When Political Ignorance is really harmful for Democracy
Moral Intuitions and Biased Attitudes in Voting Behaviour
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11340758 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jacopo Marchetti (0000-0002-2415-0113, Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale “Amedeo Avogadro”, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 49 |
| Issue | 9 |
| Pages | 1046-1060 |
| Publication date | 2023-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Philosophy & Social Criticism (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0191-4537 • E-ISSN: 1461-734X |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/01914537221093742 |
| OpenAlex | W4229064457 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 67 |
Ignorance about political related issues has long been considered a threat to democracy. This paper revolves around the concept of political ignorance, focusing especially on Ilya Somin’s book Democracy and Political Ignorance and going beyond his standpoint in two ways. First of all, it moves away from the notion of factual knowledge by showing that political ignorance cannot be limited to a matter of information quality. On the contrary, it shows that ignorance concerns the formation of opinions about political facts, which are the bricks with which disagreement is built. Then, using the insights of the Moral Foundation Theory by Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues, the paper argues that moral intuitions represent an additional source of bias that current research on the problem of voters’ ignorance should address. While Somin argues that biased moral values are the outcome of ignorance, Moral Foundation Theory suggests that moral intuitions are a robust determinant of people’s political views as they make factual knowledge partially irrelevant and also make people with different moral minds unable to understand the basis of reciprocal factual argumentations
Democracy · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Ignorance · Political philosophy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection · Law · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics
What Americans know about politics and why it matters
The Rationalizing Voter
The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
How Voters Decide
Democracy and Decision
Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy
Shifting Liberal and Conservative Attitudes Using Moral Foundations Theory
Moral Heuristics
Models of ecological rationality
The emotional dog and its rational tail
The Psychology of Life Stories
An economic theory of democracy
Political identity and moral education
Democracy and Political Ignorance
Against Democracy
Bayesian or biased? Analytic thinking and political belief updating
Uninformed Why People Seem to Know So Little about Politics and What We Can Do about It
Democracy Ancient and Modern
Above and Below Left–Right
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
Moral polarization and out-party hostility in the US political context
The psychological foundations of rational ignorance
Agreeing to Disagree Politically
Expressive voting and electoral equilibrium
Cognitive biases in moral judgments that affect political behavior
Expanding the scope and content of morality policy research
The Impossibility of a Bayesian Liberal
Individual Choice in Voting and the Market
Intuitive ethics
The Ideological Foundations of Affective Polarization in the U.S. Electorate
The Ongoing Debate Over Political Ignorance
Public ignorance and democratic theory
The myth of the rational voter
Polarization in the American Public
Hot Cognition or Cool Consideration? Testing the Effects of Motivated Reasoning on Political Decision Making
Personality Dispositions and Political Preferences Across Hard and Easy Issues
Mapping the Connections between Politics and Morality
The Influence of Partisan Motivated Reasoning on Public Opinion
Liberellas Versus Konservatives
The Motivated Processing of Political Arguments
Deliberative Democracy and Political Ignorance
Does public ignorance defeat deliberative democracy
Ideology Justifies Morality
Uninformed Votes
Intuitive Ethics and Political Orientations
Partisan Gaps in Political Information and Information‐Seeking Behavior
Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations
The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States
The Nature and Origins of Misperceptions
I Disrespectfully Agree
Do Facts Matter? Information and Misinformation in American Politics
The electoral consequences of voter ignorance
Voter Choice
Voting Correctly
Political Ignorance and Collective Policy Preferences
Information Effects in Collective Preferences
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |