ARE VOTERS RATIONAL? (COMMENT)

ARE VOTERS RATIONAL? (COMMENT) Dick Weisfelder challenged me here to explain “my much more favorable opinion of the American electorate.” I had mistakenly thought that Dick had lined up one side of a current scholarly debate about whether voters are rational. “Rational voter” on Google gives a lot of citations on the issue. For example, this article begins, “Are voters rational?….[E]conomists have devised models of political business cycles under the contrasting assumptions of voter rationality and voter naïveté…” Bryan Caplan has recently published a book, THE MYTH OF THE RATIONAL VOTER. Here is his summary of his book. His major argument is based on surveys which show that the average voter is poorly informed—and wrong–about economic issues.Whether voters are rational is an issue on which reasonable people can differ. I have to disappoint Dick by saying that while I think voters as a whole are conscientious and rational, I have no evidence to support that opinion.