Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter, Second Edition

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Somin, Ilya, author.

Title: Democracy and political ignorance : why smaller government is smarter / Ilya Somin.

Description: Second edition. | Stanford, California : Stanford Law Books, an imprint of Stanford University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016004872 (print) | LCCN 2016005766 (ebook) | ISBN 9780804798037 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780804799317 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780804799355 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: Democracy—United States. | Ignorance (Theory of knowledge)—Political aspects—United States. | Voting—United States. | United States—Politics and government.

Classification: LCC JK1726 .S665 2016 (print) | LCC JK1726 (ebook) | DDC 320.973—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016004872

Typeset by Newgen in 10/15 Sabon

DEMOCRACY AND POLITICAL IGNORANCE

WHY SMALLER GOVERNMENT IS SMARTER, SECOND EDITION

Ilya Somin

STANFORD LAW BOOKS

An Imprint of Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

To my grandparents, the late Ber and Pauline Somin and the late Basya Firun, and Nathan Firun

Contents

Preface to the Second Edition

Acknowledgments for the First Edition

Introduction

1. The Extent of Political Ignorance

2. Do Voters Know Enough?

3. The Rationality of Political Ignorance

4. The Shortcomings of Shortcuts

5. Foot Voting vs. Ballot Box Voting

6. Political Ignorance and Judicial Review

7. Can Voter Knowledge Be Increased?

Conclusion

Appendix

Notes

Index

Preface to the Second Edition

THE FIRST EDITION of this book addressed a range of issues related to one of the most important challenges facing modern democratic government: the problem of widespread political ignorance. While many readers and reviewers did not agree with all of its arguments, Democracy and Political Ignorance has attracted considerable attention from both academics and laypeople interested in the future of democracy and the role of government in society. It has been discussed in the media and used in college courses in multiple academic disciplines.

Although most of the evidence analyzed is drawn from American politics and history, the book even managed to generate interest in other countries, so much so that it has now been translated into Italian and Japanese.¹ In both the United States and many other democracies, there is growing recognition of the dangers of political ignorance.

Because of the interest generated by the first edition, I believe that the time has come for a revised version that improves and expands on the original. This edition revises and updates the analysis of its predecessor, while also addressing several important questions that were not covered in the first edition. For the convenience of readers familiar with the first edition, I offer this brief summary of the major new issues covered in this one.

Chapter 1 updates the evidence of widespread political ignorance in America with new data from the 2012 and 2014 election cycles. In Chapter 2, I have added an analysis of the implications for political knowledge of recent scholarship indicating that relatively affluent Americans wield vastly disproportionate influence over the political system. Although wealthier voters have higher average levels of political knowledge than the rest of the population, their disproportionate influence does not diminish the dangers of political ignorance, and may even exacerbate it.

Chapter 5 has been revised to include a discussion of the so-called Big Sort and its implications for foot voting. It explains why foot voting probably does not lead to widespread ideological segregation between liberals and conservatives, and that such an outcome might not be harmful even if it did occur. I further explain why the more general problem of migrants using their power at the polls to change public policy for the worse is not as great a danger as many fear.

In the same chapter, I also explain why foot voting is generally superior to ballot box voting as a mechanism for addressing problems that require new knowledge to solve, rather than merely effective utilization of already available information. Foot voters have stronger incentives to seek out and effectively use as yet undiscovered knowledge for much the same reasons as they are more likely to learn and properly utilize existing information.

In Chapter 7, I criticize the growing enthusiasm on the part of some scholars for sortition as a tool for increasing the quality of popular participation in politics. These writers contend that using randomly selected groups of citizens to deliberate over and decide various public policy issues can help overcome the problem of political ignorance. I suggest that such optimism is, at the very least, overstated.

In many places, I have revised and improved the coverage of issues already addressed in the first edition. Throughout, I have sought both to improve my treatment of the issues and to make it more accessible to both academic experts and lay readers. It is my hope that this revised edition will help increase our knowledge about ignorance, and the profound challenge it presents for democracy.

The manuscript for the second edition was completed too early for me to take full account of the issues raised by the many leading scholars who participated in the forthcoming symposium on Democracy and Political Ignorance in the interdisciplinary journal Critical Review. However, some of those issues are still addressed in this book.² I have responded to the symposium participants in greater detail in my essay in the symposium itself.³

In addition to those listed in the acknowledgments for their help with the first edition, I owe a debt of gratitude to many people who provided assistance with this one.

Michelle Lipinski of the Stanford University Press did an outstanding job of editing this edition, just as she did with the original.

