The Volokh Conspiracy

In his first Inaugural Address, President Obama famously said that we should not ask “whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.” I criticized this indifference to the size of government in one of my very first posts of the Obama Presidency. More recently, however, longtime Obama adviser David Axelrod recognized that the size of government does matter after all:

As the nation’s chief executive, President Obama is accountable for the IRS, State Department and Justice Department. His longtime adviser David Axelrod last week blamed a too-big government for the scandals: “Part of being president is that there’s so much beneath you that you can’t know because the government is so vast.” [HT: Don Boudreaux]

In my 2009 post on Obama’s Inaugural Address and in a forthcoming book, I explained that one of the dangers of big government is that rationally ignorant voters are unable to effectively monitor its activities. A closely related problem is that the modern federal government is also too large for the president to effectively monitor – even with the help of topnotch advisers like Axelrod.

Axelrod’s defense of Obama is actually very plausible. It is quite possible that Obama didn’t know about the IRS’ abusive targeting of conservative groups, and that if he had known he would have ordered them to stop – if only to forestall a scandal that might become a dangerous political liability. Yet Obama probably didn’t know because, as Axelrod puts it, “the government is so vast” that he could not possibly keep track of what it was doing.

In fairness to Obama, much of the government growth that makes his job so difficult occurred on his predecessor’s watch. The current administration is far from solely responsible for the overgrown size of modern government. But the president would be entitled to greater sympathy if he hadn’t spent much of the last four years expanding the size of government even further, and claiming that we shouldn’t worry about its growth.

UPDATE: This recent Washington Post story reports that senior White House officials admit they knew about the IRS abuses in April but claim they did not tell Obama. Even if we decide not to believe their denials on the latter point and conclude that Obama found out at the same time as they did, that still means he was unaware of the problem for over three years, since the targeting of Tea Party groups apparently began in March 2010.

Next Monday at 7 AM eastern time (probably rebroadcasting at that time in other time zones), I will be on Stand Up! with Pete Dominick on Sirius XM Satellite Radio, discussing my forthcoming book Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter, which will be published by Stanford University Press in early fall (probably September or early October).

Stanford UP has created a website for the book. You can, if you like, preorder the book there. We even have a special coupon code just for Volokh Conspiracy readers that will give you a 20% discount at the Stanford site; the code is S13LAW. OK, actually the code is available to anyone who wants to use it. But at least VC readers will now be the first to find out about it! You can also preorder the book at Amazon, while still being eligible for any price reductions that either Amazon or Stanford UP adopt between now and the publication date.

A recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll (Kaiser is one of the leading pollsters focusing on health care issues) finds that 42% of Americans are unaware that the Affordable Care Act is still the law of the land. Kaiser reports that that figures includes “12 percent who believe the law has been repealed by Congress, 7 percent who believe it has been overturned by the Supreme Court and 23 percent who say they don’t know enough to say what the status of the law is.” And as both Kaiser studies and other polls reveal, it is likely that many of the remaining 58% do not actually know very much about what is included in the law. If only the Kaiser poll had been published a little earlier, I would have included it in my forthcoming book Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter (forthcoming this fall from Stanford University Press).

This kind of widespread ignorance is striking in light of the fact that the ACA has been widely debated for over three years, and information about is readily available from a wide range of sources, online and elsewhere. Some will find the result shocking. But it will not surprise long-time VC readers who know about the problem of rational political ignorance. Much of the public often ignores readily available information about politics and public policy because they find the subject uninteresting and there is little incentive to learn about it just for the purpose of becoming a better-informed voter. For that reason, even people who are by no means stupid can and often do rationally choose to remain ignorant about a variety of political issues. Those who do become relatively well-informed about politics often evaluate political information in a highly biased way, which is also rational, given that truth-seeking may not have been their main objective in following politics. Unfortunately, individually rational behavior often leads to bad collective results when voters take their ignorance and bias to the polls.

This coming week, on Thursday and Friday, I will be doing three different two talks in New York City, two at NYU Law School, and one at Columbia Law School.

On Thursday, April 11, from 12:10 to about 1:10, Columbia law Professor Theodore Shaw and I will be debating affirmative action and the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision in Fisher v. University of Texas. The event is sponsored by the Columbia Federalist Society, and will be held in Room 103 of Jerome Greene Hall, 435 W. 116th St.

Later on Thursday, from 4 to 5:30 PM, I will be speaking at NYU about my forthcoming book Democracy and Political Ignorance (Stanford University Press), focusing specifically on the parts of the book that outline how the problem of rational political ignorance can be mitigated by decentralizing political power. This event is sponsored by the NYU chapter of the Federalist Society, and will be in Vanderbilt Hall, Room 216, at 40 Washington Square North.

Finally, on Friday, April 12, at 1 PM, I will again be speaking at NYU at a symposium commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 17th Amendment, entitled “Democracy Unfiltered: Discussing 100 Years of Direct Elections and Modern Issues Affecting the Law of Democracy.” Also on this panel will be Rick Pildes (NYU), Wendy Schiller (Brown), and Bruce Cain (Stanford). The event is sponsored by the NYU Journal of Legislation and Public Policy, and will be held in Vanderbilt Hall, at 40 Washington Square North.

