Democracy and Political Ignorance

Why Smaller Government Is Smarter, Second Edition

Ilya Somin

• Publisher: Stanford Law Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780804799355
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Public Law
• Index: Law

One of the biggest problems with modern democracy is that most of the public is usually ignorant of politics and government. Many people understand that their votes are unlikely to change the outcome of an election and don't see the point in learning much about politics. This creates a nation of people with little political knowledge and little ability to objectively evaluate what they do know.

The second edition of Democracy and Political Ignorance fully updates its analysis to include new and vital discussions on the implications of the "Big Sort" for politics, the link between political ignorance and the disproportionate political influence of the wealthy, assessment of proposed new strategies for increasing political knowledge, and up-to-date survey data on political ignorance during recent elections. Ilya Somin mines the depths of the current state of ignorance in America and reveals it as a major problem for democracy. He weighs various options for solving this problem, provocatively arguing that political ignorance is best mitigated and its effects lessened by decentralizing and limiting government. People make better decisions when they have stronger incentives to acquire relevant information—and to use it wisely.

CHAPTER 1

The Extent of Political Ignorance

Nothing strikes the student of public opinion and democracy more forcefully than the paucity of information most people possess about politics.

Political scientist John Ferejohn¹

THE REALITY THAT MOST VOTERS are often ignorant of even very basic political information is one of the better-established findings of social science. Decades of accumulated evidence reinforce this conclusion.² Unfortunately, the situation has not improved much over time.

THE PERVASIVENESS OF IGNORANCE

The sheer depth of most individual voters’ ignorance may be shocking to readers not familiar with the research. Rarely if ever is any one piece of knowledge absolutely essential to voters. It may not matter much if most Americans are ignorant of one or another particular fact about politics. But the pervasiveness of ignorance about a wide range of political issues and leaders is far more troubling.

Many examples help illustrate the point. A survey conducted not long before the 2014 election, which determined control of Congress, found that only 38 percent of Americans knew that the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives at the time, and the same number knew that the Democrats had a majority in the Senate.³ Not knowing which party controls these institutions makes it difficult for voters to assign credit or blame for their performance.

One of the most contentious issues in recent American politics has been the Affordable Care Act of 2010—President Barack Obama’s health care reform law, often known as Obamacare. Yet much of the public remains ignorant about many aspects of this program. As late as August 2013 a survey found that 44 percent did not even realize that the ACA was still the law.⁴

For years, there has been an ongoing debate over the future of federal spending in the United States, with sharp partisan divisions over how to deal with increasingly serious budget deficits that are likely to get worse in the long run. Yet a September 2014 Pew Research Center survey found that only 20 percent of Americans realize that the federal government spends more money on Social Security than on foreign aid, transportation, and interest on the government debt.⁵ Some 33 percent believe that foreign aid is the biggest item on this list, even though it is actually the smallest, amounting to about one percent of the federal budget, compared with 17 percent for Social Security.⁶

This result is consistent with numerous previous surveys showing that most Americans greatly underestimate the percentage of federal spending devoted to Social Security and other entitlement programs, while vastly overestimating the amount devoted to foreign aid and other minor programs such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.⁷ It is difficult for voters to evaluate competing approaches to reforming tax and spending policy if they don’t have even a basic understanding of how federal funds are currently spent.

A series of polls conducted just before the Republican Party chose Representative Paul Ryan to be their vice presidential nominee in August 2012 found that 43 percent of Americans had never heard of Ryan and only 32 percent knew that he was a member of the House of Representatives.⁸ Unlike Governor Sarah Palin in 2008, Ryan was not a relative unknown catapulted onto the national stage by a vice presidential nomination. As his party’s leading spokesman on budgetary and fiscal issues, he had been a prominent figure in American politics for several years.

One of the key policy positions staked out by President Obama in his successful 2012 reelection campaign was his plan to raise income taxes for persons earning more than $250,000 per year, an idea much discussed during the campaign and supported by a large majority of the public—69 percent in a December 2012 poll.⁹ A February 2012 survey conducted for the political newspaper The Hill actually asked respondents what tax rates people with different income levels should pay. It found that 75 percent of likely voters wanted the highest-income earners to pay taxes lower than 30 percent of income, the top rate at the time of the 2012 election.¹⁰ This inconsistency suggests that many people supported increasing the tax rates of high earners because they did not realize how high taxes were already.