Several scholars gave helpful comments, suggestions, and criticisms. They include Bruce Ackerman, Chris Baylor, Jason Brennan, Bryan Caplan, Emily Ekins, Michael Evans, Jeffrey Friedman, Sanford Levinson, Michael Munger, Alex Nowrasteh, John Sides, Jason Sorens, and three anonymous reviewers. I would also like to thank the many academics, students, and others who provided useful comments and suggestions when I made presentations based on the first edition at the Academia Sinica (Taiwan), the University of Antwerp (Belgium), the Cato Institute, the Florida State University College of Law, the University of Hamburg Institute of Law and Economics, the Institute of Economic Affairs (London), King’s College (London), McGill University (Montreal), the University of Texas School of Law, the University of Virginia School of Law, the University of Winchester (Winchester, United Kingdom), and other institutions.

At the George Mason School of Law, Dean Daniel Polsby, his successor, Henry Butler, and my other colleagues provided invaluable support by creating an outstanding environment conducive to in-depth scholarship. Cattleya Concepcion of the Law School library helped track down various sources needed for research, sometimes on short notice. My assistant, Katherine Hickey, once again deftly handled a number of logistical and administrative issues. Laura D’Agostino deserves credit for helpful research assistant work.

As always, my greatest debt is to my wife, Alison, who has supported this project and put up with the innumerable inconveniences it caused her, over a period of many years.

Last but not least, I should acknowledge our daughter, Lydia, who was born just three months before I submitted the initial manuscript for this revised edition. I might not have been able to complete it on time were it not for Lydia’s precociousness in learning to sleep through most of the night far earlier than expected. It is my hope that she will grow up to see a world where political ignorance is a less dangerous problem than it is today.

February 2016

Acknowledgments for the First Edition

A BOOK AUTHOR necessarily acquires numerous debts that are difficult to repay.

For excellent research assistance at George Mason University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, I would like to thank Eva Choi, Susan Courtwright-Rodriguez, Ryan Facer, Bryan Fields, Matthew Hart, Marisa Maleck, and Haidee Schwartz.

I owe a major debt to several scholars who read and commented on substantial parts of the manuscript: Bryan Caplan, Jeffrey Friedman, Heather Gerken, Guido Pincione, David Schleicher, and two anonymous reviewers. I am also grateful to other colleagues who gave discrete suggestions on individual parts of the manuscript or earlier works that it built on, including Peter Boettke, Roderick Hills, Sanford Levinson, Mark Pennington, and Donald Wittman.

Thanks are also due to the many scholars and students who gave useful comments at presentations of earlier drafts of parts of this book at the New York University Economics Department, the New York University Law School, Northwestern University School of Law, the George Mason University Economics Department, the George Mason University School of Law Levy Seminar, the IVR international conference on law and philosophy, the University of California at Santa Cruz Economics Department, the University of Athens, the University of Torcuato Di Tella law faculty in Buenos Aires, the Korea Institutional Economics Association, the Cato Institute, the Liberty Fund, and the University of Hamburg Institute of Law and Economics.

Michelle Lipinski of Stanford University Press deserves special thanks for her excellent work in editing the manuscript. Frances Malcolm, also of Stanford University Press, provided valuable assistance in preparing the manuscript for publication. I would also like to thank the copy editors at Stanford University Press for their invaluable efforts.

Colin Hall deserves credit for suggesting what eventually became the book’s subtitle. I should also acknowledge the many other friends and colleagues who made subtitle suggestions in response to my requests.

At the George Mason University School of Law, I am grateful to Dean Daniel Polsby and my other colleagues for providing such a wonderfully supportive atmosphere for scholarship, and to the Law and Economics Center for financial support. My assistant, Katherine Hickey, was extremely helpful in dealing with a variety of logistical issues related to the book.

Acknowledgment is owed to the publishers of previous works for allowing me to adapt some of the material from those pieces. Parts of Chapters 1, 2, and 6 use material from my article Political Ignorance and the Countermajoritarian Difficulty: A New Perspective on the ‘Central Obsession’ of Constitutional Theory, Iowa Law Review 87 (2004): 1287–1371 (reprinted with permission). Chapters 1, 2, and 4 borrow some material from When Ignorance Isn’t Bliss: How Political Ignorance Threatens Democracy, Cato Institute Policy Analysis No. 525 (2004). Some material in Chapters 3 and 4 is adapted from Voter Ignorance and the Democratic Ideal, Critical Review 12 (1998): 413–58, while Knowledge About Ignorance: New Directions in the Study of Political Information, Critical Review 18 (2006): 255–78, helped inform Chapter 3. Parts of Foot Voting, Federalism, and Political Freedom, in Nomos LV: Federalism and Subsidiarity, ed. James Fleming and Jacob T. Levy (New York: New York University Press, 2014), and Foot Voting, Political Ignorance, and Constitutional Design, Social Philosophy and Policy 28 (2011): 202–27, were used in the development of Chapter 5. The revised version of Chapter 7 now includes a short excerpt from Jury Ignorance and Political Ignorance, William and Mary Law Review 55 (2014): 1167–93.

