Political ignorance is the condition in which voters lack basic knowledge about government, policy, and the issues they decide at the ballot. On The Bob Zadek Show, the concept was developed at length by Ilya Somin, a professor of law at George Mason University School of Law and author of Democracy and Political Ignorance, subtitled Why Smaller Government is Smarter. Somin’s account treats ignorance not as a moral failing but as a predictable response to incentives: because a single vote is almost never decisive, acquiring political knowledge yields little individual benefit. The subject was the focus of a single episode of the program, in which host Bob Zadek framed the discussion around the founders’ reservations about democracy and Somin supplied the empirical and theoretical case.
The founders’ skepticism
Bob Zadek opened the episode by recalling Richard Beeman’s book Plain Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution, which prompted him to observe how little enthusiasm the founders had for democracy. He noted that under the government as originally drafted, the only direct voter participation was the election of members of the House of Representatives; senators were elected by state houses, judges were not elected, and voters elected electors who elected the president. Zadek described democracy, in the founders’ understanding, as a check on government rather than an end in itself.
Somin agreed that most founders were worried about voter ignorance and that this worry was one reason they limited popular participation. He named James Madison and Gouverneur Morris among those who believed the public was often ignorant about politics and irrational in evaluating the information it did have, and he said many founders were concerned about ignorance-driven excesses in state governments in the 1770s and 1780s. Zadek added James Wilson as another founder unenthusiastic about widespread democracy. Somin allowed that some founders, Jefferson among them, valued popular participation as an end in itself while remaining suspicious of it Is America Doomed by Voter Ignorance? (2013).
Why ignorance matters
Somin said he had been interested in the problem for at least fifteen years, since he was a student, and that what persuaded him of its importance was its effect on almost every other policy issue. He listed the spending crisis, gay rights, racial discrimination, economic regulation, and environmental policy as areas where survey data reveal substantial public ignorance, and argued that this ignorance feeds back into government policy and tends to make other problems worse. He stopped short of calling it the single most important problem in democracy, saying there are many contenders for that title, but described it as the problem that affects all the others.
Measures of ignorance
Somin offered several poll findings. On the federal budget, he said the public greatly overestimates the share spent on foreign aid—most people think at least 5 to 10 percent or more, when in reality it is less than 1 percent—while underestimating spending on entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security. On the Affordable Care Act, he cited a Kaiser Foundation poll conducted in April finding that 42 percent of the public did not realize the law was still in effect, and a poll a month or two later finding that 79 percent had heard nothing or very little about the exchanges. On the structure of government, he cited a 2006 poll finding that only 42 percent of the public could name the three branches of the federal government.
Somin also described a broader failure to assign credit and blame correctly. He said studies find the public rewards and punishes incumbents for short-term economic changes those officials likely had nothing to do with, while ignoring things incumbents did influence. He gave the example of incumbent politicians getting a boost when local sports teams win championships, and of governors in farm states being blamed for droughts that reduce farm prices. The underlying problem, he said, is that the chance any one vote will make a difference is infinitesimally small—roughly one in 60 million in a presidential election—so the average voter has little incentive to spend more than minimal time learning about politics.
Rational ignorance and political fans
Zadek pressed Somin on the concept of rational self-interest, describing his own habit of reading political blogs while brushing his teeth and discussing tax policy with strangers, and joked that by Somin’s logic he was wasting his time while the inattentive were behaving more rationally. Somin agreed that becoming informed makes little sense if the only reason is to be a better voter, but distinguished political knowledge acquired for enjoyment. He called such people “political fans,” comparing them to sports fans who learn about teams without expecting to influence games, and said they are a minority of the population but not irrational.
Somin added that political fans suffer a distinct problem: they evaluate the information they know poorly, overvaluing what confirms their prior views and undervaluing what cuts against them. Studies find, he said, that the people who know the most about politics are some of the most biased in how they evaluate what they know—rational for the individual whose goal is enjoyment, but bad for politics overall. On voting itself, Somin distinguished it from becoming informed: voting is an extremely low-cost activity, perhaps half an hour at most, so it can be rational to vote if you care about fellow citizens and see a substantial difference between the sides. The resulting equilibrium, he said, is large numbers of people voting while most do not know much about what they are voting on.
The failure of aggregation
Zadek asked whether uninformed voters cancel each other out, with uninformed Democrats offset by uninformed Republicans so that the informed minority decides. Somin said some important scholars make this argument, but that it works only if errors in one direction almost exactly offset errors in the other. The data on most issues suggest this is not true, he said: on most issues, increasing people’s knowledge significantly changes the distribution of opinion. He added that the effect is not limited to how voters choose between the options presented, because the options themselves are shaped by an ignorant electorate. Political professionals know the polling data, he said, and a campaign facing a largely ignorant electorate needs a different strategy and platform than one facing more informed voters Is America Doomed by Voter Ignorance? (2013).
Across episodes
Only one episode in the excerpts, the 2013 discussion with Ilya Somin, treats political ignorance directly, so the sources show no development of the topic across episodes.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state what remedies, if any, Somin proposed beyond the book’s subtitle about smaller government, nor do they describe the episode’s later segment on foot voting versus ballot box voting, which the transcript introduces but does not develop. The free speech incident at Modesto Junior College and the eminent domain plan in Richmond, California, mentioned in the episode summary, are not discussed in the excerpts. No other episode in the sources addresses political ignorance.