Epistemic democracy refers to a range of views in political science and philosophy which see the value of democracy as based, at least in part, on its ability to make good or correct decisions. Epistemic democrats believe that the legitimacy or justification of democratic government should not be exclusively based on the intrinsic value of its procedures and how they embody or express values such as fairness, equality, or freedom. Instead, they claim that a political system based on political equality can be expected to make good political decisions, and possibly decisions better than any alternative form of government (e.g., oligarchy, aristocracy, or dictatorship).
Theories of epistemic democracy are concerned with the ability of democratic institutions to do such things as communicate, produce, and utilise knowledge, engage in forms of experimentation, aggregate judgements and solve social problems. Based