Acceso usuarios
Ryan L. Claassen
It is appropriate that Paul Goren bookends this exciting new look at voter competence by indicting and then exonerating the American voter�yes, the play on the title of the seminal �Michigan model� book appears to be intentional. Few argue that many Americans fall short of the perfectly informed democrats upon whose shoulders political accountability rests in prominent theories of democratic government. The debate is not so much about whether voters are competent as much as it is about whether variation in competence matters. On one side are scholars who worry that many in American society know so little about the political world they inhabit that they fail to matter�or worse still they fall prey to deception and behave in ways that run counter to their best political interests. If the incompetents cannot bring policy to bear on their political behavior, then The American Voter and the subsequent �sophistication interaction account� (Goren�s label) indict many voters as incompetent to hold elected officials accountable democratically. On the other side are scholars who worry that the worriers have fundamentally misunderstood the way in which some citizens approach their democratic duties. While On Voter Competence probably rests more comfortably in the latter camp�thus exonerating the American voter and indicting The American Voter�Goren�s work is unique for having identified several important reasons that good scholars in each camp have arrived at different answers to similar questions about voter competence.
Goren finds important differences when he compares well-informed citizens to poorly informed ones. Consistent with The American Voter �
