political ignorance should lead us to limit and decentralize government more than we would otherwise.

Notes

1 Ilya Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), ch. 1.

2 See Andrew Gelman, Nate Silver, and Aaron Edlin, “What is the Probability that Your Vote Will Make a Difference?” Economic Inquiry 50 (2012): 321-26.

3 Tony Blair, A Journey: My Political Life, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 70-71.

4 Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance, 66-72.

5 Ibid., 78-82.

6 Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

7 Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance, 163.

8 Ibid. 110-17. For an important recent defense of this kind of argument, see Hélène Landemore, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence and the Rule of the Many, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

9 Ibid., ch. 5.

10 Ibid, pp. 144-50.

Ilya Somin’s new book is one of the most recent and most interesting contributions to the burgeoning work on political ignorance. For a long time, voter ignorance was almost exclusively the province of political scientists. The subject attracted the interest of a few law professors writing about ballot design and the like, but the yeoman’s work was done by social scientists.

While late to the game, legal scholars like Somin have nonetheless made a distinctive contribution in this area during the last few years. Perhaps because they are less constrained by disciplinary bounds, law professors have been more inclined to write broadly about the normative and institutional implications of the empirical research than the political scientists who did the research in the first place. That’s why most of the law professors to work on these questions have ended up looking like a bit like bomb throwers. Evidence of voter ignorance raises tough questions about democracy generally and majority rule in particular. The empirical work casts doubt on whether the majority is capable of forming intelligible preferences, let alone vindicating those preferences through the ballot box.

Law is a problem-oriented field, however, and legal scholars rarely stop with the critique. Somin is no exception. The most novel arguments in his book, in fact, are the ones aimed at solving the problem of voter ignorance. Those arguments pose fundamental questions about what shape our democracy should take.

To get a sense of what’s at stake, it’s useful to juxtapose Somin’s ideas against those of another legal scholar working on the same problem – David Schleicher. Both hail from George Mason (which also houses Bryan Caplan, one of the most prominent social scientists in this area). Somin and Schleicher start with the same empirical research but end up endorsing markedly different visions of democracy: Somin wants us to treat voters as fleet foxes, while Schleicher thinks we should treat them as homebody hedgehogs.

Isaiah Berlin famously categorized thinkers as foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes, Berlin insisted, know lots of little things. Hedgehogs, in contrast, know one big thing. These two categories loosely capture the differences between Somin’s and Schleicher’s reform agendas.

Somin wants us to imagine voters as nimble and detail-oriented as foxes. After canvassing the disturbing number of things voters don’t know, he turns to what they do know: Voters know whether they’d like to live in Portandia or Fort Worth. They know whether they want to live in a neighborhood with good schools, or low taxes, or lax zoning regulations, or mass transit. Voters aren’t just able to make better judgments about these small-scale issues, on Somin’s view. They also have more incentive to acquire information about local conditions (when they move) than they have to acquire information about national policy debates (when they vote).

Somin’s voters are foxes in a second sense. They don’t just know lots of small things, á la Berlin. They are also fleet of foot. Somin argues that voters can and do move based on their preferences. All of this leads Somin to conclude that we should privilege “foot voting” over ballot-box voting.

Schleicher, in sharp contrast, sees voters as hedgehogs. Like Somin, he worries about the many things voters don’t know. But he insists that voters do know one big thing: the basic difference between the two major parties. Like many political scientists, Schleicher believes that party identification – Democrat v. Republican – provides a sensible shorthand for individuals casting a ballot. One group of political scientists explains the significance of the party heuristic in this way: If a voter “knows the big thing about the parties, he does not need to know all the little things.” (Somin doesn’t have the same faith in party heuristics, as is evident from his chapter on the “shortcomings of shorthand”).

For Schleicher, then, accountability depends on voters acting like hedgehogs. Because voters understand the difference between the national parties, Schleicher says we should trust their choices in national elections. He worries, however, that while the party heuristic helps voters hold national politicians accountable, it prevents them from holding state and local officials accountable. When people vote in state and local elections, Schleicher argues, they’re voting based on how they think the national parties have performed, which may not have much to do with local performance. Schleicher’s best evidence is the fact that state and local votes almost always mirror votes on national races. To offer a crude example, Barack Obama’s success in managing the economy doesn’t tell voters whether their mayor is doing a good job with local schools, but the shorthand people use nonetheless leads them to vote in city elections based on their views of Obama. Schleicher’s reform proposals pivot off his belief that voters know one big thing. He is interested in providing voters with a form of party identity that helps them make good decisions at every level of governance.

Schleicher’s argument meets Somin’s in another way. Somin’s fox-like voters move in order to access better policies. Schleicher’s hedgehogs, in contrast, are homebodies. While some may vote with their feet, the inexorable logic of economic need and industry concentration (agglomeration economics, in academic speak) is primarily what draws and holds people to one city or one region. It’s a classic Hirschman tradeoff between exit and voice. Schleicher thinks that exit (voting with one’s feet) is costly given economic realities. He thus wants to facilitate voice by making elections work better. Somin is skeptical that voter preference can be voiced through elections, so he wants us to make exit easier.

Framed this way, you can see how much is at stake in this debate. If Somin is right, we should treat voters as fleet foxes, and the solution to voter ignorance lies with local government law, federalism, and the judiciary. If Schleicher is correct to depict voters as homebody hedgehogs, we should look to politics and election law for solace. Somin wants us to facilitate exit, not voice, and would push us toward tightly bounded microcommunities – enclaves that can develop distinctive policy packages without interference from outsiders. Indeed, Somin doesn’t just want smaller polities, but smaller government. Schleicher’s emphasis on voice over exit suggests we should focus our efforts on large, economically bounded political communities, where there are enough political and media resources for local political identities to develop. His paradigm is New York City. There people seeking jobs in finance or the arts find themselves stuck with high taxes and a history of bad management, but politicians have the political resources to rebrand themselves as “Giuliani Republicans” or “Bloomberg Independents.”

Our choices, then, don’t just involve empirical judgments about what makes voters tick, but deep normative questions about what kind of democratic communities we want to encourage. Thanks to Somin’s vigorously argued and clearly articulated proposals, we now have a clear sense of the choices before us and, more importantly, a better understanding of why those choices matter.

It’s tempting to begin by listing the many things that I liked about Ilya Somin’s Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter. But that could easily take up all of my allotted space and wouldn’t make for a particularly interesting back-and-forth. Nevertheless, I do wish to state up front that Ilya’s book is well worth reading for anyone interested in the problem of how a democracy can cope with an electorate that isn’t particularly interested in politics. It’s lucid, original, and in many ways compelling.

Ilya’s basic argument, at least as I interpret it, runs like this: The American public is deeply ignorant about politics; this is problematic for a functioning democracy; this is unlikely to change in the future; the best and fairest way to address this is to decrease the number of functions that government performs and to encourage people to “vote with their feet.”

I’m going to focus my questions and/or critiques on the beginning of Ilya’s argument: Are American voters really ignorant, at least in ways that matter? I should acknowledge up front that a lot of what I’m about to write is addressed to varying degrees at other points in Ilya’s book, but for purposes of our discussion, it seemed best to start with the argument laid out in Ilya’s précis here.

How much knowledge does the voting public really need to have?

It appears the electorate would fare poorly in a political trivia contest. To take some examples from the 2000 American National Election Study, only about a third of voters knew the crime rate had decreased in the 1990s, only 19 percent could identify Dick Cheney’s home state (although there was some reasonable debate regarding whether it was Texas or Wyoming), only nine percent knew who Trent Lott was, and only four percent could name a second candidate for House of Representatives in their district.

As I pondered this, I realized that I couldn’t name the (admittedly obscure) candidate who ran against my own Representative in the previous cycle, despite the fact that I follow congressional elections for a living. If professional elections analysts are part of the problem, then we might be beyond any solution.

But then, why do we really care if voters don’t know where Dick Cheney is from, or who leads Great Britain? Over 70 percent of voters did know that Al Gore favored a higher level of spending than George W. Bush. In 2008, 76 percent of voters knew that Barack Obama supported a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, while 62 percent knew that John McCain had opposed such a timetable. In 2010, 77 percent of voters knew that the deficit was larger than it had been in the 1990s, and 73 percent knew that Congress had passed a health care law.

These were the key issues for most voters in these elections. Since voters only have a binary choice, it might be perfectly rational to learn only about the most salient issues, while ignoring issues like abortion or the direction of the crime rate. As for those who truly know nothing, theoretically their votes should behave randomly, cancel each other out, and leave us with an election decided by informed voters.

How confident are we in judging voters’ knowledge of policy?

One of the implicit (at times, explicit) assumptions in the book is that there’s a clear “truth” on important policy questions that we might expect informed voters to arrive at, and that uninformed voters fall short of attaining. If this were clearly true, we might well be justified in limiting the polity’s ability to engage in certain forms of legislating.

Of course, there are differences of opinion, even among elites, on many if not most important policy questions. Beyond this, we should consider the possibility that the universe of “knowable” facts on any particular policy questions dwarfs our current knowledge base.

I call this the “Theodoric of York” problem, taken from an SNL sketch from the 1970s where Steve Martin plays a medieval barber. Asked to diagnose a villager’s daughter, he replies: “Why, just fifty years ago, they thought a disease like your daughter’s was caused by demonic possession or witchcraft. But nowadays we know that Isabelle is suffering from an imbalance of bodily humors, perhaps caused by a toad or a small dwarf living in her stomach.” 

This is actually profound. I’m not sure there is a major academic discipline that hasn’t been revolutionized at least once in the past 100 years. You can’t read an old history textbook without chuckling, or groaning, at the depictions of Native Americans and our founding fathers’ virtues. Early climatologists wondered whether farming begat rainfall. Phrenology and theosophy were hot areas of “scientific” inquiry at one time or another.

More pertinently, Ilya cites the early 1930s as an instance of the public perhaps behaving rationally in its voting. But contemporaries wouldn’t have seen it that way: Raising tariffs was seen as the correct response to a recession, while following the “real bills doctrine” was seen as a no-brainer. Thirty years ago, there would have been something approaching a consensus among economists that the minimum wage hurts employment, but subsequent research has whittled away at this consensus.

Of course, we can’t forget that negative eugenics was once endorsed almost unanimously by our Supreme Court; Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famous “three generations of imbeciles are enough” quote is a chilling reminder of this.

Had public opinion polling been available in the 1920s and revealed an electorate opposed to these policies, a contemporary academic would probably have shaken his head in despair. Yet today, we would judge the average American correct in most of these instances. We like to think we’ve learned since then, but have we really?

Compared to the average American, I suspect my understanding of economics is considerably greater. Yet compare me to Paul Krugman, and my knowledge base looks a lot like that of the average American. I suspect that if we were all compared to that elusive whole body of knowledge regarding how to fix health care policy or economics, our differences would resemble those among different varieties of atoms being compared to the sun.

We like to think that we know a lot about policy and that our compatriots’ knowledge base is depressingly small. But we should have some humility about this. In the big picture our differences aren’t that great, and probably they aren’t enough to justify limiting what the electorate can opt to do.

Doesn’t The Public Get It Mostly Right?

Let’s be instrumentalists for a second. Hasn’t the public done a reasonably good job of electing leaders over our country’s lifetime? There are certainly failures, but I think those failures are the exception and not the rule.

