The Volokh Conspiracy

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 own fault — because voter participation rates are running below 60 percent, a candidate would have to win 85 percent or more of the vote to be elected by a majority.

Compulsory voting, as exists in Australia and more than two dozen other countries, would fix that problem. As William Galston of the Brookings Institution argues, “Jury duty is mandatory; why not voting?”

Mandating voting has a clear effect: It raises participation rates. Before Australia adopted compulsory voting in 1924, for example, it had turnout rates similar to those of the U.S. After voting became mandatory, participation immediately jumped from 59 percent in the election of 1922 to 91 percent in the election of 1925.

Orszag’s proposal and others like it are potentially harmful solutions to a non-problem. There is no evidence that nations with compulsory voting are, as a result, better governed than those where voting is voluntary. As Tim Cavanaugh points out, the former category includes many states such as Argentina, Lebanon, Egypt, Congo, and others that are hardly paragons of civic virtue. By contrast, one of the few democracies that has even lower turnout rates than the United States is Switzerland, which is widely considered one of the best-governed nations in the world. I am not suggesting that low turnout is the cause of Switzerland’s success; but it certainly hasn’t inhibited it. Orszag himself admits that most political scientists believe that the outcomes of US elections over the last several decades would not have been significantly different if all eligible non-voters had turned out. There is also no reason to believe that a president or Congress elected by a majority of all Americans would be somehow more legitimate or otherwise morally preferable to one elected by a majority of those who voluntarily choose to vote. One cam imagine that an electorate where, say, only 1 percent turn out would be highly unrepresentative and might be perceived as illegitimate by the rest of society. But the same is not true of one where 40 to 60% of eligible voters turn out, as is true in modern US elections.

Orszag worries that without compulsory voting, people will not turn out because doing so isn’t rational:

For economists, the puzzle is not why voting participation rates are so low in voluntary systems, but why they’re so high. The so-called paradox of voting, highlighted in a 1957 book by the political scientist Anthony Downs, occurs because the probability that any individual voter can alter the outcome of an election is effectively zero. So if voting imposes any cost, in terms of time or hassle, a perfectly rational person would conclude it’s not worth doing. The problem is that if each person were to reach such a rational conclusion no one would vote, and the system would collapse.

Mandatory voting solves that collective action problem by requiring people to vote and punishing nonvoters with a fine.

However, the paradox of voting is not a serious enough problem to prevent tens of millions from turning out voluntarily every two years. Moreover, for reasons I explain in this article, it is actually rational to vote despite the low odds of decisiveness so long as the voter believes that there is a substantial difference between the opposing candidates, and cares at least somewhat about the rest of society as well as his own self-interest. To oversimplify the analysis, the low odds of decisiveness are outweighed by the potentially enormous payoff if your vote does turn out to matter. It is also relevant that voting is a low-cost activity that requires little time and effort.

While creating few if any benefits, compulsory voting laws are likely to cause harm. Most obviously, they are an infringement on the liberty of those who choose not to vote, including those who do so because they lack the knowledge needed to make a good decision. If rigorously policed, compulsory voting would also require significant expenditures on enforcement.

Finally, it is likely that those who currently choose not to vote probably have, on average, lower levels of political knowledge than those who do. If so, forcing them to the polls will exacerbate the already serious problem of political ignorance. Unlike voting, acquiring and understanding more than a minimal level of political knowledge is a costly activity, which makes it rational for most voters to stay ignorant, given the low chance that their knowledge will make a difference. This is especially true for those who are not interested in public policy for reasons other than voting. It is possible that many nonvoters are people with little or no interest in politics, and therefore little or no political knowledge.

I do not want to overstate this point, since it’s not clear how great the gap in knowledge between voters and nonvoters actually is. High-knowledge citizens who choose not to vote are more likely to falsely report having voted when asked in surveys, which makes comparisons difficult. Nonetheless, it is at least plausible that compulsory voting will make political ignorance an even more serious problem than it already is. More generally, we should spend less time worrying about turnout and more about whether those who do turn out actually understand what they are voting on.

