Here's something every democratic theorist believes, though many will deny it: understanding and successfully participating in politics requires a minimal amount of intelligence. Some will try to deny that, say, "IQ" is meaningful, but regardless, they all agree with this statement because it's obviously true. The question is where, roughly, is the cutoff. If the cutoff is severe mental disability, that's one thing, but if it turns out that, say, understanding politics enough to vote well requires something like an IQ of 100, that's pretty disastrous for democracy.
Discussions of political ignorance strike people as elitist. The people who write about political ignorance are themselves usually experts in politics and part of the broad political elite. Most researchers emphasize that they are not accusing citizens of stupidity. Rather, as Ilya Somin says, the public is “smart but ignorant”.[I]
That’s a nice thing to say, but it’s not obviously true. Not everyone in the public is smart. There is a distribution of intelligence, whatever that is and however we might try to measure it. Some people have much worse critical reading, critical thinking, and analytical abilities than others. It’s possible that many members of the electorate will never have strong enough intellectual abilities to make good choices about politics.
Intelligence (as measured however imperfectly by IQ tests) is influenced by our environment and circumstances.[ii] But intelligence is largely genetic, as twin and adoption studies overwhelmingly show.[iii] Intelligence is not completely malleable. If it turns out that many members of the electorate are not intelligent enough to make wise political choices, there may be little we can do to fix that.
On the Henmon-Nelson IQ test, medical doctors tend to have IQs of about 120.[iv] As a person’s IQ drops below 110 or 100, it becomes progressively harder for that person to become a medical doctor. In fact, hardly any medical doctors have an IQ lower than 105.[v] A person with an IQ much less than, say, 100 might simply lack the intellectual capacity to understand medicine.
Most people accept this point when it comes to medicine, but similar remarks apply to the social sciences as well. Perhaps it becomes extremely difficult to possess even a rudimentary understanding of economics if you have an IQ below 105. Similar remarks might apply to history, political science, and other areas of knowledge that voters would need to cast informed votes.
Economists Bryan Caplan and Stephen Miller recently tested to see which demographic factors tend to make people think like economists. They found that “intelligence is the single most important determinant of economic beliefs.”[vi] While many factors, including education, race, and gender, seem to affect how people think about economics, intelligence has a much stronger effect. All things equal, the smarter a layperson is, the more likely that person will think about economics the way an economist would; the less intelligent a person is, the more likely it is that this person disagrees with economists about economics.
Democratic enthusiasts advocate having more people participate rather than less; indeed, they want everyone to participate. But it might turn out not merely that many Americans don’t understand politics, but that a large percentage of Americans can’t understand politics. They might lack the intellectual capacity to do so. It might be that many, or even most citizens aren’t smart enough acquire the knowledge needed to evaluate political policies. This is a problem most political theorists overlook or refuse to consider.[vii]
Note that I stress the "might" here. I am not offering an account of what the cut-off is. But it's worth asking yourself where you think it might be and why. How much does a person need to understand to participate effectively in politics, or to vote in a responsible way? What is the minimum IQ (or whatever) a person needs to be able to do that?
One might object: To get good medical care, one doesn’t have to be smart enough to be a doctor; one just needs to be smart enough to select a good doctor. So, one might argue here that voters don’t need to be smart enough to evaluate policies themselves; they just need to be smart enough to pick smarter candidates, candidates who are themselves smart enough to evaluate policies.
However, there are two major problems with this response. First, we have strong evidence that voters are not smart enough to meet even this lower bar. Through a long series of well-replicated experiments, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger have shown that A) the politically incompetent do not know how little they know, and B) they are bad at identifying who knows more than they do. As David Dunning says, “To the extent that you are incompetent, you are a worse judge of incompetence in other people.”[viii] If asked to identify experts, most incompetent people fail. They select those who are slightly more competent than they are, but they do not select highly competent people.[ix]
Second, as a matter of fact, politicians do run on policy platforms. While the Democratic and Republican parties are not radically different from one another, Democrats and Republicans do tend to endorse slightly different political policies. They have ideological bents that dispose them to support some policies over others. If elected, they generally try to implement these policies or act upon these ideologies. Even if voters were good at picking the smartest candidate, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll pick the better candidate. The smarter candidate might still have worse ideas.
I suspect most democratic theorists will mutter the words "heuristics and shortcuts" here, sort of like saying a silent prayer to the Democratic God. But unfortunately, the empirical literature on shortcuts and heuristics does not much support the view that citizens can overcome their informational or understanding deficiencies. So it'd be surprising if it overcomes low intelligence either.
[i] Somin 2013, 89.
[ii] E.g., Anandi Mani, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir, and Jaiying Zhao, “Poverty Impairs Cognitive Function,” Science 341 (2013): 976-980.
[iii] E.g., see Bryan Caplan, 50-1
[iv] Robert M. 2002. "Meritocracy, cognitive ability, and the sources of occupational success." CDE Working Paper 98-07 (rev). Center for Demography and Ecology, The University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Bryan Caplan and Stephen Miller, “Intelligence Makes People Think Like Economists: Evidence from the General Social Survey,” Intelligence 38 (2010): 636-647.
[vii] However, see Thomas Christiano, “Knowledge and Power in the Justification of Democracy,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 79 (2001): 197-215.
[viii] Natalie Wolchover, “People Aren’t Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say,” URL=< http://news.yahoo.com/people-arent-smart-enough-democracy-flourish-scientists-185601411.html>
[ix] See, e.g., Mato Nagel, “A Mathematical Model of Democratic Elections,” Current Research Journal of the Social Sciences 2 (2010): 255-261; Ehrlinger, Joyce, Kerri Johnson, Matthew Banner, David Dunning, and Justin Kruger (2008), “Why the Unskilled are Unaware: Further Explorations of (Absent) Self-Insight Among the Incompetent,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 105 (1), 98- 121; Dunning, David, Kerri Johnson, Joyce Ehrlinger, and Justin Kruger (2003), “Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence,” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12 (3), 83-86; Kruger, Justin, and David Dunning (2002), “Unskilled and Unaware—But Why? A Reply to Krueger & Mueller,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82 (2), 189-192; Kruger, Justin, and David Dunning (1999), “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77 (6), 1121-1134