The Volokh Conspiracy

On this election day, as on most others, we will hear a lot about the need to increase turnout and the dangers of voter suppression. But few will even consider questioning the systematic exclusion of a huge part of our population from the franchise: children under the age of 18. We allow even the most ignorant and irresponsible adults to vote, but exclude even the most knowledgeable and insightful children. And to add insult to injury, we saddle them with a mediocre education system and trillions of dollars in public debt that they will someday have to repay.

For reasons I outlined during the last presidential election, this is both unjust and counterproductive. We should at least consider allowing children to vote if they are more knowledgeable than the average adult voter:

The main objection to giving children the vote is that they lack the knowledge to make informed choices. Of course the same is true of most of the adult electorate, who are rationally ignorant about politics and public policy, and often don’t know even very basic facts. Nonetheless, it’s probably true that the average child knows a lot less about politics than the average adult, and that may be a good reason to deny most children the franchise. But why deny it to all of them? If a minor can pass a test of basic political knowledge (say, the political knowledge equivalent of the citizenship test administered to immigrants seeking naturalization), why shouldn’t he or she have the right to vote? Such a precocious child-voter would probably be more knowledgeable than the majority of the adult population. Giving her the right to vote would actually increase the average knowledge level of the electorate and thereby slightly improve the quality of political decision-making. I’ve met twelve-year-olds with far higher levels of political knowledge than that of the average adult. You probably have too.

Once the knowledge objection is off the table, all the arguments for giving adults the right to vote also apply to sufficiently knowledgeable children. Like... adults, children have a claim to the franchise because government policies affect them too, because otherwise their interests might be undervalued in the political process, because it affirms their status as citizens with equal rights, and so on.

Obviously, there might be some difficult administrative issues. For example, we might not trust the government to put together an adequate knowledge test. But I don’t see any principled reason to deny the franchise to children whose political knowledge is greater than that of most adult voters.

Other standard objections to letting knowledgeable children vote also don’t hold much water, and in some cases resemble long-discredited justifications for excluding women from the franchise:

Some people might worry that even knowledgeable child-voters will be “unduly” influenced by their parents’ preferences. Given the existence of the secret ballot, I doubt that this would be a major problem. Moreover, children who are knowledgeable enough to pass the test and interested enough to take it will probably have at least some political ideas of their own that aren’t easily susceptible to parental suasion. In any event, I’m not sure that the possibility of parental persuasion would necessarily be a bad thing. The objection is in fact similar to one of the arguments once raised against giving women the right to vote – that they would be unduly influenced by their husbands or fathers. Husbands will often influence the views of their wives (and vice versa); similarly, parents will influence those of their children. That doesn’t by itself justify denying either married people or children the right to vote....

[C]hildren might lack maturity or life experience, as well as knowledge.... I’m just not convinced that either is tremendously useful for voting. Most voting decisions have to do with complex, large-scale policy issues that can’t easily be weighed based on personal experience. Realistically, even most adults have little life experience that is directly useful in assessing difficult policy issues... At the very least, it seems to me that superior knowledge might well outweigh inferior maturity and life experience. And I’m only advocating giving the franchise to children who can demonstrate knowledge levels superior to those of the average adult voter...[Moreover, we don't exclude even the most immature adults from the franchise, even if they are highly ignorant to boot].

[Some cite] the value for voting of such “adult” experiences as holding a job, paying taxes, owning property, and so on.... I’m skeptical that these experiences greatly improve the quality of voting decisions. Even more to the point, however, we don’t exclude from the franchise the many adults who lack some or all of these experiences – even if they are also ignorant of even the most basic political knowledge. If lack of life experience is not enough to justify exclusion of even the most ignorant adults from the franchise, I don’t see why it should be considered sufficient to exclude vastly more knowledgeable minors.

The key conclusion is this: There is no plausible justification for excluding knowledgeable children from the franchise that doesn’t also apply to large numbers of adults. We could easily exclude adults who don’t have a job, don’t own property, or lack whatever other life experience supposedly makes you a qualified voter. But virtually everyone agrees that we shouldn’t.

One can argue that the exclusion of children is more permissible than that of comparable adults because it is “only” temporary. But every election leads to policy decisions that have permanent long-term effects. Knowledgeable children who were denied the vote in 2004, 2008, and this year, are going to be massively affected by the decisions made by the winners of these elections. And, of course, the exclusion of adults who don’t have jobs or other relevant life experience might also be temporary, lasting only until they manage to get that experience.

