1 The Moral and Social Basis of Democratic Participation Comments on Julia Maskivker, The Duty to Vote Thomas Christiano Forthcoming in Analysis, 2020 Julia Maskivker’s The Duty to Vote is a very welcome contribution to the discussion of the theory of citizen participation in politics. 1 This is an area that has received far too little attention from philosophers and political theorists. It is receiving more attention recently due to the spate of books by mostly libertarian writers, which argue that citizens in a democracy tend to be poorly informed, or at best, excessively belligerent, and that this fact is one that arises from the very nature of citizen participation in a democracy. These writers argue that democracy itself should be scrapped in significant part in favor of rule by experts or massive reduction in the size and scope of government in order to give greater scope to markets in the regulation of the social world we live in. 2 The idea that animates this recent trend is a crude version of Anthony Downs’s thesis that citizens are rationally ignorant of issues in politics and some empirical evidence that appears to back up the thesis that citizens are ignorant of nearly all the major issues in politics. 3 The implication these skeptics draw from this thesis seems to be that in fact democracies, far from being societies ruled by vigilant and conscientious citizens, are driven by blind people or by those whose job it is to pander to the blind. Democracy, on this account, is very far from anything resembling self-government or rule by equal and effective citizens. This trend is an important challenge for democratic theory. But we need be clear about exactly what the challenge is. The skeptics are moved by the sense that democratic societies have gone down a bad road towards massively oversized and corrupt governments. The image they suggest is that of societies ruled by manipulative crooks and con artists. And they think that the cause is the prevalence of ignorant citizens. Citizens are incapable of steering the society in the proper direction because they are necessarily ignorant. This aspect of the challenge arises from the libertarian opposition to the development of the welfare state that regulates the economy for the common good. It is fueled by the confidence economists once had (in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s) in the idea that free markets should be the principal economic institutions in modern societies and that government intrusion in their operation is highly counterproductive. We can see this from the fact that the principal examples given of citizen ignorance are that most citizens favor a minimum wage, some restrictions on free trade and other government intrusions on the market. 1 Julia Maskivker, The Duty to Vote (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). References to the book will be in parentheses. 2 See Guido Pincione and Fernando Teson, Rational Choice and Democratic Deliberation: A Theory of Discourse Failure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Ilya Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014); Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 3 Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957).