Jay Carlson May 13, 2011

Deliberative Democracy and Ignorance

Phil 735: Cont. Political Philosophy
Prof. Justin Weinberg
The intuitive appeal of democratic decision mechanisms and procedures for choosing

policies is that the ultimate and decisive decision about which policies and leaders are put into

practice lies in the citizens who live under that democratic regime. The citizens—and neither

a dictator nor a relatively small group of elites—decide what policies they are to live under

based on their own preferences and opinions about what should be done. Yet, leaving the

decisions of public policy to the raw preferences of the populace is also part of the inherent

flaw of democratic decision mechanisms: are the individual citizens that make up the

electorate in a position to make adequate decisions about public policy? There are many

reasons to think that most of the citizens are not adequately equipped to make such decisions.

Chief among these reasons, as demonstrated by Illya Somin, is that huge swathes of the

electorate are demonstrably ignorant about many critical factors necessary for making an

informed decision about political matters.

This widespread ignorance threatens not only the legitimacy of generic democratic

mechanisms, but in particular the mechanisms of deliberative democracy, a species of

democratic theory that is quite prominent in contemporary political philosophy. Since

deliberative democracy locates the legitimacy of its decisions precisely in the citizens’ ability

to make informed and rational political decisions through the procedure of deliberating with

each other (Freeman 375), if the ignorance of the citizenry is wide spread and ineradicable,

then deliberative democracy is at best a naïve ideal. I intend to show that the ignorance

Somin claims is so debilitating for deliberative democracy can be overcome.

In what ways are many voting citizens ignorant? Somin notes that, at minimum,

voters should be aware of not only that a given issue exists and what each candidate’s position
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on the issue is, but also of which position is most likely to promote the individual voter’s own

interests (Somin 1998, 415). Voters also ought to be aware of the “ideological consistency”

between positions and the tradeoffs that each position requires: one cannot be an advocate for

both lower taxes and an expansion of the services the government provides (Somin 1998,

418). Finally, they must be able to discern which policies or policy leaders are deserving of

credit or blame for the outcomes that happen after they are put in place. By all of these

metrics, most citizens in Western democracies fail miserably, with many being unable to

answer even rudimentary questionnaires about government structure and candidate’s

positions, much less the higher-level questions of ideological consistency and blame of

criticism (Somin 443).

Some might say that these appalling statistics of is simply a matter of mass

misinformedness (Talisse 460). There are two problems with this view. First, this period of

mass ignorance is also a period of unprecedented amounts of high-quality information being

available, often free of charge on public television and radio stations (Somin 1998, 419). This

problem of mass ignorance does not seem solvable by a simple increase in information

availability or quality. Second, the ignorance that Somin describes is more than just a simple

matter of misinformedness or even of culpable “agent-ignorance” due to an individual’s

incompetence (Talisse 461). The critical form of ignorance at play here, as first outlined by

Anthony Downs, is ignorance as the “rational outcome of a collective action problem” (Somin

1998, 444). Acquiring sufficient knowledge to be adequately informed about political matters

is a costly, time-consuming ordeal that many citizens do not have the leisure to pursue

because occupational and familial responsibilities consume the bulk of their waking hours.

Furthermore, even if they were to commit large amounts of their resources to becoming
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politically well informed, their well informed vote would likely have very little impact on the

outcome of the election. In an election with an electorate in the hundreds of millions, the

likelihood of casting the deciding vote is infinitesimal. The well informedness of that vote

will not raise that probability at all. Thus, the miniscule utility gained by becoming informed

enough to cast a well informed ballot is almost always offset by the much greater costs

involved with becoming more politically informed. The conclusion Somin draws is that a

rational person—even one with relatively altruistic dispositions towards promoting the public

good of composing an informed electorate (Somin 2010, 260)—would not devote the time

necessary to become politically informed (Somin 1998, 437).

Standard democratic procedure states that decisions about public policy are made by

citizens registering their preferences by voting for one candidate or another (Freeman 373-4).

Insofar as these aggregations of raw preference accounts of democracy presuppose adequately

informed votes (Freeman 375), voter ignorance seems to question the viability of said

democratic procedures. But the fact of voter ignorance is even more troubling to deliberative

democracy. Deliberative democracy critiques raw preference accounts of democracy, saying

that they require too little of voters, and that only a more rigorous form of decision making

would be able to weed out unreasonable preferences and deliver truly acceptable public

policies. The procedure of “free deliberation among equal [citizens]” is the source of a

political decision’s legitimacy (Cohen 3).

