The menace of political ignorance
How can voters make informed decisions without knowing how our government works? The answer is—they can’t.
How ignorant is the American public? This ignorant:
An October Farleigh Dickinson survey found that only 34% of Americans can name the three branches of government, and 30% cannot even name one. Studies routinely find that large numbers of voters do not know which officials are responsible for which issues, a circumstance that makes it hard to hold them accountable for their performance. All too often, voters reward and punish incumbents for outcomes they do not control, including such things as droughts and even victories by local sports teams.
The biggest determinant of most electoral outcomes is the very recent performance of the economy, even though experts recognize that incumbents usually have little control over short-term economic trends. Such ignorance weakens political accountability, and incentivizes politicians to pursue dangerously misguided policies that prove popular with poorly informed voters…
Because there is only an infinitesimally small chance that any one vote can influence the result of an election, even most smart people usually have little motivation to follow politics closely.
Ilya Somin, the article’s author, thinks the level of political ignorance is due to the fact that people aren’t motivated to learn much because with only one vote a single person doesn’t determine much. I find this to be a weak argument. Those who learn a lot about politics and government have the same one vote, and it doesn’t stop them from being interested and motivated. The incentive to learn can’t depend on the number of votes a person has. It depends on the degree of his/her intrinsic interest in the topic, how much else is distracting him/her, the accuracy of that person’s sources of information, and last but not least the school system.
The three branches of government is a topic so basic that everyone should know about it. But is Civics still taught in school? Not so much (see also this).
And here’s a 2012 article from Harvard Magazine:
When was the last time anyone, politician or university president, echoed what Noah Webster said in 1788?
“It is an object of vast magnitude that systems of education should be adopted and pursued which may not only diffuse a knowledge of the sciences but may implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue and of liberty and inspire them with just and liberal ideas of government and with an inviolable attachment to their own country.”
More on the decline:
At old colleges like Harvard, moral philosophy, with civic education a major component, was once a capstone course required of all seniors. But the subject went into decline after the Civil War, as science became ascendant and universities gave pre-eminence to research. As science either marginalized or helped transform other subjects, citizens’ responsibilities for the public good were squeezed out of the mission of higher education. Moral philosophy became a marginal specialty within philosophy departments. At Amherst College, for example, the president still taught moral philosophy to all seniors in 1895; by 1905, it was but a single elective offering.
If you think about it, it’s not at all surprising that the generations coming up are so ignorant about our political system. And this is not the result of accident.
Charlatans thrive on ignorance, which does not explain the negligence of our educators. Or does it?
I have no idea where the notion that science professors and their discipline had ANY elite or rising status prior to WWII can be based.
It’s a patent falsity.
ALL of the elite professors — outside of the ‘damned’ technical colleges — were anti-scientists of one stripe or another.
They were moralists; experts in English lit, law, culture, music, art, history, … traditions right down the line… with philosophy tossed in on top.
Show me the physics or chemistry laboratory of Harvard circa 1876. It was a side show of a side show. NO-ONE wanted their elite sons to become filthy chemists.
James Clerk Maxwell, the acme of physics in the 19th Century had no patronage to speak of. (UK)
While at the same time, countless professors// dons of the liberal arts were ‘chaired’ by benefactors all through the era.
The supposition is utter nonsense — on stilts.
The bitterness of the deposed elites — circa WWII — when they could make no serious contribution to the war effort — still echoes down through time.
The result has been the buffoon’s project of melding science with morality — aka Progressivism — Leftist Utopianism — it has naturally run amok — anchored by a miasma of conceits.
The best and brightest still have yet to figure out that multi-variate analysis usually sifts noise to produce nonsense.
The result of such (‘social’) ‘research’ has been nothing but a stream of tendentious arrogances… backed up by pseudo-reality.
You may note the epic rise of intellectual fraud over the last generation. This is what flows from super saturation of ‘talent’ in the intellectual space.
