Joshua Holland: Are Americans Too Stupid for Democracy?

In 2011, Newsweek asked 1,000 Americans to take the standard US Citizenship test, and 38 percent of them failed. One in three couldn't name the vice president. A 2009 study in the European Journal of Communications looked at how informed citizens of the US, UK, Denmark and Finland were of the international news of the day, and the results weren't pretty. Overall, the scholars wrote, the Scandinavians emerged as the best informed, averaging 62-67 percent correct responses, the British were relatively close behind with 59 percent, and the Americans lagging in the rear with 40 percent. We didn't fare much better, when it came to domestic stories. Widespread ignorance of objective reality, poses a genuine threat to democracy. The people of the United States have ignorance in abundance. The way representative democracy is supposed to work is pretty simple. You protect the fundamental rights of the minority, so it doesn't become two wolfs and a lamb voting what to have for dinner, and then the majority of citizens, acting in their own rational self interest, elect representatives who will pursue the greatest good for the greatest number of citizens. That's the theory, but rational is a key word in that formulation. What happens when lots of citizens don't have a solid grasp of what's going on in the real world? Consider some examples that are especially relevant to our current political scene. People Don't Recognize Their Lack of Competence, Can't Judge the Competence of Politicians. Psychologist David Dunning of Cornell, and Justin Kruger of NYU, conducted a series of experiments, showing that incompetent people vastly overrate their own abilities. For people at the bottom, who are really doing badly, those in the bottom 10th or 15th percentile, think their work falls in the 60th or 55th percentile, so, above average. Dunning told the website Life's Little Mysteries. They do just as badly evaluating the competence of others, which poses a problem in a representative democracy. Or, as the Daily Mail put it in typical tabloid fashion, the theory of democracy has an unfortunate flaw, that most of the public are just too stupid to pick the right candidate. Dr Mato Nagel, a sociologist in Germany, recently implemented Professor Dunning and Professor Kruger's theories by computer simulating a democratic election. In his mathematical model of the election, he assumed that voters' own leadership skills were distributed on a bell curve, some were really good leaders, some really bad, but most were mediocre, and that each voter was incapable of recognizing the leadership skills of a political candidate as being better than his or her own. When such an election was simulated, candidates whose leadership skills were only slightly better than average always won!