What does such a procedure expect of its participants? The procedure is largely a

discussion over what constitutes the common good of all citizens—or at least as many citizens

as possible (Freeman 375). Effective deliberation requires participants to abstract from their

own personal preferences and consider a situation from the most impartial point of view
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possible. Frequently this impartial point of view is cashed out in terms of the principles of

civility and reciprocity, where one appeals only to reasons that are considered public and that

other deliberators might find acceptable (Freeman 398). Thus, this rigorous procedure is

more demanding on participants in terms of requiring them to be able to tease out which

reasons they have for their preferences are sufficiently public and acceptable to others. Somin

notes that deliberation might even include sophisticated moral and philosophical issues as

well as subtle empirical issues, all of which must be handled rationally (Somin 2010, 257). If

voters fail to meet even the basic benchmarks required of them in a relatively generic

democracy—indeed, if they fail to correctly identify basic factual information—then they are

even more inadequate for the higher standards required of them by deliberative democracy

(Somin 1998, 440).

If voter ignorance is a specific outcome of a collective action problem, then the

solution might come from two directions: either one could reduce the costs on individuals for

acquiring knowledge leading to sufficient informedness or increase the efficacy of a well

informed vote. The first avenue is usually approached by informational shortcuts that, in

theory, shift the burden of knowledge acquisition away from individual citizens and onto a

myriad of other entities—e.g. political parties and pundits—that have less of an opportunity

cost to acquire political knowledge than the individual citizen. Somin reviews many

variations on this shortcut theme, and his assessment is not optimistic: many of these

shortcuts are more prone to engendering myopic, unjustified bias than cultivating clarity and

full-informedness (Somin 1998, 431). Shortcuts are therefore often more harmful than they

are helpful. Furthermore, Somin notes that when individuals do engage in political debate it
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is frequently done in a way that confirms their antecedent beliefs (Somin 2010, 254).1 At best,

“effective use of shortcuts requires a pre-existing base of background knowledge that many

voters lack” (Somin 2010, 262). The other flank, of increasing the efficacy of well informed

votes, to solving this problem, has been less popular in the literature. John Stuart Mill’s

suggestion that more well informed votes should count for more votes stands as perhaps the

most prominent way of directly increasing the efficacy of well informed votes. Giving weight

directly to one set of voters, however, is blatantly undemocratic, and thus undercuts the very

aim of democracy that deliberative democrats wish to defend. Such a strategy would also

vindicate Somin’s worries that deliberative democracy would privilege certain people who

had the skills and training necessary for effective deliberation, turning an explicitly

democratic project into an essentially oligarchic setup (Somin 1998, 443).

Nevertheless, one approach that attempts to attack both flanks of the collective-action

problem of rational ignorance through the use of deliberation is Bruce Ackerman and James

Fishkin’s proposal of a deliberative holiday in their book Deliberation Day. On this holiday,

presidential candidates give an initial presentation to a cross-section sample of the population.

The sample population is also given independent information on the issues. Then participants

break down into small groups and deliberate about which questions should be asked about

each candidate’s platform. When the groups come to a consensus on which questions should

be asked, the questions are then presented to the candidates who will then be given time to

respond. There are several rounds of this discursive to-and-fro. At the conclusion of this

1
Political programming is often advertised with phrases such as “reasoned” or “fair and
balanced,” leading some to think that reasoned engagement remains an important selling point
in political advertising (Talisse 464). Nevertheless, the advertisement’s indication that the
producers of these programs cherish reasoned discussion frequently belies the actual content
and procedures of these shows, leading one to conclude that reason is only used in
advertisements to attract viewers, not to actually engage in its use.
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deliberative day, the sample population—having been given the chance to listen to sustained

presentation of candidate’s messages, reflect and deliberate with other citizens, pose questions

to the candidates and hear their responses—then votes on which candidate they think is the

superior one. This sample population, Ackerman and Fishkin claim, would represent how a

well informed populace might evaluate a set of candidates.

How does this holiday proposal solve the collective action problem of rational

ignorance? It does so by changing the incentive structure that makes ignorance otherwise

instrumentally rational (Ackerman and Fishkin 2002, 133). There are several ways that a

deliberative holiday reduces the costs and the efficacy of attaining knowledge about politics.

