200+ Academic Citations

Constituents do
not monitor
Congress,
lobbyists do.
Throughout history, the engagement of
citizens in the political process has been a
chimera. In developed countries, national
legislators vote over 1,000 times each year.
Their decisions are based on millions of
pages of bills, proposals, amendments,
hearing transcripts, debates, legislation,
executive memos, staff reports, constituent
mail, lobbyist activity etc. Further the
language is inordinately complex and often
so opaque that few can understand the
significance. Because of this scholars have
suggested that it could be impossible for
even the most active citizens (or even a full-
time professor of government) to actively
monitor the legislative process. This
argument appears to hold even if citizens
were to limit their focus to just single topics
or single legislators. Even beyond
legislatures the general argument applies,
as constituents rarely follow any aspect of
government in detail. More importantly, all
studies - across all time periods - appear to
confirm these claims.

In the United States, this situation is

exacerbated by the fact that lobbyists can
and do follow legislation. Well-paid
lobbyists are issue specialists. Many have
spent decades following single issues on the
Hill as staffers, reporters, etc. and have
been intensely involved in drafting and
crafting such legislation. Unlike the vast
majority of the population, these (often
masters degree) legal-experts / guns-for-
hire readily follow legislation in specific
fields and understand the consequences
these policy proposals. These lobbyists then
report their findings to their employers
(often wealthy groups). Once informed,
these wealthy groups go to work, usually
intimidating the legislators involved,
forcing compliance. Thus, the pervasive
ignorance of the voter is made worse by the
intricate knowledge of policy by wealthy
interests.

By James D’Angelo & Brent Ranalli – August 15,

2020

   
Major Studies
Research to support the idea that citizens do not
monitor legislation or government.

Pew Research 2011 1

Pew Research 2007 2

Intercollegiate Studies Institute 3

Annenberg Public Policy 2010 4

Ipsos Mori 2014 5

Citations
Here we present a collection of studies, citations and
sources to support the notion that citizens do not
(and likely cannot) monitor the legislative process. As
a result popular democratizing or direct democracy
reforms pushed by groups like the Sunlight
Foundation, Transparency International,
GovTrack.org or Represent.Us are likely based on
dangerously flawed, ‘pigs-fly’ type assumptions.
Worse, despite our queries, these groups have
provided no data to suggest the contrary - either that
citizens do monitor government or that transparency
of the legislative process confers benefits to citizens.
Central to this problem are misconceived notions of
accountability.

6
By anything approaching elite standards,
most citizens think and know jaw-droppingly
little about politics.

Robert Luskin 2002

Politics and Identity

7
The political ignorance of the American
voter is one of the best-documented features of
contemporary politics.

Larry Bartels 1996

Uninformed Votes
 8
The number of people who understand
the tax bill, rounded to the closest number,
probably is zero. Zero percent.

Matt Glassman 2017

Spending Bill and Speaker Ryan’s Future

9
Congress is not well understood by the
average citizen.

Walter Oleszek 2011

A Perspective On Secrecy and Transparency

Noam Chomsky 2020 - Twitter Profile 1

 1
While we certainly do not take the
American public as fools, they simply are not
knowledgeable enough about the congressional
process to understand the partisan
maneuvering.

David Rohde 2012

Party and Procedure in the United States
Congress

1
Voters in most countries can identify the
incumbent chief executive, but know little else
beyond that.

Jason Brennan 2016

Against Democracy

1
The fewer the number of taxpayers
affected, and the more dull and arcane the
subject, the longer the line of lobbyists.

Rep Pete Stark 1988

Showdown at Gucci Gulch

1
If six decades of modern public opinion
research establish anything, it is that the general
public’s political ignorance is appalling by any
standard.

Bruce Ackerman & James Fishkin 2004

Deliberation Day
 1
Mass ignorance is the most obvious cause
behind the foolishness that marks so much of
American politics.

Rick Shenkman 2008

Just How Stupid Are We?

1
 Arthur Lupia 2014 - Uninformed 1

1
The typical citizen drops down to a lower
level of mental performance as soon as he
enters the political field. He argues and analyzes
in a way which he would readily recognize as
infantile within the sphere of his real interests.
He becomes a primitive again.

Joseph Schumpeter 1942

Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
 1
It’s odd that while citizens regularly
criticize their lawmakers for being dishonest and
not following through on campaign promises,
surveys routinely show that many citizens don’t
know who their representative is in the first
place (let alone know their position on key
votes).

Tracy Sulkin 2013

Promises Made, Promises Kept

2
The unhappy truth is that the prevailing
public opinion has been destructively wrong at
the critical junctures. The people have imposed
a veto upon the judgments of informed and
responsible officials. They have compelled the
governments, which usually knew what would
have been wiser… Mass opinion has acquired
mounting power in this century. It has shown
itself to be a dangerous master.

Walter Lippman 1955

Essays in Public Philosophy

2
Citizens on average do not have the time,
expertise, resources, and interest to make the
many decisions required in contemporary
governance.

Bruce Cain 2014

Democracy - More or Less
Walter Lippman 1927 - The Causes of Political 2
Indifference

2
The great body of the people are without
virtue and are not governed by any internal
restraints of conscience.

Rufus King 1787

Constitutional Convention

2
Political science tells us that the most
American citizens neither know, nor care about
their political representatives and the policies of
their government, and the most importantly,
these findings are common knowledge among
students of politics.

Michael Margolis 1983

Democracy: American Style
 2
The people do not take any great offense
at being kept out of the government – indeed
they are rather pleased than otherwise at having
leisure for their private business.

Aristotle 350 BC
Politics

Frederic Charles Schaffer 2002 - Clean 2

Elections and the Great Unwashed
 2
We don’t see strong citizen concern about
climate if we look at citizen action. They drive
SUVs, live in enormously polluting houses,
dispose of plastic bottles. To argue that citizens
care and act accordingly is out of step with the
data.

James D’Angelo 2019

Unrig Summit Nashville

2
Public opinion research shows us that the
public will very often provide majority support
for a policy proposal and, simultaneously,
provide majority opposition to that same
proposal.

Richard Longoria 2018

Janus Democracy

2
When voters endure natural disasters they
generally vote against the party in power, even if
the government could not possibly have
prevented the problem.

Christopher Achen & Larry Bartels 2016

Democracy for Realists
 3
The public’s ignorance of political matters
has been repeatedly confirmed ever since
randomized opinion surveys began in the mid-
twentieth century. In 1964, at the height of the
Cold War, only 38 per cent of the American
public knew that Russia was not a member of
NATO. In 1979, only 24 per cent of the public
could summarize the First Amendment. In 1989,
only 57 per cent of the public knew what a
recession was.

Jeffrey Friedman 2013

Political Knowledge

Diana Thomas 2013 - Why Are Voters So 3

Uninformed?
 3
A great vice in most ancient republics was
that the people had the right to make
resolutions for action, resolutions which
required some execution, which altogether
exceeds the people’s capacity. The people
should not enter the government except to
choose their representatives; this is quite within
their reach.

Montesquieu 1748
Spirit of the Laws

3
Democratic publics are not in fact able by
background or temperament to make large
numbers of complex public policy choices; what
has filled the void are well-organized groups of
activists who are unrepresentative of the public
as a whole. The obvious solution to this problem
would be to roll back some of the would-be
democratizing reforms, but no one dares
suggest that what the country needs is a bit less
participation and transparency.

Francis Fukuyama 2014

Political Order and Political Decay

3
Decades of political science research
should have undermined any naive faith in
citizen capacity and made us aware that
pluralist realities often overtake populist ideals

Francis Fukuyama 2015

The Limits of Transparency
 3
Party and machine politics are simply the
response to the fact that the electoral mass is
incapable of action other than a stampede.

