What voters consider to be a result often is just a policy. To the public, it appears that merely getting legislation passed equals a result. What they count as a result isn't really much of a result. So what I say is the rational strategy for a person who hasn't actually studied a subject is to be agnostic. It's over someone who were to go and tell me that Babylon were the capital of ancient Assyria.
Bryan Caplan, of George Mason University and blogger at EconLog, talks about his book, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. Caplan argues that democracies work well in giving voters what they want but unfortunately, what voters want isn't particularly wise, especially when it comes to economic policy. He outlines a series of systematic biases we often have on economic topics and explains why we have little or no incentive to improve our understanding of the world and vote wisely. So, it's not special interests that are messing things up but the very incentives that lie at the heart of a vote-based system. This is a disturbing and provocative lens for viewing political outcomes.