Last fall I finished reading Just How Stupid Are We, a book about the American electorate by Rick Shenkman. The book claims that the American electorate is woefully uninformed on a variety of national and international issues and therefore can't be expected to make good decisions at the polls.
I had two major qualms with the book.
First, the book chooses a very ideological topic to focus on---the decision to invade Iraq. One of the central claims was that many Americans claimed that the war in Iraq was one of their top 2 issues when voting in the 2004 presidential election, but that many Americans were uninformed about Iraq. Specifically, many Americans believed there was an Iraq/9-11 connection, and that Iraq had WMDs (both of which have been shown to be false). There were some widely-discussed surveys about media bias showing that viewers of Fox News tended to believe in an Iraq/9-11 connection and in the WMDs at a higher proportion than the rest of the country. So there's certainly evidence that many Americans were uninformed.
This sort of presupposes that WMDs and 9/11 were the only reasons to invade Iraq. There were many who didn't want to invade Iraq even if they did have WMDs, and there were many others who wanted to invade anyway, even if they didn't have WMDs. It's also a complicated issue because the intelligence community seems to have failed as well, whether by failing to collecting the right information or by failing to steer clear or political pressure. I'm not an expert on the issue, but I think it's a little more complicated.
Then there are the claims that the administration deliberately tried to create a connection between Iraq and 9-11, even if only in people's minds by repeatedly putting them in the same sentence. This would certainly lead to misinformed voters, which is a little different than stupid voters. There's a difference between being misled and being stupid.
At any rate, while I don't necessarily disagree that many Americans are uninformed or under-informed, I wouldn't hold up the Iraq war as a great exemplar. The Iraq invasion might better illustrate how the American press is inherently pro-war due to the inevitable ratings boost, or that the modern executive branch is quite difficult to check by legislative branch, or maybe that enough Americans generally supported the war regardless of WMDs and 9-11. The author seems to assume that voting for Bush in 2004 was uninformed while voting another way was informed. You're crushing a lot of information down into a binary decision and the binary outcomes are going to be very heavily overloaded with meanings and contexts. I don't think Iraq explains it adequately.
My second concern with the book is that, well, duh, elections are always won and lost by uninformed voters anyway. Uninformed voters are probably easier to sway because they are uninformed and therefore can latch onto a variety of reasons to vote a certain way. Think about it... If you're running a campaign, the vote of an 18-year old high school dropout who only reads the sports page is worth the same as the vote of a 33-year old college professor who tries to stay informed on a variety of issues. If you can get the uninformed vote cheaply, either with slogans or rhetoric or empty promises or whatever, doesn't swaying uninformed voters have to be a plank in the winning strategy? You have limited funds to run the campaign and you need to maximize votes-per-dollar to win. How could maximizing your haul of uninformed voters not be a good idea?
To be fair, the book is careful to point out that voters both identified Iraq as a major issue in the 2004 election and showed that they were uninformed about Iraq. So he's making the point that many voters voted on the basis of bad information. Would they have voted differently if they had good information, or would have they have voted the same way for different reasons? Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence that many voters want contradictions, like higher spending and lower taxes. This book doesn't shed enough new light on these inherent quandries in democracy.
I imagine that sometimes one candidate wins the informed vote, but loses the uninformed vote and therefore loses the election. But I don't know how to fix this. Well, I mean, clearly if you have a highly educated and well-informed population, then they can sort through all the information themselves. But that requires a lifelong commitment to information literacy on the part of the entire citizenry. It's a good long-term goal for society, but in the short-term it's always a better election strategy to find a way to reach as many uninformed voters as possible.
I don't see how elections can really be determined any other way until we end up with an information-literate citizenry. And even then, there may be points of disagreement that no amount of information can change.
In the meantime, I haven't read The Myth of the Rational Voter, though I plan to listen to an interview with Bryan Caplan (the author) on Russ Roberts' excellent EconTalk series. From what I've heard, this book covers a lot of the ways in which voters are rational and irrational. I will blog about it once I've listened to the interview.