Joseph Schumpeter 1943

Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
George Lakoff 2012 - Dumb and Dumber 3
 3
“People in the mass are unconcerned
about details,” NIIC spokesmen have assured
the NAM in convention assembled. “They tend
to think in blurs. They are moved primarily by
simple, emotional ideas. The NIIC will capitalize
upon this fact with an aggressive program
designed to inspire a crusade that will sweep
free enterprise into public favor.”

Stetson Kennedy 1946

Southern Exposure

3
Political scientists are repeatedly
astonished by the shallowness and incoherence
of people’s political beliefs, and by the tenuous
connection of their preferences to their votes
and to the behavior of their representatives.
Most voters are ignorant not just of current
policy options but of basic facts, such as what
the major branches of government are, who the
United States fought in World War II, and which
countries have used nuclear weapons.

Steven Pinker 2018

Enlightenment Now
 3
Since incumbents characteristically win
reelection, constituents may usually be unable
to sanction congressmen at the polls for votes
which are out of keeping with their wishes. The
fact that voters know so little about their
congressman's record, furthermore, can be said
to indicate that they normally do not control his
behavior. Since the congressman rarely receives
any kind of specific constituency guidance on
how to cast a particular vote, another argument
runs, he must fall back on his own devices and is
left quite free to decide as he chooses.

John Kingdon 1989

Congressmen’s Voting Decisions

4
Politicians and pundits like to think that
the voters are as conscious of political issues
and tactics as the experts are, but the real
America is an apolitical country whose citizens
mostly participate – or don’t – in politics every
two or four years on election day.

Robert Kaiser 2009

So Much Damn Money
 Delegates, Trustees & Transpare…
Transpare…

Delegates, Trustees and Transparency 4

 4
But mandated disclosure is like Kennedy
after the Bay of Pigs: “The worse I do, the more
popular I get.” Or like Dr. Johnson’s description
of second marriages: “the triumph of hope over
experience.” For disclosure does not work,
cannot be fixed, and can do more harm than
good. It has failed time after time, in place after
place in area after area, in method after method,
in decade after decade. Mandated disclosure’s
failure is no stranger than its popularity.
Disclosures are the fine print everybody derides,
the interminable terms everybody clicks
agreement to without reading. Disclosures
describe complex facts in complex language;
most people little like the former and little
understand the latter. Decisions requiring
sophistication and expertise cannot be bettered
by pelting the unsophisticated and inexpert with
data.

Omri Ben-Shahar & Carl E. Schneider 2014

More Than You Wanted to Know: Failure of
Mandated Disclosure
 4
E. B. White has defined democracy as a
“recurring suspicion that more than half of the
people are right more than half of the time” This
is necessary to our self-image. But there is a
difference between recurring suspicion and
constant conviction. Issues in these times have
become so complicated that many of them are
fully understood only by experts and by officials
and legislators with staffs of experts at their
disposal. The rest of us are sometimes forced to
accept their decisions on faith or to oppose
them on a hunch that they are wrong.

Kenneth G. Crawford 1971

Is “Liberal Reform” All to the Good?

4
The silent majority is not going to be
present at the open markups of the bills; they
are going to be too busy and too occupied
otherwise. But if you have open markup on
bills...do you not think that the special interests
will be there? The silent majority will not be
there, but the special interests will be well
represented.

Rep George Mahon 1970

Congress & the People
 4
For the most recent edition of “Lie Witness
News,” Kimmel sent his team out to Hollywood
Boulevard to ask people if they had voted in the
midterms. Several of the participants were quick
to decree that they had already gone to the polls
that morning. But there was one major problem:
It wasn’t election day.

Megan McCluskey 2018

Lie Witness News

4
In the United States, most Americans
oppose “welfare” but support “aid to the poor.”
They want to decrease spending on foreign aid
and increase spending on foreign aid. They want
to amend the Constitution but oppose changing
it. They oppose regulations that harm
businesses but they also support regulations
that protect the public. Contradictory findings
like these have puzzled students of public
opinion for decades. On too many issues there
doesn’t seem to be any there “there.” The public
just doesn’t make any logical sense. This leads
many to conclude that the public simply has no
idea what it is talking about.

Richard Longoria 2018

Janus Democracy
 Pew Research Center 2018 4

4
As noted, most voters are not informed,
especially about projects that don’t affect them
very much.

Deborah Walker 2020

Public Choice - Logrolling

4
This is the dirty little secret of our
profession. Among political scientists, that most
voters are woefully ignorant about politics is
completely uncontroversial, and has been for
decades. The survey evidence on this subject is
overwhelming. Yet it is not something widely
disseminated, and a good deal of effort in the
discipline is devoted to scrounging for reasons
why the severe knowledge deficits of voters
don’t matter all that much, and why Washington
will be attentive to voters’ demands even if most
voters are not very well informed and not paying
all that much attention.

Jacob Hacker & Paul Pierson 2010

Winner-Take-All Politics
 5
In transparency models and narratives, the
‘public’, rather than representing an adjective to
describe a certain social and political sphere, is
instead understood as a noun to denote a group
of people. This group of people is assumed to
see its relationship to the state as a contract that
it is willing to enforce by using democratic
leverage to hold government to account and
uphold the principals of good governance. It is
unlikely, however, that such a public can be
found in any pure form outside the abstract
models of political scientists and the discourse
of policymakers (Fenster 2015; Fox 2015). It is
therefore problematic for policymakers to
assign to citizens beliefs, interests and
incentives, and a specific relationship to the
state based on some kind of moral responsibility
or ‘public duty’ to mobilize and participate in
what essentially needs to be a collective action
for change.

Paivi Lujala and Levon Epremian 2017

Transparency and natural resource revenue
management: empowering the public with
information?
 5
Despite the late hour, the marble-lined
committee room is packed to the doors with
‘people,’ and guards are stationed at the
entrance to stop more from pushing in.
Reporters sit cheek-by-jowl around two tables
not far from the door, and the remainder of the
room is filled with lobbyists – lots of lobbyists.
[No constituents are present]

Jeffery Birnbaum & Alan Murray 1988

Showdown at Gucci Gulch (1986 Tax Reforms)

5
Trial judges hand out more prison and jail
time to defendants just before they come up for
reelection...In spite of the tremendous power
wielded by trial court judges the study showed
that “voters are almost entirely uninformed
about judge behavior.” [But] because voters
tend only to evaluate a judge’s performance just
prior to election most judges ignore constituent
preferences while in office then try to portray a
“tough on crime” stance just prior to the
election.

Gary Hunter 2009

Elected Judges More Punitive Just Before
Elections
 Winston Churchill 5

5
Between the lobbyists, who arrived early
and stayed all day seeking scarce committee
room seats, and platoons of staff and press,
Senate committee sessions were well attended –
but not by the general public. Except for those
whose livelihoods depended on it, there wasn’t
much interest in the tax code arcania.

Martha Hamilton 1984 – The Washington Post

Opening Up Congress
 5
In theory, every citizen makes up his mind
on public questions and matters of private
conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for
themselves the abstruse economic, political,
and ethical data involved in every question, they
would find it impossible to come to a conclusion
about anything.

Edward Bernays 1928

Propaganda

*NOTE: Bernays insisted that the public

could be controlled because they are not
just unwilling to follow the inner-workings
of government, but they are also unable to
do so. He was hired by business to fight
back against the New Deal and manipulate
the masses into believing that business not
government was the reason why America
was so successful.