In a forthcoming article I coauthored with economists Bryan Caplan, Eric Crampton, and Wayne Grove, we find that voters routinely make major mistakes in attributing responsibility for a variety of policy outcomes to different branches and levels of government. This undermines voters’ ability to properly reward and punish political incumbents for their performance. The article will be published in PS: Political Science and Politics, and a draft is now available on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Many scholars argue that “retrospective voting” is a powerful information shortcut that offsets widespread voter ignorance. Even relatively ignorant voters, it is claimed, can punish incumbents for bad performance and reward them if things go well. But if voters’ understanding of which officials are responsible for which issues is systematically biased, retrospective voting becomes an independent source of political failure rather than a cure for it. We designed and administered a new survey of the general public and political experts to test for such biases. Our analysis reveals frequent, large, robust biases in voter attributions of responsibility for a wide array of political actors and outcomes, with an overarching tendency for the public to overestimate influence, though there are also important examples of underestimation.

In two recent posts, guest-blogger John McGinnis makes a strong case that the US government should legalize prediction markets, that these markets are valuable sources of information, and that claims that prediction markets can easily be “manipulated” are overblown. I agree completely on all counts. Nevertheless, I am somewhat pessimistic that prediction markets will do a lot to overcome the problem of political ignorance.

As I discussed in my previous post commenting on John’s excellent new book Accelerating Democracy, voters are rationally ignorant about politics, and are often unaware of even very basic information about government and public policy. Thus, even if prediction markets make high-quality data readily available for free, most voters may pay little or no attention to it, just as they currently ignore most of the information already available from other sources. In this context, it’s worth noting that there’s little if any evidence that more than a tiny fraction of voters have been paying attention to prediction markets over the last few years that the data has been available. Although I haven’t seen any survey data on the subject, I would not be surprised if a majority of Americans have not even heard of prediction markets, much less been paying attention to the data they generate. Obviously, as John points out, voters who actually place substantial bets on prediction markets do have a strong incentive to pay attention to them. But that is likely to be only a small proportion of the population, just as currently only a small proportion are highly active sports bettors.

Even those voters who do pay some attention to prediction markets may not evaluate their results with anything approaching objectivity. Just as voters tend to overvalue other types of information that confirm their preexisting views, while undervaluing any that cuts the other way, they could do the same with prediction market results. The very nature of prediction markets makes many people’s reactions to them particularly susceptible to cognitive bias. Because they seem like frivolous “gambling” on life and death political events, people may be tempted to ignore inconvenient results as unserious. In addition, political activists can easily use demagoguery against them. To borrow one of John’s examples, if prediction markets indicated that a capital gains tax increase would harm the economy, liberal activists and politicians could dismiss that on the grounds that the result must have been manipulated by Wall Street fatcats eager to protect their ill-gotten gains. If the markets predicted that a military action proposed by a Republican president is likely to fail, conservatives could blame the result on manipulation by liberal financiers like George Soros and other “unpatriotic” and anti-American left-wingers.

Finally, political ignorance makes it more difficult for prediction markets to function at all. In part because most of the public is either unaware of prediction markets or does not understand their value, there was little outcry over the US government’s recent crackdown on Intrade, one of the largest prediction market sites. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission forced Intrade to stop taking bets from Americans.

If more people appreciated the benefits of prediction markets, the CFTC might have been met with a massive political backlash and compelled to back down. So far, political ignorance has merely allowed the CFTC to act against prediction markets without facing much public opposition. In the future, however, opponents of prediction markets might be able to use populist rhetoric to actively mobilize public opinion against them. If, for example, government started relying on prediction markets to inform policy decisions opposed by liberals, one can easily imagine an Occupy Wall Street-like campaign against it. If prediction market-driven policies seemed to tilt leftward, conservatives could resort to populist attacks of their own. And such campaigns might well fall on receptive ears.

This is not to say that prediction markets are useless. Far from it. People can still use the data to make private sector decisions and for “voting with their feet” between states and local governments. In these situations, rational ignorance is far less of a problem. Some of the prediction market data people learn for those purposes might also eventually affect their ballot box decisions, though it’s important to remember that the types of data useful for these two purposes are often very different from each other. Prediction market data can also be used to good effect by government officials and policy experts. But, at least in the short to medium run, the potential policy benefits of prediction markets are likely to be significantly curtailed by political ignorance.

UPDATE: I have made some stylistic and organizational changes to this post in order to increase readability.

Guest blogger John McGinnis’ new book Accelerating Democracy is an outstanding analysis of the ways in which modern technology and social science can improve the quality of decision-making in government and society. It is probably the most important book on that subject in a long time.

Much of John’s thesis is compelling. He is right that modern social science enables us to evaluate the effects of public policy far more accurately than in the past, and that modern technology makes it easier to disseminate the resulting knowledge. I also agree with John’s argument that the technological and social scientific revolutions strengthen the case for political decentralization, enabling lower-level governments to experiment with new types of policies. We can now evaluate such experiments much better than in the past, which increases their value to society. John is especially persuasive in arguing that we should legalize prediction markets, which are an extremely valuable source of information, even if imperfect.

I do, however, have two reservations about John’s conclusions: Because of the problem of rational political ignorance, voters may fail to exploit much of the new information available to them. We will be able to make better use of new data if we make more of our decisions by “voting with our feet” than by voting at the ballot box. And in many cases, such foot voting is best facilitated by limiting state and local government power, as well as that of Washington.

I. How Political Ignorance Reduces the Benefits of New Information.

As John effectively demonstrates, recent technological advances both give us new policy-relevant information and make it easier for the public to access it. The problem is that voters have little incentive to actually learn and make use of the new data. Because any one vote has only an infinitesmal chance of influencing the outcome of an election, most voters have little incentive to learn political information. They are “rationally ignorant”. As a result, the majority of the public is often ignorant of very basic political information that has long been readily available through the media and the internet. For example, when the GOP nominated Paul Ryan for vice president last year, oonly 32% of the public knew that he was a member of the House of Representatives, even though he had been a major figure politics for several years. Most are also ignorant about the distribution of spending in the federal budget, the issue Ryan was most associated with, and one that has been a major point of contention over the last few years in light of our severe fiscal crisis.

