This is fascinating. Cato has released a paper by Bryan Caplan arguing that, to put it crudely, voters don’t know squat. He writes:
The central idea is that voters are worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, irrational—and they vote accordingly. Despite their lack of knowledge, voters are not humble agnostics; instead, they confidently embrace a long list of misconceptions.
Now, this isn’t exactly an entirely new argument. Economists have been talking about “rational ignorance” for years. But Caplan’s paper (which I haven’t read entirely yet) looks to flesh out a lot of the details–the hows and whys–of voter “irrationality” in a way that you don’t usually see.