Critical Review

A Journal of Politics and Society

ISSN: 0891-3811 (Print) 1933-8007 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcri20

Democracy, Voter Ignorance, and the Limits of

Foot Voting

Matthew Landauer

To cite this article: Matthew Landauer (2015) Democracy, Voter Ignorance, and the Limits of
Foot Voting, Critical Review, 27:3-4, 338-349, DOI: 10.1080/08913811.2015.1111683

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2015.1111683

Published online: 16 Dec 2015.

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 Matthew Landauer

DEMOCRACY, VOTER IGNORANCE, AND THE

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LIMITS OF FOOT VOTING

ABSTRACT: In Democracy and Political Ignorance, Ilya Somin argues that

the supposed informational advantages of “foot voting”—exercising exit options
and making market-based choices—over voting at the ballot box tell in favor of
decentralizing and limiting government. But the evidence Somin offers for the
superiority of “foot voting,” based on an analysis of the politics of the Jim
Crow-era South, is unpersuasive and internally inconsistent. Second, even if
Somin is correct that foot voters have greater incentives to acquire information
than ballot-box voters do, this would not in itself be a good reason to favor foot
voting. For Somin shows little interest in considering why we might value demo-
cratic decision making. Thus, Somin’s argument is unlikely to persuade anyone
not already committed to the superiority of market-based solutions to social and pol-
itical problems.
Keywords: decentralization; democracy; foot voting; Ilya Somin; limited government; political
ignorance; rational ignorance.

Worries about the competence of democratic citizens are as old as democ-

racy. A version of Ilya Somin’s core insight in his Democracy and Political
Ignorance (Stanford University Press, ) was raised more than ,,
years ago by the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes. In The
Knights, the character of the Sausage Seller complains that ordinary citi-
zens become markedly less competent when they engage in democratic

Matthew Landauer, landauer@chicago.edu, is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the

University of Chicago,  South University Avenue, Chicago, IL .
Critical Review (–): – ISSN - print, - online
©  Critical Review Foundation http://dx.doi.org/./..
 Landauer • The Limits of Foot Voting 

politics: “Oh blast my luck, I’m finished. When he’s at home the old
fellow’s the shrewdest of men, but when he’s sitting on that rock [the
Pnyx, the location of Assembly meetings] he gapes like a chewer of
dried figs” (Aristophanes , lines –). Somin, too, is concerned
that democratic citizens may make worse decisions in their public than
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in their private lives.

If his concerns are old ones, Somin has nonetheless written a timely
book. Political scientists are increasingly focused on the problems with,
and inherent limitations of, electoral democracy. Elections are an
entrenched democratic institution, but a growing body of research suggests
that existing democratic institutions are not responsive to the preferences of
ordinary citizens. There are surely a number of causes of this state of affairs.
But at least part of the problem might be that holding elected officials
accountable, and ensuring that they legislate and govern in accordance
with majority preferences, is not easy for citizens to do, as Somin argues
in chapter  (–). Concerns about whether voters are up to the tasks
that democratic theory prescribes for them are shared across the political
spectrum. Democratic theorists and philosophers interested in sortition as
a selection mechanism are motivated, in part, by similar concerns about
voter ignorance and the ability of ordinary citizens to hold elected officials
meaningfully accountable given the complexities of modern politics.
The supporters of sortition have offered radical proposals for insti-
tutional redesign that, in the near term, seem to stand little chance of
being adopted. By contrast, Somin presents his proposed reforms as mod-
erate and attainable. In his view, the problem of voter ignorance does not
require radically innovative solutions, but merely tells in favor of strength-
ening two constitutional mechanisms we already have in the United States
—federalism and judicial review—along with a decentralization of power
to the local level and a constriction in the scope of government power.
Somin’s basic claim is that individuals have better incentives to collect
information and to use it rationally when making consequential decisions
for themselves—when “voting with their feet”—than they do at the
ballot box. All other things being equal, Somin thinks, we should there-
fore favor decentralization and limited government. As I argue below,
Somin’s claims, while thought provoking, are not persuasive. His
support for foot voting and limited government as solutions to the
problem of political ignorance are unlikely to convince anyone not
already independently committed to privatization, decentralization, and
the superiority of market-based solutions to social problems.
  Critical Review Vol. , Nos. –

