Ilya Somin on Democracy and Political Ignorance
2016-05-28 · Guest: Ilya Somin (Professor of Law at George Mason University) · 51:52
Democracy and Political Ignorance and Smaller Government
Bob Zadek interviews Professor Ilya Somin about the second edition of his book, Democracy and Political Ignorance. They discuss why voters are rationally uninformed, how politicians exploit this ignorance, and why decentralizing power and “voting with your feet” are better solutions than traditional ballot-box voting.
Topics: Political Ignorance, Rational Ignorance, Foot Voting, Decentralization, Federalism, Public Choice Theory, 2016 Election, Constitutional Law
Speakers: Bob Zadek — Host Ilya Somin — Professor of Law at George Mason University
Introduction and the State of Civic Knowledge [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, every Sunday at 9:00 AM. The only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. I am your eponymous host, Bob Zadek. Thanks so much for listening. 800-345-5639—put it on speed dial. That’s the way to join my conversation at any time.
Today we’re going to spend the hour talking about democracy and political ignorance—why smaller government is better. Before I proudly introduce my guest, who is back again on the show and has been on many times, I’d like to tee up the issue with a short soundbite of an interview conducted on the campus of Texas Tech University. You will hear the interviewer asking a few students at random several basic questions about civic life in America, and you will hear these students’ answers. Remember, these are college students; these are not kindergartners. Raymond, the tape please.
Interviewer: Who won the Civil War?
Student 1: Who won the Civil War? Um…
Student 2: We did? The South?
Student 3: Like, the one in 1965? Or what Civil War?
Student 4: Who won it? Who was even in it? Who was in it? Just tell me who was in it.
Student 5: Oh, I don’t know. Why you make me do this?
Student 6: Who won the Civil War? The… oh my god, I am drawing a blank on this thing. I feel like I’m on the Jimmy Kimmel show. America? I don’t know.
Student 7: That’s the Confederates, right? Damn. I have no clue.
Student 8: The Union. The North. Yes. Okay.
Interviewer: Okay, who did we gain our independence from?
Student 9: These are horrible. Um… I have no idea.
Interviewer: Do you know what year we happened to…?
Student 10: Absolutely not. I couldn’t tell you.
Student 11: It’s like 1970… no, like 1677 or something like that.
Bob Zadek: Well, what better way to introduce a discussion of political ignorance than to interview—conduct an interview on a college campus. There you have it. I leave it for you, my friends and listeners, to decide whether or not we have a problem with political ignorance in America.
To help us understand this topic and, far more importantly, what to do about it, I’m happy and I must say proud to welcome back to the show Ilya Somin. Ilya is a professor of law at George Mason University School of Law, soon to be renamed Antonin Scalia School of Law. Ilya is also a blogger at the Volokh Conspiracy, which is a daily blog hosted by the Washington Post. And most relevant to today’s show, Ilya’s second edition of his book, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter. Ilya, I’m sorry to start the show with that depressing college campus interview, but in any event, welcome to the show this morning.
Ilya Somin: Thank you very much for having me.
Defining Political Ignorance [03:55]
Bob Zadek: Now Ilya, the second edition of your book has just come out. You were gracious enough to be on our show when your first edition came out. Tell us about—when you talk about political ignorance, while ignorance sounds like a pejorative, I don’t think—not I don’t think, but the book is not written as a scold that we the voters are doing something bad or wrong or we are to be criticized. Tell us the basic premise of your second edition and the first edition of Political Ignorance and why it matters, and if you want, why it matters more so today than ever before, and what the issue of political ignorance is all about.
Ilya Somin: Well, what it’s about is that often most of the voters don’t even know very basic facts about politics, such as which party controls what house of Congress, which officials are responsible for which issues, how the federal government spends its budget, and so forth.
And why it matters is simply that we the voters make big decisions about who’s going to control the government. Our opinions on what the government’s policies should be have a big impact on politicians. So if those opinions are extremely poorly informed—and most of the time it seems like they are—then that can lead to harmful and counterproductive government policies. It can make it very difficult or impossible for us to hold our political leaders accountable for their performance, and it can have a lot of other bad effects as well.
