Foot voting, political ignorance, and constitutional design

Social Philosophy and Policy

Volumn 28, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 202-227

  Somin, Ilya ^a  

^a GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 79551511481     PISSN: 02650525     EISSN: 14716437     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0265052510000105     Document Type: Article

References (190)

1. For a survey of the relevant history, see Scott Gordon, Controlling the State: Constitutionalism from Ancient Athens to Today (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
2. I have myself briefly discussed these advantages in several prior publications.
3. See, e.g., Ilya Somin, "Political Ignorance and the Countermajoritarian Difficulty: A New Perspective on the 'Central Obsession' of Constitutional Theory," Iowa Law Review 87 (2004): 1287-1371;
4. Somin, "Knowledge about Ignorance: New Directions in the Study of Political Information," Critical Review 18 (2006): 255-78;
5. and Somin, "When Ignorance Isn't Bliss: How Political Ignorance Threatens Democracy," Cato Institute Policy Analysis No. 525 (2004). However, the present essay is a much more extensive analysis. Viktor Vanberg and James Buchanan have analyzed the significance of rational political ignorance for the constitution-making process.
6. See Viktor Vanberg and James Buchanan, "Constitutional Choice, Rational Ignorance, and the Limits of Reason," in Vanberg, Rules and Choice in Economics (New York: Routledge, 1994), 178-92.
7. Viktor Vanberg and James Buchanan, in Vanberg, Rules and Choice in Economics, 1994, But this work only briefly mentions possible implications for federalism in constitutional design (ibid., 188-89).
8. The terms "foot voting" and "ballot box voting" used in this essay are similar to Albert Hirschman's well-known distinction between "exit" and "voice.
9. See Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). However, Hirschman's concept of exit includes exit mechanisms other than foot voting (such as choosing to buy one firm's products rather than another's). He defines exit as any means by which people stop buying a firm's products or "leave [an] organization" in response to poor performance (ibid., 4). Similarly, his concept of "voice" includes methods of influencing an organization from within other than voting. Thus, I use "foot voting" and "ballot box voting" instead of "exit" and "voice" in order to make it clear that this essay has a narrower focus than Hirschman's classic work.
10. Charles Tiebout, "A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures," Journal of Political Economy 64 (1956): 516-24.
11. See, e.g., Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970);
12. and Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
13. See, e.g., Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996);
14. Scott Althaus, Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
15. and Ilya Somin, "Voter Ignorance and the Democratic Ideal," Critical Review 12 (1998): 413-58.
16. The data is extensive. See, e.g., George W. Bishop, The Illusion of Public Opinion: Fact and Artifact in Public Opinion Polls (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004);
17. Somin "Political Ignorance and the Countermajoritarian Difficulty";
18. Althaus, Collective Preferences;
19. and Delli Carpini and Keeter, What Americans Know about Politics, for recent summaries of the evidence.
20. For the latter figure, see William H. Riker and Peter Ordeshook, "A Theory of the Calculus of Voting," American Political Science Review 62 (1968): 25-42;
21. for the former, see Andrew Gelman et al., "What Is the Probability That Your Vote Will Make a Difference?" Economic Inquiry (forthcoming), available at http://www.stat.columbia.edu/;gelman/ research/published/ probdecisive2.pdf. Gelman et al. estimate that the chance of decisiveness in the 2008 presidential election varied from 1 in 10 million in a few small states, to 1 in 100 million in large states such as California (ibid., 9-10).
22. See, e.g., André Blais et al., "The Calculus of Voting: An Empirical Test," European Journal of Political Research 37 (2000): 181-201, which calculates very low probabilities of decisiveness in Canadian provincial elections, despite their relatively small populations.
23. Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965).
24. There is a large literature attacking rational choice theory on the ground that it fails to explain the prevalence of voting. See, e.g., Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994);
25. and Lars Udehn, The Limits of Public Choice (London: Routledge, 1996).
26. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 73-75;
27. Aaron Edlin, Andrew Gelman, and Noah Kaplan, "Voting as a Rational Choice: Why and How People Vote to Improve the Well-Being of Others," Rationality and Society 19 (2007): 293-314.
28. See Somin, "Knowledge about Ignorance," 258-60.
29. Somin, Knowledge about Ignorance See ibid., 259-61.
30. For other efforts to reconcile rational choice theory and the "paradox of voting," see, e.g., John H. Aldrich, "Rational Choice and Turnout," American Journal of Political Science 37 (1993): 246-78;
31. and Terry M. Moe, The Organization of Interests (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 81-82.
32. See Delli Carpini and Keeter, What Americans Know about Politics;
33. Eric R.A.N. Smith, The Unchanging American Voter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989);
34. and Ilya Somin, "Voter Knowledge and Constitutional Change: Assessing the New Deal Experience," William and Mary Law Review 45 (2003): 595-674.
35. Somin, "When Ignorance Isn't Bliss," 6.
36. Delli Carpini and Keeter, What Americans Know about Politics.
37. See Philip Converse, "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics," in Ideology and Discontent, ed. David Apter (New York: Free Press, 1964);
38. Russell W. Neumann, The Paradox of Mass Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986);
39. and David RePass, "Searching for Voters along the Liberal-Conservative Continuum: The Infrequent Ideologue and the Missing Middle," The Forum 6 (2008): 1-49.
40. Delli Carpini and Keeter, What Americans Know about Politics;
41. Smith, The Unchanging American Voter;
42. Stephen E. Bennett, "Trends in Americans' Political Information, 1967-87," American Politics Quarterly 17 (1989): 422-35;
43. Althaus, Collective Preferences.
44. Somin, "When Ignorance Isn't Bliss";
45. Somin "Political Ignorance and the Countermajoritarian Difficulty";
46. Althaus, Collective Preferences;
47. Robert Luskin, "Measuring Political Sophistication," American Journal of Political Science 31 (1987): 856-99.
48. Somin, "Knowledge about Ignorance.
49. This section recapitulates and slightly extends arguments I first presented in Somin, "Knowledge about Ignorance.
50. Somin, "Political Ignorance and the Countermajoritarian Difficulty.
51. Somin, "Political Ignorance and the Countermajoritarian Difficulty Ibid.
52. Somin, "Knowledge about Ignorance.
53. See, e.g., Charles Lord, Lee Ross, and Mark R. Lepper, "Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37 (1979): 2098-2109;
54. Charles S. Taber and Milton Lodge, "Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs," American Journal of Political Science (forthcoming);
55. and Edward Glaeser and Cass R. Sunstein, "Extremism and Social Learning," Journal of Legal Analysis 1 (2009): 1-62.
56. Taber and Lodge, "Motivated Skepticism.
57. Bryan Caplan, "Rational Irrationality," Kylos 54 (2001): 5;
58. see also Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
59. Taber and Lodge, "Motivated Skepticism";
60. Philip Converse, "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics," in Ideology and Discontent, ed. David Apter (New York: Free Press, 1964), produced similar findings many years ago.
61. See Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, "Conspiracy Theories," Harvard Public Law Working Paper No. 08-03 (2008), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract-id=1084585.
62. This section is an adapted and condensed version of my more detailed analysis of this issue in Somin, "Knowledge about Ignorance.
63. There is a vast literature on this subject. For notable defenses of various shortcuts, see, e.g., Philip Converse, "Popular Representation and the Distribution of Information," in Information and Democratic Processes, ed. John Ferejohn and James Kuklinski (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990);
64. Samuel Popkin, The Reasoning Voter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991);
65. Donald Wittman, The Myth of Democratic Failure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995);
66. Arthur Lupia and Matthew McCubbins, The Democratic Dilemma: Can Citizens Learn What They Need to Know? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
67. Morris Fiorina, Retrospective Voting in American National Elections (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981);
68. and Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro, The Rational Public (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
69. John Aldrich, Why Parties? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
70. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Wilson, 1950);
71. Fiorina, Retrospective Voting in American National Elections.
72. See Somin, "Voter Ignorance and the Democratic Ideal";
73. Somin, "Resolving the Democratic Dilemma?" Yale Journal on Regulation 16 (1999): 401-16;
74. Somin, "When Ignorance Isn't Bliss";
75. Somin, "Political Ignorance and the Countermajoritarian Difficulty";
76. Somin, "Richard Posner's Democratic Pragmatism," Critical Review 16 (2004): 1-22;
77. and Somin, Knowledge about Ignorance.
