Can ignorance promote democracy

The fish, like humans and other animals, have certain sensory biases, Couzin explained. Just as humans have an innate reaction to the color red , golden shiners are naturally attracted to yellow, so the fish trained to expect food by following yellow dots were more strongly drawn to their target than those trained with blue dots. When the researchers brought the two groups together and the yellow-target fish were in the minority five yellow to six blue , the school of golden shiners followed the smaller group about 80 percent of the time.

With 10 untrained fish, the group chose the blue target more than 60 percent of the time, showing that ignorant individuals really can promote a more democratic decision. Couzin is interested in determining how widespread the phenomenon is by testing the decision-making model in other groups, including humans. A human connection? You can see his research on his Academia. He writes at www. Great article, Simon — acknowledging that politics and Democracy seldom work hand-in-hand to produce a society whereby Fairness and Justice is achieved by ALL.

Your email address will not be published. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Search for:. Blog Admin March 16th, On the complex relationship between political ignorance and democracy 7 comments 1 shares Estimated reading time: 5 minutes.

About the author Blog Admin. Pingback: People are more clued up about science than you might think - CrazyMega. Pingback: Interesting elsewhere — 12 June Public Strategist. Leave a Comment Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. No such thing exists. The professional classes often have such inner distance. But more importantly, he means that the politician keeps distance from himself, from the temptation to turn his political activity into a means of self-aggrandizement.

Distance brings both the objectivity required for sound judgment and the self-control required for dedication to a cause. Responsibility: For Weber, a sense of responsibility is the decisive virtue of the worthy political leader.

Again, this is not simply a question of taking responsibility after the fact, but of acting responsibly in the face of the facts. To what is the political leader actively responsible? Politics is for Weber a deeply ethical endeavor, and no less so for its being complicated by our allegiance to conflicting and irreconcilable value orientations, as well as by the inevitable involvement of extra-ethical interests.

It is precisely these conflicting and irreconcilable demands upon politics that make responsibility the preeminent political virtue. There is nothing to be responsible for if commitment is absent. But commitment without a realistic assessment of consequences, and commitment that ignores the moral complexity and ambiguity inherent in all human endeavors, becomes irresponsible. As Frank Knight liked to put it, the only responsible principle is to gather as many principles as possible and to strike a compromise among them as best one may.

In sum, the responsible political leader is a person who, in the face of public ignorance and indifference, acts out of responsibility to the future of the nation and if governing a world power to world history, on the basis of a dispassionate assessment of the situation, and in full cognizance of the force of rival ethical claims.

But it takes only a little reading in the genre of biography to realize that history has turned up such individuals at a surprisingly generous rate. And it takes only a little reading in comparative history to realize that, although there is an irreducible element of fortune in their emergence, it is not a random occurrence, but is facilitated or suppressed by the reigning cultural and institutional environment.

How might such extraordinary individuals be recruited, trained, and selected for by the democratic process? The key lies in the organization of democracy, and in particular by the preselection of candidates by the political system. According to Weber, the two institutions most responsible for training and vetting aspiring leaders are parliament and political parties. The question naturally divides into two parts. First, what kind of candidates does the system select for, and second, what kind of choices does the electorate make between these candidates?

I will not attempt an answer to the second part of this question. However, a few remarks are in order regarding what, according to Weber, a voter is to focus on in making his choice, and thus what kind of information is required for him to choose intelligently.

In any democracy, the electorate is finally called upon to make a selection among candidates for the highest executive and legislative offices of the land. The state of public knowledge thus cannot be wholly irrelevant to the good operation of the system. Beyond this, however, the position of the electorate is analogous to that of the political leader himself, in that what is demanded of it is not so much to be a judge of things, but of people.

That is, what is most crucial is not that the electorate be a good judge of policy, but a good judge of political character. More often than not, the candidate for political leadership maintains a studied vagueness on policy proposals. Only the underdog wishes to debate the issues, and only because the preferred means of victory have failed him. I will not attempt such an assessment here. However, it bears mentioning that there are, to my knowledge, no careful students of American politics who argue that over, say, the last four or five Presidential elections, the electorate has palpably made the wrong choice every time.