Now, as you said, I think there’s a difference between being ignorant and being stupid or having done something morally wrong. As I discuss in the book, most of the political ignorance we see is not the result of stupidity. It’s the result of the very weak incentives that most people have to become informed about politics. Though as perhaps we’ll discuss later, why I think there’s nothing morally reprehensible about being ignorant, and it certainly doesn’t mean that the person who’s ignorant is necessarily stupid or a bad person. I do think sometimes voters may violate their ethical obligations if they’re not only ignorant, but they go to the polls without making even a slight effort to remedy that ignorance and also without giving serious consideration to opposing points of view.
The Complexity of Modern Government [06:30]
Bob Zadek: Now, I would say sort of—it’s not needed, but in defense of voters, if I can be a bit of a devil’s advocate: being an informed voter is really, really hard. Take an issue which everybody seems to have an opinion on and which is relevant in all layers—well, at least at the federal level and also at the state level—it’s relevant in a lot of campaigns. I’m just picking this somewhat at random. If we take the issue like the minimum wage and who it helps and who it hurts. Now, that, Ilya, you and I know and most of our listeners know because they are pretty much informed, that it is a hard issue. And it requires a pretty solid understanding of economics, albeit basic economics. It’s not one which you can decide from the gut. Economists, informed economists, often disagree, although you and I have our own personal views about which economists have done the more thoughtful research.
This is not a minimum wage show. I just pick an issue to say here is one of dozens of issues that are presently important in making a vote, but yet it would require a lot of work just to understand the one issue. And as you have explained in your book, it is not sensible for every voter in America to immerse themselves in the right and wrong of the minimum wage. There’s nothing in it for them. It’s contrary to their self-interest.
Ilya Somin: Yes, I completely agree. In the book, I emphasize that one of the causes of political ignorance is the enormous size and complexity of modern government. Government at all levels now spends nearly 40% of our gross domestic product. And even above the spending, there’s an enormous range of different regulations of which the minimum wage is just one example.
And it’s difficult or virtually impossible for the average voter to keep track of more than a small number of those issues, particularly given that his or her incentive to do that is very weak. The chance that you will cast a decisive vote in an election that actually changes the outcome is extraordinarily small. So most people quite understandably spend most of their time paying attention to other things.
I do think, however, that I would not let the voter completely off the hook. Because even though it’s totally understandable that they don’t know much about more than a small fraction of the issues, it’s less understandable or at least less defensible that they often don’t know even very basic things about the structure of the political system, such as who controls which house of Congress or which officials are responsible for which issues. Only 34% of the public, according to recent data, can even name the three branches of federal government: the executive, legislative, and judicial.
Moreover, it’s one thing not to know much about a lot of issues, which is the case probably with all of us. It’s another thing to spend very little time on the issue but still have very strong and confident opinions about it, as a great many voters have about the minimum wage, but also about a lot of other issues where there are serious arguments on the other side.
Emotional vs. Rational Voting [10:02]
Bob Zadek: Like immigration, for example. There are certain issues that everybody has a strongly held belief—immigration being a classic example. But yet, the strongly held belief is like 98% emotion and 2% information. And therein lies an important part of the problem: that so little of the opinions are formed on the basis of rationality, rather they are formed on the basis of emotion. And it’s a lot easier—it doesn’t take a lot of work to have a feeling than it does to have a thought. Having a thought, an informed thought, is much harder. So therefore, it’s easier to respond to your emotions, and it’s a lot easier for politicians to appeal to emotions. It’s a lot harder to appeal to rationality. So I think the system is rigged in favor of emotionality in voting and rigged against rationality in voting.
Ilya Somin: Yeah. So I think it is rational, but the problem is that it isn’t logical. Let me try to explain the difference. If you know, and most people I think have at least an intuitive sense, that your chance of affecting electoral outcomes is extremely small, then in the first place, you probably won’t spend a lot of time acquiring information.
But in the second place, when you do learn some information, you won’t necessarily do the hard work of trying to analyze it in a logical and unbiased way. You won’t try to check the immediate emotional reactions that we might have. In our daily lives, we often have emotional reactions to things, but we also know that often we need to keep those emotions in check, otherwise we won’t be able to advance our careers or things will go badly with our families and so forth.
