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How much effort should a person be reasonably expected to carry out if they want to be politically informed?
On one extreme, no effort should be required. It's hard to know what this looks like, but one could imagine a world in which chips in your brain automatically feed you current news and political events from a raw and unfiltered pool of sources. You would just have the knowledge, and if anything wasn't listed, you have the right to be outraged.
On the other, serious and substantial effort. Basically, you'd have to devote much time to knowing the current political scene and all perspectives and facts. Think of watching both CNN or Fox as mandatory activities to ensure you hear both perspectives, or read articles about the same thing from both sides, etc. Do your own research every time and come to your own conclusions.
This is assuming, of course, that whatever your line is, external parties must meet their end of the deal. So if you say that a person should be able to watch CNN and be informed, then CNN must report all things that are relevant without partisan slant.
My own thought is that the bar for being informed currently seems rather high. The avenues for uncovering relevant facts and knowledge requires much more than "I know what I was taught in school" because that stuff got outdated before you even graduated. Twitter, paywalled news institutions, academic meta-reviews, etc. are all things you would have to learn to read and discover.
But maybe individuals should invest hours into researching at least one topic a week. What say you?
EDIT: It appears I misread you and just popped off on something on my mind. I'll leave it here anyway. See the last paragraph for a thought on your actual question
Virtually any altruistic use of time would be more ethically sound. Zero effort.
I believe voting would work better like jury duty, where a small representative sample of the population is picked and make it their full time job to become politically informed. Of course, this annuls one of the main adaptive benefits of a democracy, which is giving people a "Close Door" elevator button to press when they're frustrated which usually does nothing.
I do think people have an ethical obligation not to be politically militant on subjects where they haven't done the legwork. The "time" required depends on the subject.
What makes you say the time should differ? Presumably, if I need to research something, I can find the relevant meta-reviews and literature overviews fairly quickly if its a non-history field. For history, you presumably need to read, but JSTOR can come in handy if needed (we'll assume money is not a problem, or you're tech-saavy enough to get around paywalls). Also, there are reputable enough youtube channels, for example, that give relatively concise explanations and truths that would otherwise require many hours of reading.
How we get to a point that we have a fast reference for any subject is important, but assuming you have it, why would it take less or more time?
Important political questions are a bundle of (a) values, and (b) a gobsmacking number of empirical claims. To become a militant advocate of minimum wage increase/abolition probably requires a modest investigation into whether it affects job creation, consumer prices, and skill aquisition, as well as interrogating your values on deploying state power against voluntary exchanges and transferring wealth between classes. To become a militant advocate of radical economic changes like communism or georgism, on the other hand, should require an almost unfathomable amount of research into the science of economics and investigation into the values underpinning our status quo.
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