I’ve never been a big believer in the wisdom of voters. Indeed, I’ve devoted much of my academic career to writing about the dangers of widespread political ignorance, going all the way back to my first academic article. It was published in 1998, at a time when most experts tended to be relatively optimistic about voter competence. Since then, I published a book on the subject—Democracy and Political Ignorance – and many other articles exploring various dimensions of the problem, its implications for legal and political theory, and possible solutions.
In these works, I explained how most voters often don’t know even basic facts about the political system and government policy, and those that know more (the “political fans”), often tend to evaluate political information in a highly biased way. I also argued that information shortcuts and “miracles of aggregation” largely fail to offset ignorance and bias, and sometimes even…