Somin’s Argument
The fifth chapter of Somin’s book is set up as a comparison between “foot
voting” and “ballot-box voting.” While Somin does not define foot
voting, he seems to mean, in the first place, the ability of citizens under
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a federal system of government to move from one jurisdiction to

another where the laws, opportunities, climate, or whatever else suits
them better. I vote with my feet when I move from New York to
North Dakota to take advantage of the fracking boom (enabled by per-
missive legislation), or from Indiana to California out of concern for the
former’s attempts to adopt a Religious Freedom Restoration Act. But
any kind of market-based choice also seems to count as foot voting for
Somin—“limits on the power of government” will enable citizens “to
vote with their feet in the private sector” ().
Somin’s argument is not (or not merely) the familiar claim that citizens’
ability to exit a jurisdiction might, under certain conditions, function as an
effective mechanism of accountability. Rather, he claims that his contri-
bution is that foot voting’s “informational advantages over ballot-box
voting have often been overlooked” (). Foot voters have advantages
over ballot-box voters in their incentives to acquire information and
use it rationally. This is plausible, for reasons long familiar to social scien-
tists. Voters in large electorates are extremely unlikely to have a decisive
effect on electoral outcomes; by contrast, a single person’s decision to
move from Austin to Boston is decisive. Moreover, the decision to
move will for many citizens be far more consequential than the
outcome of (say) the  House race in their district. Incentives to
acquire knowledge, and to use it rationally, are therefore correspondingly
greater in the foot-voting cases.
Somin does not argue that foot voters are infallible in their use of
knowledge. The argument is, rather, comparative: “foot voting has sig-
nificant informational advantages over ballot-box voting” ().
Somin’s hope is to leverage that insight into an argument for decentraliza-
tion and limited government. Of course, concerns about political ignor-
ance are not in themselves decisive when it comes to questions of
constitutional design, but they matter (ibid.). A similar logic prevails
when considering the case for private versus public provision of goods:
insofar as markets have similar (or greater) informational advantages
over ballot-box voting, the case for privatization is strengthened, although
 Landauer • The Limits of Foot Voting 

other factors matter in this case as well (). Somin’s central claim is thus
that the informational advantages of foot voting over ballot-box voting
make arguments for decentralization and limited government stronger
than they would otherwise be. In the competition between alternatives
that Somin has staged for us—foot voting versus ballot-box voting—
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the phenomenon of political ignorance counts in foot voting’s favor.

Are Foot Voting and Ballot-Box Voting Alternatives?

One problem with Somin’s argument is its framing. Somin is right that the
problem of political ignorance is best analyzed comparatively. It is no use
castigating voters for their ignorance if other forms of decision making do
not aggregate and deploy knowledge more effectively. And Somin has no
desire to argue for the superiority of dictatorship to democracy (–). But
it is not so easy to say what exactly Somin thinks he is comparing here.
Somin thinks we need to get clear on the relative informational advan-
tages of foot voting and ballot-box voting “because foot voting and
ballot-box voting are the most important realistic alternatives facing
many societies across a wide range of issues” (). But does it really
make sense to see foot voting and ballot-box voting as “realistic alterna-
tives” to each other? In practice they are almost always used in combi-
nation. The decision of how much scope, over what domain, to leave
to markets is the result of a political process, one in which ballot-box
voting plays a crucial part.
Moreover, the framing of foot voting and ballot-box voting as alterna-
tives, along with Somin’s decision to use the word “voting” to describe
both, obscures some crucial differences between the two. In particular,
while both markets and ballots can be seen as methods of aggregating
information, ballots produce collectively binding decisions in a way that
markets (and decisions to move from Boston to Austin) do not. Strange
as it seems, it is not entirely clear that Somin recognizes this, or that he
has thought about the difference. Somin’s citation of Adam Przeworski
is telling in this regard. As Somin puts it, “Przeworski, one of the
world’s leading scholars of democratic decision-making, laments that
‘[n]o rule of collective decision-making other than unanimity can render
causal efficacy to equal individual participation’” (, emph. added).
Somin goes on to write, “But foot voting comes close. It is an option
that can be made available to most, if not all, of the population, and indi-
viduals’ choices are causally effective in a way that ballot-box votes are
  Critical Review Vol. , Nos. –

