News Release

September 22, 2004

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Voter ignorance is a real threat to American democracy
With a boundless federal government, voters have little incentive to seek political knowledge

WASHINGTON -- Americans head to the polls to choose their president in less than six weeks, but according to a report released today by the Cato Institute, voters don't know enough about the issues and the candidates to cast an informed ballot on November 2.

"An informed electorate is a prerequisite for democracy," writes Ilya Somin, assistant professor of law at George Mason School of Law. "If voters do not know what is going on in politics, they cannot rationally exercise control over government policy."

Aware that a single vote is likely to have no impact on election outcomes, voters have little incentive to gain more political knowledge, Somin argues in the report, "When Ignorance Isn't Bliss: How Political Ignorance Threatens Democracy."

Voter ignorance, he says, is doubly dangerous because it opens the door to manipulation of the public by the elite and encourages politicians to make policy errors to win votes from an ill-informed public. These actions create a larger government, which leads to a voting public less likely to waste its time learning about the government behemoth. Thus, the government becomes too large to be effectively controlled by the people.

Somin presents several studies that demonstrate a lack of political knowledge by American voters. A recent survey he cites had 70 percent of respondents unaware of the recent Medicare prescription drug benefit and 58 percent said they knew "nothing" or "very little" about the USA Patriot Act, two important and widely reported issues in the upcoming election.

With 15 cabinet-level departments and 54 regulatory agencies and government corporations in the executive branch alone, "it is doubtful in the extreme that voters could keep adequate track of all their activities even if they paid far more attention to political information than they do now."

Somin's concern is not that the elite will deviously manipulate the public, rather that the elite simply rule by default. "What the voters don't know about, they can't meaningfully control," he writes, and that threatens the very heart of American democracy.

Policy Analysis no. 525