UPDATE: I have made a few stylistic changes to this post.

UPDATE #2: It might be argued that, if nonvoters do not have electoral preferences significantly different from those who do vote, the potential decline in the average political knowledge of the electorate caused by mandatory voting will not matter. That may be. But knowledge affects more than just preferences between candidates. It also affects preferences on policy issues. A more ignorant electorate could well lead candidates and parties to change their platforms and policies when in office for the worse. That would be significant even if electoral results do not change.

UPDATE #3: In response to some who point to Australia as an example of compulsory voting, I would reiterate that there is little if any evidence that Australia has a better or more legitimate government as a result. Indeed, neighboring New Zealand, which does not have compulsory voting, has a political system that functions just as well or better. More generally, as noted above, nations with compulsory voting don’t seem to have consistently superior government relative to those that don’t.

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: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, for example, Francis Fukuyama asserted, “The political equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence rests on the empirical fact of natural human equality.”

This concern about human equality is the basis for a strange-bedfellow alliance with left-wing critics of biotechnological progress such as Marcy Darnovsky, co-founder of the Center for Genetics and Society. “The techno-eugenic vision urges us, in case we still harbor vague dreams of human equality and solidarity, to get over them,” wrote Darnovsky and environmental activist Tom Athanasiou in World Watch magazine back in July 2002. The two fear that advances in biotechnology will “allow inequality to be inscribed in the human genome.”

This is a very weak reason to oppose biotechnological enhancement of intelligence. Cognitive inequality is already “inscribed in the human genome.” There is a huge difference in intellectual ability between a person with an IQ of 150 and one with an IQ of 75. And there are already massive differences in political knowledge between different individuals and groups (many of them not caused by genetics), some of which I discuss in this article. Political theorists such as John Stuart Mill argued that these differences justify giving the more knowledgeable extra voting power long before anyone ever heard of genetic engineering.

If the case for political equality can be sustained at all, it must be on the basis that people qualify for it by meeting a certain minimum threshold of cognitive ability, not on the clearly false premise that everyone’s ability is essentially equal. On this account, rising above the minimum threshold does not entitle people to extra political power over those with lesser intellectual ability. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “[b]ecause Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others.” Unlike Francis Fukuyama, the author of the Declaration of Independence did not believe that the political equality enshrined in that document “rests on the empirical fact of natural human equality.”

Mill made a fairly good theoretical case for giving extra votes to those citizens who have greater political knowledge. Ignorant voting often inflicts harm on all of society, and not just on the ignorant voter himself. Because, as Mill puts it, voting is the exercise of “power over others,” it cannot be seen as purely an individual right that the voter is entitled to without regard to its effects. However, the theoretical argument is only worth implementing in practice if 1) the knowledgeable minority can be trusted not to use their extra power to oppress those with fewer votes, and 2) the government can be trusted to come up with a knowledge test that is objective and politically neutral. I am extremely skeptical on both counts, especially the second. These problems will not disappear with the development of cognitive enhancement. Thus, the case for political equality is buttressed by the realities of politics as well as theories of natural rights.

In the long run, cognitive enhancement could help alleviate political ignorance and increase political equality – at least in so far as political equality is enhanced by cognitive equality. Greater intelligence would enable “rationally ignorant” voters to assimilate more political information in the very limited time they are willing to devote to following politics. As for the equality issue, cognitive enhancement is likely to follow the same trajectory as numerous previous information-spreading technologies, such as books, radio, television, and computers. While at first they may be available mostly to the rich, over time costs will go down thanks to competition, and the rest of society will be able to take advantage of them as well. Ultimately, therefore, cognitive enhancement might actually reduce the large “natural” gaps in cognitive ability that currently exist. If, for example, genetic engineering enables everyone to achieve an IQ of 180, people who would otherwise have had very low IQs will gain a lot more than the Newtons of the world.