78. Somin, "When Ignorance Isn't Bliss";
79. Somin, Political Ignorance and the Countermajoritarian Difficulty.
80. Samuel Popkin and Michael Dimock, "Political Knowledge and Citizen Competence," in Citizen Competence and Democratic Institutions, ed. Stephen Elkin and Karol Soltan (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999);
81. William A. Galston, "Political Knowledge, Political Engagement, and Civic Education," Annual Review of Political Science 4 (2001): 217-34.
82. Daniel Hamermesh, "Changing Looks and Changing 'Discrimination': The Beauty of Economists," National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 11712 (2005).
83. Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
84. P. E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? 2005 Ibid., chaps. 3-5.
85. Somin, "When Ignorance Isn't Bliss," 12-13.
86. Somin, "When Ignorance Isn't Bliss," 12-13, Ibid.
87. Edward Rubin and Malcolm Feeley, "Federalism: Some Notes on a National Neurosis," UCLA Law Review (1994): 936-42.
88. Edward Rubin and Malcolm Feeley, UCLA Law Review (1994), See, e.g., ibid., 936-51;
89. and Malcolm Feeley and Edward Rubin, Federalism: Political Identity and Tragic Compromise (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008).
90. Thomas Dye, American Federalism: Competition among Governments (New York: John Wiley, 1990), 1-33;
91. Ilya Somin, "Closing the Pandora's Box of Federalism: The Case for Judicial Restriction of Federal Subsidies to State Governments," Georgetown Law Journal 90 (2002): 468-71;
92. Barry Weingast, "The Economic Role of Political Institutions: Market- Preserving Federalism and Economic Development," Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 11 (1995): 1-31.
93. Somin, "Political Ignorance and the Countermajoritarian Difficulty.
94. There is a large literature on this subject. See, e.g., Lawrence R. Jacobs and Robert Shapiro, Politicians Don't Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000);
95. Tali Mendelberg, The Race Card (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001);
96. and Somin, Voter Knowledge and Constitutional Change 652-54.
97. For a good discussion of the federalism issues raised by the Mormons' establishment of a new state in Utah, see Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
98. For a recent account of the Pilgrims' decision to leave Europe and found a new society in Massachusetts, see Nathan Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (New York: Viking, 2006).
99. See, e.g., Adolf Ens, Subjects or Citizens? The Mennonite Experience in Canada, 1870-1925 (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1994);
100. and Steven Nolt, A History of the Amish, rev. ed. (Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2004).
101. Pew Research Center, Who Moves? Who Stays Put? Where's Home? (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2008), 8, 13.
102. Somin, "Political Ignorance and the Countermajoritarian Difficulty," 1351.
103. See William Cohen, At Freedom's Edge: Black Mobility and the Southern White Quest for Racial Control, 1861-1915 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991);
104. Florette Henri, Black Migration: Movement North 1900-1920 (New York: Doubleday, 1975);
105. Daniel M. Johnson and Rex R. Campbell, Black Migration in America: A Social Demographic History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1981);
106. and David E. Bernstein, "The Law and Economics of Post-Civil War Restrictions on Interstate Migration by African-Americans," Texas Law Review 76 (1998): 782-85.