First, by taking place on a holiday when many businesses are closed anyway and by providing

a small financial stipend to participants (Ackerman and Fishkin 2004, 29), the opportunity and

financial costs of taking the time to deliberate on presidential candidates are either mitigated

or compensated for. Second, the efficacy of the participants’ opinions and reasons has the

potential to increase as well, though in the indirect manner of influencing other people’s

opinions and preferences. While in deliberation, each participant has the potential to persuade

other participants that certain difficult questions must be asked about a candidate’s otherwise

attractive proposal. Their voices are not lost in an endless sea of ballots, but all are given a

forum to speak in small groups, where they are engaging with other individuals face to face

(Ackerman and Fishkin 2002, 134).

Furthermore, the individual participant’s efficacy extends not only to the other

participants, but even to non-participants as well. The participants’ contributions to the well

informed opinion of the holiday’s final results by be seen by non-participants as an opinion

they ought to take seriously in deciding how to cast their own ballot. What Ackerman and
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Fishkin conclude is that even citizens who are normally rationally compelled to be ignorant

about politics “are more than capable of living up to the demands of deliberative democracy”

provided that they are given good reasons to think that living up to that standard would be

efficacious (Ackerman and Fishkin 2004, 7).

While this deliberative holiday proposal might work toward mitigating the costs of

political knowledge acquisition and increasing the ceiling of efficacy of well informed votes,

there are still outstanding questions over whether this proposal can actually achieve, (1) the

very difficult standards that deliberative democracy sets out, and (2) achieve (1) in a way that

individual citizens could have rational incentive to participate.

First, What reason do we have to think that deliberation can sufficiently overcome the

antecedent ignorance of the participants? Ackerman and Fishkin note that there are a few

days of preparation where the participants are given reading and information to prepare them

for their deliberative exercises (Ackerman and Fishkin 2004, 70), but why should we think

that this would overcome the ignorance the participants already have? Somin notes, “if actual

voters tend to be close-minded and unwilling to accept opposing evidence, it seems unlikely

that many of them can engage in the sort of unbiased dialogue deliberative democrats

champion,” which leads Somin to predict that deliberation is likely to degenerate into just

repetitive talking points, if not something more hostile and confrontational (Somin 2010,

264). But Somin’s prediction that deliberation will almost certainly degenerate in such a

spectacular fashion does not fit the experimental findings. In many instances of deliberative

polling, a small-scale cousin to the deliberative holiday, Fishkin found that deliberation

changed the opinion on up to 2/3rds of the questions the participants answered before the

deliberation took place (Ackerman and Fishkin 2004, 52). There is also anecdotal evidence to
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suggest that small deliberation groups can bring even deeply prejudiced people to a greater

degree of mutual understanding (Ackerman and Fishkin 2002, 141). We need not be

completely quixotic that deliberation will suddenly transform intransigent devils into

conciliatory angels, but the evidence does not seem to fit with Somin’s rather dismal

prediction. Furthermore, the disinclination of the participants to look foolish or unprepared at

a very public event might have an “anticipation effect” which incentivizes private study by

individuals to equip themselves for the holiday (Ackerman and Fishkin 2002, 140).

A central part of Ackerman and Fishkin’s thesis that a deliberative holiday can be an

effective way to cultivate an engaged, well informed populace is that deliberation does appear

to have an effect on participants. Nevertheless, change in opinion does not necessarily entail

that the updated opinions would satisfy the lofty standards of deliberative democracy that

Somin described. A changed opinion can be just as ill informed as the original one. Yet it

seems that the requirements for deliberative democracy is less about cognitive possession than

Somin suggests. Somin seems to conflate where individual citizens begin the deliberation

with where the deliberation’s collective decision ends. Deliberation does not require ready-

made, fully informed deliberators at its outset: if that were the case, then deliberation would

be unnecessary. It seems more plausible to suggest that deliberative democracy desires that

whatever decision the deliberators reach, it should be one that is fully informed by all the

interests and preferences that are affected, not that any one person possesses knowledge of

that from the outset. The deliberative forum seems designed to be more of a hermeneutical

space in which a dialectic takes place among participants with less than perfect information.

