What if you can vote but can’t understand what you’re voting on? 

Imagine two citizens receiving identical governmental notices before preparing to cast their votes in an upcoming election. Both have the same legal right to vote, contact their representatives, and participate in public policy. One can understand what the policies mean and how it may affect them while the other is left struggling to decipher it. Legally, they are political equals – but in practice, are they?

At first, reading sounds like an educational or financial issue of inequality, not a political one. While literacy may be defined as the basic ability to read and write, it simultaneously serves as the most powerful tool for access: to information, expression, political participation, and power. Being unable to effectively navigate through political information creates an overlooked vulnerability for democracy. Having political rights is not necessarily the same as being able to meaningfully exercise them.

Here Comes the Informational Middleman!

The complexity of political information can create difficulties for some citizens to independently and accurately interpret what information they are reading, which may increase reliance on others or simplified forms of media to explain it. That person, organization, or platform then becomes an “informational middleman.” 

While this phenomenon doesn’t necessarily mean the intermediary is deliberately misleading citizens, interpretation is never neutral. Each explanation involves the decision on which topics are emphasized, simplified, or even excluded. A lengthy piece of legislation can turn into a politician’s talking point, an advocacy campaign message, or a one-minute instagram reel. The original information may remain the same, but the way a citizen encounters it has changed.

This process can be understood as a chain: multifaceted political information creates difficulty understanding it; reliance on intermediaries increases; intermediaries construe information; and new interpretations emerge that shape a citizen’s preference. The issue, therefore, steers away from the capability of citizens to develop opinions toward unequal access to political information that creates a disturbing dependence on people/platforms that explain politics to them.

The Dahl Problem: Equal Rights and Unequal Access

Political scientist Robert Dahl argues that democracy requires citizens to formulate and express their political preferences. Dahl’s framework assumes a higher need in the past giving citizens the formal right to simply participate – citizens must also be able to access enough accurate information in order to curate developed partialities. Dahl touches on an important distinction between de jure and de facto political equality. De jure, citizens possess the same rights (one person, one vote, equal eligibility, equal access to institutions). De facto, on the other hand, means that citizens may lack the same abilities to comprehend information through which those rights are exercised.

The literacy crisis in return extends beyond the boundaries of solely education, or finance. It raises an imperative democratic inquiry: can political participation be truly fair when citizens have unfair abilities to access and interpret information that informs their engagement in politics? Recent OECD Research similarly finds that adults who show stronger literacy rates are generally more likely to feel capable of understanding and involving themselves with political affairs, suggesting that differences in literacy do in fact translate into differences within participation and decision-making power. When citizens struggle to properly utilize the information that democratic institutions depend on, literacy becomes a marker of nation-wide welfare.

Backsliding Doesn’t Appear as the End of Democracy

Democratic erosion is a gradual, ambiguous phenomenon that can occur from within existing political institutions rather than through an obvious overthrow of them. In truth, literacy becomes relevant to the less visible vulnerabilities posed by democratic backsliding. When people picture a democratic collapse, they may imagine:

• Elections disappearing
• An overthrown government 
• The abolition of institutions

Threats to democracy can appear in forms other than blatant authoritarianism – it is most likely incremental; institutions remain formally intact while the public’s capacity to eloquently interact with those institutions become increasingly unequal.

Low literacy rates don’t automatically cause a diminishing democratization, but it can create an unhealthy condition in which democratic rights become harder for some citizens to exercise formal rights independently. The institutions still exist. Elections still occur. Citizens still have the right to participate. Yet, the relationship between citizens, information, and the government can gradually separate. 

“Invisible Voters”

A citizen does not necessarily have the right to vote in order to become politically marginalized. They can become less able to understand how policies affect them, navigate government programs, distinguish competing claims, publicly comment, etc. The illiterate creation of voter suppression leads to the “invisible voter”: someone whose formal rights remain intact but their ability to translate their rights into adequate participation is hindered. 

Dahl’s emphasis on government responsiveness emphasizes that some citizens are consistently less able to understand and community translates into an issue where policymakers may receive incomplete or distorted illustrations of what the public actually wants. Inequality within political influences lies between nescience and inaccessibility.

Explaining “The People”

The role of the middle man becomes inherently and particularly important. If citizens depend on mediation, those who control the intermediaries gain a great influence over how constituents perceive political issues, and ultimately, what they “believe” the masses want.

A Pew Research Center Global Survey reveals an intriguing divide, finding that across almost 40 nations, 55% of them believe that social media benefits democracy while citizens who are high-income view it as disruptive (e.g. 65% of Americans and 70% of the Dutch population agree that social media harms democracy). Many political figures, like (mostly main-stream) populists, utilize social platforms to bypass traditional forms of media, allowing them to appear more relatable and feel more approachable to those who are more uninformed. When citizens who are looking to stay more informed heavily depend on these intermediaries, the person who interprets the information can begin to shape what an issue means and the interests of what supposedly count as the interests of “the people.”

Can Democracy Read?

So, can democracy read? Not literally, of course. But, democratic institutions increasingly relying on citizens being able to find their way through complex polity means that society is treating literacy as merely an educational problem that overlooks its consequences for civic engagement.

If democracy depends on citizens being able to formulate and express their preferences, then the ability to form those same preferences matters just as much as the formal right to express them. Asymmetrical opportunities within the accessibility to necessary information to understand governments creates unfavorable dependencies on the “middlemen” who explain it. 

The danger, then, is emphasized by the connection between citizens and rights that become gradually mediated  – ultimately creating deviations between responsiveness. Democracy may remain formally intact, but the people who are meant to shape a nation become powerless when they rely on someone else to explain what information means.