Review of Ilya Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter. Second Edition. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016)

Ilya Somin is a law professor and a prominent writer on the topic of democracy, ignorance, and knowledge levels among ordinary voters. Put simply, he argues that ordinary voters are largely ignorant of important political facts and that this is problematic for the functioning of representative democracy. I largely disagree. 

I have been reading and reviewing many books in this vein for at least two reasons. One, too few democratic theorists who are supportive of democracy seriously engage with these critics. Hélène Landemore sets a positive example as a contemporary defender of a very hands-on vision of democracy who also engages with the arguments of critics. But I have read many, many works of democratic theory that don’t seem to acknowledge democratic critics like Somin, Brennan, Caplan, and others. Contrary to these works, I want not just to contribute to some insular pro-democracy conversation but to engage with criticisms of democracy, specifically regarding the competence and knowledge of ordinary citizens.

Second, in the manner of John Stuart Mill, ideas can become a dead letter when they don’t engage with criticism. The positive corollary is that ideas are strengthened when they meet their critics head-on. So by engaging with critics like Somin we get a better sense ourselves of democracy’s value and the ability of the demos to be capable, wise participants. The first major work of political theory to defend participatory democracy, Carole Pateman’s Participation and Democratic Theory, does just this, advocating her position in part through a discussion and rejection of alternative, more elitist views of democracy.

So, in that spirit let’s tackle Somin’s Democracy and Political Ignorance. In what has become something of a ritual for these types of work, the first chapter covers the obligatory survey results that demonstrate the supposed high levels of ignorance on the part of ordinary voters. Here Somin offers the criticism of voter ignorance that is to be expected from such accounts. He follows this in the next chapter with a thoughtful discussion of several different democratic theories, arguing that voters are not knowledgable enough to live up to the demands of any of these four, very different democratic theories.

Somin defends the claim that voters are rationally ignorant, i.e. he argues that voting as an act doesn’t accomplish much, individual votes aren’t decisive for electoral outcomes, and therefore voters have no incentive to acquire lots of accurate information. In short, if your vote means little and accomplishes less, why bother becoming informed? It would be irrational to spend considerable time and effort to acquire the information and analysis necessary to be a thoughtful voting citizen.

This belief is within the mainstream of rational choice thinking on voting and is perhaps less critical of the voters than a perspective that blames them more fully for their ignorance. Somin, and those like him in effect say, individual votes don’t mean much so people don’t invest much time in making them mean much. They aren’t stupid, they’re simply rationally spending their limited free time on other, more important matters. Thus, representative democracies are plagued by a collective action problem whereby individual ignorance is rational but leads to bad collective outcomes.

Obviously this is not how I see the issue but it is helpful to have someone make the case for this perspective as clearly and persuasively as Somin does. Somin is less critical of democracy than Brennan, for instance (author of Against Democracy). Therefore some of my critique of Brennan and defense of democracy, found in my various blog posts and several books, also applies to Somin but some of it does not.

On to the critical part. There are, as I see it, at least two problems with Somin’s account. First, he says that we need alternative policies to reduce the “harm” caused by voter ignorance and irrationality. But his book fails to demonstrate that such harms exist. He offers the standard survey results on voter ignorance and some suggestions for why this is a problem. That’s it. No real empirical evidence that substantial harms result from this ignorance nor any theoretical arguments that will convince skeptics.

Second, his interpretations of voter ignorance in surveys are contestable. Surveys of both voters and the broader public actually show that majorities correctly answer quite a few factual questions on politics and most other questions see pluralities get the question right. Very few, if any, have majorities get survey answers wrong, although some, like “Who is Chief Justice of Supreme Court?”, might get a majority that doesn’t know the answer. The point is, his interpretation of voter ignorance is very pessimistic, and also fails to show the extremely negative consequences that come from voter ignorance on political survey questions. 

To reiterate, Somin mostly just offers some suggestive ideas and arguments for why this ignorance might be bad. But he also recognizes that, by a wide range of metrics, representative democracies tend to be better than the alternatives. So where is the evidence for the negative impact of this ignorance? Even if liberal representative democracies tend toward oligarchy and have many flaws, they are better places to live than any of the currently institutionalized alternatives in the world.

Not to mention the survey data emphatically do not support his claim that voters are “systematically misinformed.” Simply put, this is an incorrect way to describe a public where either a majority or a plurality can correctly answer most political survey questions.

Why kind of alternative policies might help alleviate the problem of voter ignorance, according to Somin? Somin discusses some possible benefits of having a deliberation day before elections, an idea that several deliberative democratic theorists have proposed. Getting people to participate in talks and informative workshops on a specific public holiday devoted to this task could help reduce ignorance before a big election. True, and he considers some of the logistics involved.

He rejects, if less forcefully than I would, attempts to restrict the franchise. Good! This is the most elitist answer to voter ignorance, one that Brennan openly considers in his Against Democracy. It is vile. Somin also rejects efforts to make government more technocratic by informally empowering the more educated. As he recognizes, turning to rule by the experts, even if in a less extreme form than restricting the franchise, is still anti-democratic. It doesn’t solve democracy’s possible weaknesses so much as replace them with elite rule. In his words, “moreover, resorting to the rule of experts is less an attempt to raise the knowledge levels of voters than an effort to dispense with democratic control of government itself, at least with respect to whatever issues the expert regulators are tasked with deciding,” (pp. 215-216). His discussion of “foot voting” versus ballot box voting is original and has some genuinely interesting ideas, although I would still reject it for reasons not worth delving into here.

