Rethinking the Uninformed Voter
During the most recent election it was not uncommon to hear pundits ask with incredulity how anyone could still be undecided, the suggestion being that those sometimes called low-information voters were so uninformed that all the attention they were getting from both campaigns could only be seen as a dumbing down of democracy.  Even one of my favorite talking head, Jon Stewart, piled on in this way.

It turns out that to the degree that our political communication system turns to focus on low-information voters we might be strengthening democracy, at least if recent studies of the impact of uniformed fish on other fish is applicable.

Iain Couzin, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton, and his team recently discovered that when a uninformed fish are added to a school of fish that previously included strongly opinonated minorty and a less opinionated majority of fish...the impact of adding uniformed fish was to moderate the impact of the strongly opinionated minority, to reduce the ability of a strongly opinionated minority to influence the majority (as they had successfully done before the uninformed fish were added to the equation).  Here is how the researchers concluded their own study:

"Our work provides evidence that uninformed individuals play an important role in consensus decision-making:  By enforcing equal representation of preferences in the group, they promote a democratic outcome.  This provides a new understanding of how informational status influences consensus decisions and why consensus descision-making may be so widespread in nature.  Furthermore, these results suggest a principle that may extend to self-organized decisions among human agents."

While it is still unclear, and to-be-tested, whether or not this finding does suggest a principle applicable to human behavior, the idea has intuitive value.  Consider your widest circle of friends interacting during the recent campaign, perhaps your Facebook community or neighborhood or parish.  When strong partisans were the dominant voices in a room, their influence could sometimes be substantial, as less strongly partisan community members were influenced. 

However, when the room included more low-information voters, the conversation changed, different questions were made salient, and more perspectives heard...often resulting in influence flowing in more, and more varied, directions...and reducing the ability of the strong partisans to influence the majority.  Seems more than plausible to me.