For example, can we clearly say that Bob Dole should have been elected over Bill Clinton? Did Jimmy Carter really deserve a second term, or Michael Dukakis a first? If you have strong ideological priors, you might say “absolutely,” but from a more detached perspective, I think most people would say we’ve done pretty well in our elections.

We once had a narrow electorate comprised largely of educated landholders. Yet our ability to choose wisely doesn’t seem to have declined as we’ve moved away from that. There’s no statistically significant relationship between the passage of time and the ratings of the presidents – and the early electors had the advantage of selecting from the Founding Generation! A recent electorate might have given us Richard Nixon, but the early electors very nearly gave us President Aaron Burr.

Nor does the electorate seem to be behaving irrationally today. Instead, it seems to be employing shortcuts reasonably well. Exit polling from 2012 reveals that overwhelming numbers of liberals voted for the more liberal candidate, while conservatives, especially white conservatives, voted for the conservative candidate; moderates split their vote. People who wanted the health care law repealed backed Romney, while those who wanted to keep it backed Obama. The list goes on, but whatever process voters are employing, they seem to be at the very least selecting candidates who line up with their worldviews.

In the end, a relatively low-information electorate has helped produce one of the most prosperous, most free societies in world history. This country has adopted many policies that economists seem to deem beneficial: tax rates have fallen, deductions have been reduced, and global trade has grown. We’ve become more tolerant with regard to racial, gender, ethnic, and sexual minorities. Sometimes this has come with a push from the courts (but see Gerald Rosenberg’s The Hollow Hope), but there’s no doubt that the will of the people has played a key role as well. I might hope for a more educated populace, but at the end of the day, I’m not sure American electorate is so broken that it demands the sort of fix that Ilya suggests.

Ilya Somin’s Democracy and Political Ignorance is a welcome gust of realism in the corridors of political theory, where democracy is too often considered in the abstract, isolated from the actual traits and tendencies of democratic decision makers—that is, voters.

Ever since the 1930s, empirical research has consistently found that voters in America, and often in other countries, are far less knowledgeable about politics and policy than most people assume.¹ Once we recognize the breadth and depth of public ignorance, as Somin helps us to do, we can no longer take it for granted that elections or opinion polls express deeply considered popular “mandates.” Even if they did, the basis of a mandate in sparse (or faulty) information calls its own validity into doubt. Therefore, Somin concludes, we should shift power from collective into individual hands, where people are likelier to make better decisions.

While I wish I could endorse Somin’s book and its conclusions without reservation, they rest on an illogical and empirically discredited foundation: the theory of rational ignorance. Anyone trying to base small-government conclusions on rational-ignorance premises is building a castle on sand.

Rational ignorance theory is partly grounded in the mathematical truth that in a large electorate, the odds are extremely low that a single vote will decide an election. But this fact alone cannot explain voters’ behavior unless we assume that it is a fact of which voters are aware. Only if they know that their votes are highly unlikely to matter is it possible that they’ll decide not to invest in becoming politically well informed, since they recognize that this would be a waste of their time.

There is a libertarian payoff to this theory, since at first glance it seems that voter ignorance cannot be alleviated: no matter how hard we try to get people to pay attention to politics, it would be irrational for them to do so. Because ignorance is baked into democratic government, we should reduce the power of democratic governments, other things equal.

However, the libertarian conclusion does not follow from the rational ignorance premise. Rational ignorance theory blames public ignorance on the low incentive to become a well-informed voter. Raise the incentives and you solve the problem. One way to raise the incentives would be to make government far more powerful than it now is, so that everyone had a much higher stake in electoral outcomes.Another solution would be to turn state power over to highly knowledgeable experts who would be fired or even fined if their policies didn’t work.

Fortunately, such solutions are not advisable, because the theory of rational ignorance is false. Somin provides no evidence that many voters are aware of the likely insignificance of their vote, and there is overwhelming evidence against it.

Part of the evidence is on page 74 of Somin’s book, where it emerges that 70 percent of American voters think that their individual votes “really matter.” Unfortunately, by page 74 Somin is explicating rational ignorance theory and doesn’t step back to notice the devastating implications of this datum for the theory’s key premise: that voters know that their votes aren’t likely to matter. Similarly, the Citizen Participation Study shows that 89 percent of voters say that influencing government policy is either a very important or a somewhat important reason for having voted, which would hardly make sense if they understood the utter insignificance of each vote in a sea of tens of millions of other votes.² Finally, if you don’t trust opinion polls, there is the fact that 100 percent of voters vote. Why would they do this if they thought their votes inconsequential?³

The fact that voters vote despite the astronomical odds against their votes being decisive is what political scientists call the paradox of voting. As a leading scholar of public opinion (himself a rational choice theorist) once put it, this is “the paradox that ate rational choice theory”—including rational ignorance theory.⁴ Voters who know that their votes are unlikely to matter should not only fail to inform themselves politically; they should also fail to vote. The fact that voters vote, along with the polls showing that they think their votes do matter, indicates that the premise of rational ignorance theory is false.

That is hardly surprising. We grow up in a democratic culture suffused with voting, starting in kindergarten, and at every step of the way we’re bombarded by propaganda assuring us that every vote counts. People tend to believe what they’re told unless it’s challenged and challenged early. But most people have never heard the challenge posed by economists and political scientists, such as Somin, who have calculated the infinitesimal chance that a vote will “count.” I’ve never taught a political science course in which more than one or two students had even heard of the idea that one’s vote may not be decisive (something that is hardly “intuitive,” as Somin claims: it took economists until 1957 to figure it out).⁵ It’s not that most students have “overestimated” the odds that their vote will be decisive;⁶ it’s that they’ve never even asked themselves the question. The whole issue of the decisiveness of their vote is an unknown unknown for them.

Somin’s solution to the paradox of voting only deepens the problems for rational ignorance. He constructs formulae showing that if a voter (1) attributes a high enough benefit to his party’s or candidate’s election, (2) multiplies this benefit by a high enough estimate of his chance of affecting the outcome, and then (3) subtracts from this benefit the cost of voting as compared to the cost of becoming politically well informed, he will conclude that going to the polls is worthwhile but that becoming well informed (which Somin assumes will be more expensive than the cost of voting) is not. So voters’ calculations, conducted at an “intuitive” level,⁷ tell them to vote, but to vote ignorantly.

Let’s set aside the implausibility of this scenario given that there’s no evidence that it has even occurred to most voters that their votes may be inconsequential. There is also a problem of pure logic. If voters can plug into Somin’s formulae even a vague estimate of the benefit of their party’s or candidate’s victory, then they must think that they know enough about this benefit to be able base their vote on this knowledge. Somin and other political scientists may think that voters should know a lot more than they do, but voters seem to think, even in Somin’s account, that they know enough that they can roughly guess who to vote for. And that’s all they need to know if they are to falsify rational ignorance theory, for, according to the theory, they should be deliberately underinforming themselves. But if they did indeed deliberately underinform themselves (by their own standards), then, of necessity, they wouldn’t be able to calculate the benefits of voting, because they wouldn’t think that they could predict the benefits of a given candidate’s or party’s victory.

It seems to me that this logical truth is fatal to rational ignorance theory, which not only assumes that voters know that their votes probably won’t matter, but also assumes that, in consequence, voters deliberately fail to inform themselves adequately—not adequately according to Somin, or adequately when judged against a standard of perfect knowledge, but adequately enough to be able to vote for one candidate rather than another.

Many voters doubtless realize that they are less than “fully” informed. We all know we could spend more time reading newspapers, etc. But that would be true even if we devoted all of our time and energy to following politics: in politics, as in everything else, there is always more to learn. What matters for rational ignorance theory is whether voters deliberately choose not to inform themselves enough (by their own standards of adequacy). But if they are able to choose one candidate, party, or ballot proposition over the others, then they must think they have information adequate to this task.

My argument could be falsified if voters flipped a coin after closing the voting curtain. Then we could reasonably conclude that they knew they were too underinformed to make a rational choice between the candidates. Surely on obscure propositions and minor offices, many voters do flip a coin—or refuse to cast a vote. But rational ignorance theory cannot explain what Somin is trying to explain: hundreds of millions of nonrandom votes on important matters.

Somin anticipates this line of argument by attributing another intuition to his supposedly ignorant voters (whose gut feelings seem to more than compensate for their lack of knowledge): the intuition that “to be an adequately informed voter, it might help to know the names of the opposing candidates, the major policies adopted by the government in recent years, and which officials are responsible for which issues.”⁸ Somin is saying that since everyone recognizes that they need to know such things in order to cast an intelligent vote, voters (who don’t usually know these things) must have concluded that voting intelligently isn’t worthwhile. But once again, survey data suggest that Somin is mistaken. For example, in a Pew poll taken in July 2012 (a full four months before the election), 90% of the respondents said they already knew what they needed to know about Obama in order to decide how to vote, and 69% said they knew what they needed to know about Romney.⁹ Clearly Somin’s criteria for being adequately informed are higher than most voters’ criteria. This means that they aren’t deliberately underinforming themselves.

One can easily confirm this fact by talking to ordinary voters, who are well aware that they aren’t omniscient but who have political opinions anyway. The same goes for Somin’s wholesale adoption of the theory of “rational irrationality”¹⁰ to analogize highly informed ideologues to sports fans who, for the sheer fun of it, willfully ignore unfriendly arguments and evidence. If one actually talks to ideologues, one finds find that they firmly believe they’re in possession of the obvious truth. The reason they dismiss counterarguments and counterevidence is that they think such arguments and evidence are implausible: they contradict things that any sane person knows to be true.

In both ignorant voters and dogmatic ideologues we have a good starting point for a truly realistic theory of politics. If voters don’t think they need to know very much if they’re to cast adequately informed ballots, they must think that our society is a mighty simple place, where it doesn’t take much information to be able to identify good policies and good politicians. The same is true of ideologues, who treat their views as reflections of obvious truths about society. (I know Somin would agree with me that modern society is more complicated than that, since he brilliantly demolishes as simplistic many decisionmaking heuristics commonly used by voters.)

That society is too complex to yield easy political answers is the most important fact of which most voters seem to be ignorant. But if so, it is not because they have calculated that it would be a waste of time to learn that society is more complicated than they think it is. It is because the complexity of modern society is, to them, an unknown unknown.

 Notes

I would like to start by thanking Heather Gerken for her thoughtful response to my lead essay and book. Gerken raises two important potential criticisms of my argument that people make better decisions through foot voting than ballot box voting. First, she contends that knowledge of the two major parties’ positions can enable otherwise ignorant voters to make good decisions at the ballot box. Second, building on the important work of my colleague David Schleicher, she worries that foot voting may often be too difficult because of moving costs.

These are legitimate points, and I address both at some length in my book.[1] On balance, however, neither seriously undermines the informational advantages of foot voting over ballot box voting. 

Parties

Party labels are often a useful information shortcut. By knowing that Candidate X is a Democrat or Republican, voters can also know a good deal about his or her positions on various issues, even if they know nothing else about that person. Unfortunately, this is not enough for voters to make an informed decision at the ballot box. Even if a voter has excellent information about the policies a given candidate will pursue in office, it is also important to have some idea of the likely effects of those policies. If a given party runs on a platform of  helping American industry by increasing protectionism, or  making the streets safer by ramping up the War on Drugs, is that actually likely to help the economy or reduce crime? Voters ignorant of basic aspects of politics and economics (as most often are) are poorly equipped to answer such questions. For example, polls show that the majority of the public believes that protectionism helps the economy, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary endorsed by economists across the political spectrum.

