Knowledge about ignorance New directions in the study of political information

1、ilya somin knowledge about ignorance: new directions in the study of political information abstract: for decades, scholars have recognized that most citizens have little or no political knowledge, and that it is in fact rational for the average voter to make little or no effort to acquire political

2、information. rational ignorance is fully compatible with the so-called “paradox of voting” because it will often be rational for citizens to vote, but irrational for them to become well-informed. furthermore, rational ignorance leads not only to inadequate acquisition of political information but al

3、so to ineffective use of the information that citizens do possess. the combination of these two problems has fundamental implications for a variety of issues in public policy and international affairs. critical review 18 (2006), nos. 1-2. issn 0891-3811. ilya somin, , george mason unive

4、rsity school of law, 3301 fairfax drive, arlington, va 22041, would like to thank frank buckley, bryan caplan, jeffrey friedman, david haddock, and participants in the 2006 latin american and caribbean law and economics association conference at buenos aires for helpful suggestions and comments, and

5、 amanda hine and sharon kim for valuable research assistance. 1 more than 40 years after the pioneering work of philip converse (1964), political ignorance remains as widespread as ever. according to surveys conducted during the closely contested 2004 presidential election, some 70 percent of americ

6、ans were unaware of the passage of president george w. bushs prescription drug bill, the most expensive new government program in 40 years and by far the most important domestic legislation of his administration (somin 2004a, 5-6). meanwhile, some 58 percent admitted that they had heard little or no

7、thing about the controversial usa patriot act, and 61 percent did not realize that there had been increases in domestic spending under the bush administration that had contributed to the budget deficit (ibid., 6) even as the bush administration had presided over spending increases far larger than an

8、y that had occurred in decades (bartlett 2006; council of economic advisers 2006, 376). such examples and many others like them1-confirm the continuing validity of converses conclusion that there is a large gap in political knowledge and sophistication “between elites and masses,” one that amounts t

9、o a “continental shelf” separating the two groups (1964, 255). while nearly all public-opinion scholars agree on the existence of deep and widespread political ignorance, there is much less agreement about its causes, significance, and implications. even after more than four decades of research, som

10、e of those implications have only begun to be explored. part i of this essay considers the extent and causes of ignorance, and the ways in which it has been extended by later research. i argue that converses findings and those of his successors lend support to the view that ignorance is rational. th

11、ey also indicate that “information shortcuts,” while often useful, cannot fully make up for lack of basic political knowledge. indeed, some shortcuts may be actively misleading in the absence of necessary 2 contextual knowledge. a further complication one that was at the heart of converses work, but

12、 ignored by many later scholars-is that we must focus not just on the amount of information voters possess, but also on their motivation to use it effectively. the theory of rational ignorance implies not only that voters will acquire little or no political knowledge, but also that they will make li

13、ttle effort to use the knowledge they do have in a consistent and effective manner. it is not just that they might be apathetic; far worse, they sometimes use their knowledge in a way that increases the danger of making serious errors. part ii briefly considers some of the normative and institutiona

14、l implications of the debate over political ignorance. unfortunately, empirical scholars of political ignorance have mostly worked in isolation from the literature on institutional development and normative democratic theory. the latter literature, in turn, has generally ignored the problem of polit

15、ical knowledge. bridging this gap should be an important part of our future research agenda. even a preliminary analysis suggests that political ignorance has important implications for institutional debates over federalism, the size and scope of government, and judicial review, among other subjects

16、. similarly, widespread ignorance poses a major challenge to normative theories of democratic participation, especially those such as “deliberative democracy” that require extensive voter knowledge and sophistication. finally, part iii addresses some important international implications of political

17、 ignorance. we know relatively little about political knowledge in nondemocratic societies, particularly those of the arab middle east, whose public opinion the united states seeks to influence as part of the war on terror. survey data suggest that political ignorance may play an important role in s

18、timulating anti-americanism in the arab and muslim world. ignorance and 3 misconceptions may be even more widespread in closed societies, where the press is under government control, than in democracies. i. causes and consequences of political ignorance. converse and other early students of politica

19、l ignorance (e.g., campbell et al. 1960) generally made little effort to explain its causes. this omission led some to conclude that they portrayed voters as simply “stupid.” in reality, however, his (and subsequent) findings that most citizens know little about politics, and do not make good use of

20、 the information they do have, is entirely consistent with rational, intelligent behavior. the rationality of political ignorance even before converse, the economist anthony downs had formulated the theory of “rational ignorance” (downs 1957, ch. 13). an individual voter has virtually no chance of i