Even before the 2012 election, economic inequality had been a major political issue for years, in both the United States and many European nations. Yet surveys consistently show that most Americans and citizens of other democracies have little or no understanding of either the extent of inequality or whether it has been increasing or decreasing.¹¹ A 2009 survey found that only somewhere between 12 and 29 percent of Americans can roughly place the shape of the income distribution in the United States when given a choice of five different simple diagrams with accompanying explanations.¹² Even the higher figure is only slightly better than what we would expect from random guessing.¹³

Equally striking is the fact that in late 2003, more than 60 percent of Americans did not realize that a massive increase in domestic spending had made a substantial contribution to the then-recent explosion in the federal deficit.¹⁴ Most of the public is unaware of a wide range of important government programs structured as tax deductions and payments for services.¹⁵ As a result, they are also unaware of the massive extent to which many of these programs transfer benefits primarily to the relatively affluent.¹⁶

Despite years of controversy over the War on Terror, the Iraq War, and American relations with the Muslim world, only 32 percent of Americans in a 2007 survey could name “Sunni” or “Sunnis” as one of “the two major branches of Islam” whose adherents “are seeking political control in Iraq,” even though the question prompted them with the name of the other major branch (the Shiites).¹⁷ Such basic knowledge may not be absolutely essential to evaluation of U.S. policy toward the Middle East. But it is certainly useful for understanding a region that has long been a central focus of American foreign policy, especially since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.

Such widespread ignorance is not of recent origin. As of December 1994, a month after the takeover of Congress by the Republican Party, then led by soon-to-be Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, 57 percent of Americans had never even heard of Gingrich, whose campaign strategy and policy stances had received massive publicity in the immediately preceding weeks.¹⁸ In 1964, in the midst of the Cold War, only 38 percent were aware that the Soviet Union was not a member of the U.S.-led NATO alliance.¹⁹ Later, in 1986, the majority could not identify Mikhail Gorbachev, the controversial new leader of the Soviet Union, by name.²⁰ Much of the time, only a bare majority know which party has control of the Senate, some 70 percent cannot name both of their state’s senators, and the majority cannot name any congressional candidate in their district at the height of a campaign.²¹

Three aspects of voter ignorance deserve particular attention. First, many voters are ignorant not just about specific policy issues but about the basic structure of government and how it operates.²² Majorities are ignorant of such basic aspects of the U.S. political system as who has the power to declare war, the respective functions of the three branches of government, and who controls monetary policy.²³ Admittedly, presidents sometimes manage to initiate war without congressional approval, as in the case of recent military interventions in Libya and against the ISIS terrorist organization in Iraq and Syria. But even under modern conditions, presidents usually seek congressional authorization for major conflicts, and generally keep interventions that lack such authorization carefully limited, usually to air strikes alone.²⁴ A 2014 Annenberg Public Policy Center study found that only 36 percent of Americans could even name the three branches of the federal government: executive, legislative, and judicial. Some 35 percent could not name even one.²⁵ The 36 percent result was an even lower figure than the 42 percent who could name all three branches in a similar 2006 poll.²⁶

Another 2006 survey found that only 28 percent could name two or more of the five rights guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution.²⁷ A 2002 Columbia University study indicated that 35 percent believed that Karl Marx’s dictum “From each according to his ability to each according to his need” is in the Constitution (34 percent said they did not know if it was or not), and only one-third understood that a Supreme Court decision overruling Roe v. Wade would not make abortion illegal throughout the country.²⁸

Ignorance of the structure of government suggests that voters often not only cannot choose between specific competing policy programs but also cannot easily assign credit and blame for policy outcomes to the right officeholders. Ignorance of the constraints imposed on government by the Constitution may also give voters an inaccurate picture of the scope of elected officials’ powers.

The second salient aspect of ignorance is that voters often lack an “ideological” view of politics capable of integrating multiple issues into a single analytical framework derived from a few basic principles; ordinary voters rarely exhibit the kind of ideological consistency in issue stances that are evident in surveys of political elites.²⁹ Some scholars emphasize the usefulness of ideology as a “shortcut” to predicting the likely policies of opposing parties com...