The Volokh Conspiracy

The recent controversial acquittal of Casey Anthony has stimulated efforts in many states to enact “Caylee’s Law” as a response. The law would require parents to report a missing child to the authorities within 24 hours, and the death of a child within 1 hour. If they fail to do either, they would be guilty of a felony (a federal one if the law is enacted by Congress).

Radley Balko has a good column explaining the many shortcomings of this idea. As he points out, high-profile criminal cases often stimulate demands for ill-advised laws, even when the case in question is extremely atypical:

Laws named after crime victims and dead people are usually a bad idea. They play more to emotion than reason. But they’re disturbingly predictable, especially when they come after the death of a child. ….

There are myriad other problems with the one-hour requirement. What if a child dies while sleeping? When would you start the clock on the parent’s one-hour window to report? From the time the parent discovers the child is dead, or from the time the child actually dies? If it’s the former, can you really believe what a parent tells you if he knows a felony charge hinges on his answer? What if a parent or babysitter missed the deadline because she fell asleep at the time the child was playing outside and suffered a fatal accident?…

The portion of the bill that requires a parent to report a missing child within 24 hours is just as fraught with problems. When does that clock start? From the time the child actually gets abducted, gets lost, or is somehow killed, or at the time the parents noticed the child was missing? How do you pinpoint the time that they “noticed”?….

The law and the attention it attracts could also cause problems of overcompliance. How many parents will notify the authorities with false reports within an hour or two, out of fear of becoming suspects? How many such calls and wasted police resources on false alarms will it take before police grow jaded and begin taking note of missing child reports, but don’t bother investigating them until much later? How many legitimate abductions will then go uninvestigated during the critical first few hours because they were lost in the pile of false reports inspired by Caylee’s Law?

This is not the first time that a highly unusual but much-publicized case has led to this kind of overreaction. Consider the dubious “zero tolerance” policies enacted after Columbine or Megan’s Law, enacted in reaction to a rare case of child rape by a stranger.

Why are these laws so popular with voters? Part of the explanation is an understandable sympathy with the victims. But a logical and knowledgeable electorate would still ask serious questions about the potential costs and benefits of the proposed laws before supporting them – especially if, as in this case, the proposed law might actually undercut crime-fighting efforts by wasting law enforcement resources. The very rare parents who deliberately kill their children and then try to cover up the evidence are unlikely to report what happened merely because of this law. A conviction for murder is a much greater threat than a conviction for violating Caylee’s Law, unless the punishments for the latter are going to be truly draconian (which would be problematic in its own right). On the other hand, lots of innocent parents will probably file reports just to avoid even a slight risk of prosecution, thereby burdening law enforcement agencies with lots of useless paperwork and false leads.

It seems likely that political ignorance is an important part of the story here. The public sees the high-profile case, and has a knee-jerk desire to “do something about it.” Most voters don’t realize how rare such cases are, and also know very little about the potential downsides of proposals like these. And, because political ignorance is rational, few will take the time and effort to investigate the evidence and deliberate carefully before forming an opinion. For their part, politicians hungry for votes and activists hungry for media attention are more than willing to cater to the public’s demands.

It’s unrealistic to expect rationally ignorant voters to devote significant time and effort to studying proposals like Caylee’s Law. But they should at least adopt Ted Frank’s Law as a helpful heuristic:

My rule of thumb is a strong presumption that any law named after a victim is poor public policy enacted by legislators who confuse voting against a law with voting against an innocent person…

Ted’s rule isn’t perfect. Once in a blue moon, a law named after an atypical but highly publicized crime victim really will do more good than harm. But it’s likely to be correct a lot more often than not. Indeed, Frank’s Law is so logical and simple that one wonders why most voters haven’t adopted it already. Sadly, the answer may be that it’s rational for ignorant voters to do a poor job of evaluating the information they do have. In the wake of a terrible tragedy, it’s much more emotionally satisfying to call for decisive action to save the next Caylee Anthony than to hold back on the grounds that there may be nothing we can do.

UPDATE: Ted Frank has some thoughts of his own on Caylee’s Law here.

UPDATE #2: Maia Szalavitz of Time has some further information on the flaws of Caylee’s law and the harm caused by past laws enacted under similar circumstances.

Inspired by Bryan Caplan’s ideological Turing Test, atheist blogger Leah Libresco proposes a religious Turing test to measure the extent to which Christians and atheists understand the arguments of the other side [HT: Bryan Caplan]:

Just like Caplan, I’d like to put my money where my mouth is and play in an ideological Turing Test against a Christian blogger. We could both answer a selection of questions posed by Christians and atheists or we could each write an argument for and against the side we support and then briefly rebut the two arguments the other one had produced. I’m flexible and open to suggestions.

Debates over religion have many parallels to political debates. Public ignorance about religion is almost as widespread as political ignorance. And most people react in a highly biased way to evidence and arguments that go against their position on either subject.

A religious Turing test, however, poses challenges that a political one does not. Liberalism, conservatism, and libertarianism are rough equivalents of each other in as much as all of them are ideologies that try to delineate the appropriate role of political power in society. Atheism on the other hand isn’t really an equivalent of Christianity in the same sense. Atheism is just denial of the existence of God; it is not a comprehensive moral system. That’s why thinkers as divergent as Ayn Rand and Karl Marx could both be atheists. By contrast, Christianity goes far beyond merely asserting that God exists. It also incorporates many other theological doctrines (e.g. – that Jesus Christ is the son of God), and various ethical commands. The same goes for Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and many other religions. Thus, simulating a Christian who is well-informed about the arguments for his religious views is a tougher challenge than simulating an atheist who is comparably knowledgeable about atheism. Christianity covers a much wider range of issues than atheism does.

Nonetheless, last year’s Pew survey of public knowledge of religion suggests that atheists and agnostics are, on average, more knowledgeable about religious doctrine than theists. Atheists and agnostics (an average of 6.7 correct answers out of 12) even outscored Christians (6.0) on questions that specifically tested knowledge of Christianity. Though it’s also fair to note that some subsets of Christians such as Mormons (7.9) and white evangelicals (7.3) did better than the atheists and agnostics did. Mormons (20.3 correct answers out of 32) also achieved a statistical dead heat with atheists (20.9) on the overall survey, as did Jews (20.5). I speculated on the reasons for these groups’ relatively high knowledge levels here.

Knowledge of basic facts about religion is not the same thing as knowledge of more detailed arguments for and against various religious claims. I think I understand the most basic tenets of Christianity (the kind of information covered in the Pew survey). But I know very little about the arguments for them that Christian theologians have developed (with the partial exception of arguments for the existence of God). Libresco’s proposal might give us some evidence on the extent to which atheists and Christian’s understand their opponents’ more in-depth arguments; though obviously it would be a mistake to generalize too much from one small-N study. She reports that at least two Christians have expressed interest in participating in her experiment. So stay tuned.

UPDATE: Libresco describes the details of her experiment in this follow-up post.

UPDATE #2: Obviously, as in the case of political ideologies such as liberalism and libertarianism, there is a good deal of internal diversity among Christians. For example, there are significant theological differences between Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians, and also between theological conservatives and liberals within each of these groups. That further complicates the the task of the Turing simulator. There is also some diversity among atheists as well, though perhaps less than among Christians because atheism, as such, covers fewer questions than Christianity does.

Reactions to my attempt to take Bryan Caplan’s ideological Turing test by simulating liberal arguments varied widely. But, on the whole, more people thought I missed the mark than that I hit it. What caused this relative failure?

Part of the problem was that it wasn’t a true Turing test at all. In the original version of the test, a computer tries to fool people into thinking that it’s actually human. The test audience doesn’t know ahead of time that they’re dealing with a computer. In this case, the audience did know ahead of time that I’m a libertarian, and so were more on their guard. It would be interesting to repeat the experiment under controlled conditions that do allow a true Turing test.

Second, I did not employ much of the aggressive rhetoric against libertarians and conservatives that many actual liberals use. For example, I didn’t say that free market advocates are mostly just apologists for corporate interests, or that the market itself is just a tool for the rich to exploit the poor. Instead, I tried to outline standard, moderately sophisticated, liberal arguments for why government intervention is needed to solve major social problems such as market failures, poverty, and injustices against women and minority groups. The rhetorical style I employed was pretty similar to that which I use in my posts defending my own views. My approach to defending libertarianism is closer to David Friedman’s than Murray Rothbard’s. Aggressive rhetoric mostly appeals to those who already agree with your argument, and tends to turn off those who don’t. The degree of rhetorical aggressiveness that bloggers use varies within ideologies more than across them. Some liberal bloggers are relatively restrained in their rhetoric; others are not. The same goes for conservatives and libertarians.

For similar reasons, I spent a significant part of my post forestalling standard objections to the position I was defending. I do the same thing in most of my pro-libertarian posts. You can’t defend a position effectively if you don’t deal with obvious objections. And since part of the goal of the exercise was to demonstrate my understanding of liberal arguments, I needed to also demonstrate my understanding of their responses to opposing views.

Be that as it may, willingness to use tough rhetoric against opponents is one of the hallmarks of a true believer in any ideology. A writer who avoids it is less likely to be viewed as authentic. Not everyone with strong views is also rhetorically aggressive. But, on average, the stronger and more deeply felt your ideological commitments, the more likely you are to engage in rhetorical attacks – or even to see these attacks as reflections of a deeper truth rather than rhetorical excesses.