My greatest debt is to my wife, Alison, for her thoughtful advice and encouragement, and for putting up with all the disruptions she had to deal with as a result of my work on this book.

Last but not least, our golden retriever, Willow, gets credit for being so understanding when I could not give her as much attention as she was entitled to during the first year of her life with us, due to my having to work on the book. Retrievers are often more rational and perhaps even more knowledgeable than humans.

Introduction

A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance. And a people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the Power that knowledge gives.

James Madison¹

MUCH EVIDENCE SUGGESTS that there is widespread public ignorance about politics in America. Weeks before the 2014 midterm elections, which decided party control of Congress, only 38 percent of Americans realized that Democrats controlled the Senate, and the same percentage knew that Republicans controlled the House of Representatives.² The biggest issue in the important 2010 congressional election was the economy. Yet two-thirds of the public did not realize that the economy had grown rather than shrunk during the previous year.³ In the aftermath of that election, the majority of Americans did not realize that the Republican Party had taken control of the House of Representatives but not the Senate.⁴

When President Barack Obama took office in 2009, his administration and the Democratic Congress pursued an ambitious agenda on health care and environmental policy, among other issues. The media covered both issue areas extensively. Yet a September 2009 survey showed that only 37 percent of Americans believed they understood the administration’s health care plan, a figure that likely overestimated the true level of knowledge.⁵ A May 2009 poll showed that only 24 percent of Americans realized that the important cap and trade initiative, then recently passed by the House of Representatives as an effort to combat global warming, addressed environmental issues.⁶ Some 46 percent thought that it was either a health care reform or a regulatory reform for Wall Street.⁷ It is difficult to evaluate a major policy proposal if one does not know what issue it addresses. In 2003, some 70 percent of Americans were unaware of the recent enactment of President George W. Bush’s Medicare prescription drug bill, the biggest new government program in several decades.⁸

The existence of such ignorance does not by itself prove that there is anything wrong with our political system. Perhaps these polls were somehow unrepresentative. In any case, maybe voters do not need much in the way of knowledge. Perhaps they can make good decisions even if they know very little. Still, these examples and others like them are at least cause for concern. If the public really is often ignorant, we might have a serious problem on our hands.

WHY POLITICAL IGNORANCE MATTERS

Democracy is rule by the people. The Greek word demokratia—from which democracy is derived—signifies exactly that: rule by the demos, the Greek word for the people. The day-to-day business of government may be conducted by elected officials. But those leaders are ultimately responsible to the public. If they fail to serve the interests of the voters, we can throw the bastards out and elect a new set of bastards who will hopefully do better. In this way, the democratic process is supposed to ensure that we get what Abraham Lincoln called government of the people, by the people, for the people.⁹ The key to the entire system is the accountability of elected officials to voters.

Some political theorists value democratic control of government for its own sake.¹⁰ Others do so for primarily instrumental reasons.¹¹ Either way, accountability is a crucial part of the picture. But effective democratic accountability requires voters to have at least some political knowledge. Voters generally cannot hold government officials accountable for their actions if they do not know what the government is doing. And they cannot know which candidates’ proposals will serve the public better unless they have at least some understanding of those policies and their likely effects.

Accountability is also difficult to achieve if voters do not know which officials are responsible for which issues. If the public schools perform poorly, should the voters blame the local government, the state government, the federal government, or all three? Which officials, if any, can be blamed for economic recessions? Are mistakes in the conduct of the War on Terror the responsibility of the president alone, or does Congress deserve a share of the blame? Answering these questions and others like them requires at least some degree of political knowledge.