Even if the party information shortcut does help voters make good choices between the platforms offered by the Republicans and Democrats, those platforms themselves would likely be different and better if the public were less severely ignorant about policy. Parties choose their platforms at least in large part to maximize their chances of winning elections. Platforms that effectively appeal to a generally ignorant electorate are likely to be different from – and of lower quality – than those that might appeal to a much better-informed one. Scholars such as economist Bryan Caplan and political scientist Scott Althaus find that there are huge differences between the views of well informed and poorly informed voters, even after controlling for a wide range of other variables, such as race, gender, income, and ideology.[2]

In addition, voters often do a poor job of figuring out the positions of the parties themselves, often overlooking even major shifts in their stances. For example, over the last forty years, the public has barely altered at all in its perceptions of the ideologies of the two parties, despite such major developments as the rise of Reagan and the New Right, Bill Clinton’s centrist “New Democrat” platform,  the ascendancy of Barack Obama in the Democratic Party, the growing influence of the Tea Party movement since 2009, and others.

In one important respect parties actually make the problem of political ignorance and irrationality worse rather than better. Many voters develop strong party loyalties that skew their perceptions of reality. For example, Republicans tend to overestimate the rate of inflation and unemployment when there is a Democrat in the White House, and they underestimate it when the president is a Republican. Democrats have the opposite bias.[3] Rather than judge parties by their records, partisans judge records by their feelings about the party in power.  Obviously, swing voters usually don’t have such strong partisan biases. But swing voters are also the least knowledgeable about politics and public policy in general.[4]

Gerken interestingly contrasts my “fox”-like view that informed voting requires knowledge of a range of issues with the “hedgehog” view that all voters need to know is the difference between the two parties. It’s worth noting that Philip Tetlock’s important research on the predictive accuracy of policy experts shows that “fox” experts who take many variables into account make far more accurate judgments than “hedgehogs” who focus only on one or two big ideas.[5]  Voters obviously don’t need to know as much as policy experts. But narrowly focused hedgehog decisionmaking is unlikely to work well even for them. It is especially problematic in a world where government addresses such an enormous range of complex issues. Hedgehog voters and hedgehog policy experts might do better if the functions of government were fewer and simpler.

Foot Voting and Moving Costs

Gerken is absolutely right to point out that foot voting often involves significant moving costs. This is indeed an important constraint. But it is far from prohibitive. In the modern United States, some 43% of Americans have moved between states at least once in their lives, and  63% have at  least made moves within a state (usually switching local governments in the process).[6] Migrations towards states and localities with relatively more effective governments  and away from dysfunctional ones are quite common. The poorly governed city of Detroit’s massive loss of population  over the last several decades is a particularly dramatic example.

In addition, much can be done to reduce those costs further. [7]  By decentralizing power to local as opposed to state governments, we can offer foot voters a wider range of options within a relatively short geographic distance. In this way, people can vote with their feet without having to give up job opportunities, social ties, or the benefits of “agglomeration” stressed in David Schleicher’s work.[8] Some unusually large jurisdictions, such as Los Angeles or New York City, could potentially be broken up into several smaller cities in order to facilitate foot voting by residents and prevent any one local government from gaining monopoly power.  The same point also applies to unusually large states, such as Texas or California, though state boundaries are politically far more difficult to rearrange than local government boundaries. Heather Gerken herself has done excellent work on the benefits of pushing federalism “all the way down” to the local level.[9] My own work reinforces her case.

Moving costs can be reduced still further by leaving more issues to be decided through the private sector rather than the public. In the market and civil society, people can often switch service providers without having to move at all. Over 50 million Americans already live in private planned communities, which provide many services traditionally associated with local governments. Moving between private planned communities is not costless, but it is far easier than moving between cities or states.

We cannot decentralize or privatize all of the functions of government. Some problems are so large that they can only be effectively addressed at the national level – or even the global one. We also cannot completely eliminate moving costs. But many of the world’s best-governed nations – such as Denmark, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Singapore, are much smaller than many US states, and, in the latter two cases, even many American cities.  This suggests that we can do a great deal of decentralization without losing much in the way of beneficial economies of scale.

My book does not offer a complete theory of federalism, or of the role of government more generally. But the informational advantages of foot voting are a good justification for shrinking and decentralizing the state more than we might otherwise.

I would like to thank Sean Trende for his kind words and thoughtful analysis. Sean offers three important criticisms of the argument advanced in Democracy and Political Ignorance: that voters know enough to make good decisions on really important issues, that they can make good choices between the two options on offer in major elections, and that the historical success of American democracy suggests that political ignorance may not be such a serious problem. Each of these points has some merit. But each is overstated. Political ignorance does not prevent voters from making good decisions in some important situations. But it does make the performance of democracy a lot worse than it would be otherwise.

Voter Knowledge on the Big Issues

Sean emphasizes that even if voters are often ignorant, they usually at least understand the big issues in an election. This is sometimes true, but far less often than he supposes. For example, Sean cites the 2010 midterm election as one where the voters were well-informed about big issues. According to the majority of Americans at the time, the most important issue was the state of the economy. Yet preelection polls showed that 67% of voters did not even realize that the economy had grown rather than shrunk during the previous year. The majority also did not know the basics of the 2009 stimulus bill, the most important policy adopted by the Obama administration to try to promote economic recovery. Moreover, a plurality believed that the 2008 bailout of major banks enacted to try to contain the financial crisis and recession that occurred that year – had been enacted under Obama rather than under President George W. Bush (only 34% knew the correct answer).1

As Sean notes, over 70% of the public in 2010 did know that Congress had recently passed a health care reform law. But polls throughout 2009 and 2010 repeatedly showed that most of the public had little understanding of what was actually included in that law. As I noted in my lead essay, extensive public ignorance about Obamacare persists to this day, even though it has been a high-profile political issue for years. Knowing that Congress has passed a health care reform law is only of very limited utility if you don’t know what the law does. This kind of ignorance about major issues was far from unique to 2010. There was comparable ignorance in numerous other elections, some of which I discuss in detail in the book. 

In addition, ignorance sometimes dictates what voters consider to be important issues in the first place. For example, as I noted in the lead essay, most of the public greatly underestimates the percentage of federal spending that goes to entitlement programs, while overestimating that which goes to foreign aid. A public better-informed on these issues would likely put a higher priority on entitlement reform.

Voters don’t always get every issue wrong. To the contrary, they do get some important things right, especially if the issue is relatively simple and if the incumbents have committed some major error whose effects are obvious even to relatively ignorant voters. One such case, noted by Sean, was the onset of the Great Depression in the early 1930s, when the voters justifiably punished Herbert Hoover and the Republican Party for their poor performance. But even in that instance, voter ignorance then led the public to support a number of severely misguided policies over the next few years, including the cartelization of much of the economy in ways that raised prices for the poor and increased unemployment relative to what they would have been otherwise. And in most cases, the relative success or failure of the incumbent party is much less glaring than it was in 1932.

Sean is right that some issues are complicated enough that even highly knowledgeable voters are likely to make mistakes. But knowing basic facts about the issues is likely to at least reduce the error rate substantially, even if it cannot eliminate all errors. Moreover, on many issues the public persists in serious errors that the vast majority of knowledgeable experts on both sides of the political spectrum condemn. For example, economists overwhelmingly agree that free trade is good for the economy, yet the majority of the public consistently believes otherwise. Similarly, both liberal and conservative economists oppose our massive system of farm subsidies, which mostly reward large agribusinesses. Yet these subsidies persist and grow, in part because much of the public is unaware of what they do, and in part because majority opinion believes that we might experience food shortages without them.

The Binary Choice Fallacy

Sean also argues that voters only need sufficient knowledge to make good choices between the options put before them by the major parties. In the book, I call this commonly advanced argument the “binary choice fallacy,” because it relies on the false assumption that all voters do is choose between two preset alternatives. As I spelled out more fully in my response to Heather Gerken, the argument is a fallacy because the candidates and platforms put forward by the major parties are themselves heavily influenced by voter ignorance. If the public were more knowledgeable, the parties would have strong incentives to put forward better candidates and policies.

Even in their choices between the candidates and parties actually on offer in particular elections, I am less confident than Sean that the electorate usually makes the right decision. I don’t have the time and space get into the relative merits of specific elections and candidates. But, at the very least, the wisdom of many of the public’s binary decisions in recent elections is far from clear.

Like some other scholars, Sean suggests that, even if many voters are ignorant, the mistakes of the ignorant will cancel each other out, thereby allowing more knowledgeable voters to determine electoral outcomes. This is a theoretically possible result. But, it rarely happens in practice. In reality, the effects of ignorance are usually not random, but systematic. On a host of issues – including major economic and social policy questions – the views of relatively more informed voters are hugely different from those of relatively ignorant ones, even after controlling for other relevant variables, such as age, race, sex, and partisan identification.²

Political Ignorance in American History 

Sean’s most far-reaching claim is that the relative historic success of the United States suggests that voter ignorance is not such a big problem. This raises so many major issues that I can’t even begin to do justice to them in a brief post. But here are a few relevant points.

In calling the United States successful, we have to ask, “relative to what?” The answer, of course, is relative to other nations, nearly all of which are either democracies that also suffer form problems caused by political ignorance, or dictatorships. I do not deny that dictatorships are, on average, much worse than democracies.³ But the relative superiority of the United States compared to dictatorships and most other democracies is not relevant to the issue I raise in the book: whether democracies would suffer less damage from political ignorance if they limited and decentralized their governments more than they do at present.

During most of its history, the U.S. government was both more limited and more decentralized than most other democracies. The large size, limited central government, and numerous diverse jurisdictions of the United States gave Americans numerous opportunities to vote with their feet. And the informational superiority of foot voting over ballot box voting is, of course, a central thesis of my book. Extensive opportunities for foot voting, rather than ballot box voting, historically made the United States unusual.

Despite America’s relative success, there are numerous historical cases where American voters committed terrible mistakes in large part because of political ignorance. For many decades, the majority of white Americans supported first slavery and later segregation in part because they were badly misguided in their views of the likely consequences of giving blacks equal rights. More recently, public ignorance about the nature of homosexuality was a major factor in promoting widespread discrimination against gays and lesbians. Ignorance of basic economics contributed to public support for numerous protectionist laws, including the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which significantly exacerbated the Great Depression. These and other well-known examples merely scratch the surface. Scholars have only begun to document the historical impact of voter ignorance on public policy.

Sean could point out, correctly, that many of these ignorance-induced policies enjoyed substantial support among knowledgeable elites as well. However, in nearly all of the cases where we have relevant survey data, more knowledgeable people were significantly less likely to support harmful policies. Survey data going back to the 1930s and 40s shows that more knowledgeable whites were more likely to be racially tolerant. In recent decades, more knowledgeable heterosexuals have been more tolerant of gays and lesbians. Knowledgeable voters are also more likely to oppose protectionism, and they have been for decades. If we had better data on 19th century public opinion, I strongly suspect that more knowledgeable voters would have been more likely to, for example, support abolitionism and equal rights for women. In these and many other cases, a more knowledgeable electorate would likely have made fewer egregious errors and corrected those it did make faster. 