Third, one can certainly question whether I made the right choice of issues. I chose market failure, poverty, and discrimination in large part because of the importance of these questions, and their centrality to modern left-wing thought. But I admit that I also chose them in part because I think they are issues where the left has a relatively strong case, though still one I largely disagree with. For example, I focused on absolute poverty rather than income inequality in part because I think the liberal argument on the former issue is a lot stronger. Obviously, many liberals might disagree with my judgment on what issues are most important, and where the liberal case is at its strongest. Indeed, they disagree about these matters among themselves as well as with me.

Finally, my post did not do justice to the different varieties of liberal thought. In framing my arguments, I implicitly channeled a liberal with a significant utilitarian streak, and one who is knowledgeable about and receptive to mainstream economics. In other words, a liberal who is in many respects similar to economist Paul Krugman, who kicked off this discussion. Utilitarian consequentialism and mainstream economics are important elements of modern liberal thought. But they’re not the only elements, and there are many liberals who reject them in whole or in part.

It’s also fair to observe, as some commenters did, that my implicit liberal is also the type most similar to me. I too have a significant utilitarian streak, and draw a lot on mainstream economics. I could have tried to simulate a liberal with radically different values and methodological assumptions (e.g. -a left-wing communitarian who thinks that mainstream economics is vastly overrated). But I admit it would have been a tougher task. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to assume that the liberal I simulated was just a slightly more left-wing version of me. Although we may share some common values and methodological assumptions, he still favors a vastly larger role for government than I do. It’s roughly the difference between a society where government spending and regulation accounts for about 10% of GDP and one where the state spends 50% or more and regulates a much wider range of activities.

Notice that a liberal or conservative trying to simulate a libertarian would face similar challenges. Should he model a deontological natural rights advocate like Robert Nozick or a consequentialist who thinks that free markets are better than government at maximizing utility (e.g. David Friedman)? Should he choose an Austrian economist who rejects mainstream economics or a neoclassical scholar who accepts it? Whichever decision the simulator makes, there will be some libertarians who can argue that he didn’t represent their views correctly.

For all of the above reasons, and perhaps others, my attempt at the ideological Turing test wasn’t especially successful. But I think it was still a useful exercise. Future attempts can avoid the mistakes I made by doing a true Turing test, and by specifying more precisely what kind of ideological opponent they are trying to simulate.

In this post, I’m going to take Bryan Caplan’s ideological Turing Test, which requires me to “simulate” an advocate of an ideology I oppose. In this case, I’m going to simulate an advocate of liberalism and focus on issues where liberals and libertarians disagree. And I’m going to try simulate an advocate who is reasonably intelligent and reasonably knowledgeable about the relevant issues. Anyone can caricature an opponent who is ignorant or stupid.

Here goes:

The free market is well and good in its proper place. But libertarians and many conservatives are wrong to advocate total laissez-faire. They indefensibly ignore or downplay market failures, the plight of the poor, and historic injustices against women and minorities. Let’s take each of these points in turn.

I. Market Failures.

A pure free market might work well in a world where there was perfect competition, perfect information, and zero transaction costs. In the real world, however, we have market failures such as public goods problems, externalities, asymmetric information and monopoly. Contrary to what some libertarians and conservatives seem to think, we progressives don’t claim that government can correct all such market failures. But it’s foolish to deny that it can correct some of them, perhaps a great many. For example, the evidence clearly shows that the Clean Air Act has greatly reduced air pollution, which the market could not have done on its own because clean air is a classic example of a public good. There are many similar cases.

It’s true that government will sometimes do a poor job of addressing market failures, or even make the situation worse. But that’s why we have the democratic process. If political leaders are failing at correcting market failure, the voters can “throw the bums out.” That’s what they did to the Republicans in 2008, after the GOP allowed market failures to cause a terrible financial crisis. Sometimes, the voters make mistakes out of ignorance (e.g. – in 2010). But in the long run, they are fairly effective at incentivizing political leaders to do a good job of correcting the deficiencies of the market. And democracy would work even better if we had stronger campaign finance laws to prevent the will of the people from being overriden by corporate lobbying and campaign contributions.

Where necessary, we can rely on judicial review to correct some of the flaws of the democratic process, and ensure that everyone has a right to participate. We need some structural safeguards to keep the “tyranny of the majority” from oppressing unpopular minority groups and violating basic rights. In general, however, democratic government is the best answer to market failure.

II. The Problem of Poverty.

In a free market, your ability to acquire goods and services is ultimately determined by your wealth. Money talks. This puts the poor at a serious disadvantage. They don’t have nearly as much purchasing power as the rich. The very poorest often have trouble even acquiring basic necessities. Private charity helps matters somewhat. But there’s far too many poor people for it to even come close to solving the problem. If we want to give the poor a minimally decent life, government-imposed redistribution is the only way to do it.

It may be true that a poorly designed welfare system will incentivize able-bodied people to stay on the dole rather than work. But the right is wrong to assume that we can only solve this problem by abolishing the welfare state or severely limiting it. We should instead make work attractive by subsidizing the working poor through policies such as the earned income tax credit, the minimum wage, and government-provided health insurance. That way, those able to work will still have incentives to get a job, even with generous welfare provision for the unemployed. Ultimately, however, it’s more important to save the poor from misery and starvation than to have a perfectly efficient labor market for low-income workers. A society as wealthy as ours can easily afford this trade-off.

III. Addressing Historic Injustices.

The case for the free market would be stronger if we did not live in a world where some groups are handicapped by massive historic injustices such as the legacy of slavery, segregation, and centuries of sexism that reduced women to the status of second-class citizens. As Lyndon Johnson put it, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” Programs like affirmative action are needed to compensate women and minority groups for the effects of centuries of oppression and discrimination.

Moreover, sometimes we need large-scale government intervention simply to stop the oppression in the first place. Very little progress was made in ending discrimination against African-Americans until the federal government passed the civil rights legislation of the 1960s and began to enforce it aggressively. Similarly, extensive federal regulation such as Title VII and Title IX was needed to begin to curb discrimination against women. Today, we need continued regulation to guard against the racism and sexism that still remains, and to eliminate the harm caused by homophobia.

OK, I think that’s enough channeling of my inner liberal for one post. How did I do on the Turing Test?

UPDATE: Some of the commenters seem to be misunderstanding what I was doing here. I was trying to outline the arguments of a reasonably knowledgeable and intelligent liberal on several key issues. I was not trying to simply imitate liberal political talking points or sound bites. That’s why I tried to make substantive arguments and respond to opposing views, instead of simply repeat slogans. Krugman’s original point, after all, was that opponents of liberalism don’t understand liberal arguments, not that they can’t repeat liberal rhetoric. Other commenters object to the use of terminology from economics, such as “market failure,” which they see as somehow biased towards libertarianism. In reality, however, the majority of economists are liberal Democrats, and terms such as “market failure” were introduced by left of center economists to explain why various forms of government intervention are needed. Finally, some people complain that I omitted various issues and arguments (e.g. – income inequality in addition to absolute poverty). That’s true enough. I could have written a much longer post that covered many more points. However, turning a blog post into a lengthy article is rarely a good idea.

In a recent interview, Paul Krugman argued that liberals generally understand conservative arguments better than vice versa:

A liberal can talk coherently about what the conservative view is because people like me actually do listen. We don’t think it’s right, but we pay enough attention to see what the other person is trying to get at. The reverse is not true. You try to get someone who is fiercely anti-Keynesian to even explain what a Keynesian economic argument is, they can’t do it. They can’t get it remotely right. Or if you ask a conservative, “What do liberals want?” You get this bizarre stuff – for example, that liberals want everybody to ride trains, because it makes people more susceptible to collectivism. You just have to look at the realities of the way each side talks and what they know. One side of the picture is open-minded and sceptical. We have views that are different, but they’re arrived at through paying attention. The other side has dogmatic views.

Bryan Caplan responds:

In a Turing Test, a computer tries to pass for human….

According to Krugman, liberals have the ability to simulate conservatives, but conservatives lack the ability to simulate liberals….

It’s not a perfect criterion, of course, especially for highly idiosyncratic views. But the ability to pass ideological Turing tests – to state opposing views as clearly and persuasively as their proponents – is a genuine symptom of objectivity and wisdom….

There are important caveats….. we should compare liberal intellectuals to non-liberal intellectuals, and liberal entertainers to non-liberal entertainers, not say Krugman to Beck….

If we limit our sample to Ph.D.s from top-10 social science programs, I don’t see how Krugman could be right. You can’t get a Ph.D. from Princeton econ without acquiring basic familiarity with market failure arguments and Keynesian macro. At least you couldn’t when I was a student there in the 90s. In contrast, it’s easy to get a Ph.D. from Princeton econ without even learning the key differences between conservatism and libertarianism, much less their main arguments… And frankly, it shows….

Indeed, I’ll happily bet that any libertarian with a Ph.D. from a top-10 social science program can fool more voters than Krugman. We learn his worldview as part of the curriculum. He learns ours in his spare time – if he chooses to spare it.

I tend to agree with Bryan. On average, non-liberal scholars and intellectuals know more about liberalism than their liberal counterparts know about libertarianism and conservatism. That’s because the non-liberals are usually surrounded by people with liberal views, and those views are extensively covered in the curriculum of nearly all top colleges and graduate schools. By contrast, it’s easier for liberal intellectuals to ignore non-liberal arguments or at least devote little time and effort to understanding them.

Outside the intellectual world, both liberals and non-liberals often have little knowledge of their opponents’ arguments. But that’s just part of the more general problem of widespread political ignorance. Indeed, a close-minded attitude to opposing views is a general facet of the way most people approach politics. It’s not a problem unique to either liberals or their adversaries.