As I discuss in my own forthcoming book Democracy and Political Ignorance (Stanford University Press, to be published this fall), political knowledge levels have remained low and risen little if at all over the last fifty years, despite massive increases in education and the rise of electronic media and the internet. The problem is not lack of information, but voters’ lack of motivation to learn it. So far, there is no indication that new technological breakthroughs will change that. Huge amounts of new information are of only limited value to an electorate that often ignores basic facts that are already widely available.

Rationally ignorant voters also have little incentive to objectively evaluate the political information they do learn. Instead, they tend to evaluate it in a highly biased way, discounting anything that cuts against their preexisting views. Because the consequences of error for any individual voter are low, few try hard to objectively evaluate about new information they learn about public policy.

The combined impact of rational ignorance and bias greatly reduce the potential benefits of new information for improving the performance of democratic government. Obviously, public opinion is not the only influence on government policy in a democracy. But it does have a substantial impact, one that is affected by ignorance. John notes the problem of political ignorance in his book. But I don’t think he shows that new technology can overcome it. At the very least, there is reason for skepticism on this point, given our experience with the last fifty years of technological innovation.

Fortunately, however, we can make more effective use our new knowledge in another way. When we “vote with our feet” by choosing between jurisdictions in a federal system, or between products in the market, we have much stronger incentives to learn relevant information and evaluate it rationally. If you are like most people, you probably spent a lot more time and effort seeking out information the last time you bought a car or a TV than the last time you decided who to support for the presidency. That’s not because the presidency is less complicated than or less important than your TV. It’s because when you buy a TV, you know that your decision will make a real difference to the outcome, whereas with the presidency that is highly improbable. The same goes for deciding what city or state you are going to live in.

II. Taking Decentralization All the Way Down.

The informational advantages of foot voting over ballot box voting reinforce John’s argument for political decentralization, limiting the power of the federal government in order to allow more issues to be decided at the state and local levels. The more issues are decentralized, the more decisions can be made by voting with our feet. Sometimes, however, we can empower foot voters even more by limiting state and local governments in order to empower the private sector.

Foot voting in the private sector has significant advantages over choosing between governments. Among the most important is lower moving costs. Moving from one city to another or one state to another is much more costly than moving to a new private planned community or switching to a new service provider in the market. The latter can often be done without moving at all. Reducing moving costs is especially important when it comes to making decisions about immobile assets, such as property rights in land. In such situations, the case for limiting state authority in order to empower the private sector is at its strongest. And enforcing such limits may require the federal intervention, including by federal courts.

Transferring decisions to private hands also often facilitates exploitation of new information. Private sector actors such as property owners often know far more about their preferences and the possible uses of their assets than the government does, a point I discuss in more detail in this article. And because there are many more private organizations than governments, they are in a position to try out a much wider range of the kinds of experiments that John rightly advocates. As John Stuart Mill pointed out back in the 19th century, creative private organizations are often the ones who develop the most innovative “experiments in living.” But such experiments are more likely to flourish if not preempted by government regulations that mandate uniformity.

The informational advantages of political decentralization and privatization are far from the only issues we need to consider in deciding how large and centralized government should be. Some problems are too large-scale to be handled by any private actor or subnational government. Global warming is an important example. But information issues do tilt the scales in favor of greater decentralization and tighter limits on government power than we might support otherwise.

In order to take full advantage of the information revolution described in John’s excellent book, government needs to be smaller and more decentralized.

On Monday April 1, I will be speaking at a George Mason University School of Law panel on the Tea Party movement and voter rationality. Lots of data show that voters are often ignorant about politics and highly biased in their evaluation of the information they do know. The panel will focus on the extent to which Tea Party supporters are better than other voters on these dimensions, worse, or roughly the same.

Also participating in the event are co-blogger Todd Zywicki (who is a prominent academic expert on public choice theory), and Matt Kibbe of Freedomworks, one of the leading organizations associated with the Tea Party Movement). The panel will be held at George Mason Law School from noon to 1 PM in Room 222. It is sponsored by the GMU Federalist Society.

I have written about the Tea Party movement and political ignorance in this article, and here. My general take is that Tea Party supporters probably have higher political knowledge levels than the average voter because they have higher-than-average education and interest in politics (two strong predictors of political knowledge). However, as I discuss in my article linked above, they are far from free of the ignorance and political bias that are common across the political spectrum. For example, I cited surveys showing that “birtherism” is much more widespread among Tea Party supporters than among the public as a whole. This is part of a general pattern in which committed partisans are more likely to fall for myths that conform to their preexisting biases.

This Thursday at 6 PM, I will be speaking about my forthcoming book Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter (Stanford University Press) at Campbell University in North Carolina. The event wil lbe held in the Hartness Lecture Hall in the Science Building.

The book itself will be published this fall. It argues that widespread political ignorance and irrationality strengthen the case for limiting and decentralizing government power. I will post more information about it closer to the time of publication.

Economist David Friedman has an insightful post on the problems inherent in deferring to the views of “authoritative” scientific bodies:

A pattern I have observed in a variety of public controversies is the attempt to establish some sort of official scientific truth, as proclaimed by a suitable authority—a committee of the National Academy of Science, the Center for Disease Control, or the equivalent. It is, in my view, a mistake, one based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works. Truth is not established by an authoritative committee but by a decentralized process which (sometimes) results in everyone or almost everyone in the field agreeing.