In sum, it is certainly true that an ignorant electorate can still sometimes make good decisions. But all too often, widespread voter ignorance is not good enough for government work.

Notes

1 For data on these three instances of political ignorance in 2010, see Ilya Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 22

2 I criticize this and other “miracle of aggregation” arguments in much greater detail in the book. See ibid., pp. 109-17.

3 Ibid., 8-9, 103-04.   

In his critique of my book, Jeffrey Friedman continues his longstanding efforts to show that most political ignorance is inadvertent rather than rational. In his view, voters are ignorant because they believe our society “is a mighty simple place” and “think they have information adequate to [the] task.” They simply don’t realize there is lots of other information out there that could help them make better decisions.

Friedman is a top-notch political theorist who has made valuable contributions to the literature on political knowledge.¹ But on this point, I think he is barking up the wrong tree.² Moreover, the mistake is of more than theoretical importance. Inadvertent ignorance has very different implications for political theory than rational ignorance.

Inadvertent Error Cannot Explain the Sheer Depth and Persistence of Political Ignorance. 

Inadvertent error might explain why voters ignore highly abstruse (though potentially relevant) bodies of knowledge. But it cannot account for widespread ignorance of very basic facts about politics and public policy. For example, as I noted in my response to Sean Trende, two-thirds of the public in 2010 did not know that the economy had grown rather than shrunk during the previous year, even though most said that the economy was the single most important issue in the election. Similarly, most had little if any understanding of the Obama health care plan, another major issue. If you think the economy or the president’s health care plan is the biggest issue on the public agenda, it isn’t rocket science to figure out that these basic facts are highly relevant. Yet the majority of the public is often ignorant of such basics.³

The inadvertence theory also cannot explain why political knowledge levels have remained largely stagnant for decades, despite massive increases in education and in the availability of information through the media and modern technology, such as the Internet. These developments have made it much harder for voters to remain unaware of the reality that there are vast bodies of knowledge out there that are likely to be helpful in making political decisions. Americans have been quick to take advantage of these technological developments in their capacity as private sector consumers. But not, for the most part, in their role as voters. This is a striking divergence that the inadvertence theory cannot account for, but rational ignorance easily can.

Friedman argues that his theory is supported by polls showing that most voters thought they had sufficient information to make a decision in recent elections. But this ignores the reality that the amount of knowledge we consider enough to make a relatively unimportant decision is often much smaller than what we consider enough to make an important one. I think I have enough information to conclude that The Hunger Games was probably the best movie of 2012, even though I haven’t even watched most of its competitors. But that’s in large part because I know that the correctness of my opinion on this issue isn’t very important. If I were solely responsible for deciding who should win the Oscar for Best Picture, I would study the issue much more carefully.

Friedman’s theory implies that the average voter would not bother to acquire significantly more information about politics if he suddenly learned that he would be part of a small committee tasked with picking the next president of the United States. I think the vast majority of people would take the decision a lot more seriously if that were the case, and would spend a lot more time learning and evaluating political information. Jurors who make decisions in small groups where each vote matters greatly perform better than voters in part for this very reason.⁴

In making decisions that are likely to have only a small effect, people naturally set lower standards of informational adequacy than in making decisions that are likely to make a big difference. Given limited time and cognitive ability, we have to make such tradeoffs all the time. Friedman assumes that people who choose to limit their acquisition of information would also take care not to form opinions on issues where there knowledge is very limited. But in fact, it is perfectly rational to form opinions on the basis of small amounts of information in cases where the cost of error is low.

This key distinction also explains why many people choose to vote, but do not choose to learn very much about the issues they are voting on. Voting usually requires very little time and effort, while studying more than minimal amounts of political information requires a lot. People with a modest sense of “civic duty” are willing to spend modest amounts of time and effort on activities that have only a small chance of making a difference. But, given the odds, they are unlikely to make big sacrifices or to set high informational standards.

Friedman suggests that most people can’t possibly be rationally ignorant about politics because the theory of rational ignorance was only developed by economist Anthony Downs in 1957, and to this day it is known by few nonexperts. But, like many economic theories, rational ignorance is simply a formalization of an intuition that people routinely apply in their everyday lives. People exploited comparative advantage in trade long before economists formalized that theory. Similarly, long before 1957, people learned to prioritize some types of information acquisition over others based on the likelihood that learning it would make a difference. The value of these formal theories lies not in giving counterintuitive advice to individual voters or consumers, but in their nonobvious implications for the large-scale operations of economic and political systems.

The Rationality of “Political Fans” 

The same weaknesses that undermine Friedman’s critique of rational ignorance theory also undercut his critique of “rational irrationality” – the idea that people might rationally do a poor job of evaluating the political information they learn. Just as sports fans evaluate information in a way that is highly biased in favor of their favorite teams, “political fans” do so in a way that is biased in favor of their preferred party, candidate, or ideology.

Friedman protests that, unlike “sports fans who, for the sheer fun of it, willfully ignore unfriendly arguments and evidence,” ideologues “firmly believe they’re in possession of the obvious truth. The reason they dismiss counterarguments and counterevidence is that they think such arguments and evidence are implausible: they contradict things that any sane person knows to be true.” But if you talk to a dedicated sports fan, you will often find that he believes it’s “the obvious truth” that a disputable referee’s call that went against his team must be wrong, or that his favorite player is the best in the league, regardless of evidence to the contrary. Both sports fans and political fans tend to be dogmatic and closed-minded in large part because seeking truth is not the main reason why they chose to pursue these activities in the first place. Instead, they have motives such as entertainment, confirming their preexisting views, enjoying the camraderie of fellow fans, and so on.

That does not mean that either type of fan deliberately endorses conclusions they know to be false. With rare exceptions, fans sincerely believe that their opinions are true, often even “obviously” so. But in reaching this conclusion, they make little effort to objectively evaluate the relevant data, seek out opposing points of view, or otherwise behave as genuine truth-seekers do. Like information acquisition, objective evaluation of information requires time and effort. In addition, it can result in great psychological pain if it leads a fan to question cherished preexisting beliefs or reach conclusions that diverge from those of friends, family, and fellow fans. Even just reading opposing viewpoints can be unpleasant. Conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently said that he stopped reading the liberal Washington Post because it made him “upset every morning.” Numerous liberal political fans tend to avoid conservative publications for similar reasons.

Most people understandably prefer to avoid all that effort and pain unless there is some substantial offsetting benefit. Many of us have thoughts that we would rather not think, and information that we avoid because we would prefer not to know. When the truth might hurt, we are less likely to seek it out, and more likely to seize on any excuse for denying it.

Why it Matters 

Widespread political ignorance is a menace regardless of whether it is rational or inadvertent. But the difference between the two explanations for it matters. Inadvertent ignorance is a much easier problem to address than rational ignorance.

We could probably make a major dent in the former simply by pointing out to people that they are overlooking potentially valuable information. Just as warnings about the dangers of smoking convinced many people to quit, and warnings about the dangers of AIDS and other STDs increased the use of contraceptives, so warnings about the dangers of political ignorance and suitably targeted messages about the complexity of political issues could persuade inadvertently ignorant voters to seek out more information. It could also lead them to be more objective in evaluating that information.

With rational ignorance and rational irrationality, by contrast, such simple solutions are far less likely to work. Rationally ignorant people choose not to acquire new knowledge because the incentive to do so is weak, not because they are blissfully unaware of the possibility that additional knowledge could improve the quality of their voting decisions.

As Friedman points out, decentralizing and limiting government is not the only possible solution to rational ignorance. I devote an entire chapter of my book to considering other approaches, and explaining why they are less promising.⁵ Still, in weighing competing options, it helps to know what kind of problem we are trying to solve.

I don’t doubt, of course, that some political ignorance is inadvertent. Even the most careful truth-seekers sometimes overlook important information by mistake. But the magnitude and persistence of political ignorance and bias is more readily explained by rational behavior.

Notes

1 See, e.g., Jeffrey Friedman and Wladimir Kraus, Engineering the Financial Crisis, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

2 I give a more detailed critique of Friedman’s theory in Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 71-77.

3 I give many other examples in Ibid., ch. 1.

4 See Ilya Somin, “Jury Ignorance and Political Ignorance,” William and Mary Law Review (forthcoming), available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2312806.

5 Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance, ch. 7.

Before saying a bit about Ilya’s defense of rational ignorance theory, I want to keep the big picture in view. I pointed out that the “paradox” that people vote casts serious doubt on rational ignorance theory, because the premise of the theory is that people know that their votes are unlikely to matter. However, sometimes we are lucky enough to move from having serious doubts about a theory to being able to falsify it. Rational ignorance theory is falsified by the fact that 70 percent of voters say that they think their individual votes are “really important,” as I noted in my earlier post. Moreover, as I noted, 89 percent say that influencing government policy is an important reason for their vote. If these findings do not falsify rational ignorance theory, what would?

There is also the fact that voters don’t vote randomly for major offices. That might seem to be an arcane point, but it demonstrates that people think they know enough to make a good choice. If they think they know enough, despite not knowing what (say) Ilya thinks they ought to know, then we have all the explanation we need of why they are (in Ilya’s judgment) poorly informed: in effect, they disagree with him about the information that is adequate to decide, for example, who the president should be. Non-random voting is an airtight falsification of rational ignorance theory.

Finally, it should not be forgotten that there is no evidence for the theory whatsoever. There is no reason to think that people know their votes don’t matter, and the fact that both their actions (voting) and their survey responses show that they do think their votes matter should be enough for us to retire rational ignorance theory once and for all.

Ilya’s responses to these points strike me as being like the epicycles that defenders of the geocentric view of the universe came up with to account for anomalies. Gut-level intuitions that are groundlessly attributed to voters play a huge role in keeping these epicycles spinning. According to Ilya, voters must intuit that their votes don’t matter; and they must realize that they should know the things Ilya thinks they should know about important issues; such that the only reason they don’t know these things must be that they realize that learning these things is too costly, given the insignificance of their vote. I suppose we have to attribute this occult knowledge to voters if we insist on defending rational ignorance theory, but the simpler course would be to admit that people can form opinions on the basis of what others consider to be insufficient knowledge without themselves thinking that their knowledge is insufficient.

Justice Scalia, for example, simply says that the bias of the Washington Post upset him. This is completely consistent with my account, according to which people refuse to take the other side seriously because they think the other side is, to be blunt, full of it. But Ilya (as I read him) misinterprets Scalia as saying that what upset him when he used to read the Post was that it contained information he would rather avoid, truths that might hurt. Here Ilya is attributing to Scalia not just the intuition that reading the other side is likely to reveal information that’s devastating to his own side, but the actual knowledge that this is the case, such that Scalia is deliberately insulating himself from what he knows to be the important truths found in the pages of The Washington Post. This, I think, is absurd.