5
There's a good reason why nobody studies
history, it just teaches you too much.

Noam Chomsky 2020

Nobody Studies History
 5
We survey a substantial body of scholarly
work demonstrating that most democratic
citizens are uninterested in politics, poorly
informed, and unwilling or unable to convey
coherent policy preferences through “issue
voting.” How, then, are elections supposed to
ensure ideological responsiveness to the
popular will? In our view, they do not. The
populist ideal of electoral democracy, for all its
elegance and attractiveness, is largely irrelevant
in practice, leaving elected officials mostly free
to pursue their own notions of the public good
or to respond to party and interest group
pressures.

Christopher Achen & Larry Bartels 2016

Democracy for Realists
 5
Democracy for Realists assails the
romantic folk-theory at the heart of
contemporary thinking about democratic
politics and government, and offers a
provocative alternative view grounded in the
actual human nature of democratic citizens.
Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels deploy a
wealth of social-scientific evidence, including
ingenious original analyses of topics ranging
from abortion politics and budget deficits to the
Great Depression and shark attacks, to show
that the familiar ideal of thoughtful citizens
steering the ship of state from the voting booth
is fundamentally misguided. They demonstrate
that voters―even those who are well informed
and politically engaged―mostly choose parties
and candidates on the basis of social identities
and partisan loyalties, not political issues. They
also show that voters adjust their policy views
and even their perceptions of basic matters of
fact to match those loyalties. When parties are
roughly evenly matched, elections often turn on
irrelevant or misleading considerations such as
economic spurts or downturns beyond the
incumbents' control; the outcomes are
essentially random. Thus, voters do not control
the course of public policy, even indirectly.

Christopher Achen & Larry Bartels 2016

Democracy for Realists
 5
We require so many of our institutions to
be chosen through elections, for example, on
the view that “citizen” control will keep officials
hewing closer to the common good, without any
realistic assessment of how the electoral
process actually works; with romanticized views
of how much interest most citizens will take (or
rather, fail to take) in voting for lower-level
offices; and without regard for the degree to
which organized private interests will be able to
dominate in low turnout, low salience elections.

Richard H. Pildes 2013

Romantacizing Democracy

6
In general, voters are ignorant,
misinformed and biased. But there is
tremendous variance. When it comes to political
information, some people know a lot, most
people know nothing and many people know
less than nothing.

Jason Brennan 2016

Against Democracy
Anthony Madonna 2019 - The World is Never 6
Watching

6
Citizens aren’t just ignorant or
misinformed, but irrational. Few citizens process
information with an open mind; most citizens
disregard any information that contradicts their
current ideology. Voters suffer from a wide range
of biases, including confirmation bias,
disconfirmation bias, motivated reasoning,
intergroup bias, availability bias and prior
attitude effects.

Jason Brennan 2016

Against Democracy
 6
“The people,” Roger Sherman told the
Convention, “should have as little to do as may
be about the government. They want
information and are constantly liable to be
misled.”

Neil MacNeil 1963

Forge of Democracy

6
The broad public simply is not able to
monitor congressional activity with nearly the
consistency or intensity of organized interests.

Frances Lee (Princeton) 2019

Select Committee on the Modernization of
Congress

6
A 1973 citizenship examination
administered by the National Assessment of
Educational Progress showed that teenagers
and young adults “know frighteningly little
about the personalities or policies of
governmental leaders, and have not even begun
to understand the workings of the American
political process.”

Ronald Garay 1984

Congressional Television
John Hibbing 2002 - Survey of Americans on 6
their participation in government

6
As a rule, we can suppose. that most
citizens know very little about politics and
policies. Indeed, an informal survey suggests
that most of my professional political science
colleagues do not recall the congressional attack
on the IRS, which was front-page news a few
years ago.

Russell Hardin 2007

The Economics of Transparency in Politics
 6
Earnest and able democratic citizens will
often lack the time to choose representatives
wisely... Moreover, well-meaning but untutored,
unsure, or merely busy, citizens can easily be led
astray by political partisans; and in a
democracy, they tend to be swayed by partisans
who advocate the unlimited expansion of
popular power. Democratic citizens will
constantly be urged, and tempted, to press for
increasing the power of the majority without
being able to assure its wisdom or justice.

Harvey Mansfield & Delba Winthrop 2000

Tocqueville: Democracy in America
 6
The facts are significant. According to the
last census, there are in America over fifty-four
millions of men and women classed as citizens
of twenty-one years of age and over. In the last
election of November, 1920, despite the fact that
we were keyed up by a great war, and despite
the fact that the foreign policy of the nation at
issue was of greater importance than any
problem which had confronted the voter for a
generation, and also despite the large
expenditure of money by the two parties, only
26,000,479 voters went to the polls. In other
words less than one half of those who could
vote, voted. And consider what happens in a
local election. On an average, not more than one
tenth of our voters attend party primaries. In
Boston less than one third of the registered
voters cast their vote for city councilmen or
school committeemen in a recent minor
election.

Samuel Spring 1922

The Voter Who Will Not Vote (Harper’s)
 7
Nowhere and at no time in the history of
the colonies did any newspaper or magazine
report one single assembly debate. We have
noticed a few fragmentary exceptions when
speeches made in assemblies were cited in the
course of political polemics. But these were
individual speeches, not debates, and do not
constitute an exception to the rule. Colonial
editors were…certainly aware that such
communication was possible…They could,
however, have provided an outlet for members
who wanted their speeches published, but this
was not done either. In general, it appears that
the demand did not exist.

J.R. Pole 1983

The Gift of Government

Trevor Corning, Reema Dodin & Kyle Nevins 7

2017 - Inside Congres
 7
Rep. Tauke said “An interest group with a
specific issue will be very motivated to make its
views known and learn what happened. The
general public is not so motivated… But behind
closed doors, lobbyists don’t know everything
that is going on.”

Richard Cohen 1994 p131

Washington at Work: Back Rooms and Clean
Air

*NOTE: This citation refers to the successful

passage of the 1990 Clean Air Amendments
(the most powerful environmental
legislation in the past 40 years), which were
brokered almost exclusively behind closed
doors by Mitchell and others expressly to
avoid the pressure of lobbyists. Full
citation can be found here.

7
Even with the impressive growth of C-
SPAN, which provides, via cable TV, admission to
the House and Senate galleries for more than 54
million homes, the public’s awareness of
Congress remains shallow.

Richard Cohen 1994

Washington at Work: Back Rooms and Clean
Air
 7
Grave responsibilities are imposed upon
the legislator by the fact that the public rarely
has any useful opinion in matter of detail...
Indeed, the ignorance of the public about
[matters] is one of the causes of [secrecy’s]
usefulness.

Robert Luce 1926

Congress: An Explanation

7
When it comes to political information
there are two groups of people. One group is
almost completely ignorant of almost every
detail of almost every law and policy under
which they live. The other group is delusional
about how much they know. There is no third
group... every one of us is almost completely
ignorant of almost every detail of almost every
law and policy under which we live.

Arthur Lupia 2014

Uninformed: Why People Know So Little
About Politics

Senator Howell Heflin 1986 - A Sonnet on 7

Transparency
 Turn the spotlight over here.
Focus the camera at my place.
Pages, please don’t come near,
Otherwise, you just might block my face.

Some have made the worst claim yet,

That viewers will tire from the dull plot,
But I’ll be willing to make a bet
Lobbyists will watch a whole lot.

7
Even world-renowned experts on specific
legal or political topics are almost completely
ignorant of almost all of the details of the many
laws, rules, and regulations under which any of
us live.