Part of the problem with that approach is that, the more often it is followed, the less well it will work....

The first time it might work, although even then there is the risk that the committee established to give judgement will end up dominated not by the most expert but by the most partisan. But the more times the process is repeated, the greater the incentive of people who want their views to get authoritative support to get themselves or their friends positions of influence within the organization, to keep those they disapprove of out of such positions, and so to divert it from its original purpose to becoming a rubber stamp for their views. The result is to subvert both the organization and the scientific enterprise, especially if support by official truth becomes an important determinant of research funding.

I. The Dangers of Deference to Biased Experts.

Friedman makes two important points here. Scientific truth cannot be established by the endorsement of an authoritative body such as the NAS or the CDC. And if people start to take the pronouncements of such expert bodies as gospel, there is an obvious potential for abuse.

Both problems are exacerbated in cases where the scientific question at issue is relevant to some hot-button political controversy. When it comes to politics, most people have strong incentives to be “rationally ignorant,” and therefore devote little time and effort to determining whether the pronouncements of “experts” are really backed by evidence or not. Given the very low chance that your vote in an election will be decisive, there is little incentive to make a serious effort to double-check the pronouncements of experts on political issues, if your only motivation for doing so is to figure out which candidate or party has the “right” position on a given issue. For similar reasons, voters tend to be highly biased in evaluating whatever information they do learn about politics, often acting as “fans” for their respective party or ideology rather than as objective truth-seekers. This often leads them to place excessive credence in real or imagined experts who support their preexisting views, while discounting those on the other side.

II. Why Deference is Often Unavoidable.

That said, I don’t believe we can simply dispense with deference to scientific experts. There are so many complex issues in the world that none of us have the time or expertise to really delve into the evidence on more than a small fraction of them. As I explained in reference to the “Climategate” controversy in 2009:

[O]ur knowledge of complex issues we don’t have personal expertise on is largely based on social validation. For example, I think that Einsteinian physics is generally more correct than Newtonian physics, even though I know very little about either. Why? Because that’s the overwhelming consensus of professional physicists, and I have no reason to believe that their conclusions should be discounted as biased or otherwise driven by considerations other than truth-seeking. My views of climate science were (and are) based on similar considerations. I thought that global warming was probably a genuine and serious problem because that is what the overwhelming majority of relevant scientists seem to believe, and I generally didn’t doubt their objectivity.

Even if you consider yourself a great skeptic, I suspect that you too defer to expertise on many issues. You probably follow your doctor’s advice on what medicine to take when you are sick, usually without first reading up on the scientific literature on that medicine’s effectiveness, and almost certainly without performing your own laboratory experiments to assess its potency first-hand.

III. Increasing Our Expertise on When to Defer to Experts.

Given the near-inevitability of deference to experts, can we avoid the pitfalls Friedman rightly emphasizes? There’s no perfect solution. But some rules of thumb can help. First, deference to expertise is more warranted in cases where there is an expert consensus that crosses ideological lines. Like the rest of us, experts are prone to ideological bias. Thus, if experts of differing ideologies converge on the same conclusion, that’s a sign that the resulting opinion is really driven by expertise rather than bias. It doesn’t prove that the experts are right, of course, but it does justify a stronger presumption in their favor. When, on the other hand, experts do split along ideological lines, that suggests the issue is more disputable, and that bias may be influencing their judgment. It doesn’t mean that the experts are wrong or that their expertise is useless. Their views are still probably worth listening to more than those of laypeople. But it does mean that we should be more cautious about concluding that an expert pronouncement must be correct simply because the person or the institution making it has impressive credentials.

A weaker but still significant indicator of expert reliability is to ask whether expertise makes you more likely to support a given conclusion, after controlling for ideology and other factors that might bias judgment. For example, if experts in a given field are 50% more likely to believe X about a key controversy in their area of expertise than are otherwise comparable non-experts, that is some indication that X derives some support from the evidence and relevant expert analysis thereof. Bryan Caplan’s research on the differences between economists and laypeople on economic policy issues is a good example of this kind of analysis. He shows many issues where expertise in economics has a major effect on policy views even after controlling for ideology, self-interest, and various relevant demographic variables. That doesn’t mean that economists are necessarily right about those economic issues where they differ from laypeople. But it does suggest that the difference really is a product of their expertise and is therefore entitled to greater deference than a supposedly expert judgment that is mostly driven by ideology or narrow self-interest.

Finally, as in the Climategate controversy, it may be worth considering whether experts in a given field have good incentives to pursue the truth, or whether theose incentives are skewed by funding sources or by the ability of one faction to “freeze out” those who dispute the received orthodoxy. However, crude analysis of funding incentives can be even more misleading than simply ignoring them entirely. Unfortunately, properly assessing the impact of incentives on the range of views expressed by experts in a given field itself often requires detailed knowledge that most of us do not have.

Such rules of thumb don’t matter much in cases where you know enough about the field in question to assess the evidence for yourself. But in the many situations where we must defer to experts, they might help reduce the dangers inherent in doing so.

Jerry Brito, a technology policy expert at the Mercatus Center, has an interesting essay describing his loss of faith in the idea that increasing government transparency will necessarily lead to smaller government or better policy:

The theory that government transparency, and in particular better access to government spending data, will lead to limited government is premised on the idea that the reason the public doesn’t press for an end to out-of-control government spending—whether on defense or entitlements or anything else—is that they are rationally ignorant.

