Rational Ignorance and Politics

"This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."
--Morpheus (The Matrix)

People's ignorance related to political issues is sometimes the subject of disdain. However, in states where political decisions are made by democratic vote, such ignorance can be viewed as completely rational.

In democratic elections of the 'first past the post' variety, the odds of a person making a difference when voting is approximately 1/N where N is the total number of voters. Consequently, many potential voters conclude that the cost of being politically well-informed is greater than the benefit of being knowledgeable about political affairs.

Political ignorance, then, becomes a rational choice.

Suppose, on the other hand, that becoming well-informed about politics did not take much time or effort (i.e., information costs are low). Voters would become more informed because, even though the benefit associated with voting is low, it is cheap to become knowledgeable about political affairs.

Government officials who benefit from the welfare and warfare state will almost certainly view a well-informed electorate as a threat. After all, the more voters understand about the damage wrought by an authoritarian state, then the more likely they will be to want to throw it off.

Because it is in the best interest of state officials to promote voter ignorance, those officials are likely to do what they can to raise the cost of becoming knowledgeable about political affairs. They will make information difficult to obtain and interpret to obfuscate the process as much as possible.

As information acquisition costs rise, voters rationally get dumber--to the delight of state officials.