But, as Bryan says, the proof is in the pudding. In my next post, I will take the ideological Turing test myself, and readers can judge how I do.

Fred Barbash of CQ Weekly recently published an interesting article about public ignorance of the federal budget, and its implications for the current political conflict over government spending:

With Washington tied in knots over the budget deficit, pollsters lately have been trying to get a sense of exactly where voters stand on the issue. What they’re finding would not be terribly helpful to those trying to solve the problem.

That’s because many Americans’ perception of how federal spending is divvied up is just plain wrong. In fact, if their answers about the federal budget were even close to correct, slashing the deficit would be a breeze.

In a recent CNN-Opinion Research survey, 30 percent of the respondents guessed that a fifth or more of the budget goes for foreign humanitarian and development aid. The real figure is closer to six-tenths of 1 percent.

In a Bloomberg survey, 70 percent said cutting foreign aid would make a large dent in the deficit. Fewer than half said the same about cutting Medicare.

About 22 percent of the respondents, when surveyed, thought the Corporation for Public Broadcasting consumes more than a tenth of the budget. The reality is closer to a hundredth of a percent…..

At a time when the deficit is driving every debate in Washington, the fiscal intelligence of the citizenry is troubling but not surprising to experts on public opinion. Mostly, pollsters say, people are in a state of confusion on a broad variety of issues.

It isn’t that they don’t care. Between 80 percent and 90 percent of those responding in most surveys see the deficit as a “major problem.” It’s that they don’t know….

Failed quizzes about the budget only scratch the surface. Research demonstrates fundamental misunderstandings across the spectrum about across the spectrum about government, about which level of government does what and which official is accountable for what. Presidents get blamed for local problems, mayors for national problems. Incumbent office holders can even get a boost on voting day if their local team wins a major championship just prior to an election.

This ignorance creates a vacuum that politicians and activists are all too happy to fill — with their own spin.

The article incorporates comments by various scholars of political knowledge, including yours truly. I previously blogged about public ignorance of the federal budget in this post.

Self-styled “anarchists” have recently mounted violent protests against the Greek government’s proposed budget cuts:

Greek anarchists threw petrol bombs and clashed with police during a major protest Wednesday against fresh government austerity measures, with at least two people reported injured.

Dozens of hooded and self-styled anarchist youths hurled water bottles and stones at police outside the Greek parliament, and the police responded with volleys of tear gas, The Wall Street Journal reported….

The strike[and the protests] come… as Greece’s parliament debated a five-year €28 billion ($40.2 billion) austerity program that the government has promised its international creditors….

These protestors seem to be confused about their own ideology. The whole point of anarchism is the abolition of government. Real anarchists would demand even bigger cuts in government spending, especially in a country like Greece, where government spending was a whopping 48% of gross domestic product as of 2008, according to the OECD.

An anarchist could consistently oppose cuts in government spending if he believed that the cuts would somehow lead to even greater state spending and regulation in the future. But the Greek “anarchists” aren’t making any such “lesser evil” argument. They apparently support the endangered government programs for their own sake. And they seem oblivious to the contradiction between that stance and their commitment to anarchism. Before their next demonstration, these people would be well advised to learn some basic political knowledge, starting with the definition of anarchy. Making an effort to become informed is an ethical obligation of voters. And that goes double for people who seek to advance a political agenda through violent demonstrations.

My article, “The Tea Party Movement and Popular Constitutionalism,” is now available on SSRN. It is part of a recent Northwestern University Law Review Colloquy symposium on the Constitutional Politics of the Tea Party Movement. Here is the abstract:

The rise of the Tea Party movement follows a period during which many scholars have focused on “popular constitutionalism”: the involvement of public opinion and popular movements in influencing constitutional interpretation. Most of the previous scholarship on popular constitutionalism analyzed movements identified with the political left. Although the Tea Party movement is primarily composed of conservatives and libertarians, it has much in common with previous popular constitutional movements.

Part I of this Essay describes some of these similarities, focusing on the ways in which popular constitutional movements have arisen in response to social or economic crises, or major policy initiatives instituted by their opponents. Part II explains how the Tea Party movement shares key strengths and weaknesses of other popular movements. Public opinion on constitutional and policy issues is often influenced by widespread political ignorance and irrationality. The Tea Party is no exception to these trends. The evidence suggests, however, that Tea Party supporters are no more likely to be ignorant than public opinion generally, or their opponents on the political left.

Part III explains two possible advantages of one unusual feature of the Tea Party: the fact that it is the first popular constitutionalist movement in many years whose main focus is the need to limit federal power. The enormous size and scope of modern government undercuts meaningful democratic control over government policy because “rationally ignorant” voters cannot keep track of more than a small fraction of government activity. Strengthening democratic accountability is one of the main objectives of advocates of popular constitutionalism. The imposition of stricter limits on government power might make that goal easier to achieve. The Tea Party’s focus on limiting government also makes it less likely that we will see the emergence of a right-wing populist movement that is primarily focused on intolerance and xenophobia, of the kind that often arose during previous economic downturns.

Le Monde has an interesting article reporting on a recent poll indicating that some 57% of French people believe that Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s recent arrest on charges of rape was the result of a “conspiracy” against him. Strauss-Kahn was the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund and a leading projected Socialist Party candidate in the 2012 French presidential election.

In this recent post, I explained some of the reasons why belief in dubious political conspiracy theories is so widespread. The DSK case fits the established pattern well. Like America’s “birthers” and “truthers,” many of the French reflexively bought into conspiracy theories about the DSK case, despite the absence of any proof supporting them. They did so at least in part because there is little incentive for citizens to objectively evaluate political claims. Like many Americans, the French are more likely to accept political conspiracy theories that reinforce their preexisting political views. For example, some 70% of Socialist Party supporters agree that DSK is the victim of a conspiracy, compared to a much lower percentage of French rightists who think so.

In fairness to the French DSK conspiracy believers, we don’t yet have definitive proof that DSK was not the victim of a conspiracy. The New York authorities have only just begun to investigate the case. Thus, the belief that DSK’s arrest was the result of a conspiracy is not (yet) as ridiculous as birtherism or 9/11 conspiracy-mongering. Nonetheless, many of the French are still giving conspiracy claims far more credence than they deserve. Even if such theories can’t be definitively disproved, there is no evidence to justify the belief that DSK’s arrest was “certainly” (as believed by 22% of the French poll respondents) or “probably” (35 percent) caused by a conspiracy.

The full Le Monde article is available only in French, but a partial English translation is available here.

UPDATE: Note that even if the charges against Strauss-Kahn are dropped or he ends up being acquitted, that would not prove that his arrest was the result of a “conspiracy.” Prosecutors and police often make mistakes even in the absence of any conspiracy against the defendant. For that matter, even if DSK is guilty, the evidence against him might not be strong enough for a jury to conclude that his guilt has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

I don’t know if we have many readers in Greece. But any who may be reading this might be interested to know that I will be giving a lecture on my forthcoming book Democracy and Political Ignorance at the University of Athens on Wednesday, May 4 at 7 PM. Details available here.

I’m really looking forward to speaking about this subject in Athens, the city where both democracy and the debate over political ignorance began. In this short article, I explain why ancient Athenian citizens were probably less ignorant than modern voters. Although much-maligned by critics such as Plato and Thucydides, the Athenian electorate may well have had a fairly impressive level of political knowledge.

You might wonder, why is my wife willing to tolerate this sort of thing on our honeymoon? It’s because she loves political theory almost as much as I do, and even read my some of work on political ignorance and related subjects before we met. She thought it would be cool to do a lecture on this subject in Athens. I am far more fortunate in my marriage than I deserve.

Belief in political conspiracy theories is widespread on both sides of the political spectrum. Some 45% of Republicans believe that Obama is not a native-born citizen and (presumably) that the Democrats have gotten away with covering up that fact. Similarly, 35% of Democrats believe that George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 attack in advance, but let it happen anyway. About a quarter of all Americans, including 32% of Democrats and 18% of Republicans, believe that “the Jews” are to blame for the financial crisis of 2008.

Other widely-endorsed conspiracy theories include claims that the government is covering up evidence of alien landings on Earth, and that the AIDS virus was created in a government lab for the purpose of infecting blacks. In a recent interview with CNN, Professor Robert Blaskiewicz of the Georgia Institute of Technology tried to explain the prevalence of such beliefs:

People are extremely social critters, and part of what makes that possible is the ability to perceive others as deliberately acting in the world, in other words to detect agency.

It’s extremely useful in building respectful communities. Sometimes that faculty doesn’t turn off when it should, and you associate “agency” with events and ideas that are unrelated.

When a responsible agent is not easily discernible, that sense that something is still deliberate endures, and you are left wondering, “Well, who caused it, then?” You fill in the blanks.

Conspiracy theories are a contemporary mythology, not unlike the Greek gods. Everything that happens has a reason, and the gods affect the course of human events through direct intervention.

The ill-defined “they,” whether referring to the U.N., CIA, international bankers, Jews or interdimensional shapeshifting reptilian space aliens living in the hollowed-out artificial moon (yeah, it’s a real one), really seem to me to be a secular version of religious mythology.

On the other side, when you are already convinced that agents are working to manipulate world events, people tend to seek out information that reinforces what they already believe.

It’s a tendency called confirmation bias, and it is a sort of perceptual filter for what you accept as evidence.