What deliberative democracy generally does require over and above that of generic

democracy has less to do with the cognitive possessions of the participants, and more to do
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with the attitudes they bring to the deliberative situation. Yes, all individuals would probably

have to learn to limit the scope of reasons they could utilize to persuade others. But it does

not seem clear that accepting something like the principles of reciprocity and civility is such

an overly intense cognitive demand. If anything it encourages the exercise of a person’s non-

cognitive faculties such as imagination or moral sentiments (Freeman 383). And far from too

demanding, acceptance of these principles—or something like them—seems like a necessary

requirement, given the time constraints, that people pare down their reasons they have for

their viewpoints that they are willing to share and defend. There is even reason to believe that

the process of deliberation itself will effectively weed out arguments or viewpoints that

cannot “withstand deliberative scrutiny” or compromise the moral integrity or equality of the

fellow deliberators (Dryzek and List 14). In addition, deliberation also has an effect on

achieving proximity to single-peakedness, a sufficient condition for achieving a Condorcet

winner and frequently indicative of some level of meta-agreement among participants about

how to semantically conceptualize the available alternatives, even given substantial

disagreement about how to rank those alternatives (List et al. 6, 9). To the degree that

deliberation does seem to effect change in participants’ opinions, we have reason to think that

deliberation is doing the job it was intended to do.

A second question is whether the change in opinion might be due to what Somin calls

“agenda setting effects” where simply presenting new information—or perhaps even

presenting it in a new format—to uninformed people results in a change of opinion (Somin

1998, 442). The time constraints on this holiday entails that a certain selection from the vast

array of policy issues on the agenda must take place, and as a result could allow for

candidates or presenters to manipulate the deliberators (Somin 2010, 268). Yet there are
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reasons to think the bias of presentations or the framing effects of what topics are discussed

are not serious problems for the deliberative holiday proposal. First, there is evidence to think

that deliberation in general gives rational incentives to the presenters to give an honest

portrayal of their view. When people are held responsible for the claims they make by

recurrent interaction with others, there are serious long-term risks with being labeled as a liar

or manipulator (Dryzek and List 9). The proposed Deliberation Day gives two ways of

ensuring positive and negative incentives for speaking honestly and straightforwardly. The

equal time given to opposing candidates ensures that even well entreched incumbents can

receive a thorough vetting by their opponents (Ackerman and Fishkin 2004, 101). They will

not be able to get away with a blatant mischaracterization of their opponents’ position.

Second, even if an opposing candidate fails to examine a questionable position from their

opponent, the format of the small group deliberation allows for the individual participants to

ask pointed questions.2 The focus of these small groups is less about deliberating directly

about the merits of the candidate’s positions, but rather what is left out or unclear about a

candidate’s position. This second avenue is important, since though framing effects—even

non-malicious ones—will inevitably occur in the procedure, there is always the possibility for

the participants to challenge those effects and point out where elisions are manipulative or

misleading. Additional empirical studies have also demonstrated that where change of

preference does occur, it is not simply due to unreflective following of cues from moderators

and presenters, as subjects of deliberative polls increased significantly in knowledge of even

less prominent matters of deliberation (List et al 17). Ultimately, it does not seem that

2
It should be noted that the format also prevents the questions from being overly hostile or
inflammatory, as the questions would need to be moderate enough that they would be agreed
to by the rest of the small group (Ackerman and Fishkin 63-4).
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agenda-setting effects are very serious worries.

A third and final question that a deliberative holiday proposal raises is how the results

of Deliberation Day carry over to the wider population. Ackerman and Fishkin claim that the

final poll results signal to the wider population the final results of fellow citizens who have

reflected and deliberated about the presidential candidates’ platforms. Their results provide

the rest of the population with an approximation of what a “well informed vote” might look

like, which might sway non-participants to rethink their own position. But Ackerman and

Fishkin do not address two critical questions about the strength of that signal, and thus the

actual efficacy of it: how strongly would the poll results transmit the ideal of a well informed

vote, and how strongly would that signal be received by non-participants?

Why should we regard a deliberated preference as proximate to a well informed

preference? One strong reason to consider a thoroughly deliberated opinion as proximate to

the ideal of a well informed opinion is that it takes seriously the pluralism of race, gender,

class, and ideology that exist in modern societies. For each political decision, there are

always numerous kinds of people whose lives are in some way affected. A well informed

opinion is one that has considered as many different perspectives as possible to determine

which possibility is best when taking everything into consideration. On the other side, for

those who are affected, it seems only an extension of the fairness and freedom that traditional,

generic democracy champions that they be able to express their opinions and interests about a

decision to a wider audience.

