They wouldn't take the form of literacy tests, nowadays. It'd be, say, civics tests, where people who went to private schools and expensive universities would have a significant advantage. People who can afford an education tend to do better in academic settings, if only because they are more used to them. So you'd end up with wealthier being overrepresented in the allowed voter population. Democracy as-is is already heavily biased towards people with money, there's no need to make it more so.
And that's in the ideal case where everything runs properly and the tests are administered fairly and so on. In practice, it's going to add yet another layer of bureaucracy that can be manipulated in favour of the desired result.
The thing is, a civics test that people have trouble passing would be a good thing.
Yes, people with a better education and who are wealthier are more likely to pass the test, but at the same time, they are also people who are more likely to actually know things like the difference between capitalism and communism and how they apply to government styles.
People who can pass civics tests are still heavily biased humans, and politics is the place where bias shines the brightest The fundamental problem with the idea of voting to determine the best candidates and policies is that the sort of abilities that favour winning an election are not strongly correlated with the sort of abilities that help in running a country or writing good laws or whatever else. To win an election, being charismatic and a good public speaker will help you quite a bit purely due to the halo effect, even among better educated people. I don't think these help too much in determining when to start a war, or how much should privacy and freedom be sacrificed in the name of security. In fact, I don't think there's any easy way to determine who has the skills to be a good president/senator/governor/etc. until after you give them the job and see how they did. And even then, it might jut be that their particular skill set was suited for the specific problems that arose when they were in charge, and they'd fail miserably if faced with the problems that might arise in some other time period.
So if I'm so sceptical about the ability of educated people to determine good candidates, why do I think
uneducated people will do better? I don't. I do, however, think that democracy has the very useful feature that you don't need a popular revolt to change who is in power, which creates a stronger incentive against the government fucking the people over too badly. This useful feature of democracies, though, fails if there is some particular class of people who are under-represented in the voting pool, because policy will default into decisions that harm them and benefit the rest.
Democracy also has the useful property of letting people think they have some control over the future of the country. Removing this (in large part illusionary) feeling from a segment of the population is bound to piss them off, cause social friction, etc.
Do note that I don't mean you should only vote to oust people you dislike or getting informed is pointless. A more informed public is better, if perhaps only weakly so. (A very well-informed public might have a strong advantage, here, but to get that you need to remove a lot of people from the voting pool, exacerbating the problem of the unrepresented groups getting fucked over). I have no strong argument for why the exact level of removing bad voters most democracies implement now (i.e. people under 18 can't vote and so on) is the ideal for the balance between informed voters vs. represented groups, but it seems strongly the case that a test-based system goes too far into removing representation.
All that being said, it might be interesting to see if anyone has done a study of the voting habits of better educated people, see if there are any interesting trends.
Right now the wealthy have undue influence in politics because they can easily manipulate the majority of low information voters. An electorate that actually is knowledgeable about the issues being voted on would be significantly less likely to be manipulated and would be able to formulate their own opinions more readily.
I strongly disagree. People at all levels in education are more or less equally influenced by advertising campaigns, which is the major advantage money can buy. If nothing else, you can't vote for someone you've never heard of.
The easiest solution for this is to make it so all politicians have equal, state-granted campaign funds. Far more efficient than disenfranchising part of the population, though it's probably not trivial to enforce.
Lastly, I am strongly in favor of international intervention with regards to elections. A committee of different foreign nations should become the independent electoral commission, handling voter registration and vote counting. It is far too easy for current local governments and organizations to influence voting patterns and rules.
That mostly shifts the problem to foreign nations influencing elections, which means they can end up favouring candidates based on foreign policy rather than what's good for the actual citizens of the country.
There's also sovereignty issues, and people-pissed-off-at-them-damn-foreigners issues. It seems far more trouble than it's worth.
Short version is that I strongly do not trust democracy.
Neither do I. But I trust most alternatives significantly less.
Government positions should require aptitude tests to make sure that the person applying for the position actually understands their job and is capable of doing the job. After they pass the test can you then perhaps have people in the field vote to get the final candidate. Far too often people who have no idea about anything are given government positions and other times people unrelated to an issue and without any real understanding of an issue vote. Limiting options to ensure relevancy is a good thing.
I would actually agree with aptitude tests for some government positions, but it still brings up the problems of who decides what goes on the test.