There’s a lesson here. Despite its name, rational ignorance theory is really a theory of something like omniscience. (Note the parallel to mainstream neoclassical assumptions of perfect knowledge.) According to the theory, everyone knows the one really important thing about politics—that their vote doesn’t matter—even though nobody is taught this outside a few economics and political science classrooms. Everyone knows that they don’t know enough about politics or policy to form intelligent opinions. Everyone knows they have learned a biased sample of information that is skewing their judgment. And what do we do about the fact that people deny all of these things in both their deeds and their words? For example, how do we study ideologues who claim that they do know what they other side has to say, but that they find it so patently absurd that they refuse to waste any more time listening to it? We ignore their deeds and their words, because we know that they know better. I don’t see much scope here for genuine investigation. The theory contains all the knowledge we need about political ignorance, a priori.

Many of Ilya’s responses are variations on the theme that people could learn more about politics (if they were sufficiently motivated), but it is not as if I disagree. That people could learn more about politics means that they are politically ignorant, and I was one of the first political theorists to make a big deal out of that very fact.[1] In the two ensuing decades, I’ve turned the journal I edit, Critical Review, into the leading scholarly forum for considering the implications of political ignorance. But since it simply isn’t true that people’s political ignorance is due to their knowledge that their votes don’t matter, we need a better explanation.

I now see that calling my explanation “inadvertent ignorance” can be misleading. Inadvertent ignorance, as I use the term, is not accidental. Inadvertent ignorance comes about when one thinks that one has reached the right conclusions, so that whatever else one might learn is unlikely to overturn them. So one more or less deliberately chooses to be ignorant only of things that one assumes are likely to be unimportant. What is accidental here is that one may thus be inadvertently choosing to be ignorant of particular things that, if one had known them, would have changed one’s mind.

For someone who thinks he already has a handle on the political truth, the problem is unknown unknowns: facts that, if he knew them, would change his political conclusions. Nobody deliberately chooses to err, or to forego the opportunity to learn something that would keep him from erring. But if he’s going to learn something that will help him avoid an error, he first has to think there’s a real likelihood that learning this or that, or reading this or that newspaper, will have such an effect. In the case at hand, he has to think that if he learns more about politics by reading a certain newspaper or consulting some other source, what he learns has a good chance of contradicting everything he thinks he already knows (about, for example, those selfish, mean-spirited Republicans or those perfidious, freedom-hating Democrats). To learn more about public policy, he’d have to think that doing so would likely reveal something (e.g., an unintended consequence) that refutes the desirability of a policy that he thinks is obviously necessary because it is intended to solve a pressing problem. The better term for my theory, then, which I shamelessly borrow from Austrian economics, is “radical” ignorance. If we don’t know the value of what we don’t know, we have no reason to learn it.

In the face of radical ignorance, it is simply irrelevant that people are bombarded now with more information than ever through education and the Internet. Easing people’s access to more political information by making it free isn’t going to interest them if they think they already know enough. However, the plummeting cost of political information does cause problems for rational ignorance theory, since the theory claims that political ignorance is based on a cost-benefit calculation about the value of learning more about politics. If the cost drops, so should the level of ignorance.

Finally, I agree with Ilya that if one is asked to justify her conclusions to others, such as other members of a jury or the entire population of the United States, she would be likely to bone up on whatever information those other people might find important. But that doesn’t mean that people deliberately inform themselves inadequately about politics. That they think they are adequately informed to justify their political conclusions to themselves (i.e., to establish their truth, not to establish their truth in a way that will persuade others) is shown by the fact that they vote non-randomly, and by the fact that they say that their votes are really important in affecting public policy.

Note, however, that Ilya’s examples here show how rational ignorance theory leads to technocratic conclusions. The high incentive to “get things right” that comes with making very important decisions is, in his view, sufficient. In that case, it stands to reason that we should turn government over to highly visible experts and give them every incentive not to err. In my view, however, technocracy is no solution at all, because the problem is not ignorance caused by low incentives; it is ignorance caused by the illusion that one’s existing set of information suffices to understand a complex society. “Experts” are even more susceptible to this illusion than ordinary citizens are, because their sets of information are larger.

Ilya’s excellent response to the issues I raised in my initial post deserves a thorough reply.  I’ll spend some time in the weeds before pulling back and examining some more “big picture” issues that I think are at the heart of our discussion.  In particular, I think we need to explore the question of just when voter ignorance becomes problematic enough that it would justify the restriction of the public’s ability to legislate certain tasks.

Before that, though, it is worth spending some time on the question of how ignorant the public is, and how much it matters.  Ilya lays out a number of concrete examples of voter ignorance.  I don’t find them as bothersome as he does.

For example, in the 2010 elections, Ilya points out that 67 percent of voters didn’t understand that the economy had grown rather than shrunk in the previous year. But again, I have to ask, how much does this matter? I would say very little, if at all. What voters were likely expressing was the same sentiment conveyed in the Allstate commercial from 2008 (before the collapse), where Dennis Haysbert, the actor who played the president on 24, comments “if this isn’t a recession, it sure feels like one.”

Even though the economy wasn’t shrinking, the fact that wages were stagnant, overall unemployment was high, and home prices were depressed probably felt functionally like a shrinking economy to most people. In other words, even if voters didn’t have the economic language to specify just how bad or not-bad the economy was, they understood that the economy was fairly lousy, a sentiment hardly anyone would have disagreed with. 

One could argue that a voter needs to know the rate of GDP growth to get the correct policy prescription; the degree of stimulus that is appropriate is directly related to GDP. And indeed, Ilya points out that Americans didn’t even know much about the composition of the stimulus, notwithstanding their professed revulsion toward it.

But implicit in the idea that Americans need this sort of knowledge is the assumption that there is a “right” answer for Americans to reach. As I noted in my first piece, I think that is often a flawed assumption.  Even in this instance, we see evidence of disagreement among economists. The University of Chicago School of Business regularly gathers together a number of top-notch economists from across the political spectrum and asks them to answer questions and then assign a degree of certainty to their answer on a scale from one to ten.

In Feb. 2012, they asked their economists to agree or disagree that “[t]aking into account all of the [stimulus]’s economic consequences … the benefits of the stimulus will end up exceeding its costs.”  Here, only 12 percent would strongly agree, 39 percent disagreed or had no opinion, and even some rather high profile supporters of the stimulus expressed uncertainty; Austan Goolsbee agreed, but was only a “five” when it came to certainty. How could Americans have gotten this “wrong,” if we’re not really certain what the right answer was?

Ilya also points out that a plurality of voters didn’t realize that the 2008 bank bailout had begun under President Bush rather than President Obama. This is more disconcerting at first, but we again ask ourselves, does it matter? President Obama supported TARP, voted for it, and asked President Bush to authorize the second round of it.  If Obama had been a staunch TARP opponent and Americans had nevertheless believed that he had signed the bill, it would be one thing. Instead, I’d say they got the basics right. (As for Obamacare, I’m still not sure exactly what the law does myself, so I’ll give the American people a pass there).

Ilya and I agree that the voters properly punished Republicans in the wake of the Great Depression, but there’s an important issue lurking beneath the scene here: Many of the disastrous policies promoted by the Hoover Administration, including higher tariffs,[1] higher taxes, attempting to balance the budget, urging the Federal Reserve Board not to lower interest rates, and above all else, staying on the gold standard, were considered to be the correct response to a downturn, based on experience from the depressions of 1893 and 1920–21. 

This is important. If we had limited government’s ability to act based on what was considered sound policy circa 1925, we might have prevented FDR from doing things that hurt the economy, but we also might have kept him from doing a lot of things to help the economy as well, especially taking us off the gold standard and supporting the Reciprocal Tariff Act.

Which brings me to my “big picture” point: Ilya and I agree that American democracy is one of the best in the world. He seeks to make it better by reining in public choices.  But—and this is tough to measure, but it’s important to try—just how much better would we make it? This is complicated by the point above: There isn’t really unanimity among experts about pretty basic policy questions, such as the long-term efficacy of stimulus spending. We’re also doing a lot of things that experts do agree on, like promoting free trade. So how confident are we that we’d “get it right” and create substantial improvements?

Of course, if this were the only consideration, even “marginally better” would be a proper and final answer. But when we restrict the public’s ability to legislate or demand certain policies, we impinge upon their liberty.  This is a very, very serious thing.  It’s also something we do quite regularly; this is what the Bill of Rights is about, but there’s also a reason we made it tough for the Bill of Rights to come into existence. We demand a high degree of certainty that a policy is overwhelmingly harmful before taking it off the policy table entirely.

Ilya is purposely vague about what restrictions he’d support, and I appreciate that this isn’t a book about political theory. But that vagueness ultimately makes it difficult to evaluate the solution.  If he has “trimming around the edges” in mind, and if he is confident that would result in huge increases in utility, then his work is quite easy to sign off on.  But major restrictions on our ability to legislate, especially absent concomitant increases in overall utility, are tougher to swallow.

I’m especially skeptical because, as Ilya notes, for much of our history, the United States was limited and decentralized; we also had a more elite electorate for much of our antebellum period. 

Yet while our modern electorate gave us Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and George W. Bush, it also gave us Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower and FDR. Yes the ancien régime gave us Thomas Jefferson and Honest Abe, but it also gave us James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce.  We have made tremendous strides toward freeing oppressed peoples during almost all phases of American political development; we’ve endured horrible financial meltdowns during almost all phases of American political development; and, perhaps most importantly, we’ve tended toward mind-boggling economic growth during all of these phases.

I honestly do share Ilya’s frustration with voter ignorance. I also believe that an informed populace would probably produce (net) results that were better overall for the country, and that achieving that level of education is probably a pipe dream.  With that said, I’m just not persuaded that the net results would be enough to justify the solution Ilya prescribes.

In his latest post, Jeffrey Friedman emphasizes that rational ignorance is inconsistent with the fact that voters vote and do not do so randomly. If voters understood that their votes have little chance of affecting electoral outcomes, they would not vote at all. Since they do vote, that also suggests that their ignorance is not the result of a rational calculation of the costs of acquiring additional political information.  Rather, they must be ignorant because they simply don’t realize that acquiring additional information would help them make better decisions at the ballot box.

Friedman’s argument would be sound if individual votes had no chance of influencing electoral outcomes. In that scenario, any rational person would simply choose not to vote at all (at least if the goal of voting was to affect electoral outcomes). But, in reality, individual votes do have a chance of determining electoral outcomes, albeit usually only a very small one.  There is an important difference between a very low chance and a zero chance. A low probability is enough to make it rational to vote so long as 1) the cost of voting is low, 2) voters are at least mildly altruistic (they care about the welfare of their fellow citizens as well as their own), and 3) they believe there is a significant difference between the opposing candidates or parties. As I discuss in more detail in the book,[1] these assumptions describe the real world fairly accurately: the cost of voting usually is fairly low, most people really are mildly altruistic (though usually not much more altruistic than that), and many do believe there is a significant difference between the candidates. These realities also explain the various polls that Friedman cites indicating that voters believe their votes make a difference or “really matter.”[2]

Obviously, very few voters know the exact odds of affecting an electoral outcome. But most do intuitively understand that the odds are relatively low. They are thus willing to incur the small costs of voting to do their “civic duty,” but not the much higher costs involved in learning and processing more than minimal amounts of political information. They are also, in most cases, not willing to incur the high psychological cost of analyzing political information in an objective and unbiased way.

