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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relevant facts and knowledge requires much more than "I know what I was taught in school" because that stuff got outdated before you even graduated.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?
One of the arguments made in the 18th and 19th centuries for restricting the franchise to male landowners with large estates was that being politically informed was the equivalent of a full-time job and that only a wealthy individual who did not have to work for a living had the free time to learn about the issues of the day and make reasonable voting decisions. Such a position eventually became politically untenable given the trends of industrialization and urbanization, but I think it was certainly an understandable concern.
For my part, I try to read or skim several articles from one of a few news aggregator sites every morning, as well as keep up with scientific advancements if possible. If a topic piques my interest, I may dig a little deeper and find the original source. I also usually try to read books relevant to current events as they pop up (e.g. pandemics, the history of Ukraine, AI). This all adds up to less than an hour each day and has a much higher information density than watching cable news, so it doesn't seem like an unreasonable expectation to me.
Was it ever really restricted to 'large' estates, of the kind that had full time managers ?
I don't think that was the argument used. Just that you don't want losers and proletariat and such having any say in how your society is run. Look how it all ended up in the end.
Antebellum figures in the Deep South used a version of that argument (laced with an assumption of elite superiority) -- civilization is a product of the leisure class. This argument hasn't been debunked IMO. Serfs/slaves were made unnecessary by technological improvements.
However, more common was the argument that the franchise should be restricted to those with a fixed stake in the country, who wouldn't simply vote themselves unsustainable handouts from the treasury. See: the Putney Debates.
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