Arthur Lupia 2014

Uninformed: Why People Know So Little
About Politics

7
Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, the poll
also showed that many Americans are still not
paying close attention to tax reform. Only one
out of ten reported that they were very familiar
with the tax-reform packages before Congress,
and 36% said they were not familiar at all.

Evan Thomas 1986

Lights, Cameras, Tax Reform!
 7
To some extent, the elites keep the people
from implementing dumb policies, policies the
people support only because they’re badly
informed.

Jason Brennan 2016

What History Teaches Us About Demagogues

8
In theory, democracy is a bulwark against
socially harmful policies. In practice, however,
democracies frequently adopt and maintain
policies that are damaging. How can this
paradox be explained? The influence of special
interests and voter ignorance are two leading
explanations...The central idea is that voters are
worse than ignorant; they are, in a word,
irrational – and they vote accordingly. Despite
their lack of knowledge, voters are not humble
agnostics; instead, they confidently embrace a
long list of misconceptions.

Bryan Caplan 2007

The Myth of the Rational Voter
 8
More systematically, the most recent
National Assessment of Educational Progress
(NAEP) tests found that fewer than a quarter of
eighth- and twelfth-graders nationally could be
considered “proficient or above” in civics, and
the results were even worse for some sub-
groups. This is not a result of recent churns in
federal education law, by the way – these figures
were just as bad, even a little worse, when the
test was first given in 1998. In fact, the 1996
book What Americans Know About Politics and
Why It Matters found the answer to the first part
of its title had always been “not much”; fifty
years of political science survey research had
documented that “levels of information about
public affairs are... astonishingly low.” A famous
study of the 1948 election by Bernard Berelson,
Paul Lazarsfeld, and William McPhee concluded
that “voters today seem unable to satisfy the
requirements for a democratic system of
government.”

Andrew Rudalevige 2017

Too many Americans know too little about
the Constitution
 Voters Worn Out - New York Times 2019 8

8
The last thing people want is to be more
involved in political decision making: They do
not want to make political decisions
themselves; they do not want to provide much
input to those who are assigned to make these
decisions; and they would rather not know all
the details of the decision-making process. Most
people have strong feelings on few if any of the
issues the government needs to address and
would much prefer to spend their time in
nonpolitical pursuits.

John Hibbing & Elizabeth Theiss-Morse 2004

Stealth Democracy
 8
Transparency undermines expertise in a
significant way, because it confines experts
using the kinds of reasons that nonexperts can
understand. But if you think about it for a
second, you should realize that a lot of expert
reasoning is by its nature, incomprehensible to
the public.

C. Thi Nguyen 2021

Transparency is Surveillance

8
Evidence of the people’s desire to avoid
politics is widespread, but most observers still
find it difficult to take this evidence at face
value. People must really want to participate but
are just turned off by some aspect of the
political system, right? If we could only tinker
with the problematic aspects of the system,
then the people’s true participatory colors
would shine for all to see, right? As a result of
this mindset, when the people say they do not
like politics and do not want to participate in
politics, they are simply ignored. Elite observers
claim to know what the people really want – and
that is to be involved, richly and consistently, in
the political arena. If people are not involved,
these observers automatically deem the system
in dire need of repair.

John Hibbing & Elizabeth Theiss-Morse 2004

Stealth Democracy
 8
The House not only has opened up
internally to invite broader participation among
its members but has also opened much of its
operations to inspection by the press and the
public. The problem remains for both members
and the public to monitor committee action in
the House because so much is going on at once.
In 1975 a record 3,881 open meetings of House
committees and subcommittees made the job of
participant, reporter, or citizen most difficult.

Lawrence Dodd & Bruce Oppenheimer 1977

Congress Reconsidered – 1st Ed

8
The creation of a multiplicity of
committees makes it difficult for the public or
the press to follow policy deliberations even if
they are open.

Lawrence Dodd 1977

Congress Reconsidered – 1st Ed

8
Nothing in the empirical record suggests
that citizens are at all well informed regarding
the people, politics, and procedures of
Congress.

Jeffery Mondak 2007

Does Familiarity Breed Contempt?
 8
Voters are woefully uninformed about the
voting behavior of their elected members. This
position is put succinctly by Miller and Stokes
(1963, 47): “Far from looking over the shoulder
of their Congressmen at the legislative game,
most Americans are almost totally uninformed
about legislative issues in Washington.”
Reporting results from a survey of 100 members
of Congress, Matthews and Stimson (1975, 28)
report that “79 percent said their constituents
seldom knew or cared how they voted.” More
recently, Dancey and Sheagley (2013) find most
voters cannot correctly identify how senators
voted on important roll call votes when they
adapt positions contrary to their party. Similarly,
using a survey of 30,000 respondents, Highton
(2018) reports little evidence linking roll call
votes, voter preferences and member vote
share. As voters lack the ability to monitor,
instead of providing an opportunity to express
sincere positions members view roll call votes as
an opportunity to “position-take” for other elites
(Mayhew 1974).

Outside groups consisting of think tanks,

interest groups and campaign donors are far
more reliable in terms of monitoring member
actions. In the contemporary U.S. Congress,
there are over a hundred different interest
groups that track member votes (Davidson,
Oleszek, Lee and Schickler 2013). The result is
that member roll call votes are prominently
featured in a large number of attack ads. A
common tactic is to feature how often a member
voted with an unpopular national figure, like a
President or the Speaker of the House (Carson,
Crespin and Madonna 2014). For example, in
2014, Republicans put out an advertisement
asserting that Rep. John Barrow (D-GA) voted
with President Barrack Obama 85 percent of the
time (Jacobson 2014). And although he
supported Republican John McCain’s
presidential campaign in 2008, Rep. Gene Taylor
(D-MS), was still attacked in campaign ads for
voting with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
82 percent of the time (Taylor 2010).

Michael Lynch, Anthony Madonna & Kisaalita

2018
Broken Record - Transparency, Position
Taking and Recorded Voting in the US
Congress (THE LINKED PAPER (2017) IS
DIFFERENT FROM THE UPDATED VERSION
(2018))

9
Consitituents generally do not and cannot
follow the development of information and
arguments on an issue.

Larry Milbrath 1963

The Washington Lobbyists
 9
Instead, I examined the role of voters’
ignorance of their representatives’ corruption.
American voters are (in)famously uninformed
about politics. What I found is that voters’
inattentiveness to politics is strongly associated
with lower propensity to vote against a corrupt
incumbent.

Marko Klašnja 2017

Voters’ Ignorance
 9
There is then nothing particularly new in
the disenchantment which the private citizen
expresses by not voting at all, by voting only for
the head of the ticket, by staying away from the
primaries, by not reading speeches and
documents, by the whole list of sins of omission
for which he is denounced. I shall not denounce
him further. My sympathies are with him, for I
believe that he has been saddled with an
impossible task and that he is asked to practice
an unattainable ideal. I find it so myself for,
although public business is my main interest
and I give most of my time to watching it, I
cannot find time to do what is expected of me in
the theory of democracy; that is, to know what
is going on and to have an opinion worth
expressing on every question which confronts a
self-governing community. And I have not
happened to meet anybody, from a President of
the United States to a professor of political
science, who came anywhere near to
embodying the accepted ideal of the sovereign
and omni-competent citizen.

Walter Lippman 1925

The Phantom Public
 9
For the real environment is altogether too
big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct
acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with
so much subtlety, so much variety, so many
permutations and combinations. And although
we have to act in that environment, we have to
reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can
manage it.