I have no doubt that these psychological tendencies play an important role in causing people to endorse political conspiracy theories. But they do not explain why people are so much more likely to endorse poorly supported conspiracy theories about politics than about events in their personal or professional lives. Here too, a ” a responsible agent” is not always “easily discernible.” It would surely be emotionally satisfying for many people if they could blame setbacks at work on a conspiracy by the Trilateral Commission or “reptilian space aliens.” It’s much less painful to believe that than to believe that the failure is largely our own fault. And once such a self-justifying thought occurs to us, “confirmation bias” would reinforce it. The same goes for failures in our personal lives.

Yet very few people actually blame personal and professional failures on shadowy conspiracies. Why not? Because deluding ourselves about such matters carries a heavy cost. If you believe that your failures at work are the fault of the Trilateral Commission, you might end up getting fired, or at least passed over for promotion. If you think that “the Jews” are the reason why you can’t get a date, you are probably dooming yourself to more lonely weekends. In each of these areas, our individual beliefs and actions make a real difference to the outcome. So people have strong incentives to seek out the truth rather than accept emotionally satisfying falsehoods. Obviously, some people still fall prey to ridiculous conspiracy theories in these fields, and few are willing to face the whole truth about all their flaws. But most people at least make a reasonable effort to assess their jobs and personal life rationally.

With politics, by contrast, the chance that any one individual vote will make a difference is miniscule. If you are deluded about Obama’s citizenship status or the causes of the financial crisis, it will not have any impact on policy. Nor will it harm you personally. As a result, people tend to be “rationally ignorant” about politics, and to do a poor job of evaluating the information they do learn. They don’t consciously embrace beliefs they know to be false. But they also don’t make much of an effort to critically evaluate the ideas they come across. If a conspiracy theory is emotionally satisfying and reinforces their preexisting prejudices, they are more than happy to run with it. This is perfectly rational and understandable behavior for individual voters. Unfortunately, it can lead to unfortunate collective outcomes in so far as such beliefs influence election results and the content of public policy.

UPDATE: I previously wrote about the relationship between rational ignorance and belief in political conspiracy theories here.

UPDATE #2: Dave Hoffman of Concurring Opinions responds to this post here. He argues that political beliefs aren’t actually much different from personal beliefs:

This claim depends on Ilya’s assertion that “very few people actually blame personal and professional failures on shadowy conspiracies.” I think Ilya is just wrong here. People do attribute personal and professional failures to conspiracies – constantly. Those shadowy conspiracies are simply less grand (and thus less likely to be generally known). My boss is out to get me at work; my friends deliberately set me up to look bad; etc. Moreover, I think Ilya’s claim of rational conspiracy theories makes the process seem more inevitable than it might otherwise be, and doesn’t explain which theories get traction (Grassy Knoll, Long-Form Birth Certificate) and which don’t (Moon Landing).

Of course people sometimes believe that they are the victims of small-scale conspiracies in their personal lives. But such beliefs are rarely as absurd and ridiculous as many widely believed political conspiracy theories. Mistakenly believing that the boss has it in for you is not in the same league with believing that Bush knew about 9/11 in advance or that Obama successfully covered up the fact he’s not really constitutionally eligible to be president. That’s because people have strong incentives to develop at least a reasonably accurate understanding of their bosses and friends. Not so with politics.

It was not the purpose of my post to explain “which theories get traction,” and “which don’t.” But my analysis does imply at least a partial answer to this question: theories will get traction if they conform to a significant number of people’s preconceptions and if they are simple and emotionally appealing.

Hoffman also claims that my analysis somehow absolves opinion leaders of “responsibility” for refuting conspiracy theories:

Ilya’s collective-action-delusion theory also absolves public figures (e.g., well-known libertarian bloggers) from any responsibility to use their moral authority to persuade the public that conspiracy theories are bunk. There is tons of evidence that people tend to listen carefully to thought-leaders who represent and embody their values, especially when those representatives are speaking about complex topics that the listener has no easy way to investigate herself.

Nothing in my analysis diminishes anyone’s moral responsibility. As I have often explained in the past, the fact that political ignorance and irrationality are the result of a collective action problem does not mean that they represent morally defensible behavior on the part of either the ignorant voters themselves or the political leaders who exploit that ignorance.

At the same time, there is no lack of easily available evidence to refute the various conspiracy theories out there, much of it from well-known public figures and publications with “moral authority.” A quick internet search is more than enough to find evidence proving that birtherism or 9/11 conspiracy theories are bunk. The problem is that, as tons of evidence shows, most people are usually unwilling to look for evidence that cuts against their preexisting political views, and tend to reject it when it’s presented to them. And that is especially true of people whose commitment to their views is strong enough that they are ready to endorse even dubious conspiracy theories, so long as they coincide with their preconceptions.

Finally, it’s worth noting that political leaders and activists face a collective action problem of their own here. If they refuse to exploit conspiracy theories that favor their own side, they risk defeat at the hands of less scrupulous opponents. For that reason, it’s not surprising that most successful politicians and activists routinely exploit political ignorance and irrationality whenever it’s in their interest to do so.

The Northwestern University Law Review Colloquy has posted a symposium on “The Constitutional Politics of the Tea Party Movement.” The symposium was organized by Richard Albert of Boston College, who arranged a panel on the subject at this year’s AALS conference and wrote an introduction available here. The symposium includes contributions by well-known constitutional law scholars such as co-blogger Randy Barnett, Jared Goldstein, and Sanford Levinson. My own contribution to the symposium analyzes the Tea Party Movement as an example of “popular constitutionalism.” Here is an excerpt from the introduction:

The rise of the Tea Party movement followed a period during which many academic students of constitutional law focused on “popular constitutionalism”: the involvement of public opinion and popular movements in influencing constitutional interpretation. Many of these scholars argue that popular constitutional movements have a beneficial impact on constitutional law, and some even contend that popular constitutionalism should supplant judicial review entirely….

Most of the previous scholarship on popular constitutionalism focuses on movements identified with the political left, such as the civil rights movement…. Although the Tea Party movement is primarily composed of conservatives and libertarians, it has much in common with previous popular constitutional movements.

Part I of this Essay describes some of these similarities, focusing on the ways in which popular constitutional movements have arisen in response to social or economic crises, or major policy initiatives instituted by their opponents. Part II explains how the Tea Party movement shares key strengths and weaknesses of other popular movements. For example, public opinion on constitutional and policy issues is often influenced by widespread political ignorance and irrationality. There also tends to be a conflation of constitutional and policy preferences. The Tea Party is no exception to these trends. The evidence suggests, however, that Tea Party supporters are no more likely to be ignorant than public opinion generally, or their opponents on the political left…..

Part III explains two possible advantages of one unusual feature of the Tea Party—the fact that it is the first popular constitutionalist movement in many years whose main focus is the need to limit federal power. The enormous size and scope of modern government undercuts meaningful democratic control over government policy because “rationally ignorant” voters cannot keep track of more than a small fraction of government activity. Strengthening democratic accountability is one of the main objectives of advocates of popular constitutionalism. The imposition of stricter limits on government power might make that goal easier to achieve. The Tea Party’s focus on limiting government also makes it less likely that we will see the emergence of a right-wing populist movement that is focused on intolerance and xenophobia, of the kind that often arose during previous economic downturns.

The Wall Street Journal website has an interesting summary of a recent study tracing the decline of the anti-war movement over the last few years, despite the deepening involvement of the United States in multiple wars:

President Obama inherited two wars, neither of which has ended—and the United States is now involved in military action in Libya—yet the anti-war movement has all but vanished. Why?

The answer, according to a new research article, has to do with the complex relationship between non-partisan activists and those who identify as Democrats. In short, many antiwar Democrats saw the election of President Barack Obama as a sufficient victory for their cause and withdrew from the streets.

The researchers conducted 5,398 surveys at 27 antiwar protests from January 2007 through December 2009. They also interviewed movement leaders and conducted ethnographic observations. The largest protest during that period occurred on Jan. 27, 2007, and drew over 100,000 people, by the researchers’ count. By October 2009, however, protests were drawing mere hundreds (which is about where they’ve remained).

What changed? During the period studied, the proportion of protesters who identified themselves as Democrats dropped from about 50% to roughly 20%. The rest of the protesters identified with no party or, less often, a third party. The proportion of third-party activists grew over time.

Both the Democratic Party and the antiwar movement gained advantages from their interaction, the researchers argue. But Democrats viewed the election of President Obama as a victory per se, while nonpartisan protesters were more attuned to policy continuities. Such continuities as—well, the wars not ending, and the one in Afghanistan escalating.

As I have explained elsewhere, many people, especially committed partisans, tend to act as “political fans”: processing political information in a highly biased way that overvalues anything that confirms their views or partisan loyalties, while ignoring or downplaying evidence that cuts against them.

One manifestation of this tendency is that committed partisans will tolerate behavior from their own party that they would be among the first to condemn if the opposition did it. When “our” side does the kinds of things that we condemn the other party for, partisans tend to ignore it, downplay it, or pretend that there is a meaningful distinction between the two cases even when there isn’t. This is similar to the way that sports fans denounce cheating or bad calls that go against their team, but ignore such things when they help the team win.

Many anti-war activists who are also partisan Democrats are willing to tolerate, if not actually support, aggressive military action undertaken by Obama that they would have vehemently opposed under a Republican president. In the immediate aftermath of Obama’s election, it might have been plausible to believe that Obama would quickly cut back on US military action abroad, even though he had actually promised to escalate the Afghanistan war during the 2008 election. By now, however, it is clear that Obama intends no such thing. Indeed, he has actually entered another war – this time without congressional authorization, and despite the fact that Muammar Qaddafi’s regime poses little threat to US national security interests, and does not have nearly as extensive a record of mass murder as Saddam Hussein did in Iraq.