Friedman claims that there is “no evidence” to support this explanation. But, as I explained in my initial response to him, it is the best explanation for why voters 1) often ignore even very basic and obviously relevant political information, and 2) have not increased their knowledge substantially despite rising education levels and the increasing availability of information thanks to modern technology. These trends are difficult to explain through inadvertent or “radical” ignorance. If you believe that the economy is the most important issue in the 2010 election, for example, it is blatantly obvious that the facts about whether the economy is growing or shrinking are highly relevant data that might well affect your decision. In Friedman’s terminology (borrowed from Donald Rumsfeld), this is not an “unknown unknown,” but a glaring “known unknown.” Similarly, if you believe (as many voters did in both 2010 and 2012) that Obamacare was a major electoral issue, it was fairly obvious that basic knowledge of what that program actually does is relevant to evaluating its quality. Yet the vast majority of the public was ignorant on  both these points. And there are many similar examples, as I describe in my earlier posts and in the book.[3]

Friedman suggests that the greater availability of information created by the Internet and other modern technology is “irrelevant” to radical ignorance because radically ignorant voters “think they already know enough” and have no desire to learn more. But the more people are aware that there are large bodies of political information out there that they do not yet know, the more likely they should be to believe that it might be relevant to their decisions – especially if much of it is relatively basic and fairly obviously relevant. The same should be true of increased education. If nothing else, greater education makes people more aware than they would be otherwise that there are useful bodies of knowledge out there.

In his latest response, Friedman admits that most voters would acquire more information if they were part of a small committee tasked with choosing the next president, or if they were part of a jury. He claims, however, that this is not because of the greater odds of influencing the outcome, but because in these settings participants must “explain their views to others,” not just themselves. In reality, however, jurors are not required to explain their views to others. They have every right to vote without offering any explanation at all.  Even in contexts where there is even less expectation of having to offer an explanation than in a jury setting, people routinely make greater efforts to acquire and objectively evaluate information than they do on political issues – for example, when they make decisions about consumer purchases such as buying a car, a laptop, or a TV.

Moreover, if the reason why voters are ignorant is, as Friedman claims, that they are confident they have “reached the right conclusions, so that whatever else one might learn is unlikely to overturn them,” they should also be confident that that information would be sufficient to justify their views to others. If they believe the information they already have is so clearly sufficient that the truth becomes obvious once you know it, why should they think they need any more information to persuade others? Perhaps they believe those others are stupid, indifferent to the truth, or impervious to evidence. But if so, additional information is unlikely to help.

Finally, Friedman reiterates his argument that, if rational ignorance theory were correct, it would justify technocracy, rather than political decentralization or limitations on government power. This is indeed a possible response to rational political ignorance. But, for reasons that I discuss at greater length in the book,[4] it is not as good a response as limiting and decentralizing government power.  Friedman somewhat misrepresents my position when he states that it amounts to claiming that “[t]he high incentive to ‘get things right’ that comes with making very important decisions is …. sufficient.”  A high incentive to get things right is often necessary, but that doesn’t make it sufficient to achieve beneficial outcomes. It is also important that decisionmakers have a strong incentive to use their knowledge to achieve beneficial results. If Friedman’s technocrats are subject to control by the electorate, they have strong incentives to cater to its ignorance and irrationality rather than to use their expertise to promote good policies. If, on the other hand, they are largely insulated from electoral control, they will have incentives to use their power to promote their own interests rather than that of the general public. Especially over time, technocratic experts whose main goal is to perpetuate their own power and influence are likely to win out in bureaucratic competition over those who are objective truth-seekers and who wish only to promote beneficial policies.

Friedman’s own theory also has potential technocratic implications that he does not consider. If the major problem is one of “radical ignorance” where people fail to acquire additional information because they simply don’t realize it might have value, then experts in a given field are likely to be less susceptible to it than laypeople. An expert on, say, health care policy, is likely to be much more aware than either voters or politicians of the kinds of information that might be relevant to health care decisions. He or she is also likely to be familiar with the relevant literature in the field authored by scholars on different sides of the question. Thus, he would be less likely to assume that views he reaches on the basis of very limited information are obviously correct and unlikely to be overturned by new evidence. Indeed, as Socrates famously recognized, part of being a real expert on any subject is that you have a relatively good understanding of the potential significance of what you don’t  know.

In his thoughtful most recent post, Sean Trende suggests that voters might sometimes offset their lack of basic political information with other knowledge and that – on some issues – even extensive knowledge may be of little help, because experts disagree on the subject. Sean also returns to the broad questions raised in his initial response essay concerning the implications of American history for the broader debate over political ignorance.

Sean makes interesting points. But, overall, basic knowledge is still of great importance in making political decisions. And while some issues really are so difficult that mistakes are likely even with extensive knowledge, in most cases lack of basic knowledge significantly increases the risk of error. Finally, the overall record of American history suggests that voter ignorance often does lead to bad public policy, and that much of America’s relative success is the result of foot voting rather than ballot box voting. Nonetheless it is important to emphasize that we are only beginning to understand the impact of political ignorance on government policy throughout much of the nation’s history.

Voter Ignorance of Basic Facts Matters 

Sean argues that voters’ ignorance of very basic facts during the 2010 election ultimately did not matter much. His defense is clever, interesting, but ultimately unpersuasive.

For example, he contends that it did not matter that two thirds were unaware that the economy was growing rather than shrinking, because they did know that it was in bad condition overall.  But in evaluating the performance of incumbents, it is important to consider not just the absolute state of affairs, but the trend. After all, Obama and the Democrats had inherited a recession and financial crisis from George W. Bush in 2008. The key question for voters in 2010 (most of whom said the economy was the biggest issue in the election) was whether Democratic policies were making the situation better or worse, and whether the GOP alternative was likely to be superior. If we want to assess the performance of a surgeon, it’s not enough to know that the patient is still bedridden after his operation.  We need to know whether the patient is getting better. Obviously, knowledge of directional trends may not have been sufficient to analyze the quality of Democratic economic policies. Perhaps the economy would have grown faster under GOP policies. But it is at the very least useful and relevant information. It’s difficult to believe that voters unaware of even such a basic fact had well-informed opinions on the economic policy debate.

The same can be said of Sean’s claim that it didn’t matter that a plurality of voters wrongly believed that the TARP bailout was enacted under Obama rather than Bush, because Obama (as a senator) had voted for TARP and expressed support for it. In apportioning the blame for TARP (which most voters in 2010 opposed), it would have been useful to know that the Democrats were not solely responsible for it. The Republicans deserved a hefty share of the blame as well. The same goes for apportionment of credit, if you believe that TARP was a success.

I don’t claim that it was impossible for any voter to be well-informed about economic policy in 2010 without knowing these two facts. One can imagine voters who happened to be unaware of them, but who actually knew a great deal of other information about economic policy at the time. In practice, however, people ignorant of such extremely basic information are likely also to be ignorant about economic policy more generally.

What if Experts Disagree or Don’t Have any Useful Knowledge Either?

Sean advances a more far-reaching defense of voter competence by suggesting that in many situations even knowledgeable experts either disagree about important political issues or have no real idea of how to address them. In such cases, perhaps it does not matter much if voters are ignorant, because more knowledge would not help them solve the problem anyway.

I don’t deny that such difficult issues exist. On average, however, greater knowledge makes it easier to solve a wide range of policy problems, even if it cannot completely solve all of them. As I noted in my earlier reply to Sean, historically more knowledgeable voters have had more enlightened views on a wide range of political issues.

Some of the cases that Sean cites as examples of intractable expert ignorance or disagreement actually illustrate the benefits of political knowledge. For example, Sean cites experts’ ignorance of how to address the Great Depression in the 1930s. Although 1930s economists may have been ignorant of how to end the Depression (an issue on which economists disagree even today), most of them did realize that adopting the massive Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 and a wide range of programs cartelizing large sectors of the economy was likely to make things worse. Then as now, economists tended to support free trade and oppose cartels. Had the median voter at the time understood as much as the median economist, the Great Depression probably would not have been averted or even shortened.  But at least we might have avoided a number of dubious policies that made the situation even worse.

But what about those cases where it is really true that experts and knowledgeable voters don’t have any more useful knowledge than the average voter does? In situations where no one has any useful knowledge, we want to maximize the incentive to obtain new information and evaluate it wisely. For reasons I explained in my lead essay and my book, ballot box voters have little incentive to do either. By contrast, foot voters have much better incentives to do both. Where new knowledge is essential, they are more likely to seek it out and use it wisely than ballot box voters are.

In dealing with problems that are genuinely intractable given the current state of our knowledge, decentralizing power to lower levels of government and to the private sector is often even more important than in cases where all we need to do is effectively apply existing knowledge. Such decentralization enables different public and private actors to experiment with different solutions. And the possibility of foot voting gives citizens strong incentives to learn about the results and evaluate them objectively.

I do not claim that all intractable problems can be solved by foot voting mechanisms. Far from it. But in cases where the solution depends primarily on incentives to seek out and evaluate new information, foot voting mechanisms have major advantages over ballot box voting.

Sean understandably complains that I don’t specify exactly how much decentralization and privatization we should have. I deliberately chose not do so, because the problem of political ignorance is not the only issue we have to consider in analyzing those questions. However, I do believe that the evidence shows that the informational advantages of foot voting over ballot box voting are very large. Therefore they counsel in favor of substantially more decentralization and privatization than we would favor otherwise. Readers who agree with my argument need not become as libertarian as I am, or even close to it. But they should become significantly more libertarian than they themselves would be in a world where political ignorance is not a serious problem.

They should become significantly less unwilling to either take issues out of the political sphere entirely or leave them to be handled by state or local governments. The latter is especially true in a nation as large as the United States, where many states are bigger than many relatively well-governed European nations, such as Switzerland, Denmark, and Luxembourg.

Political Ignorance and American History

A final theme Sean emphasizes is that the quality of voter decisions seems to be no worse today than in the nineteenth century (when government was smaller), and that the United States has been relatively successful throughout its history, notwithstanding widespread political ignorance.

There is some truth to both claims. But I take much less comfort in them than Sean. Like modern voters, 19^th-century voters made plenty of ignorance-induced errors. It is difficult to say whether they made more such mistakes overall than modern voters, or fewer – especially since we don’t have modern-style polling data for periods prior to the 1930s. But the average 19^th-century voter had far less education or access to information than  modern voters do.[1] If they nonetheless performed roughly as well as modern voters do, that suggests there is a significant advantage to having a more limited and decentralized government. Nonetheless, it is important to emphasize that political ignorance has caused great harm throughout much of our history. It contributed to many of the worst failures of American public policy. 

And the greater the scope of government power, the greater the likelihood that political ignorance will help cause other catastrophes in the future.

That said, we have only begun to analyze the impact of public ignorance on government policy in American history. There is even less research that systematically compares its impact across multiple nations.  Hopefully, future scholars will increase our knowledge of the history of ignorance.

I think this would be a good time to bring my participation in this discussion to an end by summarizing my take on the debate over rational ignorance theory in three points.

1. No answer has emerged to the “paradox of nonrandom voting.”

To its great credit, Ilya’s book, unlike other rational ignorance treatises, squarely confronts the “paradox of voting”: If voters deliberately underinform themselves because they know their individual votes are unlikely to matter, why do they bother to vote? However, Ilya’s answer is that while voters intuit that the odds against their vote counting are small, they also recognize that the chance is greater than zero, and they roughly calculate that the great benefit that would flow from casting the decisive vote for their preferred party or candidate justifies the low cost of voting (but not the higher cost of becoming politically well informed).