Walter Lippman 1922

Public Opinion

9
So I have been reading some of the new
standard textbooks used to teach citizenship in
schools and colleges. After reading them I do not
see how anyone can escape the conclusion that
man must have the appetite of an encyclopedist
and infinite time ahead of him. To be sure he no
longer is expected to remember the exact salary
of the county clerk and the length of the
coroner’s term. In the new civics he studies the
problems of government, and not the structural
detail. He is told, in one textbook of five hundred
concise, contentious pages, which I have been
reading, about city problems, state problems,
national problems, international problems, trust
problems, labor problems, transportation
problems, banking problems, rural problems,
agricultural problems, and so on ad infinitum. In
the eleven pages devoted to problems of the city
there are described twelve sub-problems.

Walter Lippman 1925

The Phantom Public
 9
Legislators in Bolivia and Colombia – even
those who strongly favored recorded voting
themselves – described a general lack of public
attention to individual legislators’ voting
behavior. Nevertheless, there are pockets of
interest. Organized interest groups – unions,
business organizations, and farmers’ groups –
sometimes monitor legislative voting, even in
systems where no records are kept, and lobby
legislators and party leaders to support their
demands.

John M. Carey 2009

Legislative Voting and Accountability

9
The usual appeal to education can bring
only disappointment. For the problems of the
modem world appear and change faster than
any set of teachers can grasp them, much faster
than they can convey their substance to a
population of children. If the schools attempt to
teach children how to solve the problems of the
day, they are bound always to be in arrears.

Walter Lippman 1925

The Phantom Public
 9
When Congress is engaged in meaningful
debate, when it is being newsworthy by passing
important legislation and by checking
presidential power, people are least happy with
the institution. One writer correctly observes
“the less people hear from Congress, the higher
Congress’ ratings soar.”

John Hibbing and James Smith 2001

What the American Public Wants Congress to
Be
Full Article
 9
The United States House of
Representatives is among the most transparent
and representative legislative bodies in the
world. All citizens have the right to call or visit
their representative’s offices and offer their
opinions. Television cameras record and TV
stations (and now the Internet) disseminate a
variety of speeches, votes, debates, committee
meetings, and other legislative actions of
lawmakers. Records of representatives’
opinions, statements, votes, and finances are
publicly available and searchable. The floor of
the House of Representatives is a manifestation
of majority ruled politics. Yet even with these
transparent building blocks, the House of
Representatives, like many other systems,
has procedures so complex and evolving that
few individuals are able to fully grasp the
entirety of what goes on and to imagine how to
impact the process.

Trevor Corning, Reema Dodin & Kyle Nevins

2017
Inside Congress

9
Public opinion research shows that voters
are poorly informed about their representative’s
votes on even the most highly visible legislation
(Ansolabehere and Jones 2010; Jones 2011;
Sulkin 2009),

Michael Lynch & Anthony Madonna 2017

Broken Record
Jenkin Lloyd Jones 1957 on the failure of Greek 1
transparency

1
Most Americans have neither the time, the
interest, nor the inclination to monitor Congress
on a day-to-day basis. But lobbyists and activists
do, and they can use the information and access
to ensure that the groups they represent are
well taken care of in the federal budget and the
legal code. This is true not only for lobbies that
want money. On any number of issues, from tort
law to American policy toward Cuba to quotas,
well organized interest groups – no matter how
small their constituencies can ensure that
government bends to their will. Reforms
designed to produce majority rule have
produced minority rule.

Fareed Zakaria 2003

Future of Freedom
 1
The unthinking multitude...domestic
cattle...Laziness and cowardice are the reasons
why such a large part of mankind gladly remain
minors all their lives.

Immanuel Kant 1784

What Is Enlightenment?

1
The mass public contains...a great many
more people who know next to nothing about
politics...The average American’s ability to place
the Democratic and Republican parties and
‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ correctly on issue
dimensions and the two parties on a liberal-
conservative dimension scarcely exceeds and
indeed sometimes falls short of what could be
achieved by blind guessing. The verdict is
stunningly, depressingly clear: most people
know very little about politics.

Robert Luskin 2002 Thinking About Political

Psychology

1
How can citizens control legislators when
most citizens pay scant attention to public
affairs? Why should legislators worry about
citizens’ preferences when they know most
citizens are not really watching them?

Douglas Arnold 1993

Can Inattentive Citizens Control
Representatives?
 1
Efforts to publicize government
performance can become “data dumps” such
that the average legislator or citizen finds it
nearly impossible to find specific, useful
information. There has been an explosion of
data in government. While there is certainly
nothing inherently wrong with providing more
performance data, often the form in which the
data is provided makes it very difficult to locate
specific information. In too many cases,
websites focused on government performance
are simply a collection of long government
performance reports. It requires someone with a
thorough knowledge of the organization of the
jurisdiction (which agency is responsible?) and
the policy area in question (what‘s a good
performance measure?) to find and interpret
these data.

Philip Joyce 2015

The Dark Side of Government in the Sunshine

1
The 1990 Clean Air Act was about 800
pages long, and nonexperts would need a
translator to make sense of it.

Barbara Sinclair 2006

Unorthodox Lawmaking
 1
Politicians know the American people,
millions of them, don’t know very much and
they count on that, and that's why they use
bumper stickers and slogans and they appeal to
fear...You can’t have a rational discussion with
the American people because it goes over their
head...only 2 out of 5 voters can name the three
branches of the federal government.

Rick Shenkman 2016

The Open Mind

1
It is necessary to say that people are
deluded and that the task of leadership is to un-
delude them.

James Traub 2016

It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the
Ignorant Masses

1
Further evidence of the emergence of a
somewhat different institutional climate in
which concerns with restoring decisionmaking
capabilities had begun to compete with
demands for openness, participation, and
decentralization came in 1983, when the return
by the Ways and Means Committee to the
traditional practice of closing bill-writing
sessions to the public excited little interest or
criticism.

Randall Strahan 1989

The New Ways and Means
 1
The problem is, of course, is that if
Americans aren’t paying attention, they can’t
hold anybody accountable...If we use statistics
on what the people don’t know...the statistics
are just appalling.

Rick Shenkman 2008

CNN (How Stupid Are Americans)

1
During election years, most citizens cannot
identify any congressional candidates in their
district. Citizens generally don’t know which
party controls Congress. During the 2000 U.S.
presidential election, while slightly more than
half of all Americans knew Gore was more liberal
than Bush, significantly less than half knew that
Gore was more supportive of abortion rights,
more supportive of welfare-state programs,
favored a higher degree of aid to blacks or was
more supportive of environmental regulation.
When asked to guess what the unemployment
rate was, the majority of voters tend to guess it
is twice as high as the actual rate.

Jason Brennan 2016

Against Democracy

1
Less than 30% of Americans can name two
or more of the rights listed in the First
Amendment of the Bill of Rights.

Jason Brennan 2016

Against Democracy
 1
Things are worse than [survey] numbers
indicate. Simple surveys of voter knowledge —
such as Pew Research Center polls or the
American National Election Studies (ANES) –
tend to overstate how much Americans know.
One reason these surveys overstate voter
knowledge is that they usually take the form of a
multiple-choice test. When many citizens do not
know the answer to a question, they guess.
Some of them get lucky, and the surveys mark
them as knowledgeable. Imagine I administer a
twelve-question test to ten thousand voters, and
each question has three choices for an answer.
Now suppose the average American gets four
out of twelve questions correct. It might be that
the average American knows the answer to four
questions, but this is indistinguishable from
them guessing at random.

