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When voters can't rationally assess the consequences of proposed policies, they can't choose the right one. They can't do the assessment when opportunist politicians and commentators give them bad information, and successfully taint those who try to give good information.
This is bound to lead to worse policy than otherwise. A critical issue then is whether voters have good enough information to make the connection between the bad policy they chose, and the bad consequences that followed that they didn't anticipate.
If they didn't have good enough information in the first place, the odds are stacked against them for the ex post evaluation. Bad faith politicians and commentators are there to muddy the already muddy waters in a complex world, and to find other scapegoats.
The scapegoats [immigrants, capitalism, fat cats, scroungers...] motivate new bad policy proposals, which are just as hard to evaluate for voters as those in the first phase.
I'm just tweeting out this old blog really, about a potential vortex of bad policy and bad outcomes that can propagate in democracies with a bad 'knowledge transmission mechanism', as I think @sjwrenlewis called it. longandvariable.wordpress.com/2018/05/11/dem…