A few antiwar liberal Democrats, such as Rep. Dennis Kucinich, have indeed denounced Obama’s war policies. But most have either kept quiet or actually supported the president. As the article by Michael Heaney and Fabio Rojas shows, this reaction is in sharp contrast to that of antiwar activists who are not also Democratic partisans. The latter have consistently opposed the various wars under both Obama and Bush, and have correctly recognized the substantial degree of continuity between the two.

Of course, this kind of partisan bias is far from limited to liberal Democrats. During the Bush presidency, many Republicans tolerated a vast expansion of federal spending and regulation that they would never have accepted from a Democrat. Earlier, the famous “Nixon in China” phenomenon arose because most Republicans were willing to accept Nixon’s cosying up to a mass-murdering Communist dictatorship just a few years after its worst crimes, even though they would not have tolerated similar policies from a liberal Democrat. There were principled conservative Republicans who denounced Nixon and Bush. But the overall level of Republican opposition was far lower than it would have been had a Democrat done the exact same thing.

CNN columnist L.Z. Granderson recently argued that ignorant voters should be excluded from the franchise:

Should ignorant people be allowed to vote?

A provocative question for sure; however, I’m not bringing it up for shock value, but rather to give us all pause.

If I were to ask you to ingest an unknown medicine from someone who knew nothing about the medical field, you probably wouldn’t do it. And I doubt many of us would feel comfortable as a shareholder in a company that asked people who knew nothing about business to hire its next CEO?

Yet we all know people who gleefully admit they know nothing about politics, don’t have time to find out what the current issues are or even know how the government works, but go out and vote. Want to know why it seems Washington is run by a bunch of idiots? Blame this hiccup in our political system for starters. What’s a solution? Weed out some of the ignorant by making people who want to vote first pass a test modeled on the one given to those who want to become citizens….

In a recent CNN poll, more than a third of the people questioned wanted to see cuts in military spending, which is a good debate to have. The problem is the poll also revealed most Americans think the military takes up 30 percent of the budget when in reality it’s 19 percent. If we don’t know how much money is being spent, how can we intelligently say it’s too much? And what to make of the 20 percent of folks polled who believe public broadcasting represents 10 percent of the budget, when it’s more like a 10th of 1 percent?

I’m not suggesting someone needs to be a Rhodes scholar to vote.

But voters should at least be able to name the three branches of government. Voters should understand what a “trade deficit” is and how laws are made.

I agree with Granderson that political ignorance is a serious problem, and I also agree that voters have a moral duty to become informed about the issues at stake in elections they participate in. As John Stuart Mill put it, voting is not a purely private choice, but the “exercise of power over others.” I also agree with Granderson that political ignorance is not the same thing as stupidity, but is merely “lack of knowledge in a specific area.” Perfectly intelligent people can choose to remain ignorant about politics, and it is actually rational for most of them to do so. A person can know next to nothing about politics, but still be a brilliant physicist, for example. To say that someone is too ignorant about politics to be a competent voter does not imply that they are generally stupid or incompetent.

Although Granderson summarizes the problem well, I am skeptical about his proposed solution: a government-imposed knowledge test for would-be voters. Any such test would have to adopted by incumbent legislators. Those incumbents would have strong incentives to skew the test in favor of their own supporters, disproportionately excluding Democrats if the legislature is controlled by Republicans or vice versa. In addition, incumbent politicians have incentives to exclude voters of whatever party who want to set strict limits on the legislators’ own power. It’s easy to come up with a knowledge test where the questions are worded in such a way as to skew the results against opponents of the majority party, people who seek to limit government power more generally, or both.

A knowledge test for voting may be defensible in theory. But it’s not a power that government can be trusted with. As Granderson admits, past experience with literacy tests and similar devices proves that there is enormous potential for abuse. Most modern legislators probably wouldn’t try to skew the test on a purely racial basis, as happened in the days of Jim Crow. But they are certainly not above using it to exclude their political opponents.

Furthermore, no test can ensure that voters are knowledgeable about more than a small fraction of the activities undertaken by modern government. When government spending encompasses some 40% of GDP and the state also regulates almost every aspect of our lives, even the best-informed voters can’t keep track of more than a tiny part of what government does. If we really want a much better-informed electorate, we will have to reduce the size and complexity of government to a more manageable scale, and empower people to “vote with their feet,” which creates much better incentives to be informed than voting at the ballot box.

In the meantime, however, we can take modest steps to increase the knowledge levels of the electorate at the margin. These ideas won’t “solve” the problem of political ignorance. But they can make it a little less severe. For instance, we can cut back on efforts to increase voter turnout, which generally draw in voters who are less knowledgeable than the average. While government should not ban ignorant voting, it also should not encourage it.

Similarly, we can try to spread the idea that those who vote have a civic duty to become informed. As philosopher Jason Brennan explains in his important new book, the conventional wisdom has things backwards. It emphasizes people’s supposed duty to vote, but suggests that they have no obligation to become informed about what they are voting on. The truth is the exact opposite. It isn’t wrong to stay home on election day. But if you do choose to vote, you should make a serious effort to understand what you’re voting about.

I recently had a chance to read an advance copy of Brown philosophy professor Jason Brennan’s The Ethics of Voting. Although I have a few reservations about Brennan’s arguments, I highly recommend the book to anyone with an interest in democracy, political theory, or the problem of voter ignorance. It may well be the best book ever on the moral obligations of voters.

Since democracy first began in ancient Greece, scholars have debated the strengths and weaknesses of democratic institutions. But much less attention has been paid to the moral obligations entailed by the act of voting itself. In modern times, the default assumption is that it is perfectly ethical for voters to support any candidate for any reason they want. Voting is implicitly considered an element of individual autonomy, much like choosing what food to eat or what clothes to wear.

Brennan argues that this conventional wisdom is mistaken. He contends that voters have an obligation to become informed about the policy issues at stake in an election and should try hard to evaluate the information they learn in an unbiased way. This is because voting decisions affect not only the individual voter, but all of society. Voting is not just a personal choice. As John Stuart Mill emphasized, it is the “exercise of power over others.” Brennan also argues that voters should focus on policy issues, not just on the candidates’ “character.” A person of good character can still end up adopting terrible policies if elected to office. Think of Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush. Furthermore, Brennan explains why voters should try to choose on the basis of what’s best for society as a whole rather than narrow individual self-interest. His argument on this point is subtle. But the core insight is that it is wrong to exercise coercive authority over other people solely on the basis of what benefits ourselves alone, without consideration for their own welfare.

In the first part of the book, Brennan argues that citizens have no duty to vote, merely a duty to become well-informed if they do choose to vote. Most critics of the idea of a duty to vote have emphasized the argument that such a duty undermines individual autonomy. Brennan advances a different critique. Even if you believe that people have a moral duty to promote the welfare of society as well as their own self-interest, some people can better do this by devoting their energies to tasks other than trying to be a good voter. For example, an outstanding scientist might benefit society best by devoting more time to research rather than learning about politics.

It might be disastrous if everyone chose not to vote or if only a tiny, unrepresentative minority goes to the polls. But society is not necessarily worse off if turnout falls to, say, 40% rather than 50%. If the smaller electorate is better-informed than the larger one, we might even be better off.

As Brennan recognizes, survey data shows that most voters do in fact try to choose the party that they think will best serve society, rather than just their own narrow self-interest. To that extent, voters are more ethical than we sometimes think. On the other hand, the data also shows that few voters make much effort to become informed, and many of those who do tend to evaluate political information in a highly biased way. If Brennan’s argument is correct, most of us often act unethically when we go to the polls. That is an unpleasant thought. But this is one of those cases where the truth hurts.

Other interesting parts of the book address the morality of vote-buying (which Brennan argues could be justified in some limited circumstances), the ethics of voting on the basis of religious principles, and the ethics of voting for the “lesser evil” and for minor party candidates who have no chance of winning. On each of these questions, Brennan has some interesting and original insights.

I do have a few reservations about Brennan’s analysis. As I have argued in my own work on political ignorance, the size, scope, and complexity of modern government is so great that even the best-informed voters are unlikely to know much about more than a fraction of what the state does. In my view, the best solution to this problem is to reduce the size and scope of government. But what of the ethical voter who has to cast a ballot in the existing political system? Does Brennan’s analysis imply that it is simply impossible for him to be adequately informed? If so, then there might not be any duty to acquire political knowledge after all; we don’t have any moral obligation to accomplish the impossible. More likely, Brennan might contend that the ethical voter should prioritize learning about some issues over others, focusing on the most important ones. But how should the voter decide which issues are the most important to learn about? Brennan doesn’t address this crucial question.

I was surprised that Brennan doesn’t consider John Stuart Mill’s classic analysis of the moral duties of voters in Considerations on Representative Government. On several key points, including the importance of political knowledge and the morality of self-interested voting, Mill’s argument anticipates Brennan’s own. It would have been helpful if Brennan had acknowledged Mill’s work and explained how his own view differs, if at all.

Despite these and a few other flaws, this is a great book. It’s original and well-argued, and most of it is easily accessible to nonexperts. Reading it might even lead you to become a better citizen than before.

Canada is in the midst of an important election campaign. Many important issues are at stake, including the state of the Canadian economy, crucial foreign policy decisions, and others. Nonetheless, the leaders of most of the contending parties have asked for the postponement of an upcoming debate between them to avoid a schedule conflict with a Montreal Canadiens’ first-round playoff game:

A move is afoot to reschedule a federal election debate slated for Thursday so it doesn’t conflict with the opening game of the Montreal Canadiens’ first-round playoff series against the Boston Bruins.

Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe got the ball rolling Sunday by saying there’s little doubt hockey-mad Montreal fans will choose the game over the debate.

NDP Leader Jack Layton later echoed those sentiments, the Liberals followed suit, and the Conservatives said they could live with whatever the debate broadcasters decide.

Bloc leader Duceppe wants other party leaders to join him in urging the consortium of broadcasters who organize the debate to move it back a day….

“We all know that hockey is very popular in Canada and in Quebec, which is why it would be a better idea to push the French debate back to allow hockey fans to watch the debate as well as the game on Thursday night.”

As a longtime Boston Bruins fan, I’m well aware of how popular hockey is in Quebec. At the same time, I’m sure that most Canadian voters recognize that the election is ultimately more important than the outcome of a hockey game, especially one that is merely a first-round playoff matchup. Why, then, would most of them tune in to the game instead of the debate?

The obvious answer is that the game is likely to be far more entertaining. But that still doesn’t fully explain the situation. Surely sacrificing an hour or two of entertainment is a small price to pay for becoming better-informed about a crucial public decision.

The real explanation is probably rational political ignorance. Because any one vote has only a tiny chance of actually determining the outcome of an election, most voters have little incentive to become informed about political issues. If a random hockey-loving Quebec voter knew that his decision would definitely determine the result of the election or even have, say, a 10% chance of doing so, he would probably watch the debate instead of the game. But in the real world, there is only a tiny chance that his vote will have any impact, so he feels free to turn the channel to the game instead.

For a very well-informed voter, of course, watching the debate won’t be useful because she probably already knows most of the points the party leaders will make. But most Canadians, like most Americans, have fairly low levels of political knowledge. Ironically, the low-information voters who could increase their knowledge levels the most are probably the least likely to watch the debate because they have the lowest level of interest in politics.

Thanks to rational political ignorance, only the most dedicated Quebec political fans are likely to watch the debate if it conflicts with a Canadiens playoff game. Interestingly, however, sports fans and political fans actually have a lot in common: Both enjoy rooting for their preferred “teams” and hating the teams’ rivals, and both tend to evaluate information in a highly biased way.

Having finished this post, I will now go back to preparing to root for the Bruins in Thursday’s game. If the favored Bruins play up to their potential, Habs fans will wish they had spent the night watching a political debate instead! Of course since I’m an admittedly biased Bruins fan, that’s exactly what you would expect me to say.

Whenever we have an election, pundits and politicians wax eloquent about the supposed need to increase voter turnout. Much less attention is paid to the question of whether the people going to the polls actually understand the issues they’re voting on.

In conjunction with the upcoming Canadian election, political philosopher Jason Brennan, author of the excellent new book The Ethics of Voting, takes aim at this oversight:

Before Canadians head once again to the polls, they should do their homework. This election is an opportunity to make Canada even better, but it’s also a chance to make it worse. Bad decisions at the polls can lead to increased poverty, a stagnant economy, lost opportunities, worse pollution or unjust wars….

Casting an informed vote is hard. Knowing what the problems are is not enough, because the solutions to Canada’s problems are not obvious. Reading parties’ platforms is not enough. Knowing what policies the different political parties favour is not enough, because a voter needs to know which policies have any real shot of working. The Conservatives, Liberals, New Democrats, Greens and others each want Canada to be healthier, happier and stronger. They’re like doctors each offering different prescriptions to cure Canada’s illnesses. Some of these prescriptions will work, some will have no effect and some will make Canada sicker. Voters need to learn how to evaluate these prescriptions….

Voting is not like choosing food from a menu. If a citizen makes a bad choice about what to eat in a restaurant, she alone bears the costs of her decision. But if she makes a bad choice at the polls, she imposes the costs on everyone. Voters are not just choosing for themselves, but for all. If a restaurant offers bad food, diners can walk away or get their money back. This is not the case with public policy. Political decisions are imposed on all and enforced by law. Fellow citizens can’t just walk away from a menu full of bad policies.

Voters face some choices. They can form their beliefs about politics in a self-indulgent way. They can ignore evidence and form policy preferences based on what they find emotionally appealing. They can treat voting as a form of self-expression and ignore what damage they do. Or they can be good citizens. They can form their policy preferences by studying social scientific evidence about how institutions and policies work, and by using reliable methods of reasoning to study the issues. They can work to overcome their personal and ideological biases and choose in a smart, thoughtful way.

Unfortunately, extensive evidence shows that most voters both know very little about public policy and do a poor job of evaluating the political information they do know. Elsewhere, I have argued that such ignorance and bias is actually rational. There is only an infinitesmal chance that any one vote will be decisive. So individual voters have strong incentives to remain ignorant. But not every form of rational behavior is morally defensible. Sometimes, rational individual behavior leads to terrible collective outcomes. Consider the case of air pollution, where individuals might rationally choose not to limit their emission of dangerous pollutants because any one person’s behavior has only a tiny effect on overall air quality in the area. Widespread voter ignorance is a kind of pollution of the political system.

As Brennan notes, many people resist the idea that voters have a duty to become informed because they consider voting to be an individual right that the voter can use however he wants. But voting is not simply an individual choice. As John Stuart Mill emphasized 150 years ago, it is the the exercise of “power over others”:

The spirit of vote by ballot- the interpretation likely to be put on it in the mind of an elector- is that the suffrage is given to him for himself; for his particular use and benefit, and not as a trust for the public. . .

Now this one idea, taking root in the general mind, does a moral mischief outweighing all the good that the ballot could do, at the highest possible estimate of it. In whatever way we define or understand the idea of a right, no person can have a right (except in the purely legal sense) to power over others: every such power, which he is allowed to possess, is morally, in the fullest force of the term, a trust. But the exercise of any political function, either as an elector or as a representative, is power over others.

Like Brennan, I don’t believe that citizens have a duty to vote. Staying home on election day isn’t morally wrong. But if you do choose to go to the polls, you have a moral obligation to your fellow citizens to exercise the power of the ballot responsibly. And that means trying to become a better-informed voter and making a real effort to evaluate the information you learn in an unbiased way.

The massive destruction and tragic loss of life in the recent earthquake in Japan will surely rekindle debates over how well democratic governments handle natural disaster. The good news is that democracies handle natural disasters much better than nondemocratic nations. On the other hand, the quality of democratic disaster policy is still negatively affected by widespread political ignorance.

I. Why Democracies Handle Disaster Better than Dictatorships.

Recent research shows that democratic governments handle natural disasters much better than dictatorships do, even after controlling for differences in wealth. The reason is not hard to figure out. If a natural disaster kills thousands of people, even the most ignorant voters are likely to notice and blame incumbent political leaders, whom they can punish at the next election. As a result, democratic leaders have incentives to try to reduce the death and destruction as much as they can, given other political constraints. Dictators don’t have any comparable electoral incentives.

II. How Political Ignorance Makes Disasters Worse.

Unfortunately, voter ignorance still has a negative impact on democratic states’ disaster policies. It is rational for most voters to pay little or no attention to the details of public policy. And rationally ignorant voters often make serious errors as a result of their ignorance. Natural disaster policy is no exception.

Economists Andrew Healy and Neil Malhotra provide evidence that voters reward politicians much more for disaster relief spending than disaster prevention spending, even though the latter is far more effective. Why this bias? Probably because disaster relief spending is far more visible to poorly informed voters than is prevention spending. After a disaster happens, the media constantly covers relief efforts, often in dramatic fashion. Many people watch, in part because the coverage is entertaining. By contrast, there is little media coverage of disaster prevention policy, probably because most viewers would find it boring, and rational ignorance ensures that few will follow the issue merely to become better informed voters. As a result, Healy and Malhotra argue that politicians have an incentive to misallocate public funds, thereby wasting resources and increasing the number of fatalities caused by natural disasters.

Political ignorance also probably contributes to widespread corruption and interest group favoritism in the distribution of disaster aid. If voters were knowledgeable and kept close track of aid spending, they would punish such corruption at the polls, thereby giving officials incentives to crack down on it. But they are not and do not. As with other crises, natural disasters given interest groups an opportunity to divert public resources to themselves in the name of combatting the emergency.

Another problem caused by political ignorance is that voters also tend to blame politicians even for those disasters they can’t control, such as droughts and shark attacks. When the electorate focuses on such bogus issues, they lose the opportunity to judge incumbents by their performance in areas where they can make a real difference – including natural disasters that politicians can genuinely mitigate.

III. The Special Case of Extremely Rare Large-Scale Disasters.

Finally, there is the special case of large but very infrequent disasters. Politicians have strong incentives to try to mitigate disasters that happen regularly. There is a good chance that such a disaster will occur at some point during the incumbents’ term in office, which means that he or she is likely to prepare for it in order to reduce the chance that a large loss of life will lead to punishment at the polls. “Normal” earthquakes hit Japan fairly regularly, which is one reason why the Japanese are very well prepared for them, as I personally had occasion to observe when I was in Tokyo during a 7.1 Richter scale earthquake that resulted in little if any damage.

By contrast, some large disasters, such as the recent 9.0 rated earthquake in Japan or Hurricane Katrina, happen only once in many decades. The probability that such a disaster will hit during the tenure of incumbent political leaders is very low. Therefore, incumbents may well choose to underprepare for them and instead spend public funds on more visible programs that will have a greater impact on their electoral chances. If voters were well-informed, they would punish such myopic policies at the polls. However, most voters know little or nothing about disaster prevention policy, and are unlikely to notice if politicians don’t devote sufficient resources to preparing for rare but large-scale catastrophes. Perhaps the voters will notice when the rare disaster finally does strike. By that time, however, the officials who made the relevant spending decisions years ago will be long gone.

