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Larry Bartels amasses an overwhelming amount of evidence suggesting that, yes, voters are aggressively ignorant, and yes, it matters -- swings elections, even. It's a pretty bad situation. Indeed, the only plausible worse situation would be if voters were informed:
[V]oters’ perceptions may be seriously skewed by partisan biases. For example, in a 1988 survey a majority of respondents who described themselves as strong Democrats said that inflation had “gotten worse” over the eight years of the Reagan administration; in fact, it had fallen from 13.5 percent in 1980 to 4.1 percent in 1988. Conversely, a majority of Republicans in a 1996 survey said that the federal budget deficit had increased under Bill Clinton; in fact, the deficit had shrunk from $255 billion to $22 billion. Surprisingly, misperceptions of this sort are often most prevalent among people who should know better—those who are generally well informed about politics, at least as evidenced by their answers to factual questions about political figures, issues, and textbook civics. If close attention to elite political discourse mostly teaches people to believe what the partisan elites on “their” side would like to be true, the fundamental premise of books such as Rick Shenkman’s—that a more attentive, politically engaged electorate would make for a healthier democracy—may be groundless.I don't know of any new data on this, but my hunch is the situation now is probably quite a bit worse. If you wanted to inhale a one-sided information diet in 1988, what did you have? Some op-ed columnists in your local paper. A subscription to The National Review or The Nation. Bill Buckley's Firing Line. If you wanted to do the same in the mid-90s, and you were on the Right, you had talk radio. Today? Every blog. Every magazine. Fox News. Talk radio on both sides. Every op-ed columnist in the country. Drudge. HuffPo. News aggregators. Some of that information is of high quality, some is of low quality. But it can all be arranged so you never hear a word that runs even slightly contrary to your biases, and so you can get a truly rich understanding of the world that has fairly little connection to the one you inhabit.
