Bryan Caplan sums up a boiled down version of public choice theory,
In sum, according to Classical Public Choice, voter ignorance transforms politics from a puzzling anomaly into a textbook example of the explanatory power of information economics. Voter ignorance opens the door to severe government failure. Interest groups — not to mention bureaucrats and politicians themselves — walk straight in.
— Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 97.
While Caplan heads down a different route than do public choice theorists, his narrative is also predominately about information and knowledge. Rather than rational ignorance, what Caplan assumes (and spends an entire chapter empirically verifying) is that there’s something about the “public’s” thought process that systemically leads them to come to different conclusions than “experts.” Either way, it’s clear that democracy works best when people are well informed, in the sense of holding a sufficient stock of objectively correct knowledge.
Reading the book reminds me of a passage from an article I recently read,
Self-organizing social systems economize on the knowledge people
need to pursue their goals successfully.
— Gus diZerega, “Market Non-Neutrality: Systemic Bias in Spontaneous Orders,” Critical Review 11, 1 (1997), p. 123.
Somebody might read the various critiques of democratic political theory and suggest that we need more education. A preferable alternative may be to develop institutions that require less information to successfully coordinate citizens’ preferences and political decision making.