Widespread voter ignorance is a serious problem in our democracy,
writes
Ilya Somin in the Washington Post
including in the current election. Scientific American has a new article offering several helpful suggestions on how to be a better voter:
#1 Don’t just go with your gut.
Voting well means making your choice from a standpoint of informed
consideration and with an eye toward the common good, says Jason
Brennan, a political philosopher at Georgetown University and author of The Ethics of Voting.
“Suppose you go to a doctor and ask for advice about an illness—you’d
expect the doctor to have your interests at heart and to think
rationally about your symptoms,” he says. “Voters owe the same thing to
each other and the electorate. Vote for everyone’s best interest, and
when you’re forming your political beliefs, form them based on
information and learning, not on the basis of quick thinking, anger or
bias….”
#2 Don’t get all your news from social media.
Most of us have unfollowed, unfriended or muted contacts on Facebook,
Twitter and other networks because their political views make us mad.
Doing so can give rise to narrowed political views and groupthink…
Try broadening your news sources by tuning to channels or sites, papers or magazines that have a different slant than you do….
#3
Watch the next debate with your eyes closed. A recent study by Joan Y.
Chiao, then at Northwestern University, a founder of the new field of
cultural neuroscience, found that voters perceive male candidates as
more competent and dominant than female ones, based on facial features
alone. What’s more, voters of both genders tend to prefer physically
attractive female candidates, whereas attractiveness doesn’t matter for
male ones….
#4 Know when to abstain.
I have a confession to make: I didn’t vote in the presidential
primaries. I’m not used to the mail-in ballots in my adopted home state
of Oregon, and I sent mine in too late to be counted. Looking back, I
think perhaps it was for the best: I’d been waffling for months about
which candidate to choose and hadn’t taken the time to firmly ground my
choice in facts and information. “We’ve found that having more
information changes people’s policy preferences,” Brennan says. “We can
specifically predict what the American public likely would choose if it
were better informed….”
All four of these points
are good advice. The real significance of No. 2 is not so much that
social media is bad, but that most people make too little effort to
consider views opposed to their own. Too often, voters act like “political fans” rather than truth-seekers,
overvaluing any information that supports their preexisting views,
while ignoring or dismissing anything that cuts the other way. A
responsible truth-seeker would make a special effort to seek out
information sources with views opposed to his or her own. They are the
ones most likely to provide a counterweight to his own biases, and to
present information and arguments he has not heard before.
Suggestion No. 4 is particularly well taken. If you know
little or nothing about the issues at stake in an election or
referendum, you can often serve the public interest best by abstaining. It isn’t necessarily wrong to be ignorant about politics. But it is wrong to inflict that ignorance on your fellow citizens. As John Stuart Mill put
it, voting is not just an exercise of personal choice, but rather “the
exercise of power over others.” The people elected by ignorant voters
will rule over the entire society, not just those who cast ballots for
them.
… Even relatively conscientious voters will often find it difficult to effectively combat their biases, or to learn enough to understand more than a small fraction of the issues addressed by the large and complicated modern state.
Also, because of the very low chance that any one vote will make a
decisive difference in an election, it is often rational for individual
voters to be ignorant, even though there is a terrible systemic effect
if large numbers of voters behave that way. For those reasons, among
others, I am not optimistic that we will overcome the problem of
political ignorance any time soon. In the long run, the most effective potential solution is to reduce the size and complexity of government, and and make more of our decisions in settings where we have better incentives to seek out information and use it wisely. Nonetheless, the situation might improve at least somewhat if more voters follow Scientific American’s excellent advice.
While a lawyer in Springfield, Abraham Lincoln was asked by his partner why on Earth he subscribed to pro-slavery newspapers such as the
Richmond Enquirer and
Charleston Mercury.
We must be tolerant of the Southerners, and learn to live with them…
the rail splitter answered William Herndon (as illustrated below by
Dan Greenberg in his and my upcoming
The Life & Times of Abraham Lincoln);
Let us have both sides at the table, Billie…
… Each is entitled to his day in court.
(Something the Democrat Party, then (150 years ago) or now, as well as the 20th/21st century MSM, are not too keen upon, if they can help it…)