not” (). The causal efficacy of foot voting, as we have seen, is a central
part of Somin’s argument for its informational advantages. From the rest of
the paragraph, it seems that Somin thinks the obvious objection to his line
of argument is that foot voting is not equally available to all, and hence is
unfair. He notes that “moving costs and other constraints” will render foot
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voting unavailable to some, but claims that such constraints are not
“nearly as severe as conventionally thought,” and that ballot-box
voting, too, is not always equal and fair (–). Nowhere does he
address the fact that foot voting is not a “rule of collective decision-
making,” however, making his response to Przeworski a non sequitur.
In general, the chapter suffers from showing no real interest in the ques-
tion of why we would value making some binding decisions collectively,
and how foot voting might complement (or threaten) that commitment.
Elizabeth Anderson’s discussion of the different ways to transmit and
aggregate “socially dispersed information”—through talk, votes, and
markets—is relevant here (Anderson , –). In her essay, “The Epis-
temology of Democracy,” Anderson rightly notes that “the epistemic
needs and powers of any institution should be assessed relative to the pro-
blems it needs to solve” (ibid., ). To some extent, Somin’s argument
follows this basic principle. But Somin also seems to assume that few pro-
blems need to be solved through democratic decision-making processes
(in Anderson’s terms, “talk” and “votes”). Because of this, he moves rela-
tively quickly from the question of “how could we improve collective
decision making?” to “how can we minimize it?” Somin never asks
whether some social questions ought to be responsive to talk and votes
rather than to price information, or why some of his readers might
believe something like this. Those committed to the importance of talk
and votes—to the value of democracy—will presumably continue to
search for ways to improve collective decision-making rather than aban-
doning it in favor of markets, even if they agree with much of Somin’s
negative argument.
I turn next to Somin’s evidence for the claim that foot voting has infor-
mational advantages over ballot-box voting.

Foot Voting in the Jim Crow South

Ballot-box voting is used to make collective decisions binding on all. Foot
voting is a catch-all term to describe individuals exercising various exit
options and market-based choices. Given these fundamentally different
 Landauer • The Limits of Foot Voting 

orientations, their respective “informational advantages” are difficult to

compare. Foot voters and ballot-box voters are choosing different sorts
of things: places to move and products on the one hand, laws and
elected officials on the other. What would such a comparison even
look like? I was therefore unsurprised to read that “there has not yet
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been a definitive study that empirically documents the informational

advantages of voting with your feet over ballot-box voting under con-
trolled conditions” (). Nonetheless, Somin gamely tries to construct
some evidence for his claim from a comparison of Jim Crow-era
African-American migrants and Southern white ballot-box voters.
Somin claims that it is striking evidence of the informational advantages
of foot voting that Southern African Americans, while “extremely ill-
educated” and poor, nonetheless were able to acquire the knowledge
they needed to vote with their feet and migrate north and west (–
). Somin briefly documents the success of foot voting for many
African Americans (including, he suggests, those who remained behind,
and who benefited in some cases from more lenient economic and
social policies put in place by white politicians attempting to prevent
further migration) and the strong support for migration among some
prominent nineteenth-century African Americans, including Frederick
Douglass (–). I am persuaded that African Americans made good
use of their opportunities to exit the Jim Crow regime and that we
have reason to value such exit options. But these are not Somin’s
central claims.
Rather, Somin seeks to leverage the success of African American
migrants to make a different argument:

If foot voting could provide powerful informational advantages in the

exceptionally adverse conditions of the Jim Crow-era South, there is
strong reason to expect that it is more effective under modern conditions,
in which education levels are much higher, information costs are lower,
and no large group is as thoroughly oppressed as were poor southern
blacks a century ago. People in less dire circumstances than early
twentieth-century southern blacks can acquire information more easily. ()