Argentina and the German state of Bremen recently extended the franchise to people over the age of 16, irrespective of their knowledge levels. We should consider doing the same for at least those children who know as much about politics as the average adult. I don’t underestimate the practical difficulties of implementing this idea. For example, it may be very hard to come up with an unbiased knowledge test for aspiring child voters. But the issue at least deserves serious consideration. We should not continue to exclude millions of knowledgeable potential voters from the franchise, unless there really is no good way to avoid it.

I am not the first to advocate giving at least some children the right to vote. Harvard political scientist Paul Peterson has been making that case for a long time (albeit on somewhat different grounds). And columnist Michael Kinsley defended a similar idea in 2011. But Kinsley and Peterson are arguing that parents should be allowed to cast an extra vote for each of their children (though Peterson would give parents the option of letting the children make their own choices). This is a little like giving husbands the right to cast an extra vote for their wives, instead of letting married women vote for themselves. I say let knowledgeable children cast their own ballots.

Finally, it’s worth noting the commonality this post and my last one, in which I urged adult voters to consider not voting on issues they know little or nothing about. Knowledge, not age, should be the main qualification for exercising political power at the ballot box. We may understandably shy away from giving government the power to use knowledge tests to narrow the franchise. But it’s much tougher to argue against using them to expand it.

Today, Americans will have an opportunity to vote on a wide range of candidates and ballot initiatives. In many cases, however, we will be voting on candidates and issues that we know very little about. It is rational for most voters to be ignorant about most issues, because the chance of casting a decisive ballot in an election is so extremely low. And the available evidence strongly suggests that much of the public is poorly informed about politics and public policy.

Even if you are an unusually well-informed voter, the enormous size, scope, and complexity of modern government ensure that there will be many issues and candidates about which you know very little. Perhaps you have a good handle on Romney and Obama. But you might not know much about your candidates for governor, senator, congressman, and various local offices, or about the various state and local referenda on the ballot in your area.

It’s unrealistic to expect that everyone will achieve a high level of knowledge about every race and every initiative. But if you find that you know little or nothing about a particular race or ballot question, you might want to consider simply not voting on it. As political philosopher Jason Brennan argues, voters have a moral duty to be at least reasonably well-informed about the issues they vote on, because the decisions they make affect not just themselves but all of society. John Stuart Mill put it well when he wrote that voting is not just an exercise of personal choice, but rather “the exercise of power over others.” If you can’t exercise that power in at least a minimally responsible manner, maybe you should not do so at all.

It would be dangerous to give government the power to forcibly exclude ignorant voters from the franchise. Incumbent political leaders could too easily abuse it to exclude their political opponents or to target unpopular minorities. But there is no such danger if a voter voluntarily chooses not to vote in a particular race because he or she decides they don’t have enough knowledge to vote responsibly.

If you abstain from voting, you might worry that the rest of the electorate will take advantage of the situation to bias policy in favor of their narrow self-interest and against yours. But the evidence strongly suggests that most people’s political views are only weakly correlated to their self-interest. When voters support bad policies, it is usually out of ignorance rather than selfishness. There are some important exceptions to this generalization(e.g. – opinion on gun control is highly correlated with gun ownership, even after controlling for many other variables). But it does hold true for most major issues in the modern US.

There is a legitimate argument to be had about how low your knowledge level needs to be before you should seriously consider abstaining. The answer depends in part on the knowledge level of the rest of the electorate. Even if you know very little about a given race or issue, you may be justified in voting if the rest of the probable electorate is even worse. But, at the very least, you should probably abstain if you know almost nothing. In that scenario, the average of the rest of the electorate will usually be better, or at least is unlikely to be worse.

In this election, as in several previous ones, I’m going to practice what I preach. I think I know at least as much as the average voter about the presidential and congressional races, and about Virginia Question 1. On the other hand, I know very little about Virginia Question 2, and almost nothing about most of the candidates in the local government elections here in Arlington County. With respect to the local races, my knowledge is diminished by the fact that the candidates don’t have party identifications listed on the ballot. Therefore, I can’t even utilize my understanding of the general proclivities of the Democrats and Republicans in this area. As a result, I’m going to abstain on most of these issues and leave them to the rest of the electorate, which hopefully knows more.

There is no shame in being ignorant about some, or even many, political issues and candidates. Such ignorance is often unavoidable, given the many races and issues out there and the fact that we all have competing demands on our time. But at least in some situations, it is wrong for us to inflict our ignorance on our fellow citizens by voting on issues we know almost nothing about.

