Democracy for Realists, Part 8 of 19

Around the country, voters who rejected fluoridation saved themselves a few pennies in taxes per year in return for many unpleasant visits to the dentist and substantial dental bills.

From the book:

Democracy for Realists, 2016

Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

By Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels

Page 54

In the 1950s and 1960s, for example, many American towns and cities decided whether to add fluoride compounds to their drinking water. The scientific evidence that fluoride reduced tooth decay was compelling, and cities whose administrators or city councils made the decision without a referendum overwhelmingly adopted fluoridation. However, when the measure went to the voters, 60% of the time the electorate voted it down. Nor were the losses confined to less educated parts of the country. Cambridge, Massachusetts, home to Harvard and MIT, voted three times, defeating it, then passing it by the narrowest of margins, and then defeating it decisively on the third try (Crain, Katz, and Rosenthal 1969, 4, 48).

Around the country, voters who rejected fluoridation saved themselves a few pennies in taxes per year in return for many unpleasant visits to the dentist and substantial dental bills. Thus, the “more democracy” they had, the more likely they were to harm their finances and their children. Why the self-defeating choices? The simple answer is that the voters were confused. Crackpots, rogue doctors, and extreme right-wing interest groups all fought fluoridation, and many voters, including a substantial fraction of those with college educations, could not sort out the self-appointed gurus from the competent experts.

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Page 55

America was founded in an era in which respectable political thought took a firmly antidemocratic line. In the wake of the English Civil War a century earlier, the Earl of Shaftesbury had argued in parliament that monarchy could be sustained only with the support of an army or the nobility. “If you will not have one, you must have the other, or else the Monarch cannot long support itself from tumbling down into a Democratical Republick.” Historian Edmund Morgan (1988, 103) added, “It went without saying that no one wanted England to tumble down there.”