Ilya Somin’s Democracy and Political Ignorance suffers from the fallacy of composition: It uses individual-level evidence about political behavior to draw inferences about the preferences and actions of the public as a whole. But collective public opinion is more stable, consistent, coherent, and responsive to the best available information, and more reflective of citizens’ underlying values and interests, than are the opinions of most individual citizens.

Those sentences, from Benjamin Page of the political science department of Northwestern University, were published in 2015. I don’t think that they hold up so well in 2016. I wonder how many of the critical participants in the symposium on Somin’s book (note: in several months, this link may lead somewhere else) would care to reconsider their views. As always with academics, I expect fewer to reconsider than should do so.

[Note: I wrote this post before Tyler also posted on the symposium, but I scheduled it for now.]

I think that a lot of conventional wisdom in political science is starting to look like pre-September 2008 conventional wisdom in macroeconomics. As Daniel Drezner put it,

the political science theories predicting that someone like Trump was highly unlikely to win a major-party nomination were so widely believed that they turned out to refute themselves.