If the problem of political ignorance is a tougher nut to crack than conventional wisdom supposes, what can be done about it? Sadly, I don't think there is any definitive solution available. But we can significantly mitigate the problem by making more of our decisions by "voting with our feet" and fewer at the ballot box.

I. Informational Advantages of Foot Voting

In chapter 5 of my book, I explain why two kinds of foot voting have important informational advantages over ballot box voting.  The first is when we vote with our feet in the private sector, by choosing which products to buy or which civil society organizations to join. The other is choosing what state or local government to live under in a federal system - a decision often influenced by the quality of those jurisdictions' public policy.

If you are like most people, you probably spent more time and effort acquiring information the last time you decided which car or TV to buy than the last time you decided who to support for president or governor. Is that because the presidency is less important than your TV, or deals with less complicated issues? Unlikely. It's because when people choose a TV, they intuitively realize that the decision is likely to make a difference. By contrast, when you vote for a presidential candidate, the chance that your decision will affect the outcome is infinitesmally small.

The key difference between foot voting and ballot box voting is that foot voters don't have the same incentive to be rationally ignorant as ballot box voters do. To the contrary, they have strong incentives to seek out useful information. They also have much better incentives to objectively evaluate what they do learn. Unlike "political fans" who can afford to be "rationally irrational" about political information, foot voters know they will pay a real price if they do a poor job of evaluating the information they get.

Consider how people react to those who argue with them about politics and point out flaws in their positions. In most cases, they react with anger or frustration. Rarely will they thank you for helping them to see the truth. It's no accident that social norms frown on arguing about politics and religion in mixed company. By contrast, people are, on average, much more open-minded if you point out to them that they're missing out on a deal in the marketplace. That's because, for most people, having their political views attacked is just psychological pain with little prospect of gain. But information that improves your foot voting decisions is much more useful, and therefore people are more willing to put up with criticism of their views on such matters.

That doesn't mean that foot voters are always well-informed or perfectly unbiased in their evaluation of information. Far from it. But, on average, they do a much better job than ballot box voters do. In the book, I discuss some dramatic examples of foot voters acquiring and effectively using information even under highly adverse conditions. For example, millions of poorly educated and sometimes illiterate African-Americans in the early 20th century Jim Crow South managed to figure out that conditions were relatively less oppressive in the North (and also in some parts of the South compared to others) and migrated accordingly. This, despite the fact that southern state governments deliberately tried to keep them ignorant by impeding the flow of information about job opportunities in the North. Foot voting under federalism did not solve all the problems of oppressed African-Americans in the Jim Crow era. Perhaps nothing could in a society as racist as the early 20th century US. But it did significantly improve their situation compared to what it would have been otherwise. And it is an important example of how foot voters can effectively acquire and make use of information even under highly unfavorable conditions.

In more recent times, some 70 percent of  the public were unaware of the massive Bush Medicare prescription drug plan when it passed in 2003. But, despite the complex nature of the options the plan offered to senior citizens, studies show that most of those eligible for benefits made well-informed decisions about which of several options to choose. I am no fan of that Bush policy; but it is an example of how  people presented with foot voting decisions about a complex  issue like health care do a much better job of seeking out relevant information than those acting as ballot box voters in that same field.

II. Implications for the Role of Government

The informational advantages of foot voting over ballot box voting strengthen the case for limiting and decentralizing government. The more decentralized government is, the more issues can be decided through foot voting. It is much easier to vote with your feet against a local government than a state government (except, perhaps, a very small state), and much easier  to do it against a state than against the federal government.

It is also usually much easier to foot vote in the private sector than the public. A given region is likely to have far more private planned communities and other private sector organizations than local governments. Choosing between the former usually requires far less in the way of moving costs than choosing between the latter.

 Foot voting has significant downsides as well as upsides. In Chapter 5 of the book and in  Part II of this article, I cover several standard objections to foot voting, such as the problem of moving costs, the danger of  "races to the bottom," and the likelihood that political decentralization might harm unpopular racial and ethnic minorities. Each of these concerns is sometimes a genuine problem. But I contend that each one is a less severe challenge than commonly believed. For example, moving costs can be reduced by decentralizing to lower levels of government or to the private sector, and are in any case declining thanks to modern technology.

Political ignorance is, of course, far from the only factor that must be considered in deciding the appropriate size, scope, and centralization of government. For example, some large-scale issues are simply too big to be effectively addressed by lower-level governments. Global warming is a good example. Ultimately, Democracy and Political Ignorance does not provide anything like a complete theory of the appropriate role of government in society. But it does suggest that the informational advantages of foot voting should lead us to limit and decentralize government  more than we would otherwise. Even if you read the book and agree with every one of its arguments, you could still rationally support a larger and more centralized government than I would. But it should be smaller and more decentralized than the government you would choose in a world where political ignorance is not a serious problem.

UPDATE: As with one of my previous posts in this series. I initially neglected to set the system to allow comments (I am used to the system at the Volokh Conspiracy, where allowing comments is the default setting). I apologize for the mistake, which has now been fixed.