Bryan Caplan has a interesting post on George Orwell’s portrayal of democracy in his classic work Animal Farm. As Bryan notes, the initially egalitarian and democratic regime established by the animals gets subverted in large part because of political ignorance. Like Bryan, I would be interested to know more about Orwell’s view of real-world democracy. Did he believe that the problem of political ignorance could be overcome by education or some other means? Or perhaps he thought that the problem of ignorance was irremediable, but democracy was still the best form of government. Given that he remained a socialist to the end of his life, Orwell obviously could not adopt my and Bryan’s preferred solution of limiting and decentralizing government in order to mitigate the problem.

It’s also interesting to note that Orwell’s portrayal of democracy at Animal Farm was actually far more positive than the Soviet history he based the novel on. Unlike Animal Farm, the USSR was a brutal totalitarian state from the start and was never democratic. Opposition parties (including even left-wing socialist ones) were suppressed from the beginning, and there were never any free elections or any direct democracy of the kind Orwell depicts.

I’m not sure whether Orwell deviated from Soviet history on this point in order to make a statement about democracy or because he was in thrall to the view (common among anti-Stalinist Western leftists in his day) that the Soviet experiment only went awry under Stalin. His modestly favorable portrayal of Snowball – the pig who serves as an analogue to Trotsky – is compatible with the latter idea, though Snowball is not a completely positive figure in the novel. Some degree of rot is evident even in the “pre-Stalinist” era at Animal Farm, though the animals are described as “happy as they had never conceived it possible to be” during this period. In reality, large-scale totalitarian repression began under Lenin, not Stalin. And the real Trotsky was almost as bad as his rival, in some ways even a little worse.

Back in January, I expressed the fear that the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship in Egypt might lead to a new regime that is as bad or worse than the old. I gave two reasons why this could happen: Illiberal forces in Egypt, especially radical Islamists, are much better organized than liberal democrats, and majority public opinion in Egypt is also highly illiberal, which creates the possibility of Islamists coming to power by democratic means.

The first round of the recent Egyptian elections, where Islamist parties got over 60% of the vote, at least partially substantiates these concerns. To be sure, two thirds of that went to the Muslim Brotherhood, the more “moderate” of the two Islamist parties. However, Islamist hardliners have more influence in the Brotherhood than more moderate “reformers.”

If the Islamists come to power and adopt repressive policies, it’s possible that they could be voted out in a future election. But this assumes that they will allow continue to hold competitive elections and allow opposition parties to operate freely. Unfortunately, it is all too likely that a radical Islamist regime would use the powers of the state to suppress opposition and ensure that it could never be voted out, as has happened in Iran. A democratically elected Islamist government could easily end up as a political system where there is “one man, one vote, one time.”

It is far from inevitable that Egypt will end up with a radical Islamist government. Perhaps the still-powerful Egyptian military will prevent it, or perhaps more liberal forces within and outside the Muslim Brotherhood will get stronger. The early indications, however, are not very positive.

In a recent post, I cited evidence suggesting that the new Egyptian government is degenerating into a military dictatorship at least as bad as the Mubarak regime that was overthrown earlier this year. Jeff Jacoby compiles some additional relevant points:

[T]he “spirit of Tahrir Square’’ has ushered in neither liberal democracy nor a rebirth of tolerance for Egypt’s ancient but beleaguered Christian minority.

One of the country’s leading liberal reformers, Ayman Nour, said Monday that with the latest bloodshed, the military has lost whatever goodwill it accrued last spring. The ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces almost surely doesn’t care. In the eight months since Mubarak’s ouster, the military has tried and convicted some 12,000 Egyptian civilians in military tribunals, often after using torture to extract confessions. The country’s hated emergency laws, which allow suspects to be detained without charge, not only remain in force, but have been expanded to cover offenses as vague as “spreading rumors’’ or “blocking traffic.’’ And just as Mubarak did, the generals insist that government repression is all that stands between Egypt and social chaos.

As for Egypt’s Coptic Christians, their plight has gone from bad to worse. Post-Mubarak Egypt has seen “an explosion of violence against the Coptic Christian community,’’ the international news channel France 24 was reporting as far back as May. “Anger has flared up into deadly riots, and houses, shops, and churches have been set ablaze.’’

