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.