The main problem with this argument is that the set of adverse conditions
African Americans were under was itself the single most relevant piece of infor-
mation for foot voters in the Jim Crow South. Is it really surprising that even the
“ill-educated” can see the possible advantages of living in a jurisdiction
without legal segregation, restrictions on civil rights, and a lower risk of
  Critical Review Vol. , Nos. –

lynching? None of this is to deny the reality of racism in the North; it is

just to say that much of the information bearing on the decision to migrate
can hardly be called difficult to acquire and assess. We can admire migrants
for their bravery, their decisiveness, their willingness to leave their homes
in search of a new life—but to think that what was amazing in their story
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was that they were able, somehow, against all odds, to acquire information
about the badness of Jim Crow is a little strange. Somin claims to have
chosen an example in which the information acquisition needed for effec-
tive foot voting took place even under unfavorable conditions; I rather
think he has cherry picked an easy case. Whether foot voters today,
choosing between jurisdictions that are far more similar, would be as suc-
cessful, even if they are better educated than Jim Crow-era Southern
African Americans, and even if the Internet has drastically lowered infor-
mation costs in comparison with the telegraph, is by no means clear, in
spite of Somin’s attempt to use the Great Migration as indirect evidence
for this claim.
The second comparison Somin makes here is between Southern white
ballot-box voters and Southern black foot voters. Somin tries to argue that
the success of African Americans in acquiring information about migration
opportunities looks especially impressive when set alongside what he takes
to be to “gross ignorance on factual matters and failure to make rational
use of political information” on the part of Southern whites ().
Somin takes lynching, for example, to be in part (primarily?) the conse-
quence of an information failure: the “widely accepted myth” “that
many if not most black men were out to rape white women” was “the
principal rationale justifying the Southern states’ policy of permitting
the lynching of numerous blacks accused (often falsely) of the rape or
murder of whites” (ibid.). Similarly, Somin claims that Southern whites
simply failed to realize that the oppression and exclusion of blacks was
“an important contributing factor to the region’s underdevelopment”
(); had they done so, he thinks, they would have hastened to dismantle
Jim Crow. That they did not is evidence that Southern views on “racial
issues” were driven either by “ignorance per se” or by “failure to ration-
ally evaluate the information voters did know.” “Most likely,” he writes,
“a combination was at work” (ibid.). This contrasts, he thinks, with “the
more effective acquisition and use of information on racial issues by black
foot voters” (ibid.).
The analysis of Jim Crow as a kind of massive cognitive failing on the
part of Southern white voters strikes me as strained. Somin himself offers
 Landauer • The Limits of Foot Voting 

an alternative explanation, although he does not seem to recognize it as

such: “The one-party system and other political institutions of the pre-
Civil Rights Movement South were organized around the objective of
maintaining white supremacy” (). If we take lynching, segregation,
and the denial of civil rights as means to that end, it is not clear that the
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main problems with Southern white voters were informational ones.

Indeed, elsewhere in the book Somin uses the Jim Crow South as a
case of “good” political knowledge combining with “bad” values to
lead to bad outcomes. In chapter , Somin observes that in the Jim
Crow South “political leaders sometimes adopted more discriminatory
policies against African Americans than they personally favored in order
to satisfy racist public opinion” (). He takes this as a paradigmatic
example of a case in which “increased political knowledge might
enable voters with ‘bad’ values to implement those values more fully”
(). The move from chapter ’s treatment of Jim Crow, which takes
the more common-sense view that voters knew what they wanted and
were able to get it from their politicians, to chapter ’s discussion,
which blames Jim Crow on voter ignorance, is never explained.
Finally, it is worth noting that the true apples-to-apples comparison
here, which Somin scrupulously avoids, would be between the (actual)
foot voting of African Americans and their (hypothetical) ballot-box
voting had they been enfranchised. Do we have any reason to doubt
that African Americans would have made rational and informed decisions
at the ballot box with respect to Jim Crow-era race issues, given the right
to vote? I doubt such a comparison would do much to support Somin’s
argument, but it seems like a relevant one, as it holds everything but
the voting mechanism constant.

Do Such Comparisons Matter?

