Solving the Problem of Political Ignorance

The 2016 election has left many stunned, as the two major parties advanced widely disliked candidates who both favor policies that gravely endanger liberty and the free market. What does the rise of these candidates tell us about the shortcomings of democracy? Ilya Somin, who recently released a second edition of his highly regarded book, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter, came to Cato in June to discuss these questions with Cato vice president John Samples.

Why should we even care about the problem of political ignorance? Some people say that even if the voters choose out of ignorance, that’s all right — they’re just exercising their individual freedom. John Stuart Mill effectively refuted this sort of argument 150 years ago when he pointed out that voting is not just an individual’s choice. Rather, as he put it, it is “the exercise of power over others.” When we vote for people who will occupy positions of political power, they do not just rule over those who voted for them, they rule over the entire society. And when we exercise power over other people in that way, we have a responsibility to be at least reasonably informed in the way that we do so. So we do have good reason to be concerned about political ignorance.

And the evidence is overwhelming that the amount of political ignorance out there is pretty severe. For example, in our last election in 2014, the main issue at stake was which party would control Congress. Yet in surveys taken not long before the election, only 38 percent of the public even knew which party controlled the House and which party controlled the Senate. Similarly, in most recent elections, one of the big issues is the future of the federal budget, yet surveys consistently show that most of the public has little to no idea how our federal government spends its money. They massively underestimate the percentage of the federal budget that goes to major entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, even though these are among the largest items in the budget. On the other hand they massively overestimate the percentage that goes to foreign aid (which is only about 1 percent of the budget). The ignorance that we observe is not just limited to particular issues — it also goes to the very basic structure of government. A recent survey found that only 34 percent of the public even knows the three branches of the federal government: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial.

As I discuss in the book, the problem of political ignorance is not new. Nonetheless the present election does underscore its significance …

When people hear the data on political ignorance, there is a tendency to think that it must be because the voters are stupid — or alternatively, maybe that the information just isn’t available to them. In reality neither of these two common explanations is likely to be true. The evidence strongly suggests that aggregate IQ scores have actually gone up in the last 40 or 50 years. Similarly, it is not plausible to argue that the information is not available to people. With the internet and other modern technology, it is more easily available than ever before in human history. The problem is not that the voters are stupid or that the information is unavailable. It is that they’re not using their intelligence to learn the information that is out there.

And as it turns out, this is perfectly rational behavior for most voters. If your only reason to become informed about politics is to cast a “better” or more informed vote in an election, that’s not much of an incentive at all, because the chance that your vote will make a difference to the outcome is infinitesimally small: only about one in 60 million in a presidential election, for example.

Why do we have elections? Is it just because we’ve always had them and people would want them? Are they desirable given the degree of voter ignorance? And after all, foot voting itself does not require elections.

SOMIN: That’s a good question and it raises an issue people often bring up when I speak on this issue: “Doesn’t your argument imply that we should do away with democracy entirely?” If you go back to the ancient world, this was exactly Plato’s answer.

Plato argued that voters don’t know what they’re doing, so we should replace democracy with rule by some sort of informed elite. You see some scholars today arguing for a less radical version of the same approach, for instance, giving more power to well-informed bureaucrats and the like.

I think that democracy still does have one important virtue, which is that, while the voters are generally ignorant, there are some forms of government failure that are so blatant and so obvious that even ignorant voters will tend to notice them and therefore punish the incumbents at the polls. In the book I discuss the striking fact that in no modern democracy has there ever been a mass famine — even though mass famines, including ones deliberately created by the government, are actually quite common in authoritarian regimes.

The reasons for this are fairly obvious: when a mass famine is going on even ignorant voters will tend to notice it and punish the incumbents.

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