21、nfluencing the outcome of the election less than 1 in 100 million in the case of a modern u.s. presidential election (riker and ordeshook 1968). as a result, the incentive to accumulate political knowledge is vanishingly small, so long as the only reason for doing so is to cast a “better” vote. thus

22、, even highly intelligent and perfectly rational citizens could choose to devote little or no effort to the acquisition of political knowledge. we cannot know for certain that the rational-ignorance hypothesis is correct. but the available evidence strongly supports it. otherwise, it is difficult to

23、 explain the fact that political knowledge levels have remained roughly stable at very low levels for decades, despite massive increases in education levels and in the availability of information through the media and now the internet (delli carpini and keeter 1996; smith 1989; bennett 1989; althaus

24、 2003). 4 some resist the hypothesis of rational ignorance on the ground that it allegedly also predicts that citizens should choose not to vote (e.g., friedman 1998 and 2005).2 however, as derek parfit (1984, 73-75) has demonstrated theoretically, and aaron edlin et al. (2003) have supported with e

25、mpirical evidence, the decision to vote is rational so long as the voter perceives a significant difference between candidates and cares even slightly about the welfare of fellow citizens, as well as his own. a simple calculation, derived from parfits analysis (1984, 74) shows why this is true. assu

26、me that uv = expected utility of voting; cv = cost of voting; and d=expected difference in welfare per person if the voters preferred candidate defeats her opponent. let us further assume that this is a presidential election in a nation with 300 million people; that the voters ballot has only a 1 in

27、 100 million chance of being decisive (riker and ordeshook 1968); and that the voter values the welfare of his fellow citizens an average of 1000 times less than his own. thus, we get the following equation: equation 1: the utility of voting d*(300 million/1000)/(100 million) cv =uv. if we assume th

28、at cv is $10 (a reasonable proxy for the cost of voting) and that d is $5000 (this can incorporate monetary equivalents of noneconomic benefits as well as actual income increases), then uv equals $5, a small but real positive expected utility. to be sure, actual voters are unlikely to calculate the

29、costs and benefits of voting this precisely, but they might make an intuitive judgment incorporating very rough estimates of d and c. furthermore, the fact that voting is a low-cost, low-benefit activity ensures that there is little benefit to engaging in precise calculations such as these, so voter

30、s might rationally choose to go with a default option of voting and forego any detailed analysis (aldrich 1993). the cost of 5 the latter could itself easily outweigh the benefit of saving time and money on voting (moe 1980, 70-72). by contrast, the acquisition of political information in any signif

31、icant quantity is a vastly more difficult and time-consuming enterprise than is voting itself. assume that upi = the utility of acquiring sufficient political information to make a “correct” decision and cpi = the cost of acquiring political information. thus: equation 2: the utility of acquiring po

32、litical information for voting purposes d*(300 million/1000)/(100 million) cpi = upi. if we conservatively estimate cpi at $100 by assuming that the voter need only expend 10 hours to acquire and learn the necessary information while suffering opportunity costs of just $10 per hour, then the magnitu

33、de of d would have to be nearly seven times greater-$33,333 per citizen-in order for the voter to choose to make the necessary expenditure on information acquisition. it is unlikely that many otherwise ignorant voters will perceive such an enormous potential difference between the opposing candidate

34、s as to invest even the equivalent of $100 in information acquisition. and this theoretical prediction is consistent with the empirical observation that most citizens in fact know very little about politics and public policy, but do vote. the analysis changes only slightly if the voter does not care

35、 about the welfare of the entire nation, but only about that of a subset, such as her racial or ethnic group. alternatively, she may care about everyone in the nation to at least some extent, but value the utility of some groups more than others. similarly, it may be that the voter believes that her

36、 preferred candidates policies will benefit some groups more than others. in each case, we can still calculate the utility increase to whatever groups she does care about and discount it by the extent 6 to which she cares about them less than about herself, and by the likelihood of her vote being de

37、cisive. as long as the resulting number is greater than the cost of voting, it will still be rational to go to the polls. at the same time, the cost of acquiring information is still likely to make being well informed irrational. for example, equation 3 demonstrates the result that obtains if equati

38、on 1 is modified to assume a voter who cares far more about the welfare of a subgroup of the population numbering 50 million than about the rest of the public, valuing members of the group five times as much as the rest. equation 3: the utility of voting, assuming unequal valuation of different grou

39、ps welfare d*(250 million/1000) + 50 million/200)/(100 million) cv = uv. in this example, uv will turn out to be $8.33, a slightly higher figure than in equation 1. at the same time, it would still be irrational for the voter to pay the costs of becoming adequately informed. plugging the new estimat

40、es into equation 2, the per-person difference in welfare would have to be over $20,000 in order to justify a decision to pay the price of becoming informed. as with the decision to vote itself, we need not assume that individual voters make a detailed and precise calculation about the costs and bene