If the cost to citizens of informing themselves about public policy is higher than the potential benefits of such knowledge, the theory goes, then the rational course of action for a citizen is to not invest in acquiring such information and thus to remain ignorant. Sadly, it’s a fact that there is a near-zero probability that any action an individual takes will have a decisive effect on any given policy outcome—whether it’s voting or calling congress or tweeting. Citizens, therefore, rationally choose to be ignorant....

Greater access to government data, the theory posits, can help undo the information asymmetry and weaken the dynamic of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs...

The lynchpin of the theory is that citizens will act rationally. It assumes that if citizens are shown evidence that a particular bill or regulation is very costly, or that a government program does not perform well, they will, at least on the margin, take some action to oppose it...

[But] [b]elieving things that are not true can feel good for ideological or emotional reasons. So as long as the cost does not outweigh the benefit of the fine feeling, it is rational to indulge in irrational beliefs. This is what [economist] Bryan Caplan calls rational irrationality....

Indulging in a belief that evolution is a myth is also virtually costless, unless you intend to make your living in the life sciences. As a result, many hold this belief without a problem....

As Caplan has shown, politics presents people with an opportunity to consume irrational beliefs very cheaply. This is because they do not have to completely internalize the cost of errors the way they would if they stopped believing in gravity.

For example, what is the material cost to a citizen of supporting a bad policy that will cost him $5,000? The answer is not $5,000, but $5,000 multiplied by the probability that his support—whether a vote, a call to congress, or a tweet—will have a decisive effect on the policy outcome. Because the probability that his action will be decisive is nearly zero, the material cost to him of holding an irrational belief is essentially zero. As a result, people will believe whatever makes them feel best about politics and act accordingly, and the aggregate costs of the political outcomes are borne by everyone.

Bryan Caplan’s theory of rational irrationality is a major contribution to the study of political ignorance. It is indeed true that people tend to evaluate new political information in a highly biased way, overvaluing anything that confirms their preexisting views and downplaying or simply ignoring evidence that cuts against them. Such biased evaluation of evidence is perfectly rational behavior once we recognize that, for many people, the purpose of following politics is not to get at the truth about political issues but to enjoy the experience of being a “political fan” cheering on one’s preferred party or ideology.

This should trouble transparency advocates even if they are not libertarians. If the purpose of transparency is to generate a public reaction that will lead to better policy (whether in a libertarian direction or not), rational irrationality is a significant obstacle.

Moreover, Brito is too quick to assume that increased transparency can at least greatly alleviate the problem of rational ignorance, even if it will not eliminate rational irrationality. Some government transparency enthusiasts have a kind of X Files vision of politics in which “The Truth is Out There” and the public is dying to get at it, only to be stymied by sinister forces who want to cover up their evil machinations. If only Mulder and Scully can somehow reveal the truth to the people, they will rise up and set things right.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is more realistic:

The single hardest thing for a practising politician to understand is that most people, most of the time, don’t give politics a first thought all day long. Or if they do, it is with a sigh...., before going back to worrying about the kids, the parents, the mortgage, the boss, their friends, their weight, their health, sex and rock ‘n’ roll.....

For most normal people, politics is a distant, occasionally irritating fog.

The main reason why most of the public is ignorant about politics is not that the information isn’t readily available, but that they don’t take the time to read it and study it. That’s why majorities are often ignorant about basic facts that are easily found in the media or the internet, including basic facts about the federal budget, whether taxes recently went up or down, and whether the economy is growing. In many cases, majorities have never even heard of prominent political leaders, such as Paul Ryan before he was nominated for vice president.

The good news for libertarians is that, despite rational irrationality, increasing political knowledge does tend to make people somewhat more libertarian than they would be otherwise. The bad news for transparency advocates of all stripes is that increasing transparency is unlikely to increase knowledge very much. Most of the public makes little effort to study the political information that is already widely available, and there is little reason to believe that they will treat new information any differently.

This doesn’t mean that transparency is completely useless. Sometimes, beneficial change can be achieved simply by revealing the existence of abuses to a small but influential elite. More rarely, some revelations are so blatant and so striking that they can even penetrate the haze of rational ignorance. The revelation of the Watergate scandal is an obvious historical example. Often, however, the truth about government won’t set the public free because they aren’t paying attention.

Many polls show that large majorities of the public want to raise tax rates on people earning over $250,000 per year. But in an interesting recent post on the Democrats’ approach to tax policy, Megan McArdle cites an interesting 2012 poll of likely voters conducted for The Hill, which shows that the vast majority of Americans prefer rates that are much lower than those that existed even before the the recent fiscal cliff deal:

Three-quarters of likely voters believe the nation’s top earners should pay lower, not higher, tax rates, according to a new poll for The Hill.

The big majority opted for a lower tax bill when asked to choose specific rates; precisely 75 percent said the right level for top earners was 30 percent or below.

The current rate for top earners is 35 percent [the rate that existed before the fiscal cliff deal - IS]. Only 4 percent thought it was appropriate to take 40 percent, which is approximately the level that President Obama is seeking from January 2013 onward...

The new data seem to run counter to several polls that have found support for raising taxes on high-income earners....

But The Hill poll found that a dramatically different picture emerges when voters are asked to specify the “most appropriate” rates.

Support for relatively low tax rates was not limited to Republicans or high-income earners. Indeed, low tax rates for the wealthy got their highest level of support from relatively low-income survey respondents, and their lowest level from the wealthy themselves:

Republicans were more likely than Democrats to support lower tax rates for the wealthy, but voters in both parties solidly supported lower rates compared to current law. Eighty-one percent of Republicans favored tax rates below current levels, compared to 70 percent of Democrats.