Jason Brennan 2016

Against Democracy
 1
But are the people really populists and
would enactment of the populist reform agenda
really make Congress more popular? Recently
collected data suggest the answer to both
questions is no. These data consist of a specially
designed national survey and numerous focus
groups held across the country. In their survey
responses and in their focus group comments,
the people left the clear impression that the last
thing they want is more involvement in the
political process. Accountability and the
representation of varied views were far from
their minds. They did not have a particularly
charitable view of their fellow citizens, and they
certainly did not perceive them as well-situated
to make informed and enlightened public policy
decisions. They betrayed no motivation to study
the issues more, to spend more time listening to
candidate debates, to discuss the issues
themselves, or to be more intimately involved in
any way with the political process.

John Hibbing 2002

How to Make Congress Popular
 1
The evidence is clear, most Americans
know very little about politics and many don’t
have any interest in politics at all. Most
Americans can’t identify which party is in control
of Congress. This makes it difficult for voters to
assign credit or blame for their performance.
They are notoriously bad at estimating how
much is spent on various programs, and they
overestimate the cost of some programs, like the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting, while
underestimating the cost of others, like Social
Security. They are ignorant about the basic
structure of government and can’t identify many
of the rights citizens have or the limits that the
Constitution imposes on the government. They
don’t know what is in specific pieces of
legislation, like the American Reinvestment and
Recovery Act of 2009, and attribute legislation to
the wrong elected official-many believe the
Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was
enacted during the Obama administration. A
majority of Americans incorrectly believed that
President Bush claimed there was a “link
between Saddam Hussein and the September
11 attacks.” Voters can’t hold their elected
officials responsible if they can’t identify their
elected officials, don’t know what is in
legislation, and don’t know which elected
officials supported which government
programs.

Richard Longoria 2018

Janus Democracy
 1
[The people] know nothing about
government or current events. They can't follow
arguments of any complexity. They stuff
themselves with slogans and advertisements.
They eschew fact for myth. They operate from
biases and stereotypes, and they privilege
feeling over thinking. The result is a political
system of daunting irrationality.

Louis Bayard 2008

Too Dumb to Vote

1
Voters consistently misperceived where
candidates stood on important issues.

Larry Bartels 2008

How Smart is the American Voter?

1
The complexity and incoherence of our
government often make it difficult for us to
understand just what that government is
doing... one need look no further than the mind-
numbing complexity of the health-care system,
or our byzantine system of funding higher
education, or our bewildering federal-state
system of governing everything from welfare to
education to environmental regulation. America
has chosen to govern itself through more
indirect and incoherent policy mechanisms than
can be found in any comparable country.

Steven M. Teles 2013

Kludgeocracy in America
 1
Madison’s principal reason for deifying the
Founders was his belief that the people could
not be trusted to intelligently rule themselves.

Michael J. Klarman 2016

The Framers’ Coup

1
Transparency, unlike other forms of
regulation, has a major disadvantage: it
assumes that those who receive the information
released by producers or public officials can
properly process it and that their conclusions
will lead them to reasonable action. However,
the well-known and often-cited findings of
behavioral economics demonstrate that very
often the public is unable to properly process
even rather simple information because of
“wired in,” congenital, systematic cognitive
biases.

Amitai Etzioni 2010

Is Transparency the Best Disinfectant?
 1
One of the folk arguments for electing
government officials is “accountability.” Citizens,
the story goes, need to be able to hold elected
officials accountable, and one way to hold them
accountable is to retain the right to fire and
replace them. But in the case of city treasurers,
it’s easy to measure (much of) the job the
treasurer is doing: just look at the interest rate
on the city debt. But even when such a key
quality index is so easy to measure, voting
citizens do an awful job of keeping the city
treasurer accountable. The better option is to let
other city officials – the elected mayor, the city
council, or maybe the appointed city manager –
pick a treasurer and then keep an eye on the job
she’s doing. Those city officials will surely notice
if the treasurer is saving the city over $200,000 a
year, even if voters are too preoccupied
watching cat videos to do the job.

Garrett Jones 2020

10% Less Democracy
 1
The right of free men to rule themselves by
the ballot seems celestial in its sanction. All
Americans boast of enjoying it. Orators
passionately play the gamut of human emotions
in praise of it until they reach the final note of
ennui. On the Fourth of July we celebrate it
proudly as our heritage and our portion in life.
Indeed, most of us would die to maintain the
right to representation in government. And yet
on the rainy election morning, when “the fate of
the nation hangs in the balance,” from a fourth
to a half of us invariably do not vote. We either
oversleep, and thus are too rushed to catch our
train, or procrastinate until the afternoon and
then completely forget about voting. Some of us
even fail to remember that there was any
election at all!

Samuel Spring 1922

The Voter Who Will Not Vote (Harper’s)
 1
Those who compare the eagerness of the
voter to read the stock ticker or attend sporting
events with his failure to vote, overlook human
nature. We are living in a distracting, harrowing
age, where a great strain is imposed upon us all.
Monotony and nervous exhaustion are the twin
demons of modern-city civilization. We cry out
for relaxation, for relief, for excitement before all
else. Watching the stock ticker affords us the
gambler’s joy and relief. Watching the baseball
scores and parades is a form of amusement that
appeals to those of us who live under the blight
of our modern cities. But voting is a duty. Like
going to school, it is the right thing to do, but it
is neither interesting, exciting, nor enjoyable.
The voter to-day has problems and troubles
enough in order to fight off the undying wolf
from his doorstep, and cannot be expected to
vote unless he is summoned to the polls in some
unmistakable, vigorous manner. We must sadly
remind him that he has one more duty added to
his burden. He must vote as well as pay taxes.
Voting cannot be continued as a side issue or an
act of patriotism.

Samuel Spring 1922

The Voter Who Will Not Vote (Harper’s)
 1
I investigate low levels of political
awareness among Americans. I focus on
whether people understand issues incorrectly or
are simply disengaged and inattentive. There is
an important difference between them. Those
who are uninformed simply do not know, which
would make it easier to turn them into informed
citizens. All that would be needed is for them to
access the right information. For those who are
misinformed, however, it is a tougher task. They
believe that their answer is right, and even
though they are in fact wrong, they are more
willing to fight the truth in order to validate
what they feel is the right answer. I analyze this
phenomenon with Public Mind Polling data from
Fairleigh Dickinson University. I anticipate my
results to show that less use of news media will
decrease a person’s level of knowledge and
increase their degree of disengagement, while
loyalty to a limited number of media sources is
likely to increase a person’s level of
misinformation.

Kyle Priest 2017

Churchill’s Argument Against Democracy: The
Average Voter. Information Levels and News
Sources among Americans
 1
Evidence assembled by behavioral
economists strongly indicates that people are
neither as able to process information nor as
likely to act on it as transparency theory
presumes.

Amitai Etzioni 2010

Is Transparency the Best Disinfectant?

Jack Abramoff on Deceiving Public 2015 1

 1
Nothing strikes the student of public
opinion and democracy more forcefully than the
paucity of information most people possess
about politics. Decades of behavioral research
have shown that most people know little about
their elected officeholders, less about their
opponents, and virtually nothing about the
public issues that occupy officials from
Washington to city hall.

John Ferejohn 1990

Information and the Electoral Process

1
Even if we assume that political
circumstances do actually allow for a politically
unconstrained and informed discussion of
complex issues, as Arias-Maldonado (2007, p.
248) points out, ‘the belief that citizens in a
deliberative context will spontaneously acquire
ecological enlightenment, and will push for
greener decisions, relies too much on an
optimistic, naive view of human nature, so
frequently found in utopian political
movements’.

Mark Beeson 2010

The Coming of Environmental
Authoritarianism (Climate)
 1
Most Americans today have only the most
general sense of the constitutional role that
Congress performs and few citizens have any
clear conception of how Congress carries out its
legislative responsibilities.

