Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter.

• Author: Allan, James
• Position: Book review

DEMOCRACY AND POLITICAL IGNORANCE: WHY SMALLER GOVERNMENT IS SMARTER. By Ilya Somin. (1) Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press. 2016 (Second Edition). Pp. xiv + 291. $27.95 (cloth).

Labels are notoriously slippery tools. Just think of the debate between "natural law adherents" and "legal positivists" on the nature of law. Whether the holders of these two views are in fact disagreeing at all depends on what you take to be the content behind the respective labels. (3) Or take the two camps of legal positivism, the "internal legal positivists" and the "external legal positivists." Are they in fact disagreeing about whether, at least sometimes, moral norms can be among the legal determinants of the law (so not just social facts determine the law in all legal systems ever to have existed), or is this debate merely one of terminology and of no real significance? (4) Again, your answer may be influenced by what you take to fall within the aegis of these two accounts of the nature of law. The point is that we humans cannot think at all without labels, but at times we cannot think well with them.

And that brings me to those of us who think comparatively smaller government tends to produce better human welfare outcomes than bigger government; who favor giving individual humans plenty of scope to make calls for themselves (when it comes to what they can say and much else); and who think the private sector usually out-produces the public sector. That package of views would describe me. Yet I would not describe myself as a "libertarian." Too many self-described libertarians seem to me to hold core-level views that are grounded in natural rights thinking where I am at core a consequentialist. Likewise, a good many libertarians leave me uncertain that they would be prepared to make anything like the compromises I would make as regards national security and national sovereignty and just generally Hobbesian "we live in a dangerous world" concerns. Thirdly, and no less importantly, most libertarians do not seem to share my views about democracy, by which I mean majoritarian "let the numbers count" democracy. (5) I see it as the least-bad decision-making option available, and certainly a good deal better than the sort of strong judicial review that exists in my native Canada or in the United States, where nearly all (Canada) or probably most (the United States) top judges adopt some version of a "living tree" (6) or "living Constitution" interpretive approach, under which these same unelected judges end up deciding a whole host of social policy issues. (7)

So I am inclined to shun the label "libertarian." My guess is that the author of this fine book. Democracy and Political Ignorance, would welcome it. Yet, as regards the first-order substantive issues related to one's ideal size of government or the desirable scope individuals ought to be left with to shape their own lives, Professor Somin and I seem to be broadly in agreement. However, on the question of democracy, and when the majority ought to prevail, we clearly are not. That said, and I will return to say more below, this is a book well worth reading. It is an updated second edition packed with interesting details, with the careful elucidation of arguments and counter-arguments, with the telling apercu, and all in the service of the book's main theme, that voters are on the whole pretty ignorant, and, more to the point, that this ignorance is probably rational from their point of view. Nor is this thesis put forward in the service of arguing for ways to make voters better informed about political matters. Somin tells us at the end of chapter seven, the final chapter before his conclusion, that "the painful reality is that we cannot count on any major increase in political knowledge in the foreseeable future" (p. 223). No, this thesis about voter ignorance is basically part and parcel of a larger critique of majoritarianism. Think of it as the plaintiff's brief for judicially enforced constitutional rights of a broadly Richard Epsteinian sort.

Now I reject that desired end point or core position for reasons I will sketch out in a moment. Nevertheless, I am very glad that I read this book. It was stimulating. It was well-written. It did all the John Stuart Mill things about making one think again, and questioning one's own positions, that you would like a book to do. If you have an interest in constitutional law, and whether you classify yourself as a libertarian, a majoritarian, or something else again, put this book on your list to order.

In the rest of this article I will do two things. Firstly, I will give an overview of Somin's book. Then, secondly, 1 will say why I did not find its rejection of majoritarianism to be convincing. As for the overview, this is a seven-chapter book with an introduction and conclusion. The first chapter runs through a host of data, at times depressing, indicating the levels of political ignorance. Put more bluntly, Somin tells you just how little the preponderance of voters actually knows about issues and, well, facts. The second chapter considers whether, nevertheless, they know enough basic facts to pass the implicit hurdles of various theories of representative democracy. Somin concludes that the answer is "no." "Public knowledge levels fall well short of the requirements of normative theories of political participation" (p. 73). Then the author moves to arguing that this political ignorance is "rational"--not a sign of stupidity, but of rationality. "Political ignorance is rational because an individual voter has virtually no chance of influencing the outcome of an election--possibly less than one in one hundred million in the case of a modern U.S. presidential election" (p. 75). Somin says this point applies as much to "highly altruistic and civic-minded citizens as to narrowly self-interested ones" (p. 78). There is a caveat however. "[I]t turns out that the decision to vote is rational so long as the voter perceives a significant difference between candidates and cares even slightly about the welfare of fellow citizens, as well as his or her own" (p. 80). Refinements on this get considered, such as possibly caring about the size of a mandate, and how "some other reason not clearly related to voting" (p. 97) will, in Somin's view, be the most powerful determinant of one's political knowledge.

That is the first half of the book, more or less, in which the author analyzes the nature and extent of the problem of political ignorance in a democracy like the United States. Lots of data: lots of social science; lots of asserted ignorance, albeit of a sort claimed also to be rational. Then the last four chapters shift to considering what Somin considers to be potential solutions. As noted above, Somin is pessimistic about voters becoming better informed any time soon. That is chapter seven, the last one. Nor does Somin think that various "shortcut" aids that might guide voters are sufficient to overcome his earlier critiques. Yes, there is "considerable merit" to the argument that...