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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

On voters leading to worse policy: The Myth of the Rational Voter by Bryan Caplan. His point is that common biases, not simple ignorance, lead to worse policies. He argues that if voters were simply ignorant, and errors were randomly distributed, then the miracle of aggregation would work and the well-informed would drive policy. Prof. Caplan's thesis is that errors are not random but skew predictably from what voters with the same values would prefer if they were better informed. Voters can indulge in feel-good "rational irrationality" because of the near-zero chance that any given vote will have a meaningful impact on policy.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

"the good of this outweighs added voter ignorance making other policies worse"

Well, the study you quote seems to say that some good does come out of compulsory voting. That added voter ignorance, and therefore worse policies, also come out of it, makes sense to me, but is it true?

If voting is not compulsory, and noone is pushing people to vote, who votes? The best informed? The most partisan?

Are there any studies that support your "added voter ignorance" claim?

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