Zachary Callen’s thoughtful review of my book summarizes its central claims and raises several questions regarding its implications. My principal argument was that high levels of voter ignorance prevent society from controlling democratic governments. While many argue that deliberation, party cues, preference aggregation, and various heuristics compensate for high levels of public ignorance, I argue that voters do not understand or direct democratic states’ actions, and public opinion is often manipulated by elites that voters are supposed to control. I use this theory to explain how conservative Republicans created the American bureaucratic regulatory state in the late nineteenth century to minimize popular influence over economic policy. Callen asks how this argument influences our understanding of state formation beyond the American case, why rival elites do not counteract false information, and what can be done to improve democratic responsiveness.
First, Callen asks about my argument’s implications for other cases beyond the United States. I believe that the theory’s generality makes it applicable beyond 19th century America. Unlike the nineteenth-century’s high levels of electoral engagement, contemporary voters are generally ignorant and apathetic, and the scope of the state’s actions has expanded dramatically. These changes indicate that contemporary political elites may enjoy greater levels of autonomy from society because voter apathy and the larger number of policies pursed by Western democracies frustrate anyone’s efforts to become politically informed. This indicates that the book’s theory is widely applicable, even if the specific sequence of historical events that I argue created the American regulatory state is not.
Second, Callen asks why rival elites often prove powerless to counteract incorrect information. If certain elites disseminate misleading and false information, why cannot rival elites popularize different information to “correct” public opinion? I think this is a fascinating question that I simply cannot answer. What we observe in empirical reality is a version of Gresham’s Law, whereby simple and misleading explanations drive out those that are complex and accurate. However, I do not see any way to accurately predict or explain why some simplified messages are more powerful than others.
If voters are too ignorant to control the state’s actions and their opinions are often manipulated by misleading information, Callen asks, what is to be done? Is there any way to improve democratic responsiveness given the knowledge problems voters face? Unfortunately, I believe that the information problems voters confront cannot be overcome by education, deliberation, or heuristics. Rather than trying to reach some unattainable informational ideal that even experts do not meet, complex societies may have epistemic justifications for maximizing the scope of institutions that minimize the amount of knowledge needed by citizens to make rational decisions. I discuss how such institutions might function elsewhere (see “Democracy, the Market, and the Logic of Social Choice,” American Journal of Political Science 58 [2014]: 637–52). Unfortunately, the vast scope and complexity of modern states’ decisions create intractable barriers to anyone’s efforts to become politically informed, ensuring that even educated and engaged citizens struggle to understand and influence public decisions.
