I think most people are bad at politics and politics is bad for most of us, yet I am not arguing that therefore we should have government do less (or more).

The reason I am interested in the rights to vote and hold office is that these rights—unlike what I am calling the civil or economic liberties—are primarily rights to exercise or attempt to acquire power over others. Our rights of free speech generally give us power only over ourselves, while rights to vote typically give us—as collectives, if not

In the Brexit referendum, “Leave” won by a slim margin. A month before the Brexit vote, the polling form Ipsos Mori discovered that the British public was systematically misinformed about the facts relevant to the decision. For instance, Leave voters believed that EU immigrants comprised 20 percent of the UK’s population. Remain voters estimated 10

American revolutionary and president John Adams said, “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting,

The problem is (as I will argue at length) that universal suffrage incentivizes most voters to make political decisions in an ignorant and irrational way, and then imposes these ignorant and irrational decisions on innocent people. The only thing that could justify unrestricted, universal suffrage would be that we cannot produce a better-performing

On average, high information voters, regardless of their background demographics or their background political affiliation, support free trade and increased immigration.

If Mill’s hypothesis is wrong and Schumpeter is right, we must ask some hard questions: How much do we really want people to participate in politics? How much should people even be allowed to participate?

Bryan Caplan has proposed a national “Voter Achievement Exam.” Each year (or maybe before an election) the government offers a voluntary test which covers basic political information and basic social scientific matters. Citizens who take the exam get a cash prize, pays a thousand dollars for getting 90–100 percent of the questions right, five

Enfranchisement lottery: Electoral cycles proceed as normal, except that by default no citizen has any right to vote. Immediately before the election, thousands of citizens are selected via a random lottery to become prevoters. These prevoters may then earn the right to vote, but only if they participate in certain competence-building exercises,