With Islamist hardliners growing increasingly influential, hate crimes against Christians routinely go unpunished. Copts, who represent a tenth of Egypt’s population, are subjected to appalling humiliations.

As Jacoby notes, the violence against the Coptic minority appears to enjoy substantial public support. That reality reinforces my longstanding concern that prospects for liberal democracy in Egypt are undercut by the intolerant nature of majority opinion in that country, as well as the superior ruthlessness and organization of antiliberal forces.

When the revolution that eventually overthrew Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak began, I warned that the end result could easily be a government as bad or worse than Mubarak’s was. In a revolutionary situation, liberal democratic forces often get outmaneuvered by more ruthless and better-organized opponents – even if majority public opinion would prefer a liberal regime. In Egypt, I pointed out, the establishment of a repressive regime is made more likely by the fact that public opinion is in may ways extremely illiberal. Unfortunately, this fear has so far been justified by events. As Thanassis Cambanis explains in the Atlantic, the new Egyptian government is well on its way to becoming a military dictatorship in some ways more repressive than Mubarak’s regime:

It’s hard to escape the feeling that Egypt’s January 25 Revolution is being eaten alive. It’s too soon to write it off, and too soon to predict that a full-fledged military dictatorship will rule the country for the foreseeable future; but that grisly outcome now is a solid possibility, perhaps as likely an outcome as a liberal, civilian Egypt or an authoritarian republic.

Eight months after a euphoric wave of people power stunned Egypt’s complacent and abusive elite, it’s possible to see the clear outlines of the players competing to take over from Mubarak and his circle, and to assess the likely outcomes. The scorecard is distasteful. The uprising — it can’t yet be fairly termed a revolution — forced the regime to jettison its CEO, Hosni Mubarak, in order to preserve its own prerogatives.

In the last two months, that regime has made clear how strong it feels. In September, in quick succession the military extended the hated state of emergency for another year, effectively rendering any notion of rule of law in Egypt meaningless; unilaterally published election rules that favor wealthy incumbents and remnants of the old regime, and that disadvantage new, post-Mubarak competitors; indefinitely postponed presidential elections, and refused any timetable for handing over authority to a civilian; reinstated full media censorship, threatening television stations and imposing a gag order on all reporting about the military; and the country’s authoritarian ruler, Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, unleashed a personal public relations campaign on state television odiously reminiscent of Mubarak’s image-making. Furthermore, the government advanced its investigation of “illegal NGOs” that allegedly took foreign money, including virtually every important and independent dissident organization.

Taken together, these moves show a military junta fully confident that it can impose measures of control as harsh — or, in the case of widespread military trials for civilians, harsher — than those employed by Mubarak.

As Cambanis recognizes, the new military rulers have not yet fully consolidated their power. So a more liberal outcome is still possible. But its likelihood is gradually diminishing. Moreover, many of the military government’s opponents are far from being liberal democrats themselves. Some of them are radical Islamists who, if they prevail, would establish a significantly more oppressive government than the generals – especially with respect to women and religious minorities.

Some dictatorships are so bad that their overthrow will almost always be a net positive. The new regime can hardly avoid being a lesser evil than the old when the latter is a totalitarian state and/or engaging in mass murder. Consider such cases as Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot. Mubarak, however, was basically a run of the mill despot who repressed political opponents but was not a totalitarian and did not commit mass murder. The overthrow of that kind of regime often leads to the establishment of a worse one. Such an outcome is also a real danger in Libya, where radical Islamists are among the leaders of the victorious anti-Gadhafi rebels.

That’s the question raised by a lawsuit in Colorado’s federal district court, in the case of Kerr v. Hickenlooper. In an amicus brief, I suggest that the answer is “no.” The brief relies heavily on the scholarship of my Independence Institute colleague Rob Natelson, who happens to be the leading scholarly expert on the Guarantee clause.

