Reply #20: Political scientists have known this for a long, long time [View All]

[Alcibiades]

The truth of the ignorance of the US electorate is an empirical fact that has been long established in political science, least since Phillip Converse's 1964 "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics." There's a whole body of work on why it is that voters are ignorant, and more ignorant in the US than elsewhere.

Of course, political scientists don't practice politics, we study it, and seldom bother any more to explain the increasingly esoteric and arcane findings of our research to anyone other than other political scientists, partly because we know that the folks who might be interested wouldn't understand, and the folks who might understand would only be depressed.