This factor likely helps explain why both the state and federal governments failed to build strong enough levies to protect against a hurricane the magnitude of Katrina, even though Louisiana was a major recipient of federal infrastructure grants. It also is probably one of the reasons why we are currently failing to devote sufficient resources to asteroid defense. The chance that an asteroid will hit during the tenure of the incumbent president and Congress is extremely low, thereby giving them little incentive to devote resources to stopping it. But if a large asteroid does hit us, it could destroy civilization as we know it, just as an earlier asteroid strike wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Whether ignorance-induced political myopia contributed to the recent loss of life in Japan remains to be seen. Perhaps nothing could have been done to mitigate the disaster beyond the precautions that were actually taken. Alternatively, it’s possible that additional precautions would not have been cost-effective even if they did help at the margin.

Overall, democratic governments tend to handle natural disasters much better than dictatorships do. But political ignorance is still an important drag on their performance in this field.

UPDATE: Various commenters suggest that voters’ flawed evaluations of disaster policy are the result of irrationality rather than ignorance. This is likely true to some extent. But notice that rational political ignorance also ensures that voters have little incentive to rationally evaluate the information they do know. And voters with little or no knowledge are more likely to be irrational in evaluating it, in part because their very ignorance makes it less likely that they will notice any mistakes they might make. Political ignorance and political irrationality are not distinct and separate problems. They are integrally linked.

UPDATE #2: The rating of the Japan earthquake has been revised upward from 8.9 to 9.0 on the Richter scale. I have edited the post to reflect this change.

A recent Kaiser poll finds that only 52% of Americans realize that the Obama health care plan has not been repealed, with 22% believing that it has been, and 26% saying they don’t know. The 52% figure probably slightly overestimates the percentage of people who really know the right answer to this question, since some survey respondents guess on multiple choice polls rather than admitting that they don’t know the correct answer. Only 49% of Republicans and 50% of independents know that the law has not been repealed, compared to 64% of Democrats. Ironically, the uneven distribution of ignorance about repeal might actually help Democratic supporters of the law. To the extent that many Republicans and pro-repeal independents think that the law has already been repealed (30% of Republicans and 25% of independents, respectively), they are unlikely to press their representatives in Congress to make repeal a priority or focus on it as a major electoral issue.

This result is not surprising in light of past data showing widespread political ignorance on other issues. Such ignorance is not primarily the result of “stupidity,” but is actually rational behavior for most voters.

Although not surprising, the recent Kaiser data is still troubling. If only a bare majority of the public knows so basic a fact about the health care bill, it seems highly unlikely that more than a small fraction know enough about the act to have a reasonably informed opinion about its merits – a vastly more complicated issue. This reality surely reduces the quality of public debate on the subject, and also the quality of health care policy decisions made by the democratic process. Give widespread public ignorance, elected officials and interest groups will continue to exploit and manipulate ignorance to their benefit rather than enact good policies. Health care policy is a particularly complicated field, and therefore even more susceptible to this dynamic than comparatively simpler policies.

A possible complication in the data is that some of the 26% who say they don’t know could have been influenced by the two district court decisions striking down the mandate. However, three other courts (two by the time the poll was conducted in early February) have upheld the mandate. And anyone with a basic knowledge of constitutional litigation knows that the final decision is going to be made by appellate courts. Thus, the litigation so far should not lead any even moderately informed person to conclude that the law has been “repealed.”

UPDATE: The original version of this post stated that only 50% of Democrats know that the health care bill has not been repealed. In reality, that survey result refers to independents. The mistake has been corrected.

This Friday, I will be taking part in a panel at the Northwestern University School of Law on the implications of accelerating technological development for democracy. The panel will be held from 3:30 to 5 PM in the Atrium. It will focus on Northwestern law professor John McGinnis’ forthcoming book Accelerating Democracy, in which John argues that the internet and other new technologies can greatly improve democratic decision-making by increasing the flow of information to policymakers and voters. Northwestern lawprof Robert Bennett and I will be commenting on the book. More details on the event (which is open to the public) here. The panel is part of a conference sponsored by the Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property.

I think there is a lot to John’s thesis, but I also have some reservations based on my work on deliberative democracy and political ignorance. I will also suggest that the information revolution strengthens the political knowledge-based case for political decentralization and privatization that I outlined in this article.

John’s book is likely to become a major work in this field. The panel will be of interest to legal scholars, people interested in democratic theory, and of course technogeeks. I suspect that we have Chicago-based readers in all three categories. All are welcome!

Robert Heinlein is best known for being one of the founding fathers of modern science fiction and for his libertarian political views. William Patterson’s fascinating new biography of Heinlein shows that an encounter with political ignorance played a key role in Heinlein’s life, setting him on the path to becoming a writer rather than a politician.

In the 1930s, Patterson recounts, Heinlein wasn’t yet a libertarian and was in fact active in left-wing politics in California, working for Upton Sinclair’s EPIC movement. In 1938, he ran for the Democratic nomination for a state representative seat in the Los Angeles area. Unfortunately for Heinlein, around this same time pro-Nazi Sudeten German leader Konrad Henlein was making headlines with his efforts in support of Adolf Hitler’s campaign to annex the Sudetenland. Heinlein’s district contained many Jewish voters, and some of them apparently confused Heinlein with Henlein. Heinlein and his political advisers thought that the confusion was a key factor responsible for his narrow defeat in the primary (he lost by about 500 votes). While the two names are indeed similar, it should not have been hard for voters to figure out that it was highly unlikely that Henlein or any close relative of his would be running for a Democratic state representative nomination in California.

Political ignorance also may have hurt Heinlein’s campaign in two other ways. First, Heinlein believed that he was harmed by the fact that the Communist Party had endorsed him. Although a leftist himself at the time, Heinlein was very hostile to the communists in the 1930s, denouncing them as “red fascists” no better than the “brown fascists” of the far right. On But most of the voters probably didn’t know about Heinlein’s record on communism, and the communist endorsement may have led some of them to think he was a communist or fellow traveler himself. Heinlein and his allies thought that this contributed to his defeat as well. In addition, Heinlein’s victorious opponent in the Democratic primary was in fact a very conservative Republican (California electoral rules allowed him to run in both the Democratic and Republican primaries and he ended up winning both). Although Patterson doesn’t consider the issue, I wonder if some of the Democratic primary voters who voted against Heinlein didn’t realize that they were voting for a Republican right-winger.

The experience of the 1938 campaign helped sour Heinlein on politics and eventually led him to become a science fiction writer. It probably also contributed to his later ideological evolution towards libertarianism. Heinlein was a far more talented science fiction writer than he was a politician. So in this case, rational political ignorance actually produced a beneficial result. In most other situations, unfortunately, it does a lot more harm than good.

In any event, I couldn’t pass up this rare opportunity to write a post that combines my interest in science fiction with my interest in political ignorance.

UPDATE: For the benefit of readers who may not know, it’s worth pointing out that Konrad Henlein was often in the news in 1938 because he was a central figure in the Munich crisis that arose from Hitler’s efforts force Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to Germany. The resulting confrontation nearly caused World War II to break out one year early until Britain and France capitulated to Hitler’s demands that fall and forced the Czechs to give up without a battle.

Heather Mac Donald has an interesting column on the widely discussed data showing that some 87% of all Wikipedia contributors are male. She argues persuasively that it’s difficult to attribute the gap to discrimination, since most Wikipedia writers are anonymous, thereby making it virtually impossible for Wikipedia to discriminate against women even if they wanted to.

Wikipedia obviously covers many subjects. But to the extent that the underrepresentation of women there extends to the entries on politics and policy issues, it’s part of a longstanding pattern of lesser interest in such issues among women as compared to men. For example, decades of research show that there is a substantial gender gap in political knowledge, with men especially overrepresented among the 5% of the population who follow politics most closely, as measured by political knowledge levels (a group that is some 80% male). I present some of the relevant data in Part VI of this article, including the figure about the top 5%. As I describe there, the gender gap in political knowledge covers a wide range of issues. There are relatively few exceptions. Similarly, this recent Harris poll shows that 25% of men, but only 10% of women report reading at least one nonfiction book on politics over the last year. As in the case of Wikipedia, it’s hard to attribute these gaps to discrimination. Basic political information of the kind tested by pollsters is easily accessed in many different places, and booksellers would be more than happy to sell more political books to women.

Obviously, it would also be wrong to attribute the gap to “stupidity” on the part of women. Political ignorance is not stupidity. As I have often pointed out in the past, it is actually rational behavior for most citizens, assuming that their only reason to become informed is to be a “better” voter. Most of those who do acquire a lot of political knowledge do so primarily because they find it interesting, rather than because they are unusually intelligent or patriotic. Moreover, it is clearly not the case that women are generally less knowledgeable than men. Younger women today have higher average levels of educational attainment than men, and the Harris poll mentioned above shows that they also read more than men do overall.

Thus, the gender gap in political knowledge and interest in politics is likely due to lower interest among women in this particular field rather than “stupidity” or a general unwillingness or inability to acquire information. More men than women are interested in reading about politics and following policy issues closely.