The Hill Poll, conducted by Pulse Opinion Research of 1,000 likely voters, also found broad support for lower rates across income groups. The group most supportive of lowering tax rates on the wealthy below current rates made between $20,000 and $40,000 a year; 81 percent supported tax rates of 30 percent or lower....

Of the income groups surveyed, those making more than $100,000 a year were the least supportive of lower rates, with just 66 percent supporting income tax rates of 30 percent or lower. That group was most likely to support income tax rates of 40 percent. Eleven percent of those voters said a 40 percent tax rate was most appropriate.

This result is not an anomaly, and is in fact consistent with previous poll results that ask questions about specific tax rates, such as this 2009 Tax Foundation study.

Why is it that large majorities simultaneously support increasing income taxes on people earning over $250,000 per year, but also believe that they should be taxed at a lower rate than existed even before the recent fiscal cliff deal raised it for individuals earning over $400,000, and families earning over $450,000? As The Hill points out, the most likely explanation is political ignorance. Most people probably don’t know what tax rates are currently in force, especially for people in income classes other than their own:

One possible explanation is voters may not know how much the nation’s top earners are already being taxed. The poll did not ask voters to identify current tax rates before saying what rate they favored.

“It might be that people are underestimating how much the rich pay now,” said Bruce Bartlett, a former Reagan adviser and Treasury official under President George H.W. Bush [Note: Bartlett is indeed a former adviser to Reagan and Bush I, but he has also moved to the left on economic issues in recent years].

If most of the public is indeed ignorant on this point, it would be consistent with extensive political ignorance on a wide range of other issues, including fiscal policy and the federal budget.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that raising tax rates above 30 percent is a bad idea merely because the vast majority of the public opposes it. Most of the public has little understanding of the relevant arguments and data. Their views are only a weak indicator at best of the desirability of particular tax rates. But the data do suggest that ignorance of current tax rates may be a strong influence on the distribution of public opinion on tax issues. And public opinion, in turn, has an influence on policy, even if it’s not the only factor affecting it.

Canadian legal blogger Leonid Sirota has posted an interesting response to my post advocating extension of the franchise to politically knowledgeable children. He argues that it is unjust to require children to pass a knowledge test for voting, but not adults. He would therefore prefer to lower the voting age to 16 instead:

Pour ma part, je pense que l’option du vote à 16 ans est préférable à celle d’un test. Au-delà problèmes d’administrabilité évoqués par prof. Somin, ce sont arguments qu’il apporte lui-même qui semblent militer contre l’instauration de tests pour les mineurs. S’il n’y a pas de bonne raison de traiter les jeunes différemment des adultes, et les arguments de prof. Somin pour dire qu’il n’y en a pas sont très convaincants, alors il est sûrement injuste d’instaurer un test pour les premiers mais pas pour les seconds. Si les connaissances du système politique devraient être un critère pour pouvoir voter, il n’y a pas de raison pour ne pas appliquer ce critère aux adultes.

Sirota’s post is in French, which I understand, but most of our US readers probably don’t. I would translate the key passage roughly as follows: “If there is no good reason to treat the young differently from adults, and Prof. Somin’s arguments that there isn’t one are very convincing, it is surely unjust to institute a test for the former, but not the latter. If knowledge of the political system should be a prerequisite to getting the right to vote, there is no reason not to apply that criterion to adults.” If I have gotten the translation wrong, I hope Sirota or one of our French-speaking readers will correct me.

I am not convinced by Sirota’s objection. It’s true that my proposal doesn’t eliminate all unequal treatment of children and adults. Children would have to pass a test to be eligible to vote, whereas adults would not. But the same is true of both the status quo voting age of 18 and Sirota’s proposal to cut it to 16. In both cases, people younger than the voting age are categorically denied the franchise solely because they are minors. My proposal doesn’t completely eliminate the unequal treatment. But it does reduce it by at least giving children some opportunity to vote.

I would prefer to minimize government policies that discriminate on the basis of age. But there are some cases where age is so closely correlated with some important ability that it’s difficult to avoid. In this case, it’s undeniably true that children, on average, have much lower political knowledge than adults. And political ignorance is a serious problem that we don’t want to exacerbate by, say, allowing completely ignorant six year olds to vote. Giving the vote to knowledgeable children both diminishes the extent of age discrimination in voting policy and actually increases the average knowledge level of the electorate. It’s a win-win situation all round.

Why not, then, require adults to pass a knowledge test as well? As Sirota says later in his post, this is not a completely ridiculous idea. But it does have two serious flaws. First, as I discuss in an earlier post, there would be a serious danger of potential partisan bias in the design of the test. I’m not certain we can overcome them even with a test confined to children. But the danger is much greater if the test applies to all voters rather than just a small subset.

Second, there is a big difference between using a test to expand the franchise to a group that has always been barred from it, and using it to take away voting rights from millions of people who have them now. The latter is both politically infeasible and quite likely unjust as well. In general, I’m not a big fan of Burkean conservatism. But this is one of those areas where Burkean suspicion of drastic change is probably justified. Allowing knowledgeable children to vote isn’t subject to the same objection, since it is likely that it would alter the composition of the electorate only modestly. Probably only a small percentage of children would both want to take the test and be able pass it.

My proposal is far from perfect. It wouldn’t completely eliminate age discrimination in voting rights, and it certainly isn’t a complete solution to the problem of political ignorance. But it could well be a genuine improvement over the status quo on both fronts. I think that’s reason enough to at least give it serious consideration.