When we go to the voting booth, on the other hand, or consider political issues, the chance that giving vent to our emotions will change the outcome of an election is extremely small. So most of us make very little effort to actually control those emotions and to give a serious consideration to arguments on both sides. In the book, I discuss a good deal of evidence suggesting that while we’re not perfectly logical in any area of our lives, we tend to give vent to our biases and emotions much more frequently when we think about politics than when we think about other aspects of our lives where we know that the decision we’re going to make is actually likely to make a difference. And therefore, we think about things more carefully and at least try to be more logical, even if we don’t always succeed.
Bob Zadek: So voting, you get a free, painless opportunity to really vent and be mean-spirited if that’s what you feel like being, and there are no consequences—at least none to you. There may be collective consequences, but not much individual consequence. You get a free one when you go to the voting box.
Ilya Somin: It’s almost free if an individual voter does it. There’s only a tiny chance that his or her vote will make a difference. The problem is that when millions of people do the same thing—and that is what’s happening—the collective consequences are bad. It’s much like if one person has a gas-guzzling car that pollutes the air. That doesn’t really matter very much. What’s one car relative to the total amount of air out there? But if millions of people have gas-guzzlers, that can really pollute the environment. So political ignorance and illogical thinking about politics is like a kind of pollution of our political environment. Any individual person who does it, it makes almost no difference. But when large numbers of people act similarly, then the consequences can be pretty severe.
Bob Zadek: I think that was called when I went to college the “fallacy of composition.” It was like what’s good for one person may be perfectly harmless to the society at large, but when a lot of people act in the same way, then the collective is harmful. And that was your point.
This is Bob Zadek. I’m speaking with Ilya Somin. Ilya has written Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter. 800-345-5639 to join my important conversation with Ilya.
Information Shortcuts [14:41]
Bob Zadek: Now Ilya, in your book, since voting is hard, it is quite natural for voters to want to do the right thing, but they simply lack the time, perhaps the skill or the access to information, although there is more information out there than ever before. So you have pointed out in your book the concept of information shortcuts—that voters will, all of us do in all aspects of our lives, we take information shortcuts to somehow lead us to the right decision but without having to do a lot of work. What do you mean by information shortcuts? What are some examples? And how are information shortcuts used for better or for worse in the voting process?
Ilya Somin: An information shortcut is simply a situation where you use some small bit of information as a stand-in for a larger body of knowledge that you may not know about. We all do this in many aspects of our lives, and certainly people do it often at the voting booth. I’m not against it on principle, but the problem is it can often be very harmful if your information shortcut or your use of it is somehow flawed or misleading.
Perhaps the most common information shortcut is what scholars call “retrospective voting.” Instead of studying the issues carefully, just say: are things going well or are they going badly? And if they’re going badly, then you take it out on the incumbents. You decide, well, they must have screwed something up somewhere along the line, so we have to vote them out and then vote in their opponents instead.
And I think this is not a terrible shortcut, but it has serious flaws. Among other things, in order to use it effectively, you need to have pre-existing knowledge about what issues the incumbents really can affect and which ones they cannot. Otherwise, you’ll end up rewarding or punishing them for things they didn’t cause. And that’s actually exactly what we do in most elections most of the time.
The biggest determinant of most electoral outcomes is short-term trends in the economy. Did the economy improve or get worse during the last year or so before the election? Even though most economists will tell you that incumbents have very little effect on short-term economic trends. It is even the case that such things as droughts or victories by local sports teams often affect electoral outcomes, even though obviously political leaders can’t affect that at all really.
On the other hand, we often ignore things that they could affect. For example, their often long-term effects on budgetary policy or on economic trends in other matters that voters tend to ignore. So in order to use shortcuts effectively, often you need pre-existing knowledge, at least some, to choose the right shortcut and apply it properly.
Moreover, what you want to do is try to process the information in an unbiased way. And voters often fail to do that because instead of looking at the information generated by the shortcut and trying to be objective about it, instead they apply their pre-existing biases to it. For example, when a Democratic president is in the White House, Republican voters tend to overestimate the rate of inflation and unemployment, whereas Democrats have the opposite kind of bias. So instead of looking at the world as objectively as we can and trying to evaluate the politicians based on that, often what we instead ask is, well, how do we feel about this party or this politician? And then we subconsciously reorder our understanding of the world to conform to that sort of bias.
