Rational Ignorance and Beyond

La sagesse collective : principes et mécanismes Colloque des 22-23 mai 2008, organisé par l'Institut du Monde Contemporain du Collège de France, sous la direction du Professeur Jon Elster. Intervention de Gerry Mackie, University of California, San Diego, 23 mai 2008 Economic theories declare that voters in a democracy are rationally ignorant (or worse, irrational) about politics, but that consumers possess perfect information about decisions in the market. Citizens lack competence because an individual voter almost never is pivotal to the outcome of an election (Downs, Brennan), or because of a lowered sense of responsibility in crowds (LeBon, Schumpeter), or because humans intrinsically prefer irrationality in politics (Pareto, Caplan). I challenge each of these analyses as conceptually faulty, empirically unfounded, or both. The economic theories also characteristically model modern political democracy as if it were direct, rather than representative, in nature. This error raises citizen competence requirements to a superhuman level. Standard arguments about specialist division of labor, principal-agent delegation, and competitive elections account for campaign discourse, parties, legislatures, and bureaucracies as information-improving devices. In conclusion, the citizen-ignorance argument for the minimization of democracy is not supported. Gerry Mackie is in the Political Science Department at the University of California, San Diego. His Ph.D. is from the University of Chicago, and he has held positions at the University of Oxford, Australian National University, and University of Notre Dame. His main interest is democratic theory and thought, including contemporary accounts of voting and deliberation. His book, Democracy Defended (2003), defends democratic voting from skeptical attacks by certain interpretations of social choice theory. He also studies social norms and conventions, conceptually and empirically, and advises on the abandonment of harmful social practices such as female genital cutting.