Of course I agree that studies of voter ignorance do not yield evidence of some fixed, immutable characteristic of citizens. It is also certainly true that different voting systems provide different incentives to acquire relevant political information. The pertinent question is whether implementing approval voting would incentivize the acquisition of political information to a sufficient degree that we could be confident in claiming that the mere transition to approval voting alone would have all the benefits that Aaron claims it would have. I am still very skeptical of those purported benefits being delivered. Even on minimally demanding normative accounts of what amount of knowledge voters ought to possess (models of retrospective voting, say), the opportunity cost of acquiring the relevant information is, for very many citizens, simply too high. I suspect this will be true even under a scheme of approval voting, and even if more voters were to think their votes matter more. For all we know, the transition to approval voting might simply increase voter turn-out by prompting citizens who previously abstained to go to the polls, now thinking that their votes matter; and since the sort of evidence about voter ignorance alluded to earlier suggests that non-voters are typically less informed than voters, we might end up in an even worse scenario as far as voter ignorance is concerned. Like you, I don’t have a particularly strong stance on this. This is clearly an empirical matter. Still, we shouldn’t rule this scenario out entirely.
In my initial comment, I mentioned that I think it is easy to overstate the significance of the demand-side of politics. This is partly because of the literature on epistemic democracy, which you allude to above in mentioning the so-called “Miracle of Aggregation” (i.e. symmetric errors cancelling each other out). Epistemic democrats would indeed dismiss my concerns about voter ignorance, for they claim that, under certain conditions, collective intelligence can emerge from large groups of individually ignorant agents. If that’s right, then the evidence from political psychology needn’t worry us. However—and with all due respect to the many theorists working on epistemic democracy (it’s nice to say “with all due respect” and mean it) - the claims about the collective intelligence of individually ignorant voters often strike me as pollyannish. To take the case of the miracle of aggregation, I don’t think the required symmetry holds. Without that symmetry, the collective intelligence does not emerge. To take another favored strategy of epistemic democrats (the Condorcet Jury Theorem), I don’t think the necessary conditions for the emergence of collective competence are satisfied.
However, another reason to downplay the significance of the demand-side of politics is worth mentioning, since it is often ignored by various parties to disputes about levels of voter ignorance. The degree to which political leaders respond to voter preferences is often greatly overstated. Policymakers and political representatives enjoy a significant degree of autonomy, and much—if not most—policy-making is done out of the public eye entirely. When you couple this with recent work in political psychology suggesting that voters are often simply happy to toe the party line, this suggests that much of the focus on voters, their knowledge, and politicians responding to their preferences has been misplaced. This is as true of epistocratic worries about voter ignorance as it is about the epistemic democrats who oppose them. I don’t think this means that voter ignorance isn’t a problem (assuming for the moment that it is indeed a problem), but it’s not the only thing we need to be looking at. Many factors other than voter competence contribute to the overall quality of governance, and voting reforms (whether approval voting or otherwise) will not change such factors much, if at all (factors such as the degree to which policymaking can be captured by special interests, levels of corruption, the decision-making methods deployed by legislators and bureaucrats, etc.).
Hi Matt,
Of course I agree that studies of voter ignorance do not yield evidence of some fixed, immutable characteristic of citizens. It is also certainly true that different voting systems provide different incentives to acquire relevant political information. The pertinent question is whether implementing approval voting would incentivize the acquisition of political information to a sufficient degree that we could be confident in claiming that the mere transition to approval voting alone would have all the benefits that Aaron claims it would have. I am still very skeptical of those purported benefits being delivered. Even on minimally demanding normative accounts of what amount of knowledge voters ought to possess (models of retrospective voting, say), the opportunity cost of acquiring the relevant information is, for very many citizens, simply too high. I suspect this will be true even under a scheme of approval voting, and even if more voters were to think their votes matter more. For all we know, the transition to approval voting might simply increase voter turn-out by prompting citizens who previously abstained to go to the polls, now thinking that their votes matter; and since the sort of evidence about voter ignorance alluded to earlier suggests that non-voters are typically less informed than voters, we might end up in an even worse scenario as far as voter ignorance is concerned. Like you, I don’t have a particularly strong stance on this. This is clearly an empirical matter. Still, we shouldn’t rule this scenario out entirely.
In my initial comment, I mentioned that I think it is easy to overstate the significance of the demand-side of politics. This is partly because of the literature on epistemic democracy, which you allude to above in mentioning the so-called “Miracle of Aggregation” (i.e. symmetric errors cancelling each other out). Epistemic democrats would indeed dismiss my concerns about voter ignorance, for they claim that, under certain conditions, collective intelligence can emerge from large groups of individually ignorant agents. If that’s right, then the evidence from political psychology needn’t worry us. However—and with all due respect to the many theorists working on epistemic democracy (it’s nice to say “with all due respect” and mean it) - the claims about the collective intelligence of individually ignorant voters often strike me as pollyannish. To take the case of the miracle of aggregation, I don’t think the required symmetry holds. Without that symmetry, the collective intelligence does not emerge. To take another favored strategy of epistemic democrats (the Condorcet Jury Theorem), I don’t think the necessary conditions for the emergence of collective competence are satisfied.
However, another reason to downplay the significance of the demand-side of politics is worth mentioning, since it is often ignored by various parties to disputes about levels of voter ignorance. The degree to which political leaders respond to voter preferences is often greatly overstated. Policymakers and political representatives enjoy a significant degree of autonomy, and much—if not most—policy-making is done out of the public eye entirely. When you couple this with recent work in political psychology suggesting that voters are often simply happy to toe the party line, this suggests that much of the focus on voters, their knowledge, and politicians responding to their preferences has been misplaced. This is as true of epistocratic worries about voter ignorance as it is about the epistemic democrats who oppose them. I don’t think this means that voter ignorance isn’t a problem (assuming for the moment that it is indeed a problem), but it’s not the only thing we need to be looking at. Many factors other than voter competence contribute to the overall quality of governance, and voting reforms (whether approval voting or otherwise) will not change such factors much, if at all (factors such as the degree to which policymaking can be captured by special interests, levels of corruption, the decision-making methods deployed by legislators and bureaucrats, etc.).