The smartest kid in elementary class finds that he’s a mid wit in college, and a positive retread at the graduate level. So he adopts the ‘Chinese’ recourse and cheats.
[ Red China, today, is a titanic cheat-state. This is the source of its academic hyper-excellence.
[ It necessarily follows that Red Chinese manufacturers cheat at quality, cheat at the docks, cheat their bankers, cheat their workers… The joint is a moral abyss.
Thanks so much for your interest!
As I discuss in my book “Democracy and Political Ignorance” and elsewhere, the minority who know a lot of about politics usually learn for reasons other than being a better voter (reasons that, unfortunately, often lead them to be very biased in the way they acquire and process political information): http://www.cato-unbound.org/2013/10/11/ilya-somin/democracy-political-ignorance
Neo, to say that a decision is rational isn’t the same thing as identifying its cause. Somin isn’t saying that voter ignorance is due to the small impact that a vote has, but that it’s rational to put more focus on decisions which have greater direct impact. This touches a bit on one of your pet subjects, game theory. It’s rational in the Commons for each person to exploit the shared resources. Not optimal, not good, but rational. Rationality relates to decision-making. A lot of what Somin says in that article may seem paradoxical if you don’t make the connection.
Civics test before being allowed to register to vote is my solution. It can be short, 10 T or F questions on the Constitution. To vote, the citizen would need to score 80% correct.
Civics, and particularly the NECESSITY of checks and balances, should be taught in 5th, 8th and 11th grades, obviously with increasing levels of sophistication.
I’m currently reading Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Facism. I’m dismayed by people’s chronic desire for “strong man” or “committee” government leadership.
I’ve been reading the interesting memoirs of Harriet Martineau, a Brit who visited to US and spent much time here in the 1830s. She remarked that political oratory–2 hour plus speeches–was a big thing here, but really wasn’t necessary since Americans were so literate and well-read…she had a long conversation with a wagon driver about a physics book he had read….Americans could be getting their political information in written form, and she expected speechifying to decline.
Parker, there used to actually be core curricula in high school and college that involved such studies. One required course in the two year core at my first attempt at college was entitled “American Institutions”. Can you imagine a required course like that now? Overtaken by gender and racial studies.
As far as I can determine there are no core requirements at all. May have mentioned that my granddaughter’s freshman comparative religion course focused on Vodou and Rastafarian who, for the unaware, believe that Emperor Haile Selassie was the Messiah.. So, an example of academic priorities and standards; i.e., none..
I’m very familiar with Professor Somin’s views. He’s a long-time poster on the VC (Volokh Conspiracy) and I was a frequent commenter there for many years until they decided to let the Washington Post host it only for subscribers.
While it is probably irrelevant to this post on political ignorance, one of Prof Somin’s areas of expertise, he is a hard-core libertarian, all-in on amnesty and a proponent of totally open borders.
Ira,
My ideal T or F test:
1. The first 12 amendments of the Constitution are commonly known as the Bill of Rights.
2. The 3 branches of the federal government are the president, the military, and the courts.
3. The POTUS is granted the power to override the House of Representatives.
4. Members of the US senate are elected for a 4 year term.
5. The president decides the budget of the federal government.
6. The 10th Amendment gives all power to the president to determine which state laws are legal under the Constitution.
7. There are 7 justices on the Supreme Court who serve for a term of 10 years.
8. The 3rd amendment guarantees the right of freedom from unwarranted searches and seizures.
9. Article 5 of the Constitution mandates the various states are never allowed to challenge the power of the federal government.
10. Slavery was made illegal by the 22nd amendment to Constitution.
David – One thing that we don’t stop and think about is that we used to get the cream of the crop from Europe. It wasn’t a Europe thing, or a white thing; it was a cream-of-the-crop thing. Educated people fleeing dangerously strong governments, coming here with the awareness that if they didn’t succeed, they wouldn’t eat.
Parker – There will never again be tests for voters in this country, but it’d be a great thing if it happened.