Yet as I said in my first post, Ilya’s solution to the paradox of voting produces a fatal problem for rational ignorance theory. If voters think that the victory of their preferred party or candidate will produce a great (or even a small) benefit, they must think that they are well-enough informed about politics to be able to make this judgment. Otherwise, they could not be confident that in the unlikely event that they ended up casting the deciding vote for their party or candidate, great harm instead of great benefit would not result.

The general form taken by this problem is the paradox of nonrandom voting. Any voter who thinks he can justify (to himself) voting for a specific candidate or party, rather than voting randomly, must think he is well-enough informed to prefer that candidate or party to their competitors. Therefore, it is logically impossible for such a voter to have deliberately underinformed himself—according to his standards of adequate information.

2. In light of the paradox of nonrandom voting, rational ignorance theorists’ complaints about voter ignorance simply display their disagreement with voters about how much information voters need.

As I said in my second post, it is striking that Ilya must constantly impute to allegedly ignorant voters knowledge—not just knowledge that their vote probably won’t matter, but knowledge that they are underinformed. His latest post continues this practice. He attributes to voters the knowledge that it is “blatantly obvious” that “the facts about whether the economy is shrinking or growing are highly relevant” to a vote cast on the basis of economic factors. But Ilya is failing to take ignorance seriously. A voter may very well think he knows that the economy is “shrinking” because he has heard reports about unemployment and low labor-force participation. A voter may not even know that there is a difference between “economic growth” and employment rates. Or a voter may disagree with Ilya that “economic growth” per se is important compared to high rates of unemployment. Suppose that Ilya is right, and economic growth rates are tremendously important. Then this voter is ignorant of an important truth. But we know from the paradox of nonrandom voting that such ignorance cannot be deliberately chosen, but must instead be the product of the voter’s belief that the economy is (as far as he knows) in the tank.

One explanation for the failure of rational ignorance theory is that neoclassical economics (of which rational ignorance theory is an offshoot) cannot deal with genuine disagreement. In neoclassical economics there is just “knowledge,” and it is assumed that everyone knows not just that this stuff is available but that it is important. In reality, the importance of a given “datum” is never self-evident, but depends on an interpretation of what is important, e.g., an interpretation based on a tacit or explicit theory of economics.

What it boils down to is that Ilya’s complaints about voter ignorance—however justified they may be in a given case—are disagreements with voters who think they know what they need to know. But Ilya doesn’t accept that these are disagreements. He insists that voters agree with him about what they need to know because it is “glaringly obvious” (to him!) what they should know. So it becomes puzzling that they don’t go out and get this stuff that they must know they should have—after all, this stuff is free for the taking.

I think this whole line of thought displays a failure of sympathetic imagination. In this respect rational ignorance theory is much like “rational irrationality” theory, which basically says that since the policy conclusions that economists think are glaringly obvious are also (by sheer assumption) glaringly obvious to the voters, the voters’ disagreement with economists’ conclusions is evidence of voters’ deliberate choice to be “irrational.”  There’s a certain lack of perspective here. Doesn’t it occur to the rational-irrationality theorist that what seem to him to be glaringly obvious truths only seem that way to him because he has been studying economics all his life? Similarly, only a policy wonk of long standing would think that the “large bodies of political information” that are “out there” are self-evidently relevant to casting an informed vote.

I must say that as a political scientist who’s thoroughly familiar with these “large bodies of political information,” I disagree with Ilya about their relevance to voting. But this is a topic for another discussion, and Sean Trende has said much that I would say in such a discussion.

3. Rational ignorance theory is a barrier to thinking about the relative merits of markets and politics.

I think Ilya is right to point out the different behavior of consumers researching a major purchase and voters not researching their vote. But because of the paradox of non-random voting, we cannot reach for the easy explanation for this difference: the relatively high incentives for consumers to do research. In any case, the need to do consumer research is not intuitive knowledge (rational ignorance theory justifies all the knowledge it attributes to people by calling it intuition). This knowledge is based on experience and feedback from past mistakes. Not everyone does research, and they often live to regret it. Sometimes they learn from the experience that even though they thought they knew enough, they didn’t, so they should be more careful next time. Sometimes people learn this through other people’s bad experiences, or their good ones. (“How did you know Subarus are so reliable?” “I read Consumer Reports.”)

Now a crucial question is whether political decisions produce similar learning opportunities through negative feedback. After all, bad policies fail, this produces bad results—so people should (in principle) be able to learn from their mistakes in this sphere as in the private sphere. Indeed, voters think it’s easy to see whether a policy is needed and whether it is a success.

But perhaps we disagree with voters about this, too. If policy failure and success were so transparent, then why do policy professionals so often disagree about whether a policy failed or, if so, why? And—crucially—once we have an account of exactly what it is that might make it harder to get accurate perceptions of policy failures than consumer product breakdowns, might this reason for the opacity of policy effects hinder policy professionals’ ability to perceive policy effects clearly?

In that case, maybe technocracy suffers a knowledge deficit, not just the relatively easy-to-fix problem of the “incentives” of the technocrats. (Again to his credit, Somin allows that voters are not self-interested. Why not extend the same charity to technocrats, or at least provide evidence—not theories about incentives—showing that real-world technocrats are corrupt?)

Answering such questions requires hard thinking about the philosophy of social science and the nature of modern society. That is a research agenda made possible by understanding voter ignorance as the result of voters’ simplistic view of social and economic problems. If we think modern society is more complex than voters assume, we have to explain precisely what makes it complex and precisely what makes human beings ill equipped to penetrate the complexity.

But if we think that “the facts” about modern society announce their importance to human beings intuitively, so that it’s “glaringly obvious” to voters what they should know and, once they know it, it’s glaringly obvious to them what conclusions they should reach, then we cannot possibly undertake that research agenda. Why? Because we have bought into the very same simplistic worldview that explains voters’ conviction that their low levels of knowledge are adequate for making potentially consequential voting decisions.

I must lead off by saying that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this discussion, and would like once again to thank Ilya for writing such a provocative and important book, Heather Gerken and Jeffrey Freidman for generating such scintillating discussions, and Cato Unbound for inviting me to participate. Truth be told, I feel as if we’ve only scratched the surface of this fascinating and important topic. But alas, time’s winged chariot hurries near, and this issue must draw to a close.

One of Ilya’s leading examples of the voters’ supposed ignorance—though by no means his only one—is that voters didn’t realize that the economy had grown in 2010. My response was that voters understood that the economy was poor, even if they were wrong in the particulars.

Ilya’s response is a clever analogy: that before you can evaluate the performance of an attending physician, you’d have to know what the patient looked like hours before. In other words, while the country was worse off economically than it had been years before, a good share of the drop-off in economic performance could be ascribed to George W. Bush.

However, consistent with Ilya’s view of what a well-informed voter might conclude, the exits from 2010 actually found that only 24 percent of voters blamed Barack Obama for the state of the economy, with Wall Street leading and George W. Bush a close second (incidentally, among these three choices, this is probably correct, if a bit misapportioned).  In other words, voters knew that an earlier surgeon hadn’t done such a great job.  Knowing that, they also weren’t impressed with the job the new surgeon they had hired had done to turn things around.

If we really want to beat this analogy to death, there’s no doubt that a surgeon will be able to assess the condition of a patient better than a layperson.  But you don’t need a surgeon’s level of knowledge to be concerned that your child is still having trouble getting out of bed a week after tonsil surgery, notwithstanding the she might have shown some improvement. You’d still identify the child as very ill and respond accordingly.

But to get out of the weeds a bit, if there is one area that I am confident the American voters are making reasonably rational judgments, at least net, it is with respect to evaluating the state of the economy. Almost every model of presidential and midterm elections has an economic variable included, and most of the variables come back with a statistically significant relationship. For example, here is the relationship between income growth in an election year and the incumbent party’s vote share (source):

If Americans were truly ignorant of basic facts, we wouldn’t see this sort of relationship. Now it’s not perfect, and other factors do intrude (see 1952, 1972).  It’s even possible that a higher level of knowledge would result in a weaker correlation, since voters might reasonably blame the preceding party entirely for economic conditions at election time. But, of course, the further we remove ourselves from basic facts and closer we come to the realm of analysis, the less clear the correct answer is (if there is indeed any such thing.)

Likewise, to the extent TARP was an issue in 2010, voters were probably wise to blame Obama somewhat for it.  He gave the bill his blessing as the Democrats’ 2008 nominee, which gave cover to Democrats to vote for it.  He asked Bush to disburse additional funds for it.  It is my understanding that at least some of the auto bailout funds were drawn from TARP monies as well. In other words, the average voter would hardly be irrational to associate President Obama with the bailout.

Turning to the bigger picture here, perhaps it is best to visualize things this way: Imagine a world where all 130 million voters from the 2012 elections could be organized from the most knowledgeable to the least knowledgeable.  Where is the point at which we say “okay, this person is knowledgeable enough to make a good choice?”

Further complicating things, I think that all 130 million people would have an opinion on this, and I’m likewise certain that most of those 130 million people would place the cutoff point somewhere beneath them.

There’s really no objective answer to this question, and we must also contemplate the possibility – a very real one, in my estimation – that the level of knowledge you’d really need to make informed decisions is quite a bit above that of even the most well-informed voter today. Given the performance of the “best and brightest” over the past couple of decades, my confidence that they have some special knowledge that enables them to do a particularly better job than the first 100 names in the Boston phone book has ebbed quite a bit from an already low degree of certitude.

Ilya’s suggestion of decentralization and foot voting as the answer to these problems is a clever one. If we’re really concerned about an electorate that doesn’t know the rate of growth, or what state Dick Cheney hails from, I’m not convinced that the electorate will be able to cast educated “foot votes” either.  This issue is being fleshed out in other discussions, and I don’t really want to address it now.  I’ll just note that this does have quite a bit of bearing on the question of “how much better” the alternative to the status quo is, which must necessarily be weighed against the impingements on liberty that Ilya suggests.

As to my final point, I think Ilya inadvertently misconstrues it a bit.  My belief—and he’s correct, it is difficult to measure it—is that the highly educated, narrow, elite electorate of the early 1800s—pre-universal white manhood suffrage—produced awful policies at roughly the same rate as our current undereducated, broad, populist electorate.  We produced Smoot Hawley and steel tariffs, they produced the Tariff of 1828.  We gave birth to Vietnam and the Iraq War, they engaged in the War of 1812. We came up with Richard Nixon, they came very close to giving us Aaron Burr; Thomas Jefferson buying off an elector is all that saved us from that fate. We suffered horrible recessions from 1789 to 1793, from 1807 to 1810, from 1815 to 1821, and for most of the 1820s.

In other words, it is about as close to a controlled experiment as we’re likely to get, and it doesn’t suggest that an educated electorate performs all that much better than an uneducated one.  Ilya points out that the decentralized nature of the country suggests that we wouldn’t perform worse, but if our standard becomes “not worse,” then why would we tolerate the restriction on the people’s ability to legislate? It’s also worth noting that Ilya’s suggestion that voters today have more access to education or knowledge suggests that perhaps voter ignorance isn’t the inevitable, rational outcome over time.

