Brexit Exposes the Flaws of Referendum Democracy

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Workers counting ballots after polling stations closed in the Referendum on the European Union in Glasgow, Scotland, on June 23. Jason Brennan writes that most voters in most countries are ignorant of even the most... Clodagh Kilcoyne/reuters

This article first appeared on the Princeton University Press site.

The Washington Post reports that there was a sharp uptick Friday in the number of Britons Googling basic questions about what the European Union is and what the implications of leaving are.

This is a bit like deciding to study after you've already taken the final exam.

Technically, the Brexit referendum is not binding. Parliament could decide to hold their own vote on whether to leave the European Union. Perhaps they should. Perhaps the U.K.'s leaders owe it to the people to thwart their expressed will.

Leaving the EU is no small affair. It probably will have enormous effects on the U.K, Europe and much of the rest of the world. But just what these effects will be is unclear.

To have even a rudimentary sense of the pros and cons of Brexit, a person would need to possess tremendous social scientific knowledge. One would need to know about the economics and sociology of trade and immigration, the politics of centralized regulation and the history of nationalist movements.

But there is no reason to think even a tenth of the U.K.'s population has a basic grasp of the social science needed to evaluate Brexit.

Political scientists have been studying voter knowledge for the past 60 years. The results are uniformly depressing. Most voters in most countries are systematically ignorant of even the most basic political facts, let alone the social scientific theories needed to make sense of these facts.

This brings us to the central injustice of democracy, and why holding a referendum was a bad idea.

Imagine, as an analogy, that you are sick. You go to a doctor. But suppose your "doctor" doesn't study the facts, doesn't know any medicine and makes her decisions about how to treat you on a whim, on the basis of prejudice or wishful thinking.

Imagine the doctor not only prescribes you a course of treatment, but literally forces you, at gunpoint, to accept the treatment.

We'd find this behavior intolerable. You doctor owes you a duty of care. She owes it to you to deliver an expert opinion on the basis of good information, a strong background knowledge of medicine and only after considering the facts in a rational and scientific way. To force you to follow the decisions of an incompetent and bad faith doctor is unjust.

But this is roughly what happens in democracy. Most voters are ignorant of both basic political facts and the background social scientific theories needed to evaluate the facts. They process what little information they have in highly biased and irrational ways. They decided largely on whim. And, worse, we're each stuck having to put up with the group's decision.

Unless you're one of the lucky few who has the right and means to emigrate, you're forced to accept your democracy's poorly chosen decisions.

There's a big dilemma in the design of political institutions. Should we be ruled by the few or the many? What this amounts to is the choice between being ruled by the smart but selfish or dumb but nice.

In Focus

Brexit...Stage Left

The United Kingdom votes to leave the European Union, shocking international observers as well as its own citizens.
Launch Slideshow 10 PHOTOS

When only a small number of people hold power, they tend to use this power for their own ends at the expense of everyone else. If a king holds all the power, his decisions matter. He will likely use that power in a smart way, but smart for himself, rather than smart for everybody.

Suppose instead we give everyone power. In doing so, we largely remove the incentive and ability for people to use power in self-serving ways at the expense of everyone else. But, at the same time, we remove the incentive for people to use power wisely.

Since individual votes count for so little, individual voters have no incentive to become well informed or to process information with any degree of care. Democracy incentivizes voters to be dumb.

Going back to the doctor analogy, here's the dilemma: Suppose you could choose between two doctors. The first doctor prescribes you medicine based on what's good for her, not you. The second is a complete fool who prescribes you medicine on whim and fancy, without reference to the facts.

Roughly, with some exaggeration, that's what the choice between monarchy or democracy amounts to. Neither is appealing.

What if there were a third way, though? In my forthcoming book, Against Democracy, I explore a way of splitting the difference. The trick is to find a political system that both (1) spreads power out enough to prevent people from using power selfishly and (2) weeds out or at least reduces the power of incompetent decision-makers.

In some sense, republican democracy, with checks and balances, was meant to do just that. And to a significant degree it succeeds. But perhaps a new system, epistocracy, could do even better.

In an epistocracy, political power is to some degree apportioned according to knowledge. An epistocracy might retain the major institutions we see in republican democracy, such as parties, mass elections, constitutional review and the like.

But in an epistocracy, not everyone has equal basic political power. An epistocracy might grant some people additional voting power, or might restrict the right to vote only to those that could pass a very basic test of political knowledge.

Any such system will be subject to abuse, and will suffer from significant government failures. But that's true of democracy too. The interesting question is whether epistocracy, warts and all, would perform better than democracy, warts and all.

All across the West, we're seeing the rise of angry, resentful, nationalist, xenophobic and racist movements, movements made up mostly of low-information voters. Perhaps it's time to put aside the childish and magical theory that democracy is intrinsically just, and start asking the serious question of whether there are better alternatives. The stakes are high.

Jason Brennan is Robert J and Elizabeth Flanagan Family chair and Provost's distinguished associate professor, strategy, economics, ethics and public policy at the McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University.

Uncommon Knowledge

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