Bob Zadek: Actually, I must confess, Ilya, you are an information—you and your colleagues at Cato are collectively an information shortcut for me. Because as I look forward, although that sounds optimistic, to the presidential election results in 2016 and I get very, very depressed, as I suspect many of your colleagues do, you are my information shortcut. If you stay, then you have hope, and I haven’t got time to figure out if it’s hopeless or not. So if you stay, I’m staying. If you leave, I’m leaving. So you have a lot of responsibility, Ilya. You are my “do I stay in this country” information shortcut. So please behave responsibly because you’re controlling my family as well as yours in your decision.
Ilya Somin: Well, I appreciate that. For what it’s worth, I think things are not bad enough that I’m planning to leave the country. On the other hand, things are pretty bad. I think the political scene is as bad as it’s been in my lifetime. And while there is certainly room for it to get better, sadly there’s also room for it to get worse. And I think the problems that we have encountered this year and more generally in recent years, political ignorance is certainly not the only cause of that, but it has been a significant factor.
Ignorance in the 2016 Election [20:08]
Bob Zadek: Now, apply what you have learned in writing both editions of your book to—we have five minutes till break, then we’ll continue the conversation of course—but apply what you have learned to the dynamic of the current presidential election climate.
Ilya Somin: Yeah. So in virtually every election, politicians are aware that the public is politically ignorant. They won’t mention it, but they’re well aware of it, and they adopt campaign strategies that try to exploit that. So that’s not unique to this year.
What is, I think, different, particularly with respect to the rise of Donald Trump, is the extent to which that exploitation of political ignorance has been even more thoroughgoing and egregious in this election cycle than in other recent ones. If you look, for example, at the themes of Trump’s campaign, pretty much every one of them exploits ignorance in one significant way or another. Just take one of his signature issues: international trade. He says that nations like Mexico and Japan are beating us and turning us into losers because we have bilateral trade deficits with them. We buy more goods from Japan than they buy from us.
But in reality, pretty much any economist across the political spectrum will tell you that a bilateral trade deficit between two countries is no indication whatsoever of economic failure. It’s no different than my trade deficit with my local supermarket. I buy a lot more stuff from them than they buy from me, but that doesn’t make me or them a failure or a loser or anything like that.
Similarly, the other theme of his campaign that he has emphasized even more is immigration. His campaign first really came to prominence when he denounced Mexican immigrants as criminals, murderers, rapists, and so forth. In reality, pretty much every serious social science study suggests that immigrants, including Mexican immigrants, have a much lower violent crime rate than native-born Americans do. And moreover, net emigration from Mexico to the US has actually fallen virtually to zero over the last 10 years. So here, too, he has exploited ignorance.
When you look at survey data on both trade and immigration, what you find is that most voters don’t understand the basic economics of trade, and the majority, particularly on the Republican side, also believe that immigration increases the crime rate, even though the opposite is actually the case.
It is also true that both Trump and also Bernie Sanders and other candidates have exploited the fact that most of the public has no idea of how the federal government spends its money. Sanders and Trump would have us believe that we can avoid all cuts whatsoever in Social Security, Medicare, and other big entitlement programs, and then on top of that add either big spending increases or big tax cuts, and that we can avoid fiscal problems, even though obviously these entitlement programs are the biggest items in the federal budget and they are at the heart of our fiscal problems. Sanders, Trump, and others can get away with this because most of the public greatly underestimates the percentage of the budget that is spent on entitlements, but they greatly overestimate such things as the percentage that is spent on foreign aid, which in reality is only about 1%, but the average voter thinks it’s about 10 to 20 times greater than that. As a result, Trump and Sanders and some other politicians can run on platforms that are based on utterly fantastical budget numbers that even economists in their own party will point out that they’re completely bogus. But the voters will give them a pass on that because the voters themselves don’t know the basics of how the federal government spends its money.
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek. I’m speaking with Ilya Somin, happily my guest for the entire hour. We are discussing voter ignorance and how it affects the electoral process. 800-345-5639 to join my conversation. We’ll be right back with the solutions to this problem. Please stay tuned.
