Rick Shenkman reminds us that voters are “grossly ignorant” about many issues. Now that the Cold War is over, we don’t have to worry about voters not knowing about “throw weights” and such, but I think it’s still probably a bad thing that “six in ten young people (aged 18 to 24) could not find Iraq on the map,” that people overestimate by a factor of 50 the percentage of the federal budget that is spent on foreign aid, and so forth.

This sort of thing is all well known to political scientists, but Shenkman is doing us all a service by presenting these survey findings so vividly.

The news is pretty bad. According to Shenkman, politically involved Americans (for example, those who watch Bill O’Reilly or Jon Stewart, or listen to Rush Limbaugh) have more political knowledge than the average American, but still are more ignorant about many issues than we might hope.

There’s one part of Schenkman’s article that I’m suspicious of, though, where he writes:

[Myth] 4. Voters today are smarter than they used to be.

Actually, by most measures, voters today possess the same level of political knowledge as their parents and grandparents, and in some categories, they score lower. In the 1950s, only 10 percent of voters were incapable of citing any ways in which the two major parties differed, according to Thomas E. Patterson of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who leads the Pew-backed Vanishing Voter Project. By the 1970s, that number had jumped to nearly 30 percent.

But . . . the 1970s were a low point in ideological partisanship, a period memorably summarized by the title of David Broder’s 1972 book, “The Party’s Over.” If Schenkman wants to compare “today” to the past, why is he using the 1970s rather than the 200s?

I’m not saying that Schenkman’s main points are wrong, I’m just suspicious of the evidence he’s using for point 4 in his article.

But voters, even if individually ignorant, can still vote somewhat coherently. Basically, a lot of people have clear enough ideologies that they will vote for the party that better represents their goals. Remember, we’re voting for people to run the government and make these choices for us. All you really need to do as a voter is choose between candidates in the primary and the general election.

Bartels’s synthesis

Larry Bartels does an excellent job of incorporating Shenkman’s findings into the general understanding in political science of how people make voting decisions. Bartels’s article is called “How stupid are we, really?” and he talks about how it is reasonable for voters to make their decisions based on partial information (as noted above, delegating the actual policy decisions to the politicians whom they elect) but at the same time elections can be determined by short-term economic conditions (which influence the voters in the middle to go one way or another). To put it another way, it’s not really clear the ways in which outcomes would be better if voters were better informed. As many people have pointed out over the years, politicians are more politically informed than (most) voters but they don’t always make good decisions. Voting provides a feedback mechanism but it’s pretty crude.