… is from page 89 of Roger Meiners’s and Andy Morriss’s superb new essay, “Special Interests, Competition, and the Rule of Law,” which is chapter 4 in the volume What America’s Decline In Economic Freedom Means for Entrepreneurship and Prosperity (Donald J. Boudreaux, ed., 2015):
Running for office requires garnering positive publicity, financial support, and votes. Issues must be framed in a way palatable to a potential majority of voters. Yet voters are rationally ignorant about most political issues: information is costly, there are hundreds of issues, and to become knowledgeable about all would take an immense amount of time, so voters focus only on a few issues that they care about, whether financial, such as support for teachers’ unions, or non-financial, such as abortion. Even voters well informed about a specific issue generally know little about the nuances of candidates’ views, even if the candidate has been in office and has an extensive record.
DBx: All chapters of this volume in which Meiners’s and Morriss’s paper appears are available here.