Foot Voting [26:01]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. We are the show of ideas, not attitude. Thanks so much for listening. 800-345-5639 to join my conversation this morning with Ilya Somin. Ilya has written Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter. Ilya is a professor of law at George Mason University School of Law. He is a blogger at the Volokh Conspiracy, which is a daily blog hosted by the Washington Post. And Ilya’s second edition of his book is just out right now.
Now Ilya, we are talking about and we have spent the first half hour talking about what voter ignorance is. We have been somewhat understanding to the plight of voters that voting is complicated. It’s a hard job to do it right. And it’s very difficult, indeed it’s almost irrational for a voter to spend the time necessary to become reasonably informed on so many issues because that voter would have to take away time from the far more significant parts of that voter’s personal life: family, friends, career, health, pleasure, things of that nature.
So you have mentioned in the book the concept of voting with one’s feet. And you to some degree embrace it, albeit not as a panacea. Tell us about the concept of voting with one’s feet because that will lead us into the subtitle of your book: Why Smaller Government is Smarter.
Ilya Somin: Yeah. So we can vote with our feet in a couple of different ways. First, we can do it in a federal system. We can decide which state or local government to live under based on whether we like their policies in education or taxes or other kinds of things. We can also vote with our feet in the market and in civil society, like when you decide what products to buy or what church or civil organization to join and so forth.
And so you might ask, why would decision-making like this be any better from a knowledge point of view than voting at the ballot box? It’s because of the different incentives that people face. If you’re like most people, you probably spend more time and effort acquiring information the last time you decided what car or what TV set to buy than the last time you decided who to vote for for president or any other political office. That’s not because your TV set is more important than the presidency or deals with more complicated issues. It’s because you knew that that decision on the TV set would actually make a difference. The TV that you pick is actually probably the one that will end up in your living room.
On the other hand, the chance that your vote will be decisive in a presidential election is about one in 60 million. The odds of being decisive are a little bit better in a local election or a state election, but they’re extremely low. So when we vote with our feet, we have much stronger incentives to become well-informed because we know that the decision is likely to make a difference.
And we can have more opportunities to vote with our feet if we decentralize government. If more issues are handled at the state or local level, and therefore we can vote with our feet in favor of those policies we like. And we have even more such opportunities if more issues are shifted out of the government sector entirely and into the private sector. Often you can vote with your feet in the private sector without even actually physically moving at all, as in when you send your kids to a different private school or when you join a new civil society organization or buy a new product and so forth. So voting with your feet, as you suggested, it’s not perfect. It can’t solve all of our problems. But it can at least mitigate the problem of political ignorance. And there is many, many opportunities in our current political system for either decentralizing political issues that are currently handled by the federal government or in some cases taking those issues out of the public sector entirely and letting the market and civil society handle them.
Bob Zadek: You know, the way you explained it, a light bulb went off of sorts in my head. And to take the what might appear to be a banal example, which is selecting a TV set, a car, or a mobile device to carry in your pocket. As you pointed out, consumers might devote a fair amount of time and study to doing that, a lot more than they might in an election. But the example can be expanded.
Just imagine if government got to pick the kind of car you drove, and the only way to drive the car you want is to vote for a candidate who supports your model of car. The likelihood that your vote would get you the kind of car you wanted is infinitesimal. On the other hand, when you are selecting a car where the decision is yours to affect your own life, you will get exactly what you want. And that in a very graphic way explains the difference: how when you vote with your feet—which doesn’t mean literally your feet, but it means when you make a personal decision and you get the benefit or suffer the detriments directly and nobody else does—you are likely to make a more careful choice than if you are voting for somebody who will then make that decision for you. That makes all the difference in the world.
So in effect, the ability to vote with your feet is a shortcut, in my mind, for merely having the right to exercise freedom over your life. And therefore, the more opportunities one has to vote with one’s feet—that is, to make a private decision that is more likely to affect them directly—is a direct function of how remote government is.
