Stanford University press has published the 2nd Edition of Ilya Somin’s Democracy and Political Ignorance. The first edition was an excellent work, with a concise overview of the phenomenon, powerful rebuttals to various “wisdom of the crowd” theories, and a series of plausible proposals for how to reduce the damage political ignorance can do.

This election cycle seems to be unusually strongly characterized by political populism, with candidates like Trump and Sanders catering to people’s ignorance and misinformation (especially about economic matters). Somin’s work is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand the pathologies of American democracy or what we can do about it.

The second edition contains a number of important updates. First, Somin includes data from recent elections, including what’s happening with Trump. Second, he has a good response to defenders of sortition. Sortition inherits all the problems of deliberative democracy, and the frequently used analogy of a randomly selected citizens in political deliberation to randomly selected jurors breaks down, in part because deciding questions of guilt is much easier than deciding policy or politics. Third, he responds to recent work (e.g., by Martin Gilens) showing that elites have disproportionate influence. He argues that this may reduce the damage of political ignorance somewhat, but only somewhat, and even the elite are dangerously ignorant. Fourth, he examines the “Big Sort”–the theory that citizens are becoming increasing ideologically segregated. (That is, American tend more and more only live among those with similar political beliefs, so cities and states are becoming segregated by politics.) He argues that “foot voting” probably does not lead to ideological segregation, but even if it did, it’s not clear that would be a bad thing.

I’ll blog about specific parts of the book at greater length later.