I see a number of proposals for inducing less well informed voters to make better choices:
1. Educating them better.
2. Boosting the rate of sustainable economic growth, which tends to persuade people to support better policies.
3. “Buying” voters with one-off transfers, in the hope they will show more support for the better sides of the system.
4. Shaming voters away from making mistakes.
5. Actually giving them control over electoral outcomes, say by having the elites copy the voting choices of the less informed.
Most of us prefer the first two options, but they are relatively hard to accomplish. What is striking is how much attention #3 gets relative to #4 and #5....
#4 is under-discussed. Take the less informed voters who voted for the better candidates in the 1960s. Why did they do that? Note that many of those people believed some pretty terrible things, including about race and about the suitability of George Wallace for higher office. I believe shame is part of the answer — they did not want to feel the shame of deviating from the preferences the elites wanted them to express.
Perhaps it is hard to re-bottle that genie, but there are plenty of historical examples where shame cultures go away and then return, consider for instance the United States after the 1920s.
There is a literature on shame and voting behavior, though from what I can tell most of it concerns participation per se rather than the quality of electoral choice. Here is one striking sentence:
Pride motivates compliance with voting norms only amongst high-propensity voters, while shame mobilizes both high- and low-propensity voters.
Hmm.
