Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter.

• Author: Beaulier, Scott
• Position: Book review

Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter

By Ilya Somin

Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013.

Pp. x, 264. $27.95 paperback.

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.

Ignorance is a problem our founders worried about, and mechanisms were put in place in 1787 with the hope of protecting Americans from themselves. But, for Somin, the problems of ignorance are even worse than our founders could have imagined: people take shortcuts when voting; they are biased; and they rely on inaccurate information when making decisions over politicians. The birthers who insist President Obama prove he is a natural-born U.S. citizen, for example, have gained a great deal of traction because people do not process political information with any real objectivity. Politics is like sports for Somin, and, like sports fans, the public plays up their team's strengths and "downplay[s] anything that cuts the other way" (p. 79).

The strength of Somin's book is in the quality of the writing and the up-to-date evidence he provides the reader with on the scope and scale of voter ignorance. It is one of the more recent books illustrating how little Americans know about politics and why it matters, and such contributions are vital.

Somin does not get bogged down in theoretical issues related to political ignorance versus rational irrationality, which is good for his intended audience. But this absence of theoretical grounding does make his use of the word ignorance a bit elastic and a departure from Anthony Downs's description of rational ignorance in his 1957 book An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper & Row). For Downs (and for about fifty...