In closing, I’d like to reiterate what an important book this is.  To a certain degree, I’m playing devil’s advocate here.  I would love to see a more educated electorate, especially on economic matters. Anyone who watches political discussions on Facebook probably spends half of his time cringing, although there’s a reasonable chance that the participants cringe right back if the viewer interjects his view.

Ilya is hardly the first person to recognize this problem, which has a long political pedigree. What is different here is that Ilya is reluctant to resort to restrictions on the franchise or other solutions that have been proposed over time.  His decentralization/foot-voting solution is probably the least-restrictive solution out there, and if we are eager to do something about the problem of voter ignorance, it is probably the best solution proposed to date.  But I’m just not convinced the problem is so serious that we really need to do anything.

I would like to start by thanking Jeffrey Friedman, Heather Gerken, and Sean Trende for their many thoughtful and penetrating contributions to our discussion. Some of the points they raise are ones I will have to address more fully in future work. Jason Kuznicki of the Cato Institute deserves great credit for his excellent work in organizing and hosting this symposium.

Most of our discussion so far has understandably focused on our differences. So I would like to start this final contribution by emphasizing three important areas of agreement among the three commentators and me.

Three Points of Agreement

First and foremost, all of us agree that voter knowledge is a relevant criterion for judging the performance of democracy. Unlike some political theorists, my critics and I do not accept the view that the voters have an intrinsic right to make political decisions on the basis of ignorance. As John Stuart Mill emphasized, voting is not a purely personal right, but rather the “exercise of power over others.” It must be done with at least some reasonable degree of knowledge and judgment.

Second, none of my critics hold out much hope that today’s generally low levels of public knowledge are likely to increase significantly in the foreseeable future. They do not contend that political ignorance can soon be overcome through improved education, technological breakthroughs, or other means.[1] In order show that political ignorance is not a serious problem, they must therefore argue that today’s low levels of knowledge are adequate. Sean Trende and Heather Gerken have argued for this position with great skill and eloquence. But it is a difficult case to make, given the enormous size and complexity of modern government on the one hand and the enormous depth of public ignorance on the other. 

Third, none of the three commentators have made much attempt to show that ballot box voters’ knowledge and judgment is comparable in quality to that of foot voters. Even if we grant the validity of many of the points made by Heather and Sean, the fact remains that most people devote far more time and effort to acquiring information about where to live or which car to buy than they do about even the most important ballot box decisions. They also judge information about the latter with greater objectivity and less bias. Even if ballot box voters perform tolerably well, foot voters likely perform substantially better. That still amounts to an important potential advantage to making more of our decisions through foot voting.

Having gone over some areas of agreement, I would like to offer some final thoughts on the questions that still divide us: the magnitude of the problem of political ignorance (on which I disagree with Sean and Heather), and the extent to which political ignorance is rational (on which I differ with Jeffrey Friedman).

The Price of Political Ignorance

Throughout our debate, Sean Trende has argued that voter ignorance is not as significant a problem as I claim because 1) voters can often rely on small bits of information to make good decisions, and 2) on many issues knowledge may not have much value because even experts disagree over them. Notice the tension between these two claims: on the one hand the political world is so simple that voters need very little knowledge. On the other, it is so complicated that no amount of knowledge is likely to help very much. I don’t doubt that there are some political issues that fall into each of these categories. But a huge range of the issues dealt with by modern government fall somewhere in between: cases where knowledge can improve the quality of decisionmaking substantially, even if it doesn’t lead to perfect solutions. At the very least, as I noted in my last response to Sean, there are many cases where greater knowledge can help us avoid serious errors, such as those that exacerbated the suffering caused by the Great Depression.

Some of Sean’s specific examples help illustrate these points. For example, he continues to argue that it does not matter that two thirds of the public in 2010 did not know that the economy was growing rather than shrinking at the time. To my point that knowledge of trendlines was important to assessing President Obama’s economic policies, he responds that much of the public recognized that the poor economy was in large part the fault of Obama’s predecessor George W. Bush. But regardless of who was to blame for the situation as of early 2009, it was important to know how the situation had changed since then. Even if patients know enough to realize that a surgeon is not at fault for the condition of a sick patient brought to the hospital, intelligent consumers still need to know whether and to what extent his condition is improving under the surgeon’s care. This is not the only relevant fact, of course. For example, the fact that the economy was improving still leaves open the possibility that faster improvement would have been possible under better policies. But it is still an important one to consider.

Sean also notes, correctly, that, in most elections, voters do in fact vote consistently with short-term economic trends – rewarding incumbents for recent improvement and punishing them for recent deterioration. This fact, however, is less than comforting. As I discuss in greater detail in my book,[2] voters often myopically focus on only the most recent period just before the election, and they therefore often end up rewarding and punishing incumbents for short-term trends in the economy over which they had little control. In this respect, one could even argue that public ignorance about the state of the economy in 2010 was potentially fortuitous; otherwise, the Democrats might have gotten some undeserved credit for improvements they had little role in causing. Ignorance in one area helped diminish the impact of ignorance in another.[3] But it would have been much better if most voters knew both that the economy was improving and that incumbents often have relatively little influence over such short-term trends. This would have enabled the electorate to make a better-informed assessment of Obama’s policies and the Republican alternatives, and possibly also have led them to put less emphasis on short-term economic trends in making their electoral decisions in the first place.

In discussing this and other individual examples of ignorance, it is essential that we not lose sight of the forest among the trees. Few if any individual bits of knowledge are absolutely essential to making good voting decisions. Most can potentially be offset by knowledge of other facts. The problem, however, is that most voters are not ignorant about just a few basic facts but about most such facts across the board. The cumulative impact of ignorance over a wide range of issues and a wide range of facts about the structure and organization of government is much more significant than ignorance about any one or two specific points. For example, voters’ ignorance about economic trends in 2010 might have been less important had they generally had a good grasp of economic policy and incumbents’ ability to influence it. Moreover, ignorance of some basic facts tends to be highly correlated with ignorance of others. A voter who doesn’t know whether the economy is growing or shrinking is also likely to be ignorant about other important aspects of economic policy.

Sean’s argument that some issues are so difficult that knowledge is of little value is similarly overstated. On a huge range of issues throughout American history, we have paid a heavy price for voter ignorance. Such grave policy errors as the persistence of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, persecution of gays and lesbians, protectionist trade policies such as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, and many others were all to a significant degree caused, perpetuated, or greatly exacerbated by political ignorance. On these and other issues, more knowledgeable voters and policy experts on average realized the nature of the mistake far earlier than the average voter did.

Even on issues that are genuinely intractable given the current state of our knowledge, we have a better chance of finding solutions when decisionmaking procedures include stronger incentives to seek out relevant knowledge and analyze it objectively. In such cases, foot voters are more likely to find and effectively utilize new information than ballot box voters.

It is true, as Sean suggests, that there are different possible standards of adequacy for political knowledge levels. In my book, I consider several standards derived from different versions of democratic theory. The problem is that actual levels of voter knowledge fall below those demanded by even very forgiving theories, such as those that merely require voters to be able to punish bad performance by incumbents and reward the good.[4] Because the public is so often ignorant of even very basic facts about politics and public policy, their knowledge levels are inadequate by almost any reasonable standard.

I am also not much moved by Sean’s argument that the supposedly more elite electorate the nineteenth century did not perform much better than ours does today. Since nearly all white male citizens got the vote by the early 1800s, it was not actually a particularly elite electorate – especially given that education levels were far lower in that era, and information was more costly. Even the education and knowledge levels of white male property owners (those allowed to vote before property qualifications were lifted) were probably not much higher than those of the average voter today. Many of the Founding Fathers – most notably James Madison – believed that the electorate of their day was often ignorant and irrational.[5] Moreover, the primitive (by modern standards) level of social science at the time ensured that there was simply less useful knowledge available for analysis by even the most dedicated voter.

That said, I think a plausible case can be made that voters in the early republic made relatively fewer ignorance-induced errors than modern voters do, in the sense of errors that could have been avoided through better utilization of information actually available at the time; not because they were a more elite group, but because the relatively smaller size and complexity of government made it easier for them to monitor the relevant issues. At the very least, the presidents they elected – Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison,Monroe– compare favorably to the average president of the last fifty to sixty years. But a truly persuasive comparison of the early 1800s and the modern era requires much greater analysis than either Sean or I have been able to give it in the limited space available here.

The Rationality of Political Ignorance 

Unlike Heather and Sean, Jeffrey Friedman largely agrees that voter ignorance is a serious problem. But he forcefully disputes my view that most such ignorance is rational.

In his most recent response, he emphasizes the claim that rational ignorance cannot explain the phenomenon of nonrandom voting. Voters who know they are ill-informed should not believe they know enough to cast a vote. I believe I addressed this in my previous responses. But perhaps I wasn’t sufficiently clear in stating my position, a mistake I will try to remedy now.

Nonrandom voting is entirely consistent with rational ignorance because people apply different standards of informational adequacy to decisions that have only a small chance of making a difference than to ones where that likelihood is higher. In many aspects of our lives, we routinely make perfectly rational and nonrandom minor decisions on the basis of small bits of information. Very often, we know that we might make better decisions if we sought out more information or analyzed it more carefully. But we don’t do so because the decision isn’t important enough to make it worthwhile to spend the additional time and effort. When I need to get gas for my car, I rationally devote only a small amount of time to searching for the cheapest and most efficient gas station. But that doesn’t mean I choose gas stations completely randomly, or that I am unaware that a more thorough search might turn up a better or cheaper option.[6] I noted in an earlier post my rational conclusion that The Hunger Games was the best movie of 2012, despite recognizing that greater knowledge might lead me to reach a different and better-informed conclusion. Rationally ignorant voting is structurally similar to rationally ignorant judgments about movies and gas stations. The difference is that individually rational behavior in the former case causes vastly more social harm than in the latter.

Jeff’s view implies that voters would not bother to acquire significantly more information if, for example, they could personally select the next president or the next governor of their state. This is both psychologically implausible and at odds with lots of empirical evidence. For example, jurors work harder at acquiring and analyzing relevant information than voters do, in part because they make decisions in small groups where each individual vote is likely to matter greatly.

I agree with Jeff that one of the reasons why foot voters have knowledge advantages over ballot box voters is that they learn from mistakes, both their own and those of others. But ballot box voters, of course, can also potentially learn from mistakes, including those made by other nations’ governments. On average, however, foot voters learn from error more effectively than ballot box voters do because they have much better incentives to gather information about such failures and analyze them rationally. That is one reason why ballot box voters have yet to learn the lesson of centuries of failed protectionist policies and why it took decades for them to realize that policies such as racial segregation and oppression of gays and lesbians caused more harm than good.

The fact that political ignorance is rational does not by itself prove that limiting and decentralizing government is the right approach to the problem. Other solutions are also possible, including Jeff’s suggestion that rational ignorance could be overcome by properly incentivized technocrats. But I am skeptical that the problem of technocratic incentives is as easily overcome as Jeff suggests. In addition, technocrats have information problems of their own, albeit somewhat different ones from those that bedevil voters.[7] Be that as it may, in evaluating competing solutions, it is important to understand the nature of the problem.

Conclusion  

I do not imagine that either my book or this symposium comes close to fully resolving the longstanding question of what we should do about the problem of political ignorance. But I hope we have at least advanced the debate over these issues, and led more people to seriously consider the possibility that the harm caused by ignorance could be alleviated by limiting and decentralizing government.