Democracy for Realists is an ambitious project that sets its sights at nothing less than turning our conception of democracy and the enlightened, wise citizens—an ideal that has ruled both the popular and academic imagination for over two centuries—upside down. Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels invite the readers to “think about democracy in a fundamentally different way” and make the case that there is a large, consistent and irreconcilable gap between the idealized picture of enlightened voter behavior in what the authors term the “folk theory of democracy” and voter behavior in actual politics.