Representative democracies do not simply impose the will of the people. They over-perform, producing better policies than the people actually want because elites keep the masses in check (and vice versa). 

But the new wave of populism through Europe and North America threatens to upset the balance. We are witnessing a rising tide of nationalist populism. 


Incentives, rewards, and power

Whether you use "populist" as a compliment or an insult depends a great deal on what you think makes "populism" tick. 

If you think populist movements are about the disaffected and left-behind forcing their governments to help them, you'll like populism.

But if you think—as I do—that populist movements consist of misinformed people pushing for counterproductive policies, policies that will hurt them rather than help them—then you'll sigh with relief when such movements fail, as they usually do in the end.


Populist waves tend to be made up of low information voters.”   — Jason Brennan

But economists prefer to think in terms of incentives. In particular, people behave (and misbehave) as they do because they're incentivized to do so by the way we distribute political power.


Individual voters aren't rewarded for being knowledgeable or thinking carefully about their votes; they aren't punished for being misinformed or indulging delusions. 

Averaging ignorance (the Brexit vote?)

To illustrate, imagine you were in a 1,000-student class and the professor announced a final exam. But suppose she adds, "I'll grade each of you, but instead of being awarded your own grade, I'll average all the grades together, and you'll each receive the class average." The other students and you probably wouldn't study much, or might not bother to focus on the more challenging material presented in lectures. The class average could easily wind up being an F.


Voters know who the president is and not much else. They can't estimate the unemployment rate within five percentage points. They don't know how much money the government spends on different programs, or what the government did last year. 

After the Brexit vote, we discovered that "leave" voters who wished to flee the European Union greatly overestimated the number of immigrants in the U.K. and greatly underestimated how much foreign investment comes from the E.U.

Democracies do sometimes collapse when populist demagogues rise to power.”   — Jason Brennan


It's not stupidity

It's not that citizens are stupid; it's that they just don't care — and that's a rational response to the incentives democracy creates. 

Since none of our individual votes matter except as part of the collective majority, it's easy to conclude that we can afford to remain ignorant, or indulge irrational and false political beliefs. In fact, understanding how to vote well—whether politicians deserve to be kicked out and replaced—requires tremendous knowledge. One needs to know:

 1) who has been in power, 

2) what they had the power to do, 

3) what their options were, and


It's tempting to view populist movements as the people "taking back" their government, rebelling against corrupt and incompetent leaders. But this gives the movements more credit than they deserve. 



To know which policies would help his hometown, he'd need significant knowledge of economics, sociology, and related disciplines. If you have felt ill for the past month that does not magically enable you to self-diagnose that you have cancer, nor does it magically imbue you with the medical knowledge to treat your cancer.

Elitism vs. Populism



As a committed "small-d democrat," Gilens is upset by these findings. But he admits there's a positive twist: Voters at the 90th percentile of income tend to be significantly better informed than voters at the 50th or 10th percentiles. 


I read Gilens's work as showing us an uncomfortable truth: Democracy works because it doesn't quite work. If politicians just did exactly what the median voter wanted, we would have worse policies — policies people support because they are ignorant or misinformed. Democracies work because politicians and bureaucrats can to some extent override most voters' preferences. Often they make better choices aligned with what better-informed elites would like to see.


For instance, economists of all ideological persuasions despise agricultural subsidies. Yet the federal government grants subsidies and protective tariffs to the corn lobby—that's why your Coke has corn syrup rather than sugar in it. 

Limited benefits are concentrated for a select few (companies like ADM) and steep costs diffused among the many (taxpayers and consumers). This kind of "rent seeking" is pervasive in representative democracy because politicians have every incentive to indulge it while voters have no incentive to learn about it, let alone fight it.

No workable solution, but...

These problems—voter ignorance and misinformation, populism, rent seeking—are endemic to representative democracy. It's not because bad people sabotage the system. Rather, the system incentivizes these behaviors. No one has yet come up with a workable solution.

The good news is that representative democracy still performs better than the other political systems we've tried. 



Overall, representative democracies work quite well—and that's true whether you prefer railing against elitist cosmopolitanism or pitchfork nativist populism. 

But there's no guarantee that the system will continue to work. Democracies do sometimes collapse when populist demagogues rise to power. It looks like we'll dodge that bullet this election, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't worry about the future.


Jason Brennan is the Flanagan Family Chair of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at Georgetown University, and the author of Against Democracy. Brennan wrote this for Zocalo Public Square.