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… is from page 132 of my late Nobel-laureate colleague James Buchanan [2]’s 1991 paper (co-authored with Viktor Vanberg) “Constitutional Choice, Rational Ignorance and the Limits of Reason,” as this paper is reprinted in Choice, Contract, and Constitutions [3] (2001), which is volume 16 of The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan [4] (footnote deleted):
One of the most familiar principles in Public Choice is the rational ignorance hypothesis, which states that in large electoral constituencies it is privately rational for a single voter to remain ignorant about the alternatives of collective choice because of the negligible influence of his or her own vote on the outcome.
DBx: It is a ceaseless source of mystery to me why so many mainstream economists bend over backwards to find alleged instances of market failure – often when no such failure really exists – but remain completely oblivious to sources of very real political failure, such as the one described above by Vanberg and Buchanan.