CIAO DATE: 10/2009
September 2009
Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University
Three uncontroversial points add up to a paradox: 1) Almost every democratic theorist or democratic political actor sees an informed electorate as essential to good democratic practice. Citizens must know who or what they are choosing and why—hence the need for expansive and publicly funded education, and the rights to free speech, assembly, press, and movement. 2) In most if not all democratic polities, the proportion of the population granted the suffrage has consistently expanded, and seldom contracted, over the past two centuries. Most observers agree that expanding enfranchisement makes a state more democratic. 3) Most expansions of the suffrage bring in, on average, people who are less politically informed or less broadly educated than those already eligible to vote. Putting these three uncontroversial points together leads to the conclusion that as democracies become more democratic, their decision-making processes become of lower quality. That conclusion presumably is controversial, and few have addressed it since the early nineteenth century. This paper explicates the historical trajectory of democratization in the United States (although the basic argument is not specific to that country). It then offers several plausible explanations for the paradox: voters are not really that ignorant; the United States is not really a democracy; institutions or electoral rules substitute for voters’ knowledge; and democracy does not, or does not primarily, need cognitively sophisticated citizens. I offer a few reflections on these explanations, but cannot genuinely dissolve the paradox.
Resource link: If Democracies Need Informed Voters, Why Is It Democratic to Expand Enfranchisement? [PDF] - 77K