Ronald Garay 1984

Congressional Television

1
[Voter’s] opinions flip depending on how a
question is worded: they say that the
government spends too much on “welfare” but
too little on “assistance to the poor,” and that it
should “use military force” but not “go to war.”
When they do formulate a preference, they
commonly vote for a candidate with the
opposite one. But it hardly matters, because
once in office politicians vote the positions of
their party regardless of the opinions of their
constituents.

Steven Pinker 2018

Enlightenment Now
 1
That government by initiative is so
dysfunctional is no surprise. As the Public Policy
Institute for California noted in its October 2012
report “Improving California’s Democracy,” less
than 10 percent of all voters polled—Democrats,
Republican, and Independents—said that they
want the governor and legislature to make the
tough choices involved in the state budget,
while a full 80 percent said California’s voters
should make those decisions through the
initiative process. Yet only one in five voters said
they know a lot about how state and local
governments spend and raise money, and most
“cannot name the largest area of state spending
(K–14 education) or the largest area of state
revenues (personal income taxes).” 64 Direct
democracy in California had gone so awry that
in 2011 The Economist published a cover story
on the initiative process titled “Where It All Went
Wrong: A Special Report on California’s
Dysfunctional Democracy.”

Nathan Gardels & Nicolas Berggruen 2019

Renovating Democracy
Gus D’Angelo 2011 - Nightmare of Initiatives 1

1
The second major theoretical claim of
Downs is that individual citizens have no
incentive even to learn enough to be able to
vote their own interests intelligently...this citizen
also builds opinions on cavalier ‘facts.’

Russell Hardin 2009

How Do You Know?
 1
The questions which really engage the
emotions of the masses of the people are of a
quite different order. They manifest themselves
in the controversies over prohibition, the Ku
Klux Klan, Romanism, fundamentalism,
immigration. These, rather than the tariff,
taxation, credit, and corporate control, are the
issues which divide the American people. These
are the issues they care about. They are just
beneath the surface of political discussion. In
theory they are not supposed to be issues. The
party platforms and the official
pronouncements deal with them obliquely, if at
all. But they are the issues men talk about
privately, and they are the issues about which
people have deep personal feelings.

Walter Lippman 1927

The Causes of Political Indifference
 1
Even if voters were smothered with
“costless” information, it is doubtful that they
would pay attention and process detailed
information about the complexities of public
policy they do not care much about. In contrast,
special interests are “naturally” better informed;
compared to the general public, they get
costless information as a by-product of their
specialized activities, and they have stronger
incentives to invest in costly information
gathering, to pay costly attention to complex
information, and to invest in costly expertise
that allows them to understand such
information.

Susanne Lohmann 1998

Information Rationale For the Power of
Special Interests
 1
The truth is that most citizens pay very
little attention to politics, and it shows. To call
their knowledge of even the most elementary
facts about the political system shaky would be
generous. To take just a few examples, less than
a third of Americans know that a member of the
House serves for two years or that a senator
serves for six. In 2000, six years after Newt
Gingrich became House Speaker, only 55
percent knew the Republicans were the majority
party in the House a success rate only a little
superior to a random guess. Just two years after
he presided over Bill Clinton’s impeachment
trial in the Senate, only 11 percent of those
surveyed could identify William Rehnquist as
chief justice of the United States.

About policy, most voters know even less, and

are prone to staggering mistakes. Roughly half
of Americans think that foreign aid is one of the
two top expenditures in the federal budget (in
reality, it consumes about 1 percent of the
budget). In 1980, in the midst of the Cold War, 38
percent of Americans surveyed believed that the
Soviet Union was a member of NATO the anti-
Soviet defense alliance. Two years after the huge
2001 tax cuts, half of Americans were unable to
recall that there had been tax cuts at all. Most of
the famous “swing voters,” whom journalists
tend to idealize as standing above the fray,
carefully sorting among the strengths and
weaknesses of each party’s offerings, are
actually the least engaged, least well-informed
citizens, reaching a final decision (if at all) on the
flimsiest grounds.
 Jacob Hacker & Paul Pierson 2010
Winner-Take-All Politics

Jason Brennan 2016 - Foreign Policy 1

 1
The reality that most voters are often
ignorant of even very basic political information
is one of the better-established findings of social
science. Decades of accumulated evidence
reinforces this conclusion...The evidence shows
that political ignorance is extensive and poses a
very serious challenge to democratic theory...

When President Barack Obama took office in

2009, his administration and the Democratic
Congress pursued an ambitious agenda on
health care and environmental policy, among
other issues. The media covered both issue
areas extensively. Yet a September 2009 survey
showed that only 37 percent of Americans
believed they understood the administration’s
health care plan, a figure that likely
overestimated the true level of knowledge. A
May 2009 poll showed that only 24 percent of
Americans realized that the important “cap and
trade” initiative then recently passed by the
House of Representatives as an effort to combat
global warming addressed “environmental
issues.” Some 46 percent thought that it was
either a “health care reform” or a “regulatory
reform for Wall Street.” It is difficult to evaluate a
major policy proposal if one does not know
what issue it addresses. In 2003, some 70
percent of Americans were unaware of the
recent enactment of President George W. Bush’s
Medicare prescription drug bill, the biggest new
government program in several decades.

Ilya Somin 2016

Democracy and Political Ignorance
 1
America’s embarrassing little secret...is
that vast numbers of Americans are ignorant,
not merely of the specialized details of
government which ordinary citizens cannot be
expected to master, but of the most elementary
political facts – information so basic as to
challenge the central tenet of democratic
government itself.

Paul Blumberg 1990

What Americans Know about Politics

1
By the mid-1820s, according to historian
Ronald P. Formisano, “the vast majority of
citizens had lost interest in politics. They had
never voted much in presidential elections
anyway, and now they involved themselves only
sporadically in state and local affairs.”

Glenn Altschuler 2001

Rude America - 19th Century Participation
 1
Voting levels in national and state
elections in the new republic had, in fact, never
been high, not even in the years of greatest
partisan contention. Only some sixty-two
thousand voters—fewer than a third of those
who were eligible—cast ballots for presidential
electors in the pivotal election of 1800, and in all
the presidential elections before 1828 the
turnout of eligible voters never exceeded 42
percent.

Glenn Altschuler 2001

Rude America - 19th Century Participation
 1
As Tocqueville remains so important a
spokesman for the forcefulness of popular
democracy in the Jacksonian era, let us note
that the great writer returned to France without
having observed a national election, and that in
the notes he kept while traveling through
America (and while speaking mainly to the most
prominent members of American society) is Joel
R. Poinsett’s answer to the question,” ‘Does the
nomination for President excite real political
passion?’ ‘No. It puts the interested parties into
a grand commotion. It makes the newspapers
make a lot of noise. But the mass of the people
remain indifferent.’“ Indifference, too, is the
theme of a letter written by Tocqueville’s
traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont,
during their American visit. It is a letter that
almost directly contradicts his friend’s appraisal
of the penetration of politics into daily life. A
people with so much free land, wrote
Beaumont, “does not feel the slightest
disposition to be discontent with the
government. Each one, on the contrary, remains
indifferent to the administration of the country,
to occupy himself only with his own affairs.”

Glenn Altschuler 2001

Rude America - 19th Century Participation
 1
[In Greece] negotiations were exposed to
the decisions, at once cumbrous and volatile, of
a body of citizens, who were extremely ill-
informed, subject to gusts of anger,
sentimentality, fear or suspicion, inclined at any
moment to reverse previous attitudes, and
disastrously slow at coming to any decision.

