The New Yorker online has an excellent article by Louis Menand on voting and democracy, or at least how these issues look through the lens of political scientists.

Menand writes:

“Skepticism about the competence of the masses to govern themselves is as old as mass self-government…”

Political scientists, at least, have given up on the notion that the public can come to well-informed judgments about political candidates, much less complicated issues of policy. The perspective of political scientists raises difficult questions about the viability of “public education” as a strategy for coming to grips with complicated issues like global climate change, genetic technologies, and international terrorism.

But if people aren’t the source of wisdom in a democracy, then where does it come from? Menad offers two alternatives in the form of three theories:

“All political systems make their claim to legitimacy by some theory, whether it’s the divine right of kings or the iron law of history. It’s not that people know nothing. It’s just that politics is not what they know. In the face of this evidence, three theories have arisen. The first is that electoral outcomes, as far as “the will of the people” is concerned, are essentially arbitrary… “

In other words, where the public is concerned, good luck.

Menand summarizes a second perspective in the form of two versions of a theoretical perspective I have called in my classes a “realist’s view of democracy,” using the concepts and ideas of political scientist E. E. Schattsschneider.

“A second theory is that although people may not be working with a full deck of information and beliefs, their preferences are dictated by something, and that something is élite opinion… The third theory of democratic politics is the theory that the cues to which most voters respond are, in fact, adequate bases on which to form political preferences. People use shortcuts—the social-scientific term is “heuristics”—to reach judgments about political candidates, and, on the whole, these shortcuts are as good as the long and winding road of reading party platforms, listening to candidate debates, and all the other elements of civic duty.”

From this perspective, the public can and does play a critical role in a democracy, but that role is mediated by experts, who comprise one part of the elite. How we think about democracy shapes how we think about the role of science, and information more generally, in policy making. All claims about science and its significance in decision making reflect a deeper set of assumptions about democracy, namely that either the public can address complex issues (which has been dismissed by most political scientists), that the public is just ignorant and cannot effectively participate in decision making (a pure elitist perspective), or a more realistic perspective, that experts play a mediating role that allows the public to participate meaningfully in the making of important decisions. Statements related to science and technology policy that invoke public education, literacy, communication, or participation ultimately are grounded (explicitly or implicitly) in one of these views, and I would suggest, are sometimes simply a result of these underlying assumptions about how a democracy ought to work.

The Menand article is well worth reading.