41、fits of information acquisition. they probably instead simply have an intuitive sense that there is little or no benefit to making a major effort to increase their knowledge about politics. most people similarly assume without precise calculation that there is little benefit to acquiring information

42、 about such subjects as theoretical 7 physics or cell biology, though these bodies of knowledge also have great value to society as a whole. if political ignorance is rational and most voters choose not to learn much about politics for that reason, this suggests that widespread ignorance is a phenom

43、enon that democracies will have to live with for the foreseeable future. the challenge for democracy is to find a way to minimize the harm that political ignorance can cause. the rationality of illogical information use contrary to some misunderstandings (e.g., friedman 2005), however, the theory of

44、 rational ignorance does not predict that voters will choose not to acquire any information at all. rather it predicts that they will acquire very little or no information for purposes of voting (somin 2004b). however, some voters will acquire information for other reasons. obviously, scholars, poli

45、ticians, political activists, journalists, and others have professional reasons for being informed about political developments. however, such professional consumers of political information are only a tiny fraction of the population. far more common are those who acquire political knowledge because

46、 they find it interesting (ibid.). there are not enough such people to eliminate widespread political ignorance, but they do nonetheless form by far the largest bloc of relatively well-informed voters. a useful analogy is to sports fans. fans who acquire extensive knowledge of their favorite teams a

47、nd players do not do so because they can thereby influence the outcome of games. they do it because it increases the enjoyment they get from rooting for their favorite teams. but if many of the citizens who acquire significant amounts of political knowledge do so primarily for reasons other than bec

48、oming a better voter, it is possible that they will acquire the 8 knowledge that is of little use for voting, or will fail to use the knowledge they do have in the right way. here again, a sports analogy may be helpful. committed red sox fans who passionately root against the yankees are unlikely to

49、 evaluate the evidence about these teams objectively. the authors of one recent history of the red sox and yankees note that they chose not to write “a fair and balanced look at the red sox-yankees rivalry,” because “neither author of this book wanted to represent the yankees sic point of view. . .

50、. neither of us could bring ourselves to say enough complimentary things about the yankees to fill the back of a matchbox, let alone half a book” (nowlin and prime 2004, 4). these writers probably differ from other committed fans more in their awareness of their own attitudes than in having such att

51、itudes in the first place. many yankees fans no doubt feel the same way about the red sox. similarly, democratic partisans who hate george w. bush, and republicans who reflexively support him against all criticism, might well want to acquire information in order to augment the experience of cheering

52、 on their preferred political “team.” if this is indeed their goal, neither group is likely to evaluate bushs performance in office objectively or accurately. this intuition is confirmed by studies showing that people tend to use new information to reinforce their preexisting views on political issu

53、es, while discounting evidence that runs counter to them (e.g., lord, et al. 1979; taber and lodge forthcoming). although some scholars view such bias as potentially irrational behavior (taber and lodge forthcoming), it is perfectly rational if the goal is not to get at the “truth” of a given issue

54、in order to be a better voter, but to enjoy the psychic benefits of being a political “fan.” rationally ignorant voters may limit not only the amount of information they acquire but also “how rationally they process the information they do have” (caplan 2001, 5). to put it a different way, such citi

55、zens mode of processing information 9 may be rational for purposes of psychic gratification, but irrational for purposes of improving the quality of their votes. the latter will rarely be the main goal of information acquisition, because there is too little chance that achieving it will have any imp

56、act on electoral outcomes. this conjecture is strengthened by a recent study showing that the most knowledgeable voters tend to be more biased in their evaluation of new evidence than those with less prior political information (taber and lodge, forthcoming). if those who acquire political knowledge

57、 do so in order to cast “better” votes, such a result would be difficult to explain. but if, as the rational ignorance hypothesis implies, the main goal is to enjoy psychic benefits similar to those available to sports fans, the greater bias of the more politically knowledgeable is perfectly rationa

58、l. the fact that they acquired more knowledge in the past suggests that they value the “fan” experience more than those who acquired less; thus, it is not at all surprising that they tend to be more close-minded in their evaluation of new information, because acknowledging that the other side may ha

59、ve a good argument would diminish their psychic gratification. the rationality of using inaccurate shortcuts the main argument of those scholars who reject the view that political ignorance is a serious problem is that lack of knowledge can be offset by the use of “information shortcuts,” or heurist

60、ics.3 for example, the shortcut of party identification enables voters to decide between candidates about whom they know little by relying on the “brand names” of their political parties, which are associated with a more or less standard set of positions (e.g., aldrich 1995). alternatively, they can