As longtime VC readers know, one of my pet peeves is denouncing the harmful effects of widespread political ignorance and irrationality. As a general rule, the things voters don’t know often hurt them. On rare occasions, however, political ignorance can actually be beneficial. The issue of free trade and protectionism is one such example.

In this article, Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman laments the two presidential candidates’ pandering to public ignorance about the benefits of free trade:

Both candidates indulge the superstition that while exports are good, imports and outsourcing are bad. In reality, it makes no sense to make something at home if we can buy it cheaper from elsewhere. The point of producing is to allow consumption. Raising the cost of consumer goods by shutting out imports makes us poorer, not richer.

Outsourcing is a competitive necessity in a global economy. If a U.S. firm can’t compete with companies producing in Mexico or China, it’s wiser to relocate its factories abroad than to go on losing money here.

The assumption promoted by Obama and Romney is that unless we act against the Chinese, our manufacturers will be unable to compete. In fact, the value of American manufactured goods, adjusted for inflation, has risen by 10 percent over the past decade.

That’s easy to forget because the number of jobs has shrunk—a consequence of rising productivity, which allows companies to do more with less. Another reason it’s easy to forget is that Chinese output has grown. But as of 2010, the World Bank says, the U.S. remains the world’s biggest manufacturer. And we are far better off with China exporting manufactures than exporting virtually nothing, as was the case a generation ago.

Economists across the political spectrum agree that free trade is better for the economy than protectionism. Take it from Paul Krugman, if you don’t believe me. But polls show that the public is mostly protectionist. For example, a 2010 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll finds that 53% believe that trade agreements have generally hurt the US, compared to only 17% who believe they helped. As Bryan Caplan describes in detail his book The Myth of the Rational Voter, this divergence between public and expert opinion is mostly due to economic ignorance on the part of the former (the divergence persists and even grows after you control for income, economic self-interest, partisanship, ideology and other factors). Because the benefits of trade (lower prices for goods and effective use of comparative advantage) are often counterintuitive and difficult to explain to rationally ignorant voters, politicians like Obama and Romney have strong incentives to pander to protectionist prejudices.

Yet, Chapman notes, presidents’ actual policies on trade are much better than their campaign rhetoric:

If there is any good news about the candidates, it’s that their policies will most likely be better than their rhetoric. Aside from tires, Obama has generally avoided protectionism, while signing free-trade deals with South Korea, Panama and Colombia.

Romney will hear from plenty of Republican CEOs who favor freer trade. Few experts believe he will keep his pledge to label China a currency manipulator, setting off a trade war. Obama, after all, slammed President George W. Bush for failing to do so—but followed suit.

Obama reneged on his 2008 campaign promises to renegotiate NAFTA and impose sanctions on China. If Romney wins this year, his protectionist pandering will likely be forgotten after election day too. How can they get away with ignoring public opinion on this issue? Probably because most voters don’t follow trade policy closely and don’t notice when presidents renege on protectionist promises. As a result, Obama has suffered little political damage for ignoring his promises on these issues. The same ignorance that leads most voters to be protectionist in the first place also prevents them from punishing presidents who fail to act on their protectionist campaign rhetoric.

But the ignorance here is not entirely blissful. We have less protectionism than we would if the public closely monitored trade policy and severely punished politicians who deviate from its preferences. But we have much more than would exist if the majority of voters understood the benefits of free trade in the first place, and used their votes to punish protectionists. As things stand, many harmful protectionist policies still get enacted – partly because politicians cater to industry interest groups that benefit from them, and partly because they can’t completely ignore majority opinion on the issue.

In this case, ignorance does indeed have some beneficial effects. But that’s mostly because ignorance in one area partially offsets the harm caused by ignorance in another. Greater knowledge across the board would be better. But it’s not likely to happen any time soon.

UPDATE: I have corrected a couple of minor but annoying snafus in this post, most notably omitting Steve Chapman’s name in the first sentence mentioning his column. I apologize for the mistake.

Given the extreme closeness of both the national and battleground state polls, one would think that serious political commentators would avoid making bold predictions about the outcome of the presidential race. After all, an overconfident pundit who turns out to be wrong will have egg on their face in just a few days. This is especially true in a situation where state polls and national polls seem to be in tension with each other.

Yet one of the striking things about recent election commentary is that most conservative Republicans are confidently predicting a Romney victory, while liberal Democrats seem equally convinced that Obama is sure to win. Karl Rove, for example, is predicting a clear Romney win. Liberals such as Joan Walsh and Mark Mellman are just as confident that Romney is doomed.

