Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter

摘要

In Ilya Somin's excellent new book Democracy and Political Ignorance, the public is ignorant; their ignorance is a problem for American democracy, and it "poses a very serious challenge to democratic theory" (p. 6). In the same general vein as Bryan Caplan's wonderful book The Myth of the Rational Voter (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), Somin blames the problem of ignorance on the lack of weight any one person's vote carries on electoral outcomes. When a person's vote has little bearing on an electoral outcome, most citizens devote little time to acquiring political knowledge, and we get ugly electoral outcomes. For Somin, the old computer science saying "garbage in, garbage out" seems to apply to politics, and a great deal of garbage is being inputted into the system thanks to a general lack of incentives.