Sir Harold Nicolson 1953

The Evolution of Diplomatic Method

1
Things weren’t perfect in the old days.
Hell, in 1952, there were 4 percent of the
American people in a Gallup Poll that still
thought FDR was president. But I think there
was a moderately increased awareness of the
basics of governance in those days. People had
a little better idea of the Congress and the
Supreme Court and the executive branch, and
they understood the differences. They don’t
anymore, because they’ve been pounded every
day by people whose business it is to distort and
confuse and to drive home a narrow,
substantive viewpoint, rather than educating.
So you don’t get Ed Murrow anymore; you get
Rush Limbaugh, for Christ’s sake.

Rep. Obey 2010

Obey Surveys the House (Politico)
 1
Before assessing the impact of public
perceptions of congressional candidates on
individual vote choice and on electoral
outcomes, I must first document what the public
knows about the candidates. Donald Stokes and
Warren Miller were impressed with how many
voters in 1958 knew nothing at all about the
candidates for the House of Representatives.
Since the publication of their findings, no
evidence has been presented to dispute the
accuracy of this conclusion for the 1958
electorate or to support the view that the level
of public information about congressional
candidates has increased. The burden of proof is
clearly on those who would argue that a
significant part of the public is aware of the
candidates.

Mann 1978
Unsafe at Any Margin

1
Mass public knowledge of congressional
candidates declines precipitously once we move
beyond simple recognition, generalized feelings
and incumbent job ratings

Mann 1978
Unsafe at Any Margin
 1
If nobody else cares about it very much,
the special interest will get its way. If the public
understands the issue at any level, then special
interest groups are not able to buy an outcome
that the public may not want. But the fact is that
the public doesn’t focus on most of the work of
the Congress. Most of the work of the Congress
is very small things... And all of us, me included,
are guilty of this: If the company or interest
group is (a) supportive of you, (b) vitally
concerned about an issue that, (c) nobody else
in your district knows about or ever will know
about, then the political calculus is quite simple.

Rep. Vin Weber (R-Min) 1995

Speaking Freely (Schram)

1
Throughout the first 150 years of the
federal government, access to government
information does not appear to have been a
major issue for the federal branches or the
public.

Austin Sarat 2018

Is full transparency good for democracy?
 1
Transparency is not a viable substitute for
regulation. Regulation is needed to ensure that
the information disclosed through transparency
is accurate and accessible. Moreover,
transparency's effectiveness in achieving
accountability requires conditions of civic and
democratic engagement that do not hold in
practice. When there are compelling reasons to
advance a particular public good, transparency
can help regulation but cannot replace it.

Amitai Etzioni 2015

The Limits of Transparency

1
Citizens are not strongly attached to
representative democracy’s processes and
norms. Preferences for more participatory
opportunities and democratic deliberation are
shallow at best.

Kathryn VanderMolen 2017

Reconsidering Preferences for Less Visible
Government
 1
Much has been written about public
alienation from the public affairs process
(Berman 1997), and the literature usually
assumes that if only the right vehicle for
empowerment and engagement were offered,
citizens would lose their cynicism toward
government and actively support democratic
processes. However, theorists need to
acknowledge that working out policy decisions
and implementation details over a protracted
series of meetings is an activity that most
citizens prefer to avoid. Where communities are
complacent, there is a strong argument for top-
down administration simply on the grounds of
efficiency. Lawrence and Deagen (2001) allude
to this in their study of public participation
methods, suggesting that in cases in which the
public is likely to accept the mandate of an
agency decision maker, a participatory process
is not necessary. Williams et al (2001) show that,
although members of the public indicated intent
to participate, very few (less than 1 percent in
their study) followed up by phoning for more
information to join a participatory process.
Members of the public might prefer to pay taxes
to hire an astute public administrator to do the
decision making rather than personally allocate
the time to get involved in the governing
process.

Renee Irvin & John Stansbury

Citizen Participation in Decision Making: Is It
Worth the Effort?
 1
Evidence from recent presidential
campaigns has done little to rehabilitate the
American voter’s image. For example, a 1992
report by the Center for the Study of
Communication at the University of
Massachusetts found that while 86 percent of a
random sample of likely voters knew that the
Bush’s family dog was named Millie and 89
percent knew that Murphy Brown was the TV
character criticized by Dan Quayle, only 15
percent knew that both candidates favored the
death penalty and only 5 percent knew that
both had proposed cuts in the capital gains tax.
There is seemingly no end to the examples one
can find to illustrate the public’s ignorance of
politics. The single most commonly known fact
about George Bush’s opinions while he was
president was that he hated broccoli. More
people were able to identify Judge Wapner (host
of the television series, The People’s Court) than
Chief Justices Burger or Rehnquist. More people
know John Lennon than Karl Marx, or know Bill
Cosby than either of their U.S. senators. More
people know who said “What’s Up Doc,” “Hi Yo
Silver,” or “Come Up And See Me Sometime”
than “Give Liberty or Give Me Death,” “The Only
Thing We Have To Fear Is Fear Itself,” or “Speak
Softly And Carry A Big Stick.” More people knew
that Pete Rose was accused of gambling than
could name any of the five U.S. Senators
accused of unethical conduct in the savings and
loan scandal. And so on.

Delli Carpini 2005

What Americans Know about Politics
Jimmy Kimmel - Congress for a Cookie 2017 1

1
In other words, lawmakers mandating
disclosure are grazing a public commons –
people’s attention. Each mandate draws a bit of
this resource, degrading the others. Lawmakers
never consider this when mandating a
disclosure, since they are focused on the
immediate problem before them. Yet so many
law-makers are trying to solve so many
problems with disclosure that the already
overgrazed commons becomes daily more
depleted.We are often asked what should
replace mandated disclosure. If mandated
disclosure does not work, little is lost in
abandoning it. And if mandated disclosure
cannot work, the rational response is not to
search for another (doomed) panacea, but to
bite the bullet and ask which social problems
actually need a regulatory response and what
response might actually ameliorate the
problem.

Omri Ben-Shahar & Carl E. Schneider 2014

More Than You Wanted to Know: Failure of
Mandated Disclosure
 1
Two experts in public opinion and political
behavior find that many citizens are remarkably
informed about the details of politics, while
equally large numbers are nearly ignorant of
political facts. And despite dramatic changes in
American society and politics, citizens appear
no more or less informed today than half a
century ago. Michael X. The authors
demonstrate that informed persons are more
likely to participate, better able to discern their
own interests, and more likely to advocate those
interests through political actions. Who, then, is
politically informed? The authors provide
compelling evidence that whites, men, and
older, financially secure citizens have
substantially more knowledge about national
politics than do blacks, women, young adults,
and financially less-well-off citizens. Thus
citizens who are most disadvantaged socially
and economically are least able to redress their
grievances politically.

Delli Carpini & Scott Keeter 1996

What Americans Know about Politics
 156
Only 13 percent of the more than 2,000
political questions examined could be answered
correctly by 75 percent or more of those asked,
and only 41 percent could be answered by more
than half the public. Many of the facts known by
relatively small percentages of the public seem
critical to understanding—let alone effectively
acting in—the political world: fundamental rules
of the game; classic civil liberties; key concepts
of political economy; the names of key
representatives; many important policy
positions of presidential candidates or the
political parties; basic social indicators and
significant public policies.

Delli Carpini & Scott Keeter 1996

What Americans Know about Politics

157
Then there are countless programs that
are not secret but that are too complicated and
numerous for the public to pay attention to –
from E.P.A. regulation to quantitative easing…
This puts even more pressure on the first prong
of the paradox. If much (most?) of government
activity remains invisible to the public, how can
democratic accountability work? The answer, I
think, is that political accountability in modern,
large-scale democracies rarely takes place
through informed public monitoring of specific
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