107. Johnson and Campbell, Black Migration in America, 74-75.
108. Johnson and Campbell, Black Migration in America, Ibid., 77.
109. Johnson and Campbell, Black Migration in America, Ibid., 114-23.
110. Johnson and Campbell, Black Migration in America, Ibid., 60-61;
111. Cohen, At Freedom's Edge;
112. Robert Higgs, Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy 1865-1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
113. Price V. Fishback, "Can Competition among Employers Reduce Governmental Discrimination? Coal Companies and Segregated Schools in West Virginia in the Early 1900s," Journal of Law and Economics 32 (1989): 324-41;
114. Cohen, At Freedom's Edge;
115. Higgs, Competition and Coercion.
116. U.S. Census Bureau 2000, Tables 3 and 11a.
117. James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
118. Henri, Black Migration: Movement North, 59-60.
119. Johnson and Campbell, Black Migration in America, 83.
120. Some shortcut advocates argue that rationally ignorant voters can rely on cues from "opinion leaders" more knowledgeable than themselves. I have criticized this theory in Somin, "Voter Ignorance and the Democratic Ideal,"
121. and Somin, "Resolving the Democratic Dilemma.
122. Henri, Black Migration: Movement North, 63-64.
123. For a detailed account of these "emigrant agents" and their role in providing information to southern blacks, see Bernstein, "The Law and Economics of Post-Civil War Restrictions on Interstate Migration by African-Americans," 782-83, 792-802.
124. See also Henri, Black Migration: Movement North, 60-62;
125. Cohen, At Freedom's Edge, 119-27, 259-57.
126. Henri, Black Migration: Movement North, 62-63.
127. Henri, Black Migration: Movement North, 62-63, Ibid.;
128. Bernstein, "The Law and Economics of Post-Civil War Restrictions on Interstate Migration by African-Americans."
129. Henri, Black Migration: Movement North, 57-60;
130. Johnson and Campbell, Black Migration in America, 84-85.
131. Frederick Douglass, Selected Speeches and Writings (1886), ed. Philip S. Foner and Yuval Taylor (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 702 (emphasis in the original).
132. Quoted in Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 164.
133. Henri, Black Migration: Movement North, 168-73.
134. See, e.g., Dye, American Federalism;
135. Weingast, "The Economic Role of Political Institutions.
136. Bernstein, "The Law and Economics of Post-CivilWar Restrictions on Interstate Migration by African-Americans," 784.
137. See also Henri, Black Migration: Movement North, 75-76, 170-71;
138. and Higgs, Competition and Coercion, 29-32, 59, 119-20, 152-53.
139. Michael J. Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874-1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
140. Henri, Black Migration: Movement North, 57-58;
141. Johnson and Campbell, Black Migration in America, 84-85.
142. Fishback, "Can Competition among Employers Reduce Governmental Discrimination?
143. For a general discussion of the ability of migration to reduce discrimination in education, see Robert A. Margo, "Segregated Schools and the Mobility Hypothesis: AModel of Local Government Discrimination," Quarterly Journal of Economics 106 (1991): 61-75.
144. Douglass, Selected Speeches and Writings, 702.
145. It should be noted, however, that its failure to do so was partly attributable to southern state governments' partially successful efforts to reduce black mobility.
146. See Cohen, At Freedom's Edge, 201-72;
147. Bernstein, The Law and Economics of Post-Civil War Restrictions on Interstate Migration by African-Americans, 810-27.
148. See the discussion of retrospective voting in Somin, "When Ignorance Isn't Bliss,"
149. and Somin, "Voter Ignorance and the Democratic Ideal," 427-29.
150. U.S. Census Bureau 2000, Tables 7a and 11a.
151. Somin, "Political Ignorance and the Countermajoritarian Difficulty," 1327;
152. Delli Carpini and Keeter, What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters, 144-45.
153. Sandra Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890- 1912 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996);
154. Pfeifer, Rough Justice.
155. Pfeifer, Rough Justice.
156. For a discussion of one of the best-known efforts to disprove this rationale for lynching, see Patricia Schechter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
157. We have no survey data documenting the precise number of southern white voters who accepted the rape myth. However, contemporary observers believed that it was widely accepted, and politicians routinely exploited it in their campaigns, and as a justification for lynching. See generally Pfeifer, Rough Justice.
