Against Democracy: New Preface

In general, the best places to live right now are liberal democracies, not dictatorships, one-party governments, oligarchies, or real monarchies. Yet this does not show democracy is the ideal or even best feasible system. And even if democracy turns out to be the best feasible system, we might be able to improve it with less participation.

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

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, su

This analogy fails. An electorate is not like an individual. It is a collection of individuals with separate goals, behaviors, and intellectual credentials. It is not a unified body in which every person advocates the same policies. Instead, some people impose their decisions on others. If most voters act foolishly, they don’t just hurt themselves.

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?

The political truthiness has been flying thick and fast on this subject for decades now. Politicians are taking claims that have a very tenuous connection to economic reality—claims that feel true—and running with them, sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes because of cynical calculation.

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

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

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 hundr