Jane Galt (still banning me, for reasons unknown) links to this: Robert Weissberg, the author of Polling, Policy, and Public Opinion: The Case Against Heeding the "Voice of the People" argues

that polls designed to ask voters if they want more government spending on any given item don't generate politically useful information....Weissberg defends periodic elections as all the democracy we require, thank you very much. He thinks most people don't have the slightest idea what they are talking about when it comes to public policy. That's why, he argues, we should be thankful for having elected representatives to make decisions for us.

He's tough about it too. Not for him the pat-on-the-head doctrine of "rational ignorance." That's the widely accepted notion from the public choice school of economics that says it makes perfect sense, given the high cost-benefit ratio of public policy savvy, for citizens to have only dim notions of what the hell is going on in government.

Economists have gone even further in explaining/excusing public sloth in regard to political beliefs and actions. George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan recently has posited the appropriateness of rational irrationality, whereby we choose an optimal amount of absurd and counterfactual things to believe based on what it costs us to hold these unrealistic beliefs...

Weissberg's findings, which show that people seem to credulously accept the endless possibilities of government goodies, believing they will all deliver exactly the benefits they promise. Weissberg argues that most polls are systematically biased toward manufacturing a vox populi that clamors for an ever-growing welfare state.

To test this thesis, he designed and executed a pair of surveys that he thinks provide a more sophisticated and accurate way of gauging an intelligent, informed decision -- not just an ignorant wish. He used these polls to retest public support for a couple of Clinton-era government expansions: shrinking public school class size by hiring tens of thousands of new teachers, and increasing government-supported day care.

Weissberg found exactly what he was looking for (and one wonders how often that happens in social science research -- there's a poll whose results I'd like to see). If you give longer, more detailed polls that demand citizens balance costs within a necessarily limited total budget, and inform them of both the possibilities of failure and the real dimensions of the problem allegedly being solved, previous apparent support for government action and spending quickly fades.

Fascinating.