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The topic of the democratic public's limited competence has preoccupied students of democracy for centuries. Anecdotal concerns about the problem reached their peak of sophistication in the writings of Walter Lippmann & Joseph Schumpeter. Not until Philip E. Converse's "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics" did statistical research overwhelmingly confirm the worst fears of such democratic skeptics. Subsequent work has tended to confirm Converse's picture of a tiny stratum of well-informed ideological elites whose passionate political debates find little echo, or even awareness, in the mass public. While a great deal of attention has been devoted to "saving" democratic legitimacy from such findings, the Converse-inspired work of John Zaller (1992) shows how fruitful Converse's basic ideas can be not only in analyzing real-world political events, but in pulling together & stimulating new lines of research into what moves the "creative synthesizers" of belief systems; into the factors that affect the small numbers of people who grasp such systems & attempt to transmit them to the public; & into the long-term psychological or cultural sources of the predispositions with which members of the mass public confront the resulting political messages. Adapted from the source document.

Annotation

Social-scientific data, such as those found in Philip E. Converse's 1964 essay, 'The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,' have led some to question whether basic assumptions about democratic legitimacy are unfounded. However, by another set of criteria, we have the 'democracy' that was intended by the Framers-namely, a liberal representative system that avoids strong civic engagement by the citizenry. At its deepest level, the American system has been designed to ensure elite influence over the main ambitions of American policy: the expansion of public and private power. When social scientists accumulate findings of civic disengagement and ignorance, it is wrongly supposed to be an indictment of the citizenry; rather, those findings should be understood as the expected result of a certain set of commitments throughout American political history, of which civic apathy and ignorance are the desired outcomes. Adapted from the source document.

In Democracy, Expertise, and Academic Freedom: A First Amendment Jurisprudence for the Modern State, Robert Post offers a powerful argument for why the First Amendment should protect the manner in which professional disciplines produce expert speech. This symposium Essay responds to Post's book by focusing on the potential interaction between Post's theory of "democratic competence" and the freedom of the press. Using the WikiLeaks affair as a foil, this Essay concludes that a "democratic competence" approach might provide a more coherent theoretical underpinning for according constitutional protection to newsgathering (as distinct from publication), and might thereby help to answer the unanswerable question about what the First Amendment's Press Clause actually protects. By the same logic, though, it might also provide for greater restraint on the media insofar as it constitutionalizes conventional arguments about the need to honor the government's expertise when protecting national security secrets against public dissemination. Thus, the question Post really raises is whether such a deeper but narrower First Amendment is one to which we should aspire.