Even if an individual voter does not care about political accountability or does not mind if the government performs poorly, he or she may still have a responsibility to become informed for the sake of his fellow citizens. After all, the winners of the next election will govern not only the voter but everyone else who lives in his society. Casting a ballot is not a purely individual choice that affects no one but the voter. In the admittedly highly unlikely event that it influences the outcome of an election, it will also affect the lives of thousands or millions of other people. Even the citizen who is personally uninterested in the quality of public policy may justifiably feel a moral obligation to become informed if he or she intends to vote.¹²

Obviously, it is not enough to conclude that voters need to have at least some political knowledge to make democracy work. We also need to know how much knowledge is enough. If it turns out that voters know too little, it would be useful to know why. Even more important, we need to know what if anything can be done to alleviate the harm caused by excessive political ignorance.

These questions are the focus of this book. I doubt that I or anyone else can answer them definitively. It would be arrogant to assume that any one book can settle issues that have been debated for over two thousand years. But I hope to at least make a useful contribution to the discussion.

The first half of the book analyzes the nature and extent of the problem of political ignorance in American democracy. The evidence shows that political ignorance is extensive and poses a serious challenge to democratic theory. The severity of the problem is exacerbated by the reality that, for most citizens, political ignorance is not primarily the result of stupidity or selfishness. Rather, ignorance turns out to be rational behavior—even for many who are far from stupid and are genuinely concerned about the welfare of the nation. The insignificance of any one vote to electoral outcomes makes it rational for most citizens to devote little effort to acquiring political knowledge. They also have little incentive to engage in objective, unbiased evaluation of the information they do know.

The last four chapters consider potential solutions. While it may be possible to make voters more knowledgeable at the margin, I conclude that a major increase in political knowledge is unlikely in the foreseeable future. Therefore, the problem of political ignorance may be more effectively addressed not by increasing knowledge but by trying to reduce the impact of ignorance.

This can be at least partially achieved by limiting and decentralizing government power in ways that enable citizens to vote with their feet as well as at the ballot box. People choosing between different jurisdictions in a federal system or between different options in the private sector often have better incentives to become informed about their options than ballot box voters do. Unlike ballot box voters, foot voters know that their decisions are likely to make a difference. As a result, they are more inclined to seek out relevant information and evaluate it logically.

Is Concern About Political Ignorance Paternalistic?

Concern about political ignorance strikes some critics as unduly paternalistic. Perhaps citizens should be free to choose policies and leaders for whatever reasons they wish—even if those reasons are the result of ignorance. A democrat committed to this view might find the issue addressed in this book at best irrelevant and at worst an unjustified attack on the rights of the people. Even if ignorance leads voters to make poor decisions, we would not be justified in imposing constraints on democracy because the voters have a right to rule as they please. As Robert Bork put it, [i]n wide areas of life majorities are entitled to rule, if they wish, simply because they are majorities.¹³ H. L. Mencken famously satirized the same point when he wrote that [d]emocracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.¹⁴

Unfortunately, when voters make poor decisions out of ignorance, everyone gets it good and hard, not just those who voted for the wrong candidates and supported their harmful policies. That is what makes voting different from individual decisions that affect only the decision makers themselves and those who voluntarily choose to interact with them. As John Stuart Mill put it in his 1861 book Considerations on Representative Government:

The spirit of vote by ballot—the interpretation likely to be put on it in the mind of an elector—is that the suffrage is given to him for himself; for his particular use and benefit, and not as a trust for the public. . . . [D]emocrats think themselves greatly concerned in maintaining that the franchise is what they term a right, not a trust. . . . In whatever way we define or understand the idea of a right, no person can have a right . . . to power over others: every such power, which he is allowed to possess, is morally, in the fullest force of the term, a trust. But the exercise of any political function, either as an elector or as a representative, is power over others.¹⁵

As Mill emphasized, voting decisions involve not simply an individual choice but the exercise of power over others. For this reason, we are justified in urging constraints on the scope of that choice if ignorance or other factors lead voters to make systematic errors. Such constraints, of course, are only defensible if we have reason to believe that alternative arrangements might handle information problems better. This book makes precisely that argument.

There is a second reason why it is not a paternalistic infringement on voters’ freedom to worry about political ignorance and advocate measures to reduce its impact. As discussed in Chapter 3, widespread ignorance about politics is in large part the result of a collective action problem. An individual voter has little incentive to learn about politics because there is only an infinitesimal chance that his or her well-informed vote will actually affect electoral outcomes. Political ignorance is therefore an example of rational individual behavior that leads to potentially dangerous collective outcomes.

Economists have long recognized that outside intervention may be needed to address situations where individually rational behavior otherwise leaves everyone worse off.¹⁶ Such intervention is not necessarily paternalistic because it may actually be giving the people that which they want but lack the incentive to produce for themselves through uncoordinated individual action.

