Direct Democracy vs public education Citizens are not as well-informed as they think [Big surprise -- citizens are boobs. --PR] “A POPULAR GOVERNMENT without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to Farce or Tragedy or perhaps both,” James Madison wrote. “A people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.” So the Field Poll asked what it considered the easiest question: whether Proposition 13s tax reduction applied “only to residential property taxes, only to commercial property taxes, or both”. Only about one in three respondents correctly answered “both”. However, the main surprise was hidden in the details. Political scientists normally assume that the older, more educated, wealthy and attentive voters are, the better informed they will be. But Kimberly Nalder, a professor at California State University in Sacramento, discovered that in this instance the opposite was true. The factors that usually indicate greater knowledge instead predicted “not only a lack of accurate understanding but actual misinformation”. Thus Ms Nalder found that the best-educated (those with more than a masters degree) were most likely to answer incorrectly that Proposition 13 applies only to residential property. Those with the least education (high-school dropouts) were most likely to get it right. Similarly, those who were already of voting age when Proposition 13 passed were most likely to answer incorrectly and the youngest correctly. The same pattern held for income, with wealthier respondents being more likely to be misinformed. Perhaps most intriguingly, the largest group among homeowners (who directly benefit from Proposition 13) were misinformed, whereas the largest group of renters (who do not benefit) answered correctly. These results are puzzling and troubling. As Ms Nalder suggests, perception (as opposed to knowledge) of issues such as Proposition 13 appears to have more to do with “self-interest and a potential blindness to issues outside of ones own experience” than with the content of the legislation. This would explain why those respondents who were “non-citizens” or “registered elsewhere” (probably recent arrivals) were more likely to give the correct answer than voters who are registered where they live. The longer that people live in California, it seems, the more likely they are to be misinformed, and possibly brainwashed into ignorance. The supporters of Proposition 13, says Mr Nalder, have for three decades framed the debate as the “little guy versus the established powers”, with images such as that of a grandmother being taxed out of her home. Homeowners who are happy with their low property taxes might therefore ignore the fact that large firms, trusts and hedge funds which own commercial property benefit just as much, because that would “disrupt that clean narrative”. They also ignore the fact that property taxes elsewhere are high.
Posted on: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 22:33:55 +0000
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