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Ilya Somin asks, “What happens in a democracy when voters don’t know what they’re voting for or against?”
Ilya Somin joins Aaron and Trevor for a discussion on political ignorance, which is the idea that the majority of the electorate doesn’t have enough information to make fully-informed political decisions, with the understanding that for most people this ignorance is perfectly rational.
The idea of democracy is that the citizens should decide how they’re governed and what policies their government adopts, and they way they do this is via the ballot box. But what if the voters are too ignorant about what makes good policy—or even about the effects of bad policy—to vote well in the first place?
Somin is Professor of Law at George Mason University School of Law and is also a regular contributor at the Volokh Conspiracy.
Show Notes and Further Reading:
Ilya Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter
A Libertarianism.org video featuring Prof. Somin explaining political ignorance
Cato Unbound symposium on political ignorance
Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies
Ilya Somin is Professor of Law at George Mason University and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. Somin is a prominent blogger at the Volokh Conspiracy, focussing on issues related to democracy, federalism, and property rights.
Aaron Powell founded Libertarianism.org. He is now the host of (Re)Imagining Liberty, a podcast about the case for radical freedom.
Trevor Burrus was a research fellow in the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. His research interests include constitutional law, civil and criminal law, legal and political philosophy, legal history, and the interface between science and public policy.
He is the editor of A Conspiracy against Obamacare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Deep Commitments: The Past, Present, and Future of Religious Liberty (Cato, 2017). Burrus holds a BA in philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a JD from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. He also contributed a chapter to Libertarianism.org’s Visions of Liberty.