158. Numan V. Bartley, The New South, 1945-1980 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 245-60.
159. See discussion in Section III above.
160. For the classic analysis, see V. O. Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Knopf, 1949), chaps. 24-31;
161. see also Earl Black and Merle Black, Politics and Society in the South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 75-77.
162. Robert Nelson, Private Neighborhoods and the Transformation of Local Government (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2005), xiii.
163. Robert Nelson, Private Neighborhoods and the Transformation of Local Government, (2005), xiii Ibid.
164. See generally, Georg Glasze, Chris Webster, and Klaus Frantz, eds., Private Cities: Global and Local Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2006).
165. For a related argument suggesting that private planned communities might improve the quality of decision-making and deliberation relative to government bodies, see Guido Pincione and Fernando Tesón, Rational Choice and Democratic Deliberation: A Theory of Discourse Failure (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 228-47;
166. see also Vanberg and Buchanan, Constitutional Choice, Rational Ignorance, and the Limits of Reason, 186-90, which argues that individuals might make better-informed choices between alternative constitutional arrangements in the market than through voting.
167. Somin, "Closing the Pandora's Box of Federalism.
168. See the discussion of this issue in Section III above.
169. See Bruno Frey, "A Utopia? Government without Territorial Monopoly," Independent Review 6 (2001): 99-112; (Pubitemid 32710758)
170. Bruno Frey, Happiness: A Revolution in Economics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 189-97;
171. and Bruno S. Frey and Reiner Eichenberger, The New Democratic Federalism for Europe: Functional, Overlapping, and Competing Jurisdictions (London: Edward Elgar, 2004).
172. See Erin O'Hara and Larry Ribstein, The Law Market (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
173. For well-known arguments that the political safeguards of federalism make judicial intervention unnecessary in the United States, see Larry D. Kramer, "Putting the Politics Back into the Political Safeguards of Federalism," Columbia Law Review 100 (2000), 215-311;
174. Jesse H. Choper, Judicial Review and the National Political Process (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980);
175. Jesse H. Choper, "The Scope of National Power vis-à-vis the States: The Dispensability of Judicial Review," Yale Law Journal 86 (1977): 1552-84;
176. and Herbert J. Wechsler, "The Political Safeguards of Federalism: The Role of the States in the Composition and Selection of the Federal Government," Columbia Law Review 54 (1954): 543-64.
177. These points are elaborated in greater detail in John McGinnis and Ilya Somin, "Federalism vs. States' Rights: A Defense of Judicial Review in a Federal System," Northwestern University Law Review 99 (2004): 89-130.
178. John McGinnis and Ilya Somin Northwestern University Law Review 99 (2004): 89-130, See ibid.;
179. and Weingast, The Economic Role of Political Institutions.
180. See also James Buchanan and Geoffrey Brennan, The Power to Tax: Analytical Foundations of a Fiscal Constitution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 214-15.
181. See BarryWeingast, "Second Generation Fiscal Federalism: Implications for Decentralized Democratic Governance and Economic Development," draft paper (2007), 13-16, 42-43.
182. BarryWeingast, "Second Generation Fiscal Federalism: Implications for Decentralized Democratic Governance and Economic Development," (2007), 13-16, See ibid.;
183. Somin, Closing the Pandora's Box of Federalism.
184. As I noted above, 70 percent of Americans were unaware of the creation of the new Medicare prescription drug benefit, the largest new government program in forty years.
185. For a particularly influential argument for competitive federalism, see Weingast, "The Economic Role of Political Institutions.
186. Weingast, "The Economic Role of Political Institutions, Ibid.;
187. Somin, Closing the Pandora's Box of Federalism.
188. For a recent restatement of that view, see Douglas Laycock, "Protecting Liberty in a Federal System: The U.S. Experience," in Patterns of Regionalism and Federalism: Lessons for the UK, ed. Jörg Fedtke and B. S. Markesinis (London: Hart, 2006), 121-45.
189. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights.
190. Ilya Somin, "Tiebout Goes Global: International Migration as a Tool for Voting with Your Feet," Missouri Law Review 73 (2008): 1247-64.