Why should non-participants seriously regard the results of Deliberation Day? As

Fishkin’s research with Deliberative polling suggests, deliberation creates a surprising number

of “swing” voters, voters who begin the deliberation with one opinion and end with either a
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different opinion or a heavily modified version of the original. The non-participant cannot

discount out of hand the idea that if she were one of the deliberators, she might be one of

those “swing” voters who switched sides as well. It might be rational for them to consider if

their current position is somehow inadequate. Others might see the results as an informational

shortcut that is superior to the other available shortcuts to political information (e.g. political

parties, opinion leaders, common sense, etc.). Furthermore, Deliberation Day seems like the

only informational shortcut that goes to great lengths to remove any specter of myopia by

including a full representation of the pluralism present in western societies, with each equally

having the freedom and forum to voice their interests and their preferences. Conversely, if the

demographic composition of the event included too many of one class at the expense of others

who would have added more balance to the proceedings, then one has reason to not take the

results as seriously as one would otherwise.3

Also, for Ackerman and Fishkin, deliberation day is not just a one-off part of the

electoral season that is discretely separated from the rest of the year. In their eyes, the

anticipation of a day of sustained discussion could shape both candidate, participant, and even

non-participant behavior throughout the year. Politicians would no longer rely blindly on just

raw poll numbers of an unreflective population, but will form their opinions knowing that

3
One should note that Ackerman and Fishkin are under no delusions that the results

from deliberation are infallible such that it removes the rationality of opposition (Ackerman

and Fishkin 2002, 145). It might be perfectly reasonable for some reasonably open-minded

citizens to stick with their opinions even if they do not coincide with the deliberators’ overall

conclusions. The option of ultimate dissent must remain open as a live, viable option.
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they will have to answer to the reflective discourse of Deliberation Day. Deliberation Day

also gives a politician no comfort that some unpopular or unseemly action will go unnoticed:

before a deliberative audience, potentially every act is a high visibility act (Ackerman and

Fishkin 2004, 79). Participants would find it advantageous to become informed through their

own study, which would likely include at least some informal discussions with non-

participants.

For Somin, the pervasiveness and ineradicability of voter ignorance is in part due to

the massive scope of modern states (Somin 1998, 444). Modern governmental plays such a

wide variety of roles in society that it is impossible for individual voters to be informed about

more than a narrow sliver of the government’s overall functioning (Somin 1998, 431).

According to Somin, if the scope of government is inversely proportionate to voters’ ability to

be informed about governmental affairs, then the best way to solve the ignorance problem is

to reduce the scope of government that voters must be informed about. Narrowing the scope

of government, specifically transferring more power to more state and local government

where voters have a more manageable number of issues about which they can be informed.

Somin also notes that these more “localist” alternatives are even compatible with even some

measure of deliberative democracy (Somin 2010, 264), the chief difference being that it starts

and ends in the local setting. Such a local setting with a smaller population of participants

also increases the amount of individual opinion and vote efficacy, potentially resulting in a

decrease of rational ignorance—though its more intimate, personally-connected setting could

also lead to preference falsification, where people silence their dissenting viewpoints because

of social pressures (Somin 2010, 271).4

4
It should also be noted that Ackerman and Fishkin do not quibble with the necessity of
localized operations in their proposal (Ackerman and Fishkin 2002, 147).
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There are several questions that need to be asked about this proposal, however.

Joshua Cohen points out that we should be skeptical that purely localized deliberative arenas,

with no feeder into a larger network of arenas. Such atomized arenas are unlikely to generate

the sustained, open-ended deliberation that deliberative democracy aims for, as a local area

usually includes only a narrow range of interests and opinions that would be affected by

policy (Cohen 10). Another question about Somin’s proposal is its vagueness in regards to

what should and should not be within the scope of government.5 Presumably attempting to

responsibly narrow government would require knowledge of what government can reasonably

do, as well as what the social consequences of such narrowing would be. If citizens are

generally ignorant about political matters, it seems hardly plausible to expect them to have the

kind of knowledge about what government can and cannot do. But even if we ignored the

knowledge required to effect the transition Somin suggests, it does not seem that a reduced

knowledge burden required of citizens follows from a more narrowly focused government.

Under this plan, whatever current government functions fall outside the new, streamlined

government would still need to be addressed by citizens. The knowledge these citizens would

need to effectively carry out these functions would not decrease by localizing government and

might even increase.

