Informed voting > not voting > uninformed voting
Greg Mankiw has a column on this: http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/11/election-day-approach...
The idea that "the uninformed" should not vote is contrary to universal suffrage and has a long history of use for disenfranchisement. "Uninformed voting" is in the eye of the beholder (working definition: uninformed voters are those who both disagree with me and are outside my social group).
One person's criteria for being informed may be awareness of specific proposals for complex policies, while another's might be the candidate's up or down stance on a single issue, and for another it might be party affiliation (noted on the ballot in most US jurisdictions).
Conversely, a person can be highly informed and vote in a way which damages the community at large, e.g. a person may vote to reduce educational funding thereby lowering their taxes with the intent of using the savings to fund the production of child pornography.
Today, vote as well as you are able.
But, if someone has enough self-knowledge to recognize that they are relatively uninformed, on a single issue or the ballot as a whole, they should abstain from voting on those portions of the ballot. By doing so, they delegate the decision to more-informed people.
The option to vote if they are later agitated or informed remains important -- but it doesn't have to exercised every time to serve its purpose of defending their interests.
People moved to vote at the last minute by a speech about their 'obligation', and deciding based on a few fleeting impressions from the last wave of rhetoric, make the process more random and superficial. They are the people most affected by negative ads, or simpleminded sloganeering.
The problem as I see it, is that believing oneself to be "relatively uninformed" does not make a person relatively uninformed (it may in fact lead them to actively acquire more information - i.e why Severs believes he is below average). Conversely, believing oneself to be well informed does not make one well informed, and may alas lead a person to stop seeking relevant information.
Indeed it would not surprise me if the people most affected by "simpleminded sloganeering" tend to believe they are well informed.
The problem with "people should" in a political context is that it can quickly become "people must" backed with the force of government, and any implementation of: "Informed voting > not voting > uninformed voting" requires disenfranchisement.
The "curse" of rational ignorance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance
Also, the only acceptable way to show that you don't want to vote is to go and cast a blank or invalid vote.
It might be the case that we should encourage everyone to vote, so that all of the uninformed votes might cancel each other out.
I wouldn't be surprised if the same were true of other skills useful to high-quality voting, such as military strategy, education, criminology and history.
I'm also a little leery of anything coming out of the Cato Institute. If this was a published study, that would be different. Given that the author is a professor, I'm willing to give him a little slack, but I'd rather see the opinion peer-reviewed. I don't follow economics well enough to know of any contrarian points of view.
The author's main point seems to be that just because some people can vote, doesn't mean that they should vote. What he doesn't address is why the noise from the uninformed doesn't cancel out. Or more accurately, why wouldn't more noise be better noise? He states that the errors compound, but he never really give a good reason why (at least in my skimming).
I still maintain that the current distribution of uninformed voters isn't uniform. There was a study a while ago (but I can't remember the citation) that said that an increate in even uninformed opinions strengthened predictive power. So in this case more idiots were better idiots. I wish I remember what field this was in though...
The link is to Cato Unbound, where they host an essay and discussion by outsiders to the Cato Institute. The participants aren't just libertarians; Matthew Yglesias had an essay not too long ago.
> I'd rather see the opinion peer-reviewed.
It isn't formal peer review, but there are reaction essays here: http://www.cato-unbound.org/archives/november-2006/
> The author's main point seems to be that just because some people can vote, doesn't mean that they should vote. What he doesn't address is why the noise from the uninformed doesn't cancel out...(at least in my skimming).
Caplan addresses it in the last three paragraphs under How Misconceptions Are Possible, but he's pressed for space in that essay. He wrote about book about this. You can also find his argument here (PDF link): http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/publication/Straight...