What explains such seemingly irrational overconfidence? One possibility is that these people are simply engaging in biased wishful thinking. Like sports fans, committed political partisans tend to overvalue evidence that reflects favorably on their preferred “team” and ignore or downplay anything that cuts the other way. But another factor may be the desire to create a “bandwagon effect” by convincing as many people as possible that their candidate will win. As I explained here, a small number of swing voters will tend to gravitate to the side that looks like it’s going to win. In a close election, they could make a decisive difference. If the Roves and Mellmans of the world can persuade the public that their guy has the momentum and is likely to win, it could turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A recent Gallup poll shows that 54 percent of the public believe that Obama will win, compared to only 34 percent who predict that Romney will prevail. That certainly does not prove that Obama really will win. It’s possible that Romney will amass enough support to offset the bandwagon effect. But the public’s perception that Obama is the likely winner does give him an edge.

My forthcoming article, “Foot Voting, Federalism, and Political Freedom,” is now available on SSRN. The article is part of a symposium on Federalism and Subsidiarity in the interdisciplinary journal Nomos, which focuses on a different broad issue in political theory every year. Other contributors include a variety of big-name federalism scholars in legal academia and political science: Daniel Weinstock, Loren King, Judith Resnik (Yale), Steve Calabresi (Northwestern), Jenna Bednar, Andreas Follesdal, Vicki Jackson (Harvard), Sotirios Barber, Michael Blake, Ernest Young (Duke), and Jacob Levy (McGill).

Here is the abstract for my article:

The idea of “voting with your feet” has been an important part of debates over federalism for several decades. But foot voting is still underrated as a tool for enhancing political freedom: the ability of the people to choose the political regime under which they wish to live.

Part I of this article explains some key ways in which foot voting in a federal system is often superior to ballot box voting as a method of political choice. A crucial difference between the two is that foot voting enables the individual to make a decision that has a high likelihood of actually affecting the outcome. By contrast, the odds of casting a meaningful ballot box vote are vanishingly small. This reality both enhances the individual’s degree of political freedom and incentivizes him or her to make better-informed and more rational decisions. It is an important consideration in favor of greater political decentralization.

In Part II, I consider some possible limitations of foot voting in a federal system as a tool for enhancing political freedom. These include moving costs, the possibility of “races to the bottom,” and the problem of oppression of minority groups by subnational governments. Each of these sometimes poses a genuine constraint on effective foot voting. But none are as severe a limitation as critics claim.

Part III argues that the case for foot voting under federalism should be expanded “all the way down” to local governments and private communities, and “all the way up” to freer international migration. It builds on a growing recent literature that advocates granting greater autonomy to local governments relative to regions. Just as foot voting can be expanded all the way down to the local level, there is also a strong case for extending it “all the way up” to the international level. The potential gains from freer international foot voting in some respects dwarf those that can be achieved domestically. For people living under authoritarian regimes, foot voting through international migration is often their only means of exercising any political choice at all.

The utility of foot voting as a tool for exercising political freedom is not the only factor that should be considered in designing federal systems. But it deserves much greater consideration than it has so far received.

In a recent Language Log post, Mark Liberman argues that surveys overestimate the extent of political ignorance. Unfortunately, his evidence is far from compelling.

He notes a few examples where scholars or reporters simply misstated the results of a particular survey. That surely happens. But it doesn’t account for more than a small fraction of the survey evidence finding widespread political ignorance.

Liberman also cites evidence that surveys based on “open-ended” questions sometimes overestimate ignorance because the coders are given bad instructions. An open-ended survey is one where the respondent is asked a question (e.g. – “Who is the Chief Justice of the United States”), and then must give an answer that he comes up with on his own, instead of choosing from a pre-set range of choices, as with a multiple choice question.

Open-ended questions do indeed have their flaws. But extensive political ignorance shows up in multiple-choice surveys too. For example, multiple choice surveys showed that only about 32% of the public knew that Paul Ryan was a member of the House of Representatives. These polls were taken before he was nominated for the vice presidency but after he had been a major figure in American politics for several years. Other multiple choice questions reveal massive ignorance about the distribution of federal spending. Back in 2009, a multiple-choice survey found that only 24% knew that “cap and trade” is an environmental program, even though it had just passed the House of Representatives (I cite the data in this article). And there’s many other examples where those came from.

Moreover, if open-ended survey items overstate ignorance, multiple-choice questions often understate it, because ignorant people will sometimes get the right answer by guessing. In an age of standardized testing, many people are used to the idea that they should guess on a survey question if they don’t know the right answer. And some prefer that option to admitting ignorance. If there are 4 options on a multiple-choice question, random guessing gives you a 25% chance of getting the right answer, and your odds go up if there are only 2 or 3 options.

Finally, it’s worth noting that a recent article by political scientists John Bullock and Robert Luskin shows that much of the criticism of open-ended questions is overstated. Even after correcting for various flaws pointed out by critics, they find that the evidence still shows a generally low level of knowledge.

In sum, both open-ended and multiple choice questions have their shortcomings. Survey researchers and people who cite their work should exercise due caution. But the overall picture painted even by multiple choice surveys is one where the public is ignorant about a wide range of basic facts about numerous political issues.

In addition to Willow, there were two major dogs that didn’t bark during tonight’s presidential debate. First, even though the debate was supposed to focus on domestic policy, neither the moderator nor the candidates ever focused on some of the most important domestic issues on which the president can have a big impact: issues such as judicial nominations (not discussed at all) and regulatory agencies (only mentioned in passing). Instead, they spent a lot more time talking about short term economic performance, which presidents have only very limited leverage over. That is likely because voters who know little about politics and policy tend to focus on the wrong issues because they often don’t understand what a president can actually control and what he (mostly) can’t.

Second, although Romney predictably spent a lot of time attacking Obamacare, he said absolutely nothing about the individual health insurance mandate, which remains hugely unpopular – far more so than any other part of the law. Even when Obama waxed eloquent about the evils of insurance companies, Romney didn’t play the obvious gambit of pointing out that the President is the one who passed a law that forces millions of people to buy insurance company products that they don’t want, after saying in 2008 that “[f]orcing people to buy health insurance [in order to provide them with health care] is like forcing the homeless to buy a house to eliminate homelessness.”

Why did Romney let this opportunity slip by? The answer is obvious. If he had attacked the individual mandate, Obama could have countered by noting that Romney’s own Massachusetts health care plan also includes an individual mandate, and Obamacare was modeled on Romneycare. Even as it stood, Obama was able to point out (correctly) that his health care plan was modeled on Romney’s and designed by some of the same advisers.

Overall, Romney did reasonably well in tonight’s debate. If the CNN commentators I’m watching are to believed, he even outperformed Obama. But by nominating the father of Romneycare, the GOP cost itself an opportunity to attack the most politically vulnerable part of Obamacare. That’s what happens when, as economist Bryan Caplan once put it, the Republicans nominate the John the Baptist of Obamacare to run against the program’s Jesus Christ.

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

UPDATE #2: A CNN poll of people who watched the debate shows that 67% thought Romney won, compared to only 25% who picked Obama. My own impression is that the two candidates were pretty even. But I’m obviously not the the average swing voter whom they were trying to appeal to. That said, surveys have repeatedly shown that swing voters (like most of the rest of the public) hate the individual mandate. Other things equal, the GOP would be better off if they had a candidate who was able to attack it.

In a recent Slate column, John Dickerson points out that presidential elections typically focus too much on issues the president has little control over and too little on those that he has more effect on:

Nothing tests a president’s temperament like foreign affairs. Though this presidential campaign has only recently touched on the topic, the lack of focus points to another flaw in our election system. If we arranged our campaigns around what a president actually can control, we wouldn’t spend the majority of our time talking about the economy, where a president is a bit player.

Not so in foreign affairs. A president is the last word on decisions regarding military strikes, covert operations, or how to treat political prisoners. George W. Bush signed off on every prisoner that faced enhanced interrogation techniques. Barack Obama personally approves every drone strike of a high-value terrorist target. When the president serves as the country’s chief diplomat, he acts almost entirely alone.

Dickerson exaggerates a little when he suggests the president “acts almost entirely alone” on key foreign policy issues. But he certainly has much more control over them than over short-term economic trends. Yet the latter are the biggest factor in most elections. Voters also tend to ignore or underemphasize other issues that the president has a great deal of control over: issues such as judicial nominations and appointments to federal regulatory agencies.

Why are voters myopic in this way? Because, thanks to widespread political ignorance, most voters have difficulty telling the difference between issues that the president can affect and those he can’t. That’s why studies show that voters routinely reward and punish politicians for events they have little or no control over, including trends in the world economy, shark attacks and droughts, and even victories by the local sports team.

Voters would not do this if they were well-informed about politics and public policy. But for the vast majority, it’s actually rational to be ignorant, and to do a poor job of evaluating the political information they do know.

UPDATE: For those who want to argue that an Obama victory this year would prove that voters have given up overemphasizing short-term economic trends, I would point out that his performance in the polls is roughly on par with the predictions of economic models of presidential contests based on data from past elections.

