Political scientists John Sides and Lynn Vavreck have a helpful post summarizing survey data showing that most of the public knows little or nothing about newly selected GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan: A series of polls done by YouGov for the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project suggests that most people have never heard of Paul […]
Archive | Political Ignorance
Peter Orszag’s Case for Compulsory Voting
By Ilya Somin on June 24, 2012 11:05 am in Democracy, Elections, Political Ignorance, Public Opinion
In a recent op ed, former Obama adviser and Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag argues that the the United States should make voting compulsory: The U.S. prides itself as the beacon of democracy, but it’s very likely no U.S. president has ever been elected by a majority of American adults. It’s our […]
My Video Presentation on the Problem of Political Ignorance
The Cato Institute’s Libertarianism.org website has posted a video I did for them on “The Problem of Political Ignorance.” In the video, I explain why political ignorance is a serious problem for modern democracy and why it strengthens the case for limiting and decentralizing government power. As a bonus, the video includes some cool pictures […]
Why Partisans Overstate their Candidates’ Chances of Winning
At the Right Coast, University of San Diego law professor Tom Smith asks an interesting question. Why do partisans overstate their party’s chance of winning an election? After all, as Smith notes, doing so may lead to complacency: A question — take a biased media outlet, for example NPR, which I listen to a lot. […]
Sec. of State Clinton–Don’t Believe our Pro-Israel Rhetoric (or Anything Else we Say)
Here’s Clinton speaking in Tunisia. Note that the questioner operates under the assumption that to be pro-Israel is to be against the “common Arab citizen,” and Clinton not only fails to challenge that assumption, but implies that rhetoric that pleases the “Zionist lobby” is somehow anti-Muslim. She then suggests that Americans (and others) are fools […]
Larry Solum on Originalism and Political Ignorance
By Ilya Somin on March 6, 2012 6:39 pm in Constitutional Law, Constitutional Theory, Originalism, Political Ignorance
At the Legal Theory Blog, Georgetown law professor Larry Solum – a leading originalist scholar – has the following comments on my new paper, “Originalism and Political Ignorance”: If Somin is correct, his argument provides support for one of the core arguments of “Semantic Originalism,” that the success conditions of constitutional communication can be met […]
Originalism and Political Ignorance
My paper on “Originalism and Political Ignorance,” currently under submission to law journals is now available on SSRN. Here’s the abstract: Original meaning originalism may now be the most popular version of constitutional theory in the legal academy. The methodology has been endorsed by at least two Supreme Court justices and well-known scholars from across […]
Cognitive Enhancement and Political Equality
Over the next several decades, it is possible that genetic engineering and other cognitive enhancements could significantly increase human intelligence. However, as Ronald Bailey points out, critics on both the right and the left worry that this will undermine political equality: [N]eoconservatives fear biotechnology’s implications for human equality. In his 2002 book Our Posthuman Future: […]
Foot Voting, Political Ignorance, and Constitutional Design
By Ilya Somin on February 17, 2012 10:50 am in Federalism, Political Ignorance, Voting With Your Feet
My 2011 article “Foot Voting, Political Ignorance, and Constitutional Design” is now available on SSRN, after a delay due to policies of the publisher. Here’s 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 […]
Why Most People Tend to Talk About Politics Only with those Who Agree with Them
Economist Robin Hanson has a blog post discussing a recent study showing that most people tend to limit conversations about politics to those who agree with their views. This is not just a matter of people tending to have friends and acquaintances who have similar views. Even when there are people in our social circle […]
Issues on which People are Most Resistant to Persuasion
By Ilya Somin on February 6, 2012 11:51 pm in Abortion, Affirmative Action, Constitutional Law, Political Ignorance
This semester, I am once again teaching Constitutional Law II: The Fourteenth Amendment. I often tell my students in this class that there are three issues on which most people are particularly resistant to rational persuasion: abortion, the death penalty, and affirmative action. And it so happens that the course covers all three. Actually, there […]
Voters as Modern-Day Phrenologists
Nineteenth century phrenologists believed that they could discern a great deal about your abilities and personality by studying the shape of your skull. Today, phrenology is long-discredited. But many voters think they can judge candidates by making similar inferences from their attractiveness and other physical traits. Libby Copeland of Slate has an interesting article summarizing […]
Charles Murray on Elite Ignorance of Ordinary Americans
In his new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, Charles Murray argues that a new elite class has emerged that is much more ignorant about the lives of ordinary Americans than were the elites of earlier generations: As the new upper class increasingly consists of people who were born into upper-middle-class families […]
Radical Islamists Win Final Round of Egyptian Elections
Although it has been pushed out of the US headlines by the New Hampshire primaries, radical Islamist parties just won the lion’s share of the vote in the final round of the Egyptian elections. I wrote about why this sort of development was a likely and dangerous possibility in several posts going back to the […]
The Nazis and Political Ignorance
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Jonah Lehrer has an article arguing that political ignorance makes democracy work better, and may even be essential to its survival. Much of the article is based on extrapolations from a dubious study of fish behavior, which I criticized here. Lehrer takes the argument a step further by claiming that […]