A fascinating post by Ilya Somin at Volokh asserts that the swing voter is not only likely to be the one who decides an election, but the most politically ignorant.

As I have discussed in various articles (e.g. here and here), most citizens know little about politics. They are rationally ignorant. Because there is so little chance that your vote will be decisive (less than 1 in 100 million in a presidential election), there’s no incentive to acquire political knowledge if your only reason for doing so is to cast a better-informed vote in order to ensure that the “right” candidate wins. Numerous studies find, however, that swing voters – defined as those who are in the ideological center and don’t have any strong identification with either party – are among the most ignorant. For example, in my research using questions from the 2000 National Election Study, I found that self-identified “Independent-Independents” could on average correctly answer only 9.5 of 31 basic political knowledge questions, scoring much lower than self-described “strong Democrats” (15.4) and “strong Republicans” (18.7). Many other studies find similar results.

Thus, the voters who know the least are the ones who tend to determine electoral outcomes. Not exactly a comforting thought.

Intuitively, there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for swing voters, as individuals who were more even-kheeled, willing to consider candidates with a mind less cluttered by ideological bias so that they were open, even desirous, of learning as much as possible before casting their lot with one side or the other.  Not so, according to Ilya.

Part of the reason why swing voters tend to be ignorant is that they have lower average education levels than committed partisans, and education is correlated with political knowledge. But another important factor is that they tend to be less interested in politics; in most studies, interest in politics is a stronger predictor of political knowledge than any other variable, including education, income, race, gender, etc. Their lack of interest is part of what prevents them from developing strong ideological or partisan commitments in the first place.

As Ilya concedes, the lack of interest in politics is a very rational position, since no individual voter has much of an influence in the outcome, and spending too much personal capital learning about something that you cannot impact is an irrational way to spend one’s time, if the purpose is to be a good citizen.  If it’s morbid curiosity, that’s another matter.

If Ilya’s correct, it suggests that the experiment of democracy is ultimately subject to the lowest (read most ignorant) common denominator, as the least ignorant have long since taken sides leaving the final vote to a group that cares little and knows less.   Which explains a lot when you think about it.