Much cyber-ink has already been spilled over Mitt Romney’s May fundraiser statement dismissing the “47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what” because they don’t pay income taxes and depend on government benefits. In my view, Romney’s statement reflects a crude and and largely inaccurate view of voter motivation. But it’s not as offensive as many claim.

As Bryan Caplan points out, Romney’s statement implies a close correlation between narrow self-interest and voting decisions. The “47 percent” will oppose him because they get a lot of government benefits and pay no income taxes. In reality, as Bryan describes in this article, the empirical evidence suggests that, on most issues, the connection between narrow self-interest and views on political issues is quite weak. Most people’s issue positions and voting decisions are driven by their view of the public interest rather than narrow materialism.

Bryan also points out that the GOP has actually managed to win the support of a large fraction of voters below the median income, even though most such people pay little or no federal income tax. The GOP has also done very well in recent elections among the elderly, even though they are the group that gets the lion’s share of federal benefits, and retirees also pay little in the way of income taxes. Conversely, a hefty 66 percent of Americans say that no one should have to pay more than 19% of their income in taxes, and 88% believe that no one should pay more than 29%, which suggests that support for tax limitation is far broader than the range of people who pay substantial federal income taxes. Narrow self-interest is very closely correlated with issue positions on a few policy questions (e.g. – restrictions on smoking). But these are exceptions.

That narrow self-interest is a relatively minor determinant of political views should not be surprising. If your goal in voting is to maximize your income, you would be better off devoting the time it takes to vote to looking for loose change lying around in the street outside the polling booth. Because of the extremely low likelihood that your vote will decisively affect the outcome of an election, the expected income gain from looking for change is going to be higher, unless you literally have billions of dollars at stake in the election. By contrast, if you care about the welfare of the rest of the public at least slighlty, it is rational to cast a vote, because the low probability of decisiveness is roughly offset by the huge number of people who will be positively affected if your vote does end up making the difference between victory and defeat (I describe the relevant calculations in detail here).

Altruistic motivation for voting doesn’t necessarily mean that voters weigh everyone’s interests equally. For example, racist, ethnocentric, or nationalistic voters value the well-being of their preferred group far more than that of others. But most voters do try to benefit some large part of society rather than merely seeking to maximize their personal narrow self-interest. Contrary to popular belief, the problem with most voters is not that they are selfish, but that they know little about the issues and often do a poor job of analyzing the information they do happen to know.

Although Romney’s remarks were inaccurate, I find them less offensive than many do. Political partisans often ascribe selfish or otherwise crude motivations to their opponents’ supporters. And campaign strategists routinely write off constituencies that are firmly in the opposition’s camp in order to focus on what Romney called “the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents.” Romney’s disparagement of Democratic voters is actually reminiscent of Obama’s famous 2008 statement describing people who opposed him in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary as “bitter” people who “cling to guns or religion, or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.” Both comments drew a lot more outrage than was warranted.

William Saletan recognizes that Obama’s remarks were “patronizing,” but argues that they were less bad than Romney’s because Obama did not dismiss the possibility of winning these people over to his side. That’s true. But it’s important to remember that Obama was talking about Democratic primary voters – people who were relatively close to him in partisan loyalties and ideology; most of them supported Hillary Clinton, a fellow liberal Democrat who had few ideological differences with Obama. By contrast, Romney was talking about voters who are likely to oppose him in the general election – most of them Democrats ideologically hostile to the GOP. It’s much harder to win over the other party’s loyalists than to win over members of your own party. If you ask Romney whether he thinks he can win over people who voted for Santorum or Gingrich in the GOP primaries, I bet he could honestly answer yes.

UPDATE: Looking at Romney’s remarks again, I think it may not be fair to suggest that he ascribes the 47 percent’s support for Obama solely to self-interest. He also refers to their sense of entitlement and their “victim” mentality. But it’s nonetheless clear that self-interest is at least a major factor in his explanation, particularly when he emphasizes the claim that these people don’t pay income taxes and are dependent on government programs, citing their lack of exposure to taxation as the reason why “our message of low taxes doesn’t connect.”

UPDATE #2: It’s worth noting that Romney’s remark that there are 47% percent of voters he can’t hope to reach isn’t far from the truth. Even in mid-summer, polls showed that there are relatively few undecided voters. If you scale down his claim from 47% to say 40% or 43%, it seems highly plausible; And I don’t know whether he really meant to be statistically precise, as opposed to just convey the idea that Obama starts off with a large base of hard to shake support. Obvously, there is a comparable fraction of the electorate that Obama can’t hope to reach too. In a year where the electorate is polarized and the two candidates relatively familiar to voters by virtue of the fact that one is a polarizing incumbent and the other a second-time major candidate, it’s not easy to change minds.