UPDATE: Sirota has put up a response to this post:

I think that what drives the disagreement between us is that we have different views on what justifies the denial of a legal right to vote (note that I am only talking about the legal situation―prof. Somin makes the case, in a separate post, that there is something like a moral duty to abstain from voting on issues or candidates about which one is ignorant, and I agree with him on that). In prof. Somin’s view the key factor is political knowledge, and lack thereof. I think that the real issue is not so much knowledge as maturity and capacity for judgment.

It is true that minors are generally less knowledgeable about politics (and other things) than adults. But they are also, on average, less mature and less capable of responsible judgment, and the law recognizes this diminished capacity by making them, depending on their age, less criminally liable, incapable of entering into (certain kinds of) contracts, etc. At least in criminal cases, it is quite clear that the reason for the distinction made between minors and adults is not knowledge of the relevant facts, but capacity for judgment. I think that it is the reason for the other distinctions too. Note, too, that the one category of adults to whom we uncontroversially deny the franchise are those too mentally ill, too lacking in judgment and decision-making ability to be responsible for their own decisions; such people have guardians, just like children do. They need not be ignorant―but their judgment faculty is severely impaired.

Now, in those areas where―I think―the law makes distinctions on the basis of age that are grounded in maturity and capacity for judgment, it usually does so by drawing bright lines.

Obviously, some degree of judgment is necessary for almost any decision. But in my view, there is a big difference between a situation where we are making choices in our own personal lives (e.g. – signing contracts, to use one of Sirota’s examples), and decisions where we are choosing rulers for an entire society. The former kind of decision usually requires only a modest amount of knowledge, and it is reasonable to assume that anyone with reasonably good judgment could acquire it. By contrast, good judgment of the sort that enables us to make effective personal decisions is not the most important factor in making voting decisions. There, we need knowledge of how policy affects people in very different circumstances from our own. The key ingredient here is not judgment of the kind that helps us make personal decisions, but knowledge of how large-scale political and economic systems work. Personal experience and judgment is only of limited relevance. A person can easily be an above-average quality voter while displaying poor judgment in their personal life, and vice versa. I make that case in more detail here. My guess is that any child who has more political knowledge than the average adult is also likely to have enough judgment to analyze that knowledge at least as well as the average adult eligible to vote (which may, of course, not be a very high level of competence in an absolute sense). On net, therefore, my proposal would still improve the overall quality of the electorate, even if perhaps only slightly.

Even with respect to criminal law and contracts, I think that knowledge plays a bigger role in the law than Sirota suggests. One big reason why we distinguish between minors and adults in these areas is that the latter are less likely to understand the true consequences of certain contracts, or of criminal acts. They may also be less likely to realize that a given act is wrong. That’s also a major factor in the differential legal treatment of the mentally insane. Indeed, the traditional legal definition of insanity actually defines it in terms of lack of knowledge: the defendant gets off if, as a result of his mental disease or defect, he (i) did not know that his act would be wrong; or (ii) could not understand the nature and quality of his actions.

It’s also worth noting that Sirota’s proposal of reducing the voting age to 16 without imposing tests of either knowledge or judgment would result in a reduction of the quality of the electorate on both dimensions (assuming, of course, that 16 to 18 year olds on average have worse judgment than adults). And, as I previously noted, it would continue to engage in more blatant age discrimination than my idea, since those under 16 would be forbidden to vote regardless of their level of knowledge or how good their judgment might be.

Finally, contra Sirota’s description of my view, I don’t necessarily regard it as a “mistake” that we have extended the franchise to include all or nearly all adults. As discussed above, I’m skeptical that we can trust government enough to come up with a knowledge test that would apply to the entire electorate. Creating a knowledge test that applies only to children poses fewer risks of abuse.

Beginning today, pundits are going to offer a wide range of explanations for Obama’s victory. But I think the simplest and most obvious is that he won because the economy had improved just enough since 2008 to give him the edge. As I pointed out back in September, standard models of presidential election outcomes based primarily on economic variables predicted, on average, that Obama would get 50.2% of the popular vote. Although late West Coast results will increase this total slightly, it looks like he actually got about 50.4%. That’s a very close match.

The econometric models generally assume a two party race. In reality, two third party candidates, Libertarian Gary Johnson (1 percent) and Jill Stein of the Green Party (0.3%) got statistically meaningful shares of the vote. If we plausibly assign most of Johnson’s vote to Romney and most of Stein’s to Obama, we end up with a roughly 51-49 split in a hypothetical “pure” two party race. We get a similar result if we throw out the third party votes and just look at Obama’s share of the 98.5% of the electorate who voted Democratic or Republican. Obama slightly outperformed economic expectations, but not by much. Republicans who thought that the state of the economy gave Romney a huge advantage forgot that voters care about the directional trend as well as the absolute situation.

In my view, much of the electorate gave insufficient weight to the possibility that Obama’s policies made the recovery weaker than it otherwise would have been, and they also likely gave him too much credit for at least some recovery that would have happened regardless of who was in the White House. Economist Casey Mulligan recently published an important book defending the former theory. If you believe that the TARP bailout was the key to recovery (which I do not), it’s worth recalling that George W. Bush and John McCain both supported it. It would surely have proceeded apace had McCain somehow managed to win the 2008 election. But politically ignorant voters often give incumbents too much credit for positive economic trends that happen during their terms, and too much blame for negative ones. In some past elections, such as in 2010, Republicans were the lucky beneficiaries. This year, it was Obama and the Democrats.