I have argued that Somin’s framing of foot voting and ballot-box voting as
alternatives is unhelpful. I have tried to cast some doubts on his claim that
the informational advantages of foot voting over ballot-box voting are
meaningfully comparable and on the evidence he uses to support that
claim. Now I want to shift focus. Suppose it is possible to think of foot
voting and ballot-box voting as alternatives, and suppose we could mean-
ingfully compare the informational advantages of one with the other.
Would this give us a reason to favor one over the other? I am not
convinced.
  Critical Review Vol. , Nos. –

Recall that Somin’s central claim is that the “informational advantages”

of foot voting over ballot-box voting—the greater incentives we have
to gather information and use that information rationally when we
make choices that are both consequential for our own lives and indivi-
dually decisive—tell in favor of decentralization and limited govern-
ment: “Political ignorance is just one of many factors that have to be
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weighed in deciding how centralized a political system should be. But

it does make the case for decentralization stronger than it otherwise
would be” (). The same holds true, a fortiori, for privatization: “to
the extent that the informational benefits of foot voting are even
greater in the case of private sector institutions than political institutions,
they argue for increasing the authority of the former relative to the
latter” ().
To see why I think Somin’s argument here is specious, consider the
following hypothetical example. Imagine we, the denizens of East
Chortleton, get together at a town meeting in advance of an upcoming
vote on a new minimum-wage initiative. There is currently no
minimum wage in East Chortleton. Following Somin, let us frame the
alternatives as a choice between foot voting and ballot-box voting: we
can either allow employers and employees to “vote with their feet” and
sign whatever wage contracts they wish to, or we can collectively set a
binding wage floor.
As we debate the merits of the proposed law, some citizens raise argu-
ments about rights. Such arguments are raised on both sides: the time-
honored right of high school kids to scoop ice cream for low wages (a
character-building experience!); the right to a “living wage”; the right
freely to enter contracts; and so on. Citizens also raise arguments about
outcomes: the new minimum wage might put the local bookstore out of
business; it might increase the ranks of the unemployed; it might also
put more money in the pockets of many low-income workers. Surely
the minimum-wage law, if passed, would create both winners and
losers, relative to the status quo, and we might spend some time discussing
how to balance their interests.
Now imagine that, as our debate progresses along these lines, a consen-
sus begins to form: the proposed minimum wage law is simply not right
for our town, given the likely bad outcomes. At this point, a voice rings
out from the back of the hall: “I’m glad everyone has come to see the
likely bad outcomes the proposed law will cause. But I want to add
another reason to vote ‘no’ on the initiative. Aside from outcomes and
 Landauer • The Limits of Foot Voting 

rights, we should consider the fact that voters, at least compared

to employers and employees, are woefully ignorant.” I suspect this
addition to the debate would be met by puzzlement, or at least a
request for clarification. We’ve been talking about people’s rights, and
the effects of the law on the town’s economy. Why should we care
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about ignorance at all?

If we have confidence in our assessment of the likely outcomes of the
proposed minimum-wage law, then questions about voter knowledge
and ignorance become irrelevant. Political knowledge is not valuable
for its own sake, and voter ignorance is not in itself a major failing.
Rather, we care about political information and its lack because of their
consequences for the outcomes that we care about. Ignorance might
sometimes be the cause of bad outcomes. But to cite it as a separate
reason to reject ballot-box voting, alongside those likely bad outcomes,
is to double count. Absent the bad outcomes it causes (or doesn’t), the
problem of political ignorance amounts to little more than an ad hominem.
Perhaps Somin’s argument, then, only applies when we are highly
uncertain, or strongly disagree, about the likely outcomes of alternative
policies. For any actual decision between the alternatives of “ballot-box
voting” and “foot voting”—levels of centralization, health-care policy,
minimum-wage laws, or whatever else—we would do best to ignore
ignorance and focus instead on the rights claims involved (if any) and
the likely outcomes. But when we are not confident in our knowledge
of outcomes, perhaps the informational advantages of foot voting over
ballot-box voting tend, all things considered, to support decentralization
and sharply limited government. Even this weak claim strikes me as
tenuous.
Somin’s argument, construed in this fashion, relies on a suppressed
premise: that informational advantages tend to translate into better out-
comes. Under some circumstances this may be a reasonable assumption,
e.g., when we are comparing decisions using the same or a similar pro-
cedure. But it is not so in the case of interest, that is, in comparing
ballot-box voting and foot voting. Directly comparing the “informational
advantages” of ballot-box voting and foot voting, as Somin asks us to do,
is useless. This is because foot voting and ballot-box voting translate infor-
mation into global outcomes in very different ways. Voting does so by
giving each person an equal share of decision-making power to elect poli-
ticians or to pass laws. Markets and foot voting do so through a series of
voluntary transactions and decisions. Suppose we could say with Somin
  Critical Review Vol. , Nos. –