Why the difference? The most obvious explanation is that politics was historically a male-dominated sphere from which women were largely excluded. Only in the last few decades has that begun to change in a major way. Elements of the old attitude surely persist, and they probably influence women’s propensity to become interested in politics. At the same time, that may not be the only factor. Despite massive changes in public attitudes on women’s role in politics over the last fifty years, the general gap in political knowledge has declined only modestly over time (I cite some of the relevant data in this article). The gender gap might therefore persist even after sexism in politics has been more fully overcome than it has been so far. One possibility is that women are simply more likely to have various nonpolitical interests than men are, which leaves less free time available to follow politics. For example, the Harris survey shows that many more women than men read various genres of fiction than men do (science fiction is an unusual, but predictable exception).

At this point, some readers will be tempted to dismiss the data by saying something like “I’m a woman and I love politics,” or “I know many women who follow politics all the time.” But the data are based on statistically representative samples of the population as a whole. For every such general pattern, there are many individual exceptions. The fact that I like Jane Austen novels doesn’t discredit the data showing that her readership is disproportionately female.

Our personal experience can be a poor guide to general patterns because we and the people we know are often unrepresentative. If you regularly read political blogs such as this one, you and your friends are likely to be much more interested in politics than the average person – male or female. The fact that women on average are less interested in politics than men is perfectly consistent with the existence of many individual women who follow politics closely and an even larger number of men who don’t. Indeed, the statistically average man is very far from being a political junkie. But among those people who do fall into that category, men are significantly more common than women.

UPDATE: In this 2008 post, I commented on the related fact that the vast majority of political bloggers are male, as are about 70-80% of political blog readers.

For those readers who may be interested, I will be giving two talks this Saturday at the Students for Liberty International Conference.

I. “Democracy and Political Ignorance: What the Voters Don’t Know and Why it Hurts Them” – 2:15-3:15 PM

II. “Harry Potter and the Rings of Power: Liberty in Fantasy and Science Fiction” – 3:30-4:30 PM

Both will be held in Room 308 at the Marvin Center at George Washington University. VC readers very much welcome, and encouraged to stop by and say hello. Other conference speakers include a variety of prominent bloggers such as Tyler Cowen and Megan McArdle.

UPDATE: The conference organizers inform me that, unfortunately, attendance at the conference has hit capacity. Therefore, these events are closed to students who have not already registered for the conference. But you are welcome to if you have registered.

I don’t have any brilliant suggestions for how President Obama should handle the situation in Egypt. But history and economic theory do give us some insight on why the revolt against the government started so suddenly and unexpectedly. They also highlight the danger that any regime that replaces incumbent dictator Hosni Mubarak might turn out to be much worse than he is.

I. Why the Revolt was Such a Surprise.

It seems likely that the revolt against Mubarak came as a surprise to him, and also to Western intelligence agencies, including the Israelis, who are renowned for their capabilities in this field and have obvious incentives to keep close tabs on events in Egypt. Why was everyone so surprised?

A key reason is that citizens of oppressive regimes have strong incentives to keep anti-government opinions to themselves. As a result, many who oppose the government might hesitate to say to to pollsters, foreign journalists, and anyone else who might potentially reveal their views to the authorities. As I have previously emphasized here, here, and here, this makes it very hard to gauge the true level of opposition to the government. Indeed, even the regime itself might underestimate the true extent of its own unpopularity, which may be one reason why Mubarak was caught flatfooted.

As economist Timur Kuran showed in a brilliant 1995 book on this kind of “preference falsification,” regimes that rely on repression to inhibit expression of opposition opinion can rapidly collapse if the public perceives that the reins have been loosened. Once a few people start protesting openly and the government does not react as forcefully and effectively as everyone expects, protests can quickly snowball and spread, as more and more people begin to believe that it’s safe to express antigovernment opinions openly. This is what happened in Eastern Europe and the USSR in 1989-91, in Tunisia a couple weeks ago. It may also account for current events in Egypt, as protests rapidly grew once police and security forces failed to suppress their initial manifestations a few days ago. By their very nature, such occurrences are difficult to predict, since they rely on a combination of random events and relatively modest relaxation of vigilance on the part of the regime.

II. Why the New Regime Might be Worse than the Old.

There is a long history of revolutions against repressive governments resulting in takeovers by groups that are even more oppressive. Czar Nicholas II, who slaughtered thousands and significantly repressed opposition movements, was overthrown only to be supplanted by the communists, who slaughtered millions and permitted no opposition at all. Batista, the run of the mill Cuban dictator, was replaced by the mass murdering Fidel Castro, who both killed many more people and made Cuba far more economically backward than before. The repressive Shah of Iran was replaced by the even more repressive Ayatollah Khomeini.

What these cases have in common is that the illiberal forces were much better organized and prepared to seize power than their liberal democratic rivals. A secondary factor was the illiberal strain in Russian, Cuban, and Iranian public opinion, which gave the new regime broader support than it might have had otherwise (though, contrary to popular mythology, the vast majority of Russians did not support the Bolsheviks in 1917). Under oppressive governments, rational political ignorance and irrationality are even more of a problem than in democracies, since the regime inhibits the free flow of information. This makes people even more susceptible to dangerously irrational ideologies than they would be otherwise.

Both of these danger signs are very much present in Egypt. As political scientist Barry Rubin, an expert on Arab politics, points out, the best-organized opposition in group in Egypt is the radical Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. If they manage to seize power, the resulting regime is likely to be even more repressive than Mubarak’s, especially when it comes to women, non-Muslims, and liberals. Rubin also notes that Egyptian public opinion is far from liberal:

[W]hat do Egyptians really think? According to a recent Pew poll, they are extremely radical even in comparison to Jordan or Lebanon. When asked whether they preferred “Islamists” or “modernizers,” the score was 59% to 27% in favor of the Islamists. In addition, 20 percent said they liked al-Qaeda; 30 percent, Hezbollah; 49 percent, Hamas. And this was at a time that their government daily propagandized against these groups.

How about religious views? Egyptian Muslims said the following: 82 percent want adulterers punished with stoning; 77 percent want robbers to be whipped and have their hands amputated; 84 percent favor the death penalty for any Muslim who changes his religion.

The Pew poll Rubin cites is this one. He does misinterpret one question. The 59% who said they preferred fundamentalists to “modernizers” is not 59% of the entire sample, but merely of the 31% who say they perceive a conflict between these two groups in Egypt. We don’t know what the other 69% of Egyptian Muslims believe on this issue. Nonetheless, the overall picture of Egyptian public opinion is a disturbing one. In addition to the points cited by Rubin, it’s also worth noting that 54% of Egyptians say they favor legally mandated sex segregation in the workplace, and that the survey might underestimate the extent of sympathy for Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas. Some Egyptians might have been reluctant to express such views so long as Mubarak seemed firmly in control, since all three groups were enemies of his regime.

None of this definitively proves that radical Islamist forces will soon take over Egypt. The Mubarak regime might yet survive, perhaps sans Mubarak himself. Even if it does not, it’s possible that more liberal forces will somehow prevail. But it does suggest that an Islamist takeover is a serious threat, and that repressive forces are better positioned to seize power than their rivals for much the same reasons as in 1917 Russia and 1979 Iran.

It is reasonable to point out that this sad state of affairs is in part the result of longstanding US support for the Mubarak regime, which has repressed liberal opposition and allowed radical Islamists to pose as the only viable alternative. Of course this critique of US policy assumes that there was a viable liberal alternative to Mubarak that we could have supported instead, which is far from clear. Mubarak might have been the lesser of the available evils. But even if US policy does deserve a share of blame for Mubarak’s repression, that only makes it all the more imperative that we do what we can to forestall the rise of an even worse government.

UPDATE: It seems like most of the commenters are focusing on the very brief discussion of US foreign policy in my last paragraph and using it as an occasion to rehash well-worn debates about the history of US policy in the Middle East (e.g. – whether the US was wrong to ally with various Arab dictators, and whether doing so helped cause the 9/11 attacks). I’m not going to delete comments on these issues. But it seems to me that it would be better for readers to focus on the main points I make in the post rather than rehash arguments that have already been debated ad nauseum elsewhere.

My new article “Foot Voting, Political Ignorance, and Constitutional Design,” was recently published as part of a symposium on “What Should Constitutions Do?” in Social Philosophy and Policy, a journal published by Cambridge University Press. The article is available here. Here is the abstract:

The strengths and weaknesses of federalism have been debated for centuries. But one major possible advantage of building decentralization and limited government into a constitution has been largely ignored in the debate so far: its potential for reducing the costs of widespread political ignorance. The argument of this paper is simple, but has potentially important implications: Constitutional federalism enables citizens to “vote with their feet,” and foot voters have much stronger incentives to make well-informed decisions than more conventional ballot box voters. The informational advantage of foot voting over ballot box voting suggests that decentralized federalism can increase citizen welfare and democratic accountability relative to policymaking in a centralized unitary state.

Ballot box voters have strong incentives to be “rationally ignorant” about the candidates and policies they vote on because the chance that any one vote will have a decisive impact on an electoral outcome is vanishingly small. For the same reason, they also have little or no incentive to make good use of the information they do possess. By contrast, “foot voters” choosing a jurisdiction in which to reside have much stronger incentives to acquire information and use it rationally; the decisions they make are individually decisive.

The rest of the symposium contains interesting and important articles on constitutional design by leading scholars in law and other disciplines, including Larry Alexander, Richard Epstein, James Fishkin, William Galston, Sanford Levinson, Guido Pincione, and Fernando Teson. And for all you book lovers and university librarians out there, the symposium is also about to be published in book form by Cambridge University Press.

UPDATE: I have corrected a minor but annoying typo in the post title. Thanks to various readers and commenters for pointing it out.