Oldflyer – A lot depends on the particular school. You could get a degree without studying the Constitution, sure, but not from every institution.
I ran across an online version of the citizenship test recently. If I understood it correctly, there is a list of 100 questions. The potential citizen is asked 10 of them, and has to get at least 6 right. I wouldn’t mind seeing something like that for voters or, God help us, presidential candidates.
Parker, I just looked over your test. I’m kind of proud of myself for spotting the false one.
Oldflyer,
People need to shine on most universities, and seek higher ed elsewhere.
Nick,
We taught civics at home, and it was taught in the 5th, 8th, and 11th grades. No need for classes in the higher grades.
BTW, all answers are false.
Parker…
You DID get that from Barry Soetoro’s Constitutional ?
If not, don’t give the boy any ideas.
You think knowing the constitution will help? It doesn’t make you any wiser, merely more knowledgeable.
Knowing how many Supreme Court judges there are isn’t going to help when you vote Trump or Hillary based on their future ability to chose the justices. It’s totally irrelevant detail.
It’s unwise to assume that people vote based on their own knowledge anyway. People vote based on the opinions of other people who they canvass. So the knowledgeable get to spread their knowledge around.
Or do each one of you become experts before you make any decision? Learning all about finance before you take a mortgage and all about cars before you buy one? No, you farm out some of that to people who know more than you, and take their recommendations.
It’s very disheartening to know that I, as an autodidact, am more educated than a current college graduate. My children and their peers stare like a deer in headlights when presented with the most common knowledge. It’s all been on purpose, too. How I wish I had homeschooled my children, but I didn’t know. My kids were in school at the vanguard of this and they were in “good schools”. It is only in retrospect that I can see that it was beginning, with the emphasis on unearned self-esteem, multiculturalism, and “outcome based education”. I was concerned, though, about the way they weren’t corrected for misspellings on their papers! The “educators” thought it was better for the students to just be able to write their ideas and answers without having to worry about the spelling or syntax. Much like some parents prefer to let their children act out in an antisocial way rather than inhibit their free spirits, no learning happens.
Our educators are not negligent; they are in collusion.
Chester Draws, a couple years ago 4 of us took a civics test focusing on our federal framework. Two of us scored higher than a percentage of those serving in the government. (I think you may have linked that test, Neo.). It’s clear that a number of our public servants are ignorant of the most basic premises. The Affordable Care Act? Passed, even though it was physically impossible to have read through it (let alone hash it out,) as “not a tax’. Upheld by the vote of our Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, “as a tax”! After the Benghazi debacle, Congress voted to increase the number of Marine Security Guards (up to that moment, an elite core). MSG’s only guard information at designated Embassies (where classified information exists). They do not guard people or property. Benghazi wasn’t even an Embassy. I’m convinced those who voted for the increase don’t even know what an MSG does, nor do they care. Just one example of the lack of standards and knowledge among our civil servants.
People are ignorant in America today because it doesn’t cost them anything to be so.
Matt…
Fear the grim auditor.
What happened in Babylon is not confined to Babylon.
Mene, Mene, Tekel and Parsin…
Has a universal, timeless, haunting warning.
A nation that denies its youth judgment — is damning them with false praise.
In binary, 2^n-1 AND 0 are information flat… no matter how high ‘n’ may go, no matter how many zeros are in the register.
All ‘1’s and all ‘0’s — that’s what our pedagogues are preaching.
BTW, it’s the lazy way out for any pedagogue.
‘Teaching’ without correction.
Wow, now that’s hip.
In defense of the People – when you take your car to the mechanic, you don’t have to know how to fix it, just hope and have trust in him that he won’t screw you over, knowing helps to determine who to trust to do a good job but even then, sometimes you get stiffed. Now multiply this 100 fold when we talk about Gov’t and $4 Trillion a year budget to spend.