You know, Ilya, when you make your example of the federal government versus state, local government, towns and the like, I live in a small town outside of San Francisco. And I dare say every issue that our small town worries about is one that I am confident I know enough about to make an informed vote. I am not voting in any issue out of ignorance because I can see them. My senses receive the information. I see the effect of improving a park or redirecting road traffic or building housing. I can see it. I don’t have to be a housing expert. There’s no way on earth I can make a decision about the correct military tactic to follow in the alleged war on ISIS. So the farther away the decision is, the more likelihood it is I vote out of ignorance, which is your point about why smaller government is smarter.
Ilya Somin: I think the issue is less one of distance and more one of incentive. Even when government is doing something right near you, you might still fail to figure out exactly what it’s doing and what the effects are. But you’re more likely to figure it out, or at least you’re more likely to make a serious effort to do so, if you know that you have an opportunity to make a decision about this that will actually make a difference. And if you can vote with your feet, you have a better chance of doing that than if your only option is to vote at the ballot box.
So I think local governments still make many bad decisions and voters are still often ignorant about those decisions. But it’s also the case that when you have the opportunity to vote with your feet, the problem is at least somewhat less severe than it is where your only option is to vote in an election where you’re just one of many, many millions of voters, or alternatively, your option might be just to leave the country entirely, which is much more difficult and costly than moving from one city to another or even one state to another.
The Duty to be Informed [34:13]
Bob Zadek: You mentioned before the break the concept of duty—the duty of a voter. And what’s interesting to me is I tend to hang around with a politically engaged crowd—not necessarily totally informed, but certainly politically engaged. And when I ask them—when your book first came out and now the second edition, I do it again—I ask these politically engaged people who care, they truly care, why they vote. I ask them, why do you vote? And they get defensive, sometimes apoplectic. And a lot of times—and this is the point you made earlier, but we didn’t expand upon it—they feel it’s their duty to vote. They owe a duty to who? It’s not clear, but a duty. Talk about, if you would, Ilya, for a few seconds, how the word “duty” interacts with the right to vote.
Ilya Somin: Yeah. So in our society, we often talk about how we have a duty to vote. We almost never talk about how we have a duty to be at least minimally informed about the issues that we vote on. So I would actually flip the conventional wisdom on its head. I don’t think people necessarily have a duty to vote. Even if you believe you have an obligation to contribute to the community in some way, voting is by no means the only way of doing so. There are many other things that you can do that can help out the community in various ways.
So I think it’s perfectly fine for the most part if you choose not to vote. But I think if you do choose to go to the ballot box, then you do have a duty to be at least reasonably well-informed about the issues that you vote on. Because when you vote, it is not just a purely individual choice. It’s not just like, you know, what flavor of ice cream am I going to eat today? Rather, when you vote, you’re electing politicians who will exercise power not just over you, but also over the rest of society. So as John Stuart Mill put it, voting is not an individual choice; voting is the exercise of power over others. And when we exercise power over other people—often even the power of life and death when it comes to voting in government—then at the very least, we have a duty to be reasonably informed in the way that we exercise it, and also a duty to give at least some serious consideration to opposing arguments.
Now, if you feel you just can’t do that, don’t have the time to do it, I think that’s totally understandable. But if that is your situation, then maybe you should seriously consider not voting. Because it’s better to abjure exercising power over other people than to exercise it in an irresponsible and potentially dangerous way.
As I said before, I think the main problem with political ignorance is structural. It’s not a matter for the most part of the bad behavior of individual voters. But I do think that voters not thinking or not considering their duty to be at least minimally informed, that does make things worse, at least at the margin. In that no amount of action by individual voters in terms of becoming better informed can fully solve the problem of political ignorance or even come close to it, but it could make things somewhat better at the margin. That fewer people would vote with an almost complete lack of relevant information, and fewer people would be just completely dismissive of the positions of the other side. And that wouldn’t solve all of our problems, but if people were to behave that way, it would make things at least somewhat better.
Structural Solutions [38:11]
Bob Zadek: You mentioned structure, which is as if you were producing my show today, because I want to spend the next 13 minutes that we have, having explained the problem, the question is: so how do we fix it?
Now, you can say, well, we have—everybody has to take a master’s level course in government or else they lose the right to vote. That probably wouldn’t fly. So if we can fix it, as you said, in the margins by hoping to persuade voters to either become somewhat more informed or not voting—but that’s not likely to produce results. So is your book an indictment on democracy, or is it the way democracy has evolved in America that is the problem? And if so, the hard question: what’s wrong and what’s the solution?