Somin admits that the knowledge burden might not decrease, only to point out that in

5
There is also the possibility that Somin’s suggestion is not as radical as narrowing the scope
of government itself, so much as narrowing what voters have control over, namely from voter
control over all public policy to simply voter control over the officials elected to office
(Somin 1998, 445). It is, first, unclear how that is different from that current political
situation, nor, second, how this overcomes the ignorance that is demonstrably at work in most
citizens. If citizens cannot accurately assign blame or credit for current situations, then
Somin’s argument leads one to the conclusion that citizens should have no vital role in
selecting either individual policies or leaders. Third, limiting the voter control to the selection
of leaders is consistent with parts of Ackerman and Fishkin’s proposal (Ackerman and
Fishkin, 157).
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this scenario, citizens have more informational feedbacks—namely prices—that could

increase their ability to make more informed decisions than they would have as citizen-voters.

It is relatively easy, Somin thinks, to connect performance to quality of a product based on its

price, but very difficult to “connect the social outcomes to public policy” (Somin 1998, 446).

Yet if decisions come down to prices and more local considerations, it seems that this would

encourage a myopia in the resulting decisions: the decisions that cost the least for an

individual are preferred, even if their cost on more distant—or future—people are much

greater (Ackerman and Fishkin 2002, 143). And while this localist, more consumerist,

alternative avoids the problem of a rationally ignorant electorate, with Somin’s proposal there

becomes an equally troubling prospect of a rationally myopic electorate who votes primarily

on what is in their immediate best interest. Somin’s advocacy for a local-only alternative also

runs afoul of Somin’s own very salient point against the use of daily experience as an

informational short cut: many problems are not immediately encountered on a daily basis

(Somin 1998, 420-421). Deliberation Day strives to resist the equally unattractive

possibilities of a rationally ignorant and a rationally myopic electorate by providing a context

in which engaging reflectively on the difficult and wide-ranging policy questions can be

considered a rational endeavor for many citizens.

In his concluding remarks on his survey of the literature of deliberative democracy,

Samuel Freeman notes that the most difficult obstacle for deliberative democracy—as is true

of perhaps all political ideals—is in making it a feasible enterprise for the imperfect rational

practitioners that humans are (Freeman 418). I hope to have shown that deliberative

democracy through the implementation of Deliberation Day makes great strides in

overcoming the vexing problem of rational ignorance—and perhaps of even more general
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ignorance—within the electorate. This is far from the final word, as Deliberation Day

remains simply a hypothetical construct at this point. Ackerman and Fishkin’s proposals and

inferences—as they themselves recognize—are exercises in “utopian realism” (Ackerman and

Fishkin 2002, 130) and thus are largely speculative in the ways that their deliberation day

proposal would operate. Yet they have given us reasons to be at least cautiously optimistic

about the ability of the electorate to deliberate effectively about political decisions and public

policy.

Works Cited

Ackerman, Bruce and James Fishkin. Deliberation Day. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press. 2004.

---. “Deliberation Day.” The Journal of Political Philosophy. 10.2 (2002):

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129-152.

Cohen, Joshua. “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy.” The Good

Polity: Normative Analysis of the State. Ed. Alan Hamlin and Phillip
Pettit. New York: Blackwell, 1989.

Dryzek, John and Christian List. “Social Choice Theory and Deliberative
Democracy:
A Reconciliation.” British Journal of Political Science. 33.1 (2003):
1-28.

Freeman, Samuel. “Deliberative Democracy: A Sympathetic Comment.”

Philosophy & Public Affairs 29.4 (2000): 371-418.

List, Christian, Robert C. Luskin, James S. Fishkin and Iain McLean.

“Deliberation, Single-Peakedness, and the Possibility of Meaningful
Democracy: Evidence from Deliberative Polls.” (April 25, 2006).
PSPE Working Paper No. 1. Accessed Thursday May 12, 2011.
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/20069/

Somin, Ilya. “Voter Ignorance and the Democratic Ideal.” Critical Review.
12.
4 (1998) : 413-458.

---. “Deliberative Democracy and Ignorance.” Critical Review, Vol. 22.2-3

(2010):
253-279.

Talisse, Robert B. ‘‘Does Public Ignorance Defeat Deliberative

Democracy?’’
Critical Review 16.4. (2004): 455-64.