This year’s outcome was not set in stone. Obama’s advantage derived from the economy was small enough that an unusually strong challenger or an unusually weak incumbent might have negated it. The same goes for some dramatic noneconomic issue that cut in favor of the challenger. But Romney was not an unusually appealing candidate, nor Obama an unusually poor one. And Romney wasn’t able to take advantage of any major extraneous issues, and indeed was probably slightly damaged by some of them (the death of Bin Laden, Hurricane Sandy, etc.).

Obama did do better in electorate vote count, where he will end up with a 332-206 margin, than in the popular vote. He did it by winning nearly all the close swing states. I leave it to others to determine to what extent that happened because the electoral vote map now slightly favors Democrats relative to the popular vote (a change from 2000 and 2004, when it slightly favored the GOP), and to what extent it was a superior Democratic “ground game.” I suspect both factors were at work.

The above should not be interpreted to imply that ideology and noneconomic issues don’t matter at all. A party wildly out of synch with the public on one or the other may well lose even if economic conditions are somewhat favorable. But, despite frequent claims to the contrary, I don’t think either the Democrats or the Republicans deviated from public opinion to such a huge extent, though both are at odds with the median voter on some issues. If swing voters paid close attention to the issues and were well-informed about politics, they might punish even small deviations from their preferences. In reality, however, they tend to be disproportionately ignorant, and generally base their votes on broad economic trends rather than detailed consideration of issue positions.

UPDATE: I should emphasize that attributing Obama’s victory in large part to the underlying economic situation does not imply that the GOP made no mistakes in crafting its message or that the party doesn’t need to reach out to a wider range of voters. An unusually strong candidate or message could have overcome Obama’s relatively narrow advantage. And a party with a broader base can more easily overcome adverse economic conditions. At this point, it would be silly to suggest that the Republicans don’t have any significant political weaknesses. But analyses of their flaws should not begin with the false assumption that Romney and the party flubbed an opportunity despite having the odds strongly in his favor. In reality, they were slightly against him.

In response to my post arguing that we should grant voting rights to politically knowledgeable children, Paul Horwitz of Prawfsblawg makes the following suggestion:

What spurred this post is Ilya Somin’s argument on the VC yesterday that knowledgeable children ought to be allowed to vote. He addresses some standard objections in his post, but a number of his commenters wrote to argue that such a rule, if enforced by knowledge or literacy tests, would end up privileging some groups and disadvantaging others (as, indeed, previous tests have done in the United States). Indeed, given massive educational inequality in this country, it’s hard not to see how this proposal wouldn’t give much more electoral power to the wealthy, well-educated, mostly white elite. Unless....perhaps Ilya would welcome a trade-off: knowledgeable children get the vote, in exchange for guarantees of massive public/private efforts to assure meaningful educational and welfare rights to ensure that the opportunity to be a knowledgeable child voter is fairly and widely distributed among the entire population rather than limiting that vote to enclaves with better resources. I’m just going to go ahead and consider this Ilya’s very subtle case for overruling San Antonio School District v. Rodriguez [the 1973 decision that ruled that there is no constitutional right to equal education spending].

Paul is, of course, entitled to interpret my argument however he wants. But I have no desire to overrule Rodriguez. Setting aside the legal merits of the case, extensive evidence compiled by economists Eric Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth shows that increasing education spending in public schools does little or nothing to increase educational achievement. On the other hand, I would be happy if my child-voting proposal were paired with increased school choice, which does have a demonstrated record of increasing educational achievement among poor minority children.

That said, I think the child-voting proposal could potentially be implemented even in the absence of increasing school choice. Most studies of racial attitudes suggest that racism is correlated with age (the young are much less likely to be racist than their elders) and inversely correlated with knowledge and education (the knowledgeable and educated are less likely to be racist). Therefore, even if knowledgeable children are disproportionately likely to be white and/or wealthy, the resulting electorate is not likely to be more hostile to minorities than the one we have now, and may well be less so. Much evidence also suggests that there is little correlation between political attitudes and narrow self-interest (after controlling for other variables that affect political opinion). So it’s unlikely that knowledgeable children (or knowledgeable adults) would seek to promote policies that benefit the rich or some narrow interest group at the expense of the general public or the poor. Indeed, at this point in history, the young, including the well-educated young, are disproportionately liberal Democrats.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the unequal historical impact of literacy and knowledge tests was in considerable part the result of biased application. Unbiased test administration would have a much less skewed effect. And, obviously, racial or ethnic bias in test administration would today (unlike in the Jim Crow era) be grounds for lawsuits under the Voting Rights Act and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

That said, as I noted in my original post, I do take seriously the danger that incumbent political leaders would try to skew the test to favor their political supporters and disfavor opponents. I don’t at this point have anything approaching a complete solution to this problem. But I’m not convinced it’s completely intractable either. One possible approach would be to leave the design of the test to a politically balanced, nonpartisan commission. Some election scholars believe that this approach has helped solve the comparable problem of gerrymandering of political districts in favor of the incumbent party in places like Nebraska. But I admit that for my proposal to actually work in practice, this issue would have to studied much more carefully.

UPDATE: I should note that I’m aware that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 suspended the use of tests for voting in much of the country because they had been used to exclude African-Americans. It’s likely that the Act would have to be modified to permit knowledge tests for minors in order for my proposal to be allowed in states covered by that section of the Act. I think there are obvious and important differences between using knowledge tests to exclude adults, and using them to include children who otherwise would be categorically barred from voting in any case. In any event, allowing states to use knowledge tests for children is still compatible with also giving both individuals and the federal government to sue states that attempt to use the test for purposes of racial or ethnic discrimination, whether by designing it in a biased way, or through unequal enforcement.