1/10/2024 0 Comments Retrospective voting definition![]() According to this view, it is vital to deprive political rights of incompetent citizens in order to prevent them to “exercise political authority over” innocent and competent individuals (Brennan 2016, 17). In contrast to the minimalist definition, Jason Brennan understands competence as having “tremendous amount of social scientific knowledge” (2016, 29). Political scientist Corey Brettschneider also suggests a similar account of competence when he argues that if a citizen has political rights, it means we have already assumed that she is the best judge of her interests (2007, 31). Most political theorists, in principle, accept that only competent individuals should have the political rights although they may disagree on what counts as “competence.” For example, Robert Dahl accepts the minimal conception of competence which is knowing your interests and being able to make decisions about your life (1998, 100). For the very existence of representative democracy, voter competence is a necessary factor. By looking at all these facts, it is preposterous to claim that democracy does not need voter competence in order to work properly. Another piece of disappointing news from empirically minded political scientists is that this trend of political ignorance does not seem to change in the near future. in 1960 that American voters’ political knowledge has not improved (Smith 1989, 3 Achen and Bartels 2016). Voter ignorance is a well-documented subject in political science, and we know since the groundbreaking research of Campbell et al. For many questions, flipping a coin would produce more reliable answers than asking an average American voter on the street (Brennan 2016, 28). They are unable to identify stances of the candidates on important policy issues. Bryan Caplan points out that most voters are “worse than ignorant,” namely irrational and casting their votes accordingly (2006, 2). One of the most important reasons behind democratic malfunction today is public ignorance (see, Bartels 1996 Brennan 2016 Somin 2016 Achen and Bartels 2016). Thus, “even the most discriminating popular judgement can reflect only ambiguity, uncertainty, or even foolishness if those are the qualities of the input into the echo chamber” (Key 1968, 2-3). In short, the input, lack of political knowledge of American citizens, mostly determines the output, a desired political system that benefits the lives of all citizens. Rick Shenkman concludes that mass ignorance is “the most obvious cause” behind the “foolishness that marks so much of American politics” (2008, 123). If political information is the “central resource for democratic participation,” American citizens have serious shortcomings in terms of political resources (Carpini and Keeter 1996, 50). Even more than a decade before Bartels, Michael Margolis stated that “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” (Margolis 1983, 115). As political scientist Larry Bartels points out, “the political ignorance of the American voter is one of the best documented features of contemporary politics” (1996, 194). However, empirically minded political scientists have been studying political behavior of democratic voters for decades, and their findings do not even come close to the popular theory in terms of voter competence. Popular democratic theory assumed that democratic citizens were rational voters who elaborate the positions of candidates on most, if not all, political issues and then vote accordingly (Achen and Bartels 2016, 1-3).
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