Ilya Somin: So I certainly don’t indict democracy across the board. I recognize that overall, democracy is better than other forms of government like dictatorship or oligarchy or whatnot. But democracy where the power of the government is extraordinarily broad is not nearly as good as democracy where its powers are tightly limited and more decentralized.
So as I said earlier, we can mitigate the problem of political ignorance by limiting the scope of government power, but also by decentralizing it so more of it is wielded at a state or local level as opposed to in Washington. Now, a reasonable question is, well, how do we accomplish that? After all, if voters are ignorant much of the time, why would they pay attention to the possible virtues of limiting and decentralizing government? And I’d be lying to you if I said that I thought this was an easy problem to solve.
But there are a couple of different paths by which we can proceed. One is that even though voters do tend to be ignorant, there’s a lot of data which shows that there is great distrust of government and of politicians in particular. Often, unfortunately, that distrust is channeled into the idea that if only we elect the right type of person, he will solve all of our problems. Or in the case of Donald Trump, he says, well, I’ll appoint the best people and those great people will solve the problems.
But I think it might also be possible to channel that frustration and dissatisfaction with government into the idea that if you’re that frustrated and dissatisfied, you should reduce the power of these institutions in the first place. If you think politicians are untrustworthy and dangerous, don’t let them make as many of our decisions as they currently make.
If you look historically, until 100 or 200 years ago, most people in the Western world took it for granted that it was the job of government to promote the right religion and in many cases persecute adherents of other religions. But over time, we’ve come to realize not that religion isn’t important, but that government, including we voters when we go to the polls, that we do a terrible job of deciding religious questions by that mechanism. So we’ve gradually come to realize that religion, at least for the most part, should be left to the private sector, to people interacting in civil society. And I think and I hope that over time we can make that recognition with respect to more issues.
It is unlikely that we can get a massive increase in the amount of time that people spend on paying attention to politics or considering political issues. But we might over time help generate a recognition that there’s more issues that precisely for that reason, because we don’t do a good job of considering them, that there’s more issues that should be kept out of the political process, or alternatively, should at least be decentralized to a local or state level.
You don’t have to be nearly as libertarian or free-market as I am to recognize, for example, that some of the better-governed nations in the world are smaller countries like Switzerland, New Zealand, and others. If you think Switzerland can have its own healthcare policy or its own education policy, then why not the state of Virginia or the state of California or the city of Los Angeles or San Francisco, all of which have populations the same size as Switzerland or even much larger? So if you think those small countries can function well and make good decisions, which often they do, then the same thing can be said for American states and often even local governments as well. So while I think it’s unlikely that we will come close to fully solving the problem of political ignorance, it is possible to make at least incremental progress. And the first step on that process, as in any 12-step program, is to recognize that we in fact have a serious problem and need to do something about it.
The Founders and Indirect Selection [44:01]
Bob Zadek: Ilya, I have—in your book, you sort of draw the rough parallel to the operation of a jury, and you discuss, you speculate in your book about the advantages of having randomly selected—I’ll call them voter jurors—who get to vote for president, and therefore they become specialists and they study the issues. You, of course, in your book, you mention it but somewhat dismiss it as being not workable.
I have a variation on that. I have a core theory that the Founders—there never was a generation collectively of political scientists who understood government as well as the Founders did. And therefore, any attempt by post-Founder generations to improve the Constitution—putting aside the Civil Rights amendments, the Civil War amendments, putting those aside because they’re special—any change in the structure of our government as set forth in the Constitution, except maybe giving women the right to vote, done by amendment made the functioning of our government worse.
And by way of one example, and there are many in my opinion: we had, because the Founders had the same fear of and distrust of the voters and democracy—they sometimes referred to it as “the mob”—they of course had representative government where we’re supposed to have wise men in the Senate who were above the fray and could make certain important decisions for us. But if you take the model of the Senate, and if you say we elect senators because they spend full-time studying the issues and they’re better able to decide these issues. If you take the concept of the Senate we are comfortable with, and if you say why don’t we go back to a truly functioning Electoral College? And let’s say there are 1,500 members in the Electoral College who are elected by the voters. Now, if you have a number like 1,500, that means every district would be pretty small. And therefore, voters are more likely to know the elector they’re voting for. And the elector would be elected a year before any presidential election, so they’re not allied with a candidate. And only the electors vote for president. If we had a system such as that, isn’t that more likely to ameliorate some of the problems you discuss in your book?