This Thursday, I will be giving a talk on my book Democracy and Political Ignorance (under contract with the Stanford University Press), at the George Mason Economics Department Workshop on Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. The talk will run from 2 to 3:30 PM, in Enterprise Hall 318, at George Mason’s campus in Fairfax.

I covered some of the themes of the book in this video.

In this recent column, political analyst Sean Trende explains why the current state of the economy is likely to lead to a very close election in November. Various pundits have suggested that Romney should be doing much better in the polls, given the weak economy. Romney is indeed a far from inspiring candidate. But, as Trende explains, his performance in the polls is roughly in line with standard economic models of presidential elections. The economy is not good. But there has been a modest recovery since 2009, enough to bring Obama’s chances to the point where the outcome is a close call. As Trende puts it:

2012 is simply not a year like 2008 or 1980, which stand as the worst or second-worst presidential years in recent history in almost every category. Nor, of course, is it a year like 1984, 1964, or 1972, when the economy was going full-bore ahead....

Instead, this is a middling sort of year, like 1960, 1976, 2004, or 1992, where the economy is limping along, but not contracting. Those years have generally produced close elections....

So think of it this way. In 1980, Jimmy Carter didn’t have an argument for re-election that appealed very far beyond the Democratic base. Similarly, in 1984, Walter Mondale simply didn’t have much of an argument for getting rid of Ronald Reagan...

This year, Barack Obama has an argument — he didn’t inherit the mess, and the economy is slowly expanding. That’s an argument that is probably good enough to get him to 46 or 47 percent of the vote. Similarly, Mitt Romney has a pretty good argument for electing a new president, one that will shore up his base and Republican-leaning independents. Thus, we should probably expect what we’re presently seeing in the polls: a close race, to be decided by a relatively small slice of the electorate.

Trende makes a strong case, and does a good job of explaining the relevant economic models and data in an accessible way.

Obviously, the situation might change if the economy improves or worsens significantly over the next few weeks, or if some major scandal or foreign policy crisis occurs. Barring some such dramatic change, this race will be decided by a small minority of fence-sitting voters – those with little or no commitment to either party. These true “independents” also happen to have by far the lowest levels of political knowledge of any part of the electorate, as I explained here:

[S]wing voters – on average – tend to be far more ignorant about politics than the rest of the electorate. Like any statistical generalization, this one isn’t true in every case. There are some swing voters who know a great deal about politics. They, however, are the exception, not the rule....

Numerous studies find... that swing voters – defined as those who are in the ideological center and don’t have any strong identification with either party – are among the most ignorant...

Why do swing voters tend to be so much more ignorant than the rest of the electorate? It’s tempting to assume that it’s because they are stupid. However, ignorance is not the same thing as stupidity. Even very smart people are inevitably ignorant about a great many things. Indeed... for most voters political ignorance is actually quite rational.

Part of the reason why swing voters tend to be ignorant is that they have lower average education levels than committed partisans, and education is correlated with political knowledge. But another important factor is that they tend to be less interested in politics; in most studies, interest in politics is a stronger predictor of political knowledge than any other variable, including education, income, race, gender, etc. Their lack of interest is part of what prevents them from developing strong ideological or partisan commitments in the first place.

As I discuss in this article, the fact that there is little incentive to acquire political information in order to be a better voter suggests that most of those who do acquire such knowledge do so for other reasons. They find politics entertaining or they enjoy “cheering on” their political “team.” In the same way, the people who know the most about pro sports tend to be those who enjoy watching games and those with the strongest commitment to their favorite teams. Because swing voters generally don’t find politics to be very interesting and by definition have no strong commitment to a party, they have far less incentive to acquire political information than strong partisans do.

My commentary on the the ignorance of swing voters should not be interpreted as praise of committed partisans. Although they have much higher average political knowledge levels than swing voters, they are more likely to be highly biased in their evaluation of the information they learn, often behaving as “political fans” rather than truth-seekers.

UPDATE: Readers interested in elections may also want to check out Trende’s interesting recent book, The Lost Majority, explaining why it is so difficult for either party to achieve a lasting political realignment that ensures it a long period of dominance similar to that which the Democrats accomplished with their New Deal coalition from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Political scientists John Sides and Lynn Vavreck have a helpful post summarizing survey data showing that most of the public knows little or nothing about newly selected GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan:

A series of polls done by YouGov for the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project suggests that most people have never heard of Paul Ryan before today. In several polls since April 28, YouGov has asked a representative sample of 1,000 people if they have heard of Ryan and to rate him in terms of favorability. This gives us a large sample on which to base this analysis.