In the same way, it is not necessarily paternalistic to advocate the restriction of air pollution. Individual citizens and firms may produce more air pollution than any of them actually want because they know that there is little to be gained from individual restraint. If I avoid driving a gas-guzzling car, the impact on the overall level of air pollution will be utterly insignificant. So I have no incentive to take it into account in making my driving decisions even if I care greatly about reducing air pollution. Widespread public ignorance is a type of pollution that infects the political system rather than our physical environment.

Finally, even if voters do have the right to select whatever policies they please regardless of their effect on fellow citizens, ignorance might still be problematic. After all, a person making a choice based on ignorance might well fail to achieve his or her intended result. If I buy a lemon car based on the erroneous belief that it is in good condition, my purposes in purchasing it are likely to be frustrated if it quickly breaks down.¹⁷ Similarly, voters who support protectionist policies in the erroneous expectation that they will benefit the economy as a whole rather than weaken it will also end up undermining their own goals.¹⁸ Voters may not be able to effectively exercise their right to choose the policies they wish if their choices are based on ignorance.

Political ignorance might be unimportant if public opinion had little or no effect on policy. In that event, voters would not actually be exercising any genuine power over others after all. However, a large literature shows that public opinion does have a significant impact on at least the broad outlines of policy.¹⁹ Voters’ views are, of course, far from the only influence on policymaking. As discussed later in this book,²⁰ there are often individual issues on which public opinion has relatively little impact because the voters are unaware of what is going on. Such other influences as bureaucratic discretion and interest group lobbying also have important effects. But there is little doubt that voter opinions have considerable influence over many policy decisions, even if other factors also matter.

Even relatively ignorant voters can influence policy in cases where some effect seems easily traceable to a government action or when the government is rewarded or blamed for some highly visible event.²¹ Ignorant voters can also influence policy by creating opportunities for politicians, activists, and interest groups to manipulate that ignorance.²² These effects make voter knowledge a potentially important input into the policymaking process. Politicians who wish to be elected and reelected must enact policies that win voter support. And the distribution of that support may be affected by ignorance.

Even if public opinion did not influence policy in the status quo, most major normative theories of democracy assume that it should do so, at least to some substantial extent. As explained in Chapter 2, these theories also imply knowledge prerequisites that voters must meet in order to exercise that influence effectively.

In focusing on the importance of voter ignorance, I do not mean to deny the significance of ignorance among political elites and expert policymakers. Such elites also sometimes suffer from political ignorance, either because there are some types of information they inherently cannot know,²³ or because they choose to ignore relevant social science data that are readily available.²⁴ But whatever the knowledge levels of elites, voters have a vital role in democratic political systems, and their ignorance is significant regardless of whether political elites have similar shortcomings of their own. Moreover, a more knowledgeable electorate would be in a better position to choose leaders who are knowledgeable themselves and remove ignorant ones from office.

The Historic Debate Over Political Ignorance

The problem of political ignorance is not a new one. Political philosophers have debated the implications of voter ignorance for democracy since that system of government first originated in ancient Greece, in the city-state of Athens. Early critics of Athenian democracy argued that Athens was doomed to failure because its policies were set by ignorant common citizens.²⁵ In The Gorgias, the great philosopher Plato contended that democracy is defective because it adopts policies based on the views of the ignorant masses and neglects the better-informed counsel of philosophers and other experts.²⁶

Aristotle was more optimistic about political knowledge than Plato was. Although he admitted that citizens usually have little knowledge individually, Aristotle argued that they could access far larger amounts of information collectively.²⁷ Nonetheless, Aristotle still asserted that women, slaves, manual laborers, and others he considered incapable of achieving adequate levels of virtue and knowledge should be excluded from political participation.²⁸

In more recent centuries, even some thinkers generally supportive of liberal democracy have sought to limit the power of voters for fear of giving free rein to political ignorance. The American founding fathers inserted numerous anti-majoritarian elements into the Constitution in order to provide a check on what they saw as ignorant and irrational voters. As James Madison put it in Federalist 63, checks such as an indirectly elected Senate were needed as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions.²⁹ John Stuart Mill, perhaps the greatest nineteenth-century defender of liberalism, very much feared political ignorance and argued that it justified giving extra votes to the better educated and more knowledgeable.³⁰