This may not mean much. The system of candidate recruitment and selection winnows the field down to a few from out of potentially millions. And about this part of the question, something more substantial and dispassionate may be said. And if there is a pressing problem in American democracy, here is where it lies. Long-time observers uniformly note a general decline in recent years in the quality of the members of the legislature in terms of experience, ideas, and political skills.

The candidates are less politically experienced, more ideological, less able to enter into contrary points of view, and therefore less prepared to strike responsible compromises. What has happened? A comprehensive answer would be lengthy and complex, emphasizing cultural as well as institutional factors. The first is the exorbitant cost of elections for higher office. The pain of fundraising has proven a strong barrier to the recruitment of otherwise viable political leaders into the political system, and has led a number of very able legislators to drop out of it.

The political system swings toward those with high fundraising capacity. In consequence, we see more and more candidates coming from the ranks of independently wealthy businessmen who come prefunded , legacies with established political names , and celebrities with star power. Unfortunately, fundraising capacity is not the same thing as leadership capacity, and even worse, we have seen that those blessed with generous funding are anxious and able to shoot straight for higher office, overstepping the lower offices in which leadership capacity is tested and cultivated.

Finally, the high cost of campaigns, coupled with limits on individual campaign contributions, require the typical member of Congress, for example, to spend a significant chunk of each working day raising funds for the next election, which greatly cuts down on the time he or she can devote to actual legislative work.

The result is that there is less political talent entering the system, less involvement of parties and low-level government bodies in weeding out the politically reckless, less political experience and responsibility coming to Washington and the statehouses, and less policy experience as opposed to fundraising experience accumulated by politicians while they are in office.

The second development has been the weakening of the political parties. A variety of causes can be adduced for this, but I mention only the cause that was most avoidable and most easily reversible: the reform of the primary system. In the name of more direct democracy, we now have a party system in which presidential nominees are effectively determined before the nominating conventions even meet, greatly weakening the ability of party regulars to direct nominations toward individuals with proven political experience and ability, diminishing the necessity of striking a compromise within the party, and loosening collective party responsibility for a platform.

As Somin and Friedman see it, democracy is a political system designed to secure voter control of public policy. Unfortunately, none of the proposed cures hold out much promise of working, and the very viability of democracy seems to be in doubt. But if Weber is right, Somin and Friedman are barking up the wrong tree. Under democracy as Weber presents it, policy is not the purview of the voter who pays more attention to character. It is the purview of the bureaucracy, the trained specialists.

Bureaucracy is an imperfect device for certain, but it seems the best of bad alternatives. While this defuses the problem of public ignorance, it is by itself no great point in favor of democracy. The bureaucracy will more or less continue about its business whatever the political system grafted onto it.

Nevertheless, for the ultimate fate of the political community, it matters very much what political system it is paired with. For it is the political system that determines the kind and quality of political leadership that will be selected, and it is political leadership that is relied upon to keep the bureaucracy roughly oriented toward the public welfare, and the public roughly oriented toward a common political-cultural ideal.

And it is on this matter of selecting for political leadership that, if Weber is right, political democracy shows its superiority to all comers. In the final analysis, the organization of our political parties and our campaign finance system may be in much more urgent need of a cure than the political intelligence of the average American voter.

Durkheim, Emile. The Division of Labor in Society, ed. Lewis A. New York: Free Press. Friedman, Jeffrey. Knight, Frank H. Risk, Uncertainty and Profit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Novak, William J. Somin, Ilya. Democracy in America, ed. Weber, Max. Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ellis Ave. Wang for helpful comments, and the Institute for Humane Studies for a Humane Studies Fellowship, which partly supported the writing of this paper. West said, "We definitely want to caution against jumping to the conclusion that the whole Occupy Wall Street movement can learn something from the study.

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