Ilya Somin, Democracy and political ignorance: why smaller government is smarter

摘要

For over 50 years, political scientists have systematically built a rich and established empirical literature on American political ignorance. This literature includes dozens of journal articles and several reference-type compilations of public opinion data, including central works like Campbell et al's (1960) The American Voter and Delli Carpini's and Keeter's (1996) What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters. The literature itself is so large that an exhaustive list of important contributors would be difficult, but they include Converse (1964), Althaus (2003), and Shenkman (2008).