that (for example) voters bring to the ballot box “five units of knowledge”
while consumers bring to some comparable market-based decision “ten
units of knowledge.” Such knowledge is subsequently aggregated by
very different procedures (votes, market transactions) that may generate
very different overall outcomes. The extra units of knowledge our
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market participant brings to her decisions tell us little or nothing about

the quality of those overall outcomes.
For example, imagine a world where minimum-wage workers require
knowledge about the best food sales each week in order to pay for their
family’s groceries. They will be strongly incentivized to acquire this
knowledge and to use it rationally. Now imagine a situation where
minimum-wage workers also receive food stamps. The workers’ incen-
tives to acquire knowledge of food sales might well decline. And the
decision to pass a law mandating food stamps for low-wage employees
might have been made by citizens with poor incentives to gather the
relevant knowledge. But the law mandating food stamps may nonethe-
less lead to superior outcomes. More generally, for any given choice
between market provision and public provision, one can accept that
market participants will be better incentivized than voters to become
informed about their choices and to use their knowledge effectively,
and still be skeptical that markets will transform those knowledge
advantages into good outcomes overall, for all of the familiar reasons
that citizens and theorists are sometimes skeptical about markets—con-
cerns about distribution, externalities, and so on. If the conclusion
about the good outcomes markets and foot voting will produce
holds, their informational advantages will be only a small part of the
explanation. And Somin does nothing to supply the rest of the
explanation.
Somin thinks that his analysis shows that “the need to combat the
effects of political ignorance justifies stronger constitutional constraints
on centralization and the growth of government than we might otherwise
wish to impose” (). But without a fuller—and undoubtedly contro-
versial—argument for the superiority of markets, it can show no such
thing. Readers already inclined to the view that market provision, small
government, and decentralization will lead to superior outcomes may
find in Somin’s book some validation of their beliefs. But readers not
yet committed to the ideology of small government will have no
reason to change their views based solely on market participants’ informa-
tional advantages over voters.
 Landauer • The Limits of Foot Voting 

NOTES

. See in particular Guerrero  for an argument that voter ignorance can be a
serious threat to electoral democracy’s ability to bring about responsive and desir-
able outcomes.
. See, for example, Hirschman  and Warren .
. Somin in places seems to recognize this, as with his discussion of the difficulty of
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implementing his plan: “widespread voter ignorance and irrationality are likely
to prevent the political process from producing the appropriate level of decentra-
lization and limits on government needed to restrict the harm caused by ignorance
and irrationality themselves” (). He concludes that “constitutional restraints on
centralization and the growth of government” may be needed.
. Somin is quoting from Przeworski , .
. Here “need” should be understood, I think, normatively.
. Perhaps consistency can be rescued by claiming that Jim Crow-era white South-
erners were knowledgeable about the politicians but ignorant about their true
good? This would still cut against Somin’s seemingly non-cognitive discussion of
values as “ultimate goals” in chapter two ().
. In places Somin actually seems to deny this (see, e.g., his discussion of knowledge
combined with bad values in chapter ), but I cannot see how his argument could
function without something like this premise.
. For this reason, I find Somin’s claim that there may be informational advantages to
deciding some policies on the local or state rather than the federal level, and that
this might in turn lead to better outcomes across those policy domains, more per-
suasive (–). Note that this argument, however, does not rely on the super-
iority of foot voting over ballot-box voting; it relies on the (case by case)
superiority of democratic decision making at the local or state rather than federal
level.
. Although the ability to influence others’ votes is usually not equal.

REFERENCES

Anderson, Elizabeth. . “The Epistemology of Democracy.” Episteme (): –.

Aristophanes. . The Knights, in Aristophanes I, trans. Jeffrey Henderson.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Guerrero, Alexander. . “Against Elections: The Lottocratic Alternative.”
Philosophy and Public Affairs (): –.
Hirschman, Albert O. . Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms,
Organizations, and States. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Przeworski, Adam. . Democracy and the Limits of Self Government. New York:
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Somin, Ilya. . Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Warren, Mark. . “Voting with Your Feet: Exit-Based Empowerment in
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