To reiterate, the main problem with his account is that Somin never shows how some voter ignorance on survey questions translates into bad outcomes. He doesn’t want to say people are inherently irrational. This is good. He just says that if people are politically ignorant they will be instrumentally irrational, i.e. they won’t be able to get what they want in politics. But he offers little if any evidence to back this up. It is something taken for granted by elitists who lament voter ignorance.

Thankfully, by focusing on instrumental ends, Somin doesn’t make the kinds of elitist judgments that say voters are bad because they want outcomes that he personally thinks are bad. But Somin also doesn’t look at actual policy debacles, like the Iraq War, or the multi-decade deregulation of the economy that led to the 2008 economic crisis, to get insights into how policy decisions were made that most people would agree (at least in retrospect) were bad. In other words, for the stuff that we all agree was bad, how did it happen? The answer sure as hell isn’t due to the ignorance of the ordinary voter. This is a point I develop at much more length in other work. It boils down to the claim that the elites who dominate the political and economic system are primarily responsible for the bad decisions it makes, as they are the ones guiding it.

Thoughts on Patriarchy

Reading Richard Reeves’ thoughtful work on how boys are falling behind in school in America has me reflecting on the changing, and increasingly complex, nature of gender relationships and equality in the USA and similar societies.

The USA, most of Europe, and much of the rest of the world have made massive changes in favor of gender equality in recent decades. What does this mean for second and third wave feminist criticisms of patriarchy? Well, that depends in part on what we mean by the term. Let’s define patriarchy, simply, as systematic inequality for women. This is a simple gloss on a complex topic but it will serve our purposes here. There was indisputably pervasive patriarchy in the USA (and many countries) through the mid-twentieth century. What about since then?

In so far as there is still patriarchy, or enduring and difficult to rid gender inequality, it is more subtle and less extreme than 1950s style patriarchy, or that which endured through the 1970s-1990s. And as women now outperform men on standardized tests and out-graduate men at all levels of education, including BA and PhD programs, things get more complicated. The professional classes, in academia, government, media, and the corporate world, are increasingly women-friendly, increasingly defined by gender parity, and maybe even moving in a direction where they are somewhat dominated by women. So, is there still patriarchy? As I see it, there are three main ways in which women, broadly speaking, are still not equal to men:

1. Partner violence. Men do suffer plenty of violence. But in the US at least, they generally don’t have to fear intimate partner violence. The horrifying reality is that many murders, perhaps approaching half of them in the US, are male partners killing their current or former female partners. This is a nightmarish danger from those supposed to love you that men, generally, don’t have to fear. And that is not counting the physical and emotional toll of domestic abuse that is short of death. This is oppressive. It is unequal for women. (The answer of course is not simple parity. Partner violence is an evil. We need to equalize it in one way only—completely eliminating it for everyone).
2. Domestic work. It has probably become much better than in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, when many women first joined the workforce and still did almost all the housework (leading to the idea of the second shift—see Arlie Hochschild’s excellent The Second Shift). But even in the 21st century evidence suggests that women do more domestic work, including chores and child-rearing, than men, even if both work full time. This is more a norm, internalized and enforced in ways subtle and not, than a direct result of laws. And as more women join the professional class we may see the norms of office life, time off, domestic work, parental leave, and so forth slowly change. I hope we are. But this is an obvious case where women are in a worse, unequal position. The best news is that the latest research shows men are doing much more domestic work than they used to but still not an equal amount.
3. Pay and job prospects. Again, as the professional classes come to reach gender parity this may/will recede but women do earn less than men for a variety of reasons. Liberals harp on pay discrimination and conservatives deny the problem, but it is real, just subtle. Women work slightly fewer hours, they tend to take on more part-time jobs because they have assumed more domestic responsibilities, they often can’t commit to higher-pay, higher-hours jobs for these reasons, they miss time and advance more slowly up the ladder once they have kids (the motherhood penalty), and at the lowest end of the economy, some of the worst jobs, like maids, cleaners, and careworkers, are dominated by seriously underpaid and exploited women. So it’s subtle but it ain’t a free choice. Women, writ large, have less power in the labor market than men, although this again seems to be changing as many men struggle to get into or complete college and many women succeed into the professional classes. But ultimately the best answer here has to be not simple gender parity but full equality, i.e. we don’t need more poor men and more women CEOs. What we need, rather, is democratic socialism, where there are no poor people (of any gender), no CEOs, and firms are owned and run by the workers themselves on an equal basis. Otherwise you get lean-in feminism and neoliberal bullshit that sees a female boss as liberating or some confused identity-empowerment perspective where seeing professional women thriving is supposed to be some great gender triumph for poor maids.

To sum up, and briefly setting aside concerns for class, race, and other issues, women have not achieved full equality with men in our society (the same goes in many similar countries) because they are much more likely to experience partner abuse and violence, they do more housework, and they have less power on the labor market. Because our neoliberal polity is so class-stratified, all of these experiences vary widely depending on the people involved, and if or how they are experienced will differ from person to person.

But we are in a strange position. The US (and many other places) has made tremendous progress on gender equality. The reaching of parity in education, the massive role of women sports, broader cultural changes, the role of MeToo in exposing abuses, the slowly percolating changes in gender norms since the 1960s and 1970s— there have been so many contributing factors moving us towards political, cultural, and economic equality. Patriarchy ain’t what it used to be. Indeed, in education there is now a massive gap with boys, not girls, falling behind at every level! This is clearly a new problem and signals we are not in the old world. 

At the same time, key areas of inequality persist between men and women. Call it patriarchy, call it what you will, we still don’t have full gender equality. How to make sense of this world, in which women have not yet reached full equality with men, while at the same time many men are struggling more than women to get educated and employed, is a key challenge for the years ahead. As a final thought it should go without saying that full gender equality is a requirement for those of us on the democratic left.