In the twentieth century, totalitarian leaders on both the left and the right resuscitated Plato’s claim that voter ignorance justifies the abolition of electoral democracy in favor of concentrating power in the hands of a small elite. Vladimir Lenin’s 1902 book What Is to Be Done? argued that workers cannot be expected to develop sufficient political knowledge to launch a socialist revolution on their own. Left to itself, a spontaneous working class cannot get beyond mere trade union consciousness and will not recognize the need for a full-blown reordering of society along socialist lines. Therefore, Lenin concluded that the transition to communism required firm leadership by a vanguard party whose members would better understand the political interests of the working class than the workers themselves could.³¹

Adolf Hitler, too, rejected democracy in part because he believed that voters are ignorant and easily manipulated, a problem that could be solved only by instituting a dictatorship headed by a far-seeing leader. In his view, [t]he receptivity of the great masses [to information] is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous.³² The exploitation of political ignorance helped pave the way for the Nazis’ rise to power in 1930s Germany.

On the other side of the fence, many modern scholars—economists and political scientists—have argued that political ignorance is unimportant or easily surmounted through the use of information shortcuts.³³ [G]ive people some significant power, writes political philosopher Benjamin Barber, and they will quickly appreciate the need for knowledge.³⁴

Unlike Plato and the totalitarians, I do not argue for a complete rejection of democracy. I accept the evidence that democracy generally functions better than alternative systems of government.³⁵ Democracies tend to be more prosperous and peaceful than dictatorships or oligarchies, and usually provide greater freedom to their citizens.³⁶ They are also more likely to avoid major policy disasters and do not commit mass murder against their own people.³⁷

As an immigrant from the Soviet Union to the United States—one with relatives who were victims of both communist and Nazi repression—I am acutely conscious of the advantages of democracy over dictatorship. But the superiority of democracy over other forms of government leaves open the possibility that democracy might function better if its powers were more tightly limited.

DEFINING POLITICAL KNOWLEDGE

Before analyzing political ignorance, it is important to define what we mean by political knowledge. Throughout this book, I focus primarily on political knowledge defined as awareness of factual matters related to politics and public policy. This includes knowledge of specific policy issues and leaders. As we shall see more fully in Chapter 1, many voters are unaware of the elements of important public policies enacted by the legislature. Factual political knowledge also includes knowledge of broad structural elements of government, such as which public officials are responsible for which issues and the elements of competing political ideologies, such as liberalism and conservatism. For example, the majority of citizens do not know which branch of government has the power to declare war.³⁸ Relevant factual information further includes data that can assist in evaluating the effectiveness of policies. It often does little good for voters to know what the government is doing to stimulate the economy or protect the environment, unless it has some way to analyze the effectiveness of its policies in achieving those ends.

My approach differs from that of economists such as F. A. Hayek, who famously argued that government planners cannot make well-informed decisions because doing so would require them to have information that no one person or small group could possibly know.³⁹ Instead, I ask whether voters effectively seek out relevant information that is already known by at least some people and at least potentially available to the electorate. In Chapter 5, however, I briefly consider the question of voters’ incentives to seek out relevant information that is not yet known to anyone but could potentially be found.

It is also important to consider the extent to which voters are unable to rationally evaluate the information they do have. By rationally, I mean only whether they evaluate the information in a logically consistent, unbiased manner, not whether they reach morally defensible conclusions about public policy. For example, if a voter wants to increase economic growth and she is shown evidence that free trade is likely to promote that goal, her support for protectionism should diminish. However, she could rationally ignore this evidence if she does not value economic growth and instead prefers to maximize the incomes of protected domestic industries, regardless of the impact on the overall economy or the effects on foreigners.

This emphasis on factual knowledge and value-neutral rationality is not meant to denigrate the importance of values and moral knowledge. Ideally, we would want to have voters who are not only factually knowledgeable but also motivated to use that knowledge to pursue morally praiseworthy goals. We would not want a highly knowledgeable electorate that values cruelty and oppression for its own sake, and uses its knowledge to elect those leaders whose policies are most effective in implementing such despicable purposes.

But factual knowledge and moral decisions are not completely separate. Many perverse moral judgments made by voters are in part a result of factual ignorance. For example, longstanding public hostility toward gays and lesbians was in part the result of ignorance about the likelihood that homosexual orientation is genetically determined and not freely chosen or determined by environmental factors.⁴⁰ As explained in Chapter 5, many early twentieth-century white voters favored policies oppressing blacks in part because they believed that African Americans had inherent criminal tendencies and were likely to rape white women unless they could be cowed by the threat of lynching. Such false factual beliefs were not the only cause of widespread racism. But they surely contributed to it.

Disagreement over some issues, such as abortion,⁴¹ may largely be determined