ABSTRACT
For a long time, democracy was understood, not just as rule by ‘the People’, but as a form of government for small communities. In the city-states of Ancient Greece, or the rural townships of pre-industrial America, citizen political knowledge was largely direct ‘knowledge by acquaintance’. Candidates for public office were often personally known to their fellow citizens, patterns of economic interdependence were relatively unelaborated, and the functions of government were few and easily understood. But modern ‘mass’ democracies, operating in a complexly interdependent world, are not like this. Given this scale and complexity, the political knowledge of modern citizens must be based on conceptual abstractions and a command of facts they cannot personally validate. It requires an intellectual understanding of the world. A mass of social survey evidence shows that most western citizens do not possess such understanding. This did not matter so long as the bulk of them benefitted from the workings of the global economy, but it matters now when a significant proportion are being damaged by those workings. For their ignorance can lead them to support policies that only make their problems worse. The chapter ends with some suggestions for remedying this ever-worsening knowledge weakness of modern democracy.