Ilya Somin: So I think it’s a very clever idea, but I have a little bit of skepticism as to whether it would work. Let me explain a couple of the reasons why. One problem is that the same ignorance that currently affects the election of the president and other public officials would also affect the election of the 1,500 people to become presidential electors. Yes, it might be in a sense more local, but each constituency would still have thousands of people, and there would still be a lot of incentive for voters to be ignorant about those electors and their qualifications and the issues that they will be voting on and so forth.
I think it’s also highly unlikely that those electors will be genuinely independent. In reality, most will probably be affiliated with one or the other major political party. If they were completely unaffiliated, then we could say, well, that would make them more independent, but it would also make the voters’ job harder in terms of figuring out what those people stand for. Because one of the information shortcuts that we can use, at least with some effectiveness, is that even if you don’t know very much about an individual, you learn something about their views simply by knowing whether they’re a Democrat or a Republican. And if you don’t even have that, then it’s even tougher to figure out what they really stand for, what their positions are, and so forth.
And of course, you would still have the problem of the enormous range of issues that the modern presidency and modern government deal with, and it will be hard for people to take account of more than a small fraction of those as they choose the 1,500 electors.
So I think the Founding Fathers, they got a lot of things right and they understood a lot of things well. But one area where I think they were a little bit weak is that they had more confidence than I think is justified in sort of indirect electoral mechanisms where they say, well, we can solve the problem of political ignorance by electing one group of people and then that one group will choose another. That’s what they did with the Electoral College. That’s also what they sought to do with the Senate, which originally was elected by state legislatures. And in both of those cases, I think reality pretty quickly confounded the expectations that the Framers had. It’s not because the Framers were stupid; it’s simply that they were engaged in a very new experiment with a lot of unprecedented things that they were doing. They got a lot of them right, but understandably, they did get some wrong. And this area of indirect selection of officials, this is an area where they proved, I think, a bit more optimistic than was justified.
Conclusion [49:18]
Bob Zadek: Ilya, here comes the hardest question of the day. You have a minute and a half. What’s the solution?
Ilya Somin: Well, as I said before, there is no one solution that will immediately solve all of our problems. But what we should work to is limiting and decentralizing the power of government so that we have more opportunities to make decisions by voting with our feet.
Bob Zadek: So therefore, the bad decisions we make will have less of a profound effect upon our own lives, the country, and the world. It de-leverages the power of a decision. And we get to make—if we make wrong decisions, they are less dramatic in their effect.
Ilya Somin: Yes, that’s right. That when you make a decision that’s only for you, it’s less likely that you’ll harm other people. But moreover, when you make a decision that’s actually likely to have a decisive impact, at least on you and your family, then you’re more likely to take the time and effort to get it right. And that, I think, is the core insight that I try to defend in the book: that people understandably have only limited time and effort available to them, and they’re more likely to devote it to decisions where the decision is actually likely to make a difference.
Bob Zadek: Ilya, how do our friends out there follow your writing? You do a lot of daily writing. How can they follow your thoughts?
Ilya Somin: So they can follow it at the Volokh Conspiracy blog at the Washington Post website. Volokh is spelled V-O-L-O-K-H. So if you Google it, if you Google Volokh Conspiracy, you can find it. You can also find many of my writings just by Googling my name and you can punch up my website, which has many of them available for free. And also my book, Democracy and Political Ignorance, is now available at Amazon and other fine websites near you.
Bob Zadek: And don’t forget, if you decide to leave, you have to tell me because you are my shortcut, Ilya. So if you stay, I stay. If you go, I’m in your slipstream.
Ilya Somin: It’s a deal.
Bob Zadek: Thanks a lot. Thanks so much again for giving us an hour of your time on this holiday weekend. Thanks to all my friends out there for listening. I’ll be back again next Sunday. Enjoy the rest of the three-day weekend. Thanks so much.