ABSTRACT
Many people write about voter (in)competence. The topic is especially tempting after an author's favored side loses an election or public-policy battle, for they can attribute their losses to voter ignorance (e.g., Herbert 2004). Other evaluations of voter competence arise when elections approach. These occasions prompt claims about "what informed voters ought to think about" when making political choices. Some of these claims are ideological in nature: they assert that a set of ideas with which the writers and their peer group agree should be privileged in political decision making. One problem with such claims is that ideas in question need not be consistent with the self-interest of the voters who are
Many people do not give correct answers to standard "political knowledge" questions. Some respondents provide incorrect answers. Some say they "don't know." Others just don't respond at all. Academic writers have used these responses to generate broad conclusions about voter competence. Stephen Earl Bennett (1988) and Ilya Somin (2004), for example, are among those who use political knowledge scales (the sum of the number of correct responses to these questions) to conclude "that about one-third of respondents are 'know nothings' possessing little or no politically relevant knowledge" (Somin 2004, 8).