Over the last several months, roughly 43% of Americans report that they have never heard of Paul Ryan. In mid-July, 52% could not even make a guess as to whether Ryan was a member of the House, the Senate, was Secretary of State, or was a Governor (32% got it right). Republicans are more likely to know that Ryan was a member of the House—42% of Republicans knew this, compared to 29% of Democrats and 34% of independents.

The above polls may actually understate the true degree of ignorance about Ryan. Studies show that some people don’t like to admit to pollsters that they don’t know something; if presented with a multiple choice question like the one about Ryan’s office, some ignorant respondents will guess rather than choose “don’t know.” In this case, random guessers had a 25% chance of getting the question right.

The degree of ignorance about Ryan is striking. Unlike Sarah Palin in 2008, Ryan is not a relative unknown catapulted onto the national scene for the first time by getting a VP nomination. He’s been a major figure in national politics for several years now, and is the GOP’s leading spokesman on budgetary and economic issues. That said, extensive public ignorance about Ryan is not surprising in light of other data showing widespread ignorance about a wide range of political leaders and policy issues. As I have pointed out many times, such ignorance about politics is actually rational behavior for most voters, because there is so little chance that any one vote will actually affect the outcome of an election.

Obviously, Ryan’s name recognition is going to rapidly increase now that he is the VP nominee. On the other hand, it is much less likely that a majority of voters will come to understand his budget and entitlement reform proposals – the ideas for which he is most famous. These are much more complicated than merely learning a name and job title.

Public ignorance about federal spending is widespread. One of the challenges that Ryan faces in selling his entitlement reform proposals is that most Americans don’t realize how large a proportion of federal spending is devoted to these programs, and therefore don’t understand that it is impossible to get the budget crisis under control without cutting back in this area.

UPDATE: For those interested, here is a recent video on political ignorance and its implications for democracy that I did for the Cato Institute in June.

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.

The Cato Institute’s Libertarianism.org website has posted a video I did for them on “The Problem of Political Ignorance.” In the video, I explain why political ignorance is a serious problem for modern democracy and why it strengthens the case for limiting and decentralizing government power. As a bonus, the video includes some cool pictures of John Stuart Mill, last year’s royal wedding, a 1950s TV, and a wrecked car. It will all make sense if you watch the video! Here it is:

At the Right Coast, University of San Diego law professor Tom Smith asks an interesting question. Why do partisans overstate their party’s chance of winning an election? After all, as Smith notes, doing so may lead to complacency:

A question — take a biased media outlet, for example NPR, which I listen to a lot. It consistently overstates how well things are going for O[bama] and the Dem Party. I don’t listen to Fox so much but assume they do they same thing for the GOP. Why? How does this help the party they are biased in favor of? Doesn’t it promote complacency? How does having a falsely positive view of things help the side for which you are skewed positive? On Wisconsin, panic did set in, but really late, like the day before the vote. Wouldn’t panic have been useful earlier? This suggests to me that (perhaps) the bias is more unconscious than an attempt to be useful to the side favored.

Unconscious bias may be a part of the story. But this kind of overclaiming isn’t limited to media pundits. Campaign operatives do the exact same thing, including even skilled political strategists who follow the polls closely and probably know very well what their candidates’ true chances are. The real answer to Smith’s question probably has to do with the “bandwagon effect.” A small but significant number of swing voters tend to support whichever side seems to be winning, partly because they want to be identified with a winner and partly because of a sense that whoever seems to be winning might well be the best person for the job for that very reason. Bandwagon voters are unlikely to make a decisive difference in an election where one side has an overwhelming edge to begin with. But they can be decisive in a closer race. They can also increase the winner’s margin of victory, thereby adding to the perceived extent of his “mandate.” For these reasons, candidates and their supporters routinely project greater optimism than they really feel.

The bandwagon effect is an inversion of the normative ideal of democracy. Instead of choosing the winner based on their perception of what would best serve the public interest, bandwagon voters modify their perception of the public interest based on who they think is likely to win. Worse, these voters are often among the key swing voters who decide electoral outcomes.

Obviously, few well-informed voters with well-developed views on the issues are likely to change their vote based on bandwagon considerations. But rational political ignorance is extremely widespread, and is especially common among swing voters.