[Ilya Somin] Time to start taking political ignorance seriously

Even more than most others, the awful 2016 election cycle has highlighted the dangers of political ignorance. Data has long shown that voter ignorance is widespread on both sides of the political spectrum . A high percentage of the public is often ignorant of even very basic information, such as which party controls Congress, which officials are responsible for which issues, and how the federal government spends our tax money.

This year, public ignorance has likely played a major role in giving us an unusually painful set of choices on election day, especially (but not exclusively) by contributing to the rise of Donald Trump. Most of the ignorance out there is not the result of stupidity or venality on the part of voters. It is, to a great extent, entirely rational behavior driven by the fact that there is so little chance that any one vote will change the outcome of an election.

If your only reason to become informed about politics is to make better choices at the ballot box, that turns out not to be much of an incentive at all. The odds that your vote will decide the outcome are infinitesimally small. From the standpoint of the ordinary voter, it makes sense to pay little attention to political issues, and instead devote most of your time and effort to other matters.

As former British Prime Minister Tony Blair puts it, “[t]he single hardest thing for a practising politician to understand is that most people, most of the time, don’t give politics a first thought all day long. Or if they do, it is with a sigh…., before going back to worrying about the kids, the parents, the mortgage, the boss, their friends, their weight, their health, sex and rock ‘n’ roll…. For most normal people, politics is a distant, occasionally irritating fog.” This year, the fog is even more irritating – and much scarier – than usual. But it does not seem to have caused voters to become better-informed. Such behavior is perfectly rational. The ignorance of any one voter makes almost no difference. But individually rational ignorance can cause great harm when many millions of voters behave the same way.

In addition to making little effort to seek out information, most voters also do a poor job of evaluating what information they do know. Instead of acting as truth seekers, they instead function as “political fans” cheering on Team Red or Team Blue, overvaluing any information that confirms their preexisting views while ignoring or downplaying anything that cuts the other way.

This kind of bias is exacerbated by the intense partisanship and polarization that has descended upon American politics in recent years. Partisans like to claim that the other side’s voters are influenced by ignorance, and they are often right to think so. But rarely consider the possibility that the same may be true of their own party’s supporters.

By some measures, partisan hatred is now more widespread than racial and ethnic prejudice, and certainly more socially acceptable. Even if voters somehow become significantly better informed than they are, they may not get much value out of their knowledge unless we can figure out how to curb the “tribal” partisan hatred that has engulfed our politics.

Political ignorance is not unique to the United States, but is also a serious problem in many other democracies. In recent years, dangerous demagogic movements of both the right and the left have grown in influence in many European democracies, and elsewhere. Public ignorance is a major contributor to the racism, xenophobia, and zero-sum thinking that facilitate their ri