In short, the Founders defined a “republic” to include governments such as those of ancient Athens, Carthage, and Sparta, all of which included elements of direct democracy. According to Minor v. Happersett (U.S. 1875), the decision of Congress to admit a state to the Union is conclusive proof that, at the time, the state had a Republican Form of Government. Massachusetts and Rhode Island had referenda when they were admitted. The progressive movement for initiative and referendum began in the last 19th century. Congress chose to admit Oklahoma (1907) which had very strong I&R provisions in its state constitution, and New Mexico (1911), whose statehood constitution specifically provided for the creation of a citizen initiative system.

Courts have held that the Republican Form of Government issue is not justiciable, and enforcement is up to Congress. The amicus brief, however, addresses the merits of the issue.

Libertarians, economists, and my fellow constitutional theorists are all known for arguing that the conventional wisdom overstates the importance of individual political leaders. Instead, we emphasize the the constraining impact of institutions, public opinion, and political incentives. The structure of the system matters a lot more than the individual leader. Libertarian economist Bryan Caplan, however, recently argued that a great leader could do a lot more good than most libertarians believe:

I maintain that an intelligent, wise, brave president could do enormous good. How? For starters, he could give full presidential pardons to everyone serving time for (federal) drug-related offenses. The president can’t end the drug war on his own, but he could free hordes of innocent people before his term (singular, no doubt) ran out.* And needless to say, there are plenty of other unjust laws a president could negate with blanket pardons.

The lesson: Libertarians should stop insisting that our problems are too complex for any human being to solve. Many of our problems can literally be solved with the stroke of a pen. Any intelligent, wise, brave leader who wants to solve problems faces vast orchards of low-hanging fruit. The only reason the orchards are so bountiful, unfortunately, is that people who are intelligent, wise, and brave rarely make it to the top.

Bryan’s main point is well taken. An “intelligent, wise, brave president” unconcerned about reelection could do a lot of good that conventional politicians avoid for fear that it would hurt their electoral prospects. By the same token, such a leader could also do a lot of harm, if his unpopular policies turn out to be worse than those preferred by the electorate. At the same time, as Bryan recognizes, it’s no accident that such leaders “rarely make it to the top.” The political process systematically advantages those candidates who prioritize seizing and holding on to power over those who are willing to sacrifice office for the sake of principle.

In addition, Bryan somewhat overstates the good that even a president totally indifferent to his political fate can do in the unlikely event that he could get elected in the first place. Such a leader would still have to trim his sails somewhat in order to avoid a political backlash that makes things worse than they were before. Consider Bryan’s example of a president who decides to pardon everyone serving time for federal drug-related offenses. That policy would be extremely unpopular. It will be even more so if even one or two of the pardoned drug dealers goes on to commit a highly publicized murder or other serious crime.

In response, Congress might well enact broader and more punitive anti-drug laws; even if the incumbent vetoes them, his successor would not. The next president would sweep into office on a pro-drug war platform; quite possibly, he would order federal prosecutors and law enforcement agencies to pursue the War on Drugs more aggressively than before. There might be a similar backlash at the state level (the states imprison many more drug offenders than the feds do). The cause of drug legalization, which has been slowly gaining ground over the last several decades, would suffer a significant political setback. The net result could well be a long-term increase in the number of people imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses. Other principled but highly unpopular policies could backfire in similar ways.

That said, there is much that a politically brave president opposed to the War on Drugs could do to make things better without generating a massive backlash. He could order federal prosecutors to deemphasize drug prosecutions relative to other priorities (without actually banning such prosecutions entirely). He could issue pardons or commutations in some of the more egregious drug cases (ones involving police abuses or extremely long sentences for minor offenses). He could keep President Obama’s broken campaign promise and genuinely end medical marijuana prosecutions in states where medical marijuana is legal. Many of these measures would carry a political price, which is one reason why Obama hasn’t done any of them. On the other hand, they probably are not large-scale enough to make drugs a major issue in the next presidential election or generate a backlash large enough to undue the good they would do at the margin. These changes are small enough that the majority of rationally ignorant voters wouldn’t even notice them, thereby reducing the likelihood of a major backlash.

The bottom line: A good, wise, and politically fearless president could do a lot more good than many suppose. But even the best and bravest leader would still have to make substantial concessions to political reality, lest all his good works be undone.

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.

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.

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.