I just dont buy all these so called studies or polls that show how stupid we all have become. They are self serving drama’s and always published right when you need them for dramatic effect. How many people do you know that would fit in that 30% ?
So where are they finding all these folks? There is so much fake “journalism” out there now.
I am not sure when our educational system decided it was appropriate to to teach protesting, storming the stage, and stifling other people’s speech rather than basic civics, but it has seemed to have worked.
Federal elections aren’t referendums for proposed legislation. They elect officials.
Of course, basic system, and more advanced legal and policy knowledge would help for judging candidates, but voting serves a particular function. It’s one check in the system, and a restricted check at that. Voting is not a be-all, end-all law-making, law-enforcement tool for the people. Nor was voting designed to be a complete solution. Republic, not Democracy.
Neo:
If you think about it, it’s not at all surprising that the generations coming up are so ignorant about our political system. And this is not the result of accident.”
Defining the problem frames the solution. It does for activists, anyway.
Participatory politics subsume electoral politics. In and of itself, voting is contained within a greater social cultural/political context.
Voting is better understood as social action rather than individual action in aggregate. Nick mentioned Game Theory, which cites trust as a key for cooperation. Building and reinforcing trust on the social cultural/political level is an activist function. Sowing fractural distrust among the competition in the arena is also an activist product. Activism is the power of the people available to anyone for any cause. And to use against anyone for any cause. Voting is a reflection of activist competition (or in the case of conservatives, the refusal to compete for real).
For the people, the primary value of elections for affecting government is not the direct designed popular check on government, but rather the ready setting to organize a social activist movement that is capable of affecting government on the long term and broad range of participatory politics including but not limited to elections.
For example, acquiring the social dominance required to reconstruct the critical social nodes, foundational, pre-conditional building blocks of academia and education.
Since you recognize about political ignorance that “this is not the result of accident”, then by the same token, you recognize that political ignorance can be fixed with methodical de-construction and reconstruction. Pointing out the fundamental change in civic education is a recognition that the solution is within reach.
The creative destructive and reconstructive method needed to compete for real is, of course, activism on the full social cultural/political spectrum.
Blert, “I have no idea where the notion that science professors and their discipline had ANY elite or rising status prior to WWII can be based.” How right you are. Charles Townes, the man who invented the laser in the early 1950s, said that graduate students in physics in those days tended to be a rather sketchy bunch. Prior to WW II, the physics department rated somewhere below medieval French.
Jim Doherty:
They are finding them everywhere. It’s not hard to do.
I was once rather shocked when a group of my friends (there were about 12 people there) had asked me something about politics (they know I’m a blogger) and I mentioned something about our federalist form of government. None of them had a clue what I was talking about, and this was a group of smart, college-educated women with varying degrees of interest in politics but mostly not all that interested. I had to explain what I meant, and even then I could see their eyes glazing over with boredom. I never asked them about the three branches of government (it’s not something that ordinarily comes up in conversation) but I have little doubt that at least 1/3 of them would not have been able to tell me what they were.
And that’s bright and well-educated people who are mostly older than 50 (the composition of that group I was talking to). In younger people and/or those who are less well-educated, such ignorance is probably at least 1/3. I don’t know why you would doubt this.
Oh Chester,
If you return to this thread of comments…. I wish to acknowledge you as fool or idiot. Or, perhaps both. Under the rule of law, the Constitution, we survive as a sane society. Otherwise, it is the capricious rule of power hungry men and women and transsexuals.
Neo, it was here on your blog, I believe, a few years back that you linked to a story and survey of mostly local and state politicians who scored so low on that question “what are the three branches of government.”
What amazed me about that survey was the number of people who chose “The Pentagon” as one of the branches! And this was from the people who, I assume, pass the laws telling the rest of us what we can and cannot do!
This is the human condition. The wise and skillful float to the top, the rest settle on the bottom of the human trash bin.
The problem with Westerners is that they taught that we were all “equal”. We are not equal, not even legally in the fiction.