An ignorant electorate cannot achieve true democratic control over public policy. The immense size and scope of modern government makes it virtually impossible for voters to acquire sufficient knowledge to exercise such control. A truly democratic government must, therefore, be strictly limited in size. Since then, several lines of analysis have tried to vindicate the mass electorate. The media also affect which issues people consider important, and negative advertisements discourage political participation.
People learn from the media only because they know so little about politics.
Were democracy deliberative, these media effects would undermine it. But democracy is not a deliberation but a contest that relies on the ability of the media to shape public opinion. The evidence for media effects is strong, but the media cannot be undermining a form of democracy that does not and cannot exist, and they do sustain the form that does. Because neither individuals nor the public collectively have what Zaller would call real attitudes, he concludes that the effectiveness of democracy rests on competition among intellectual and political elites. In truth, however, the public has many real attitudes that depend heavily on elite leadership, in ways that Converse did not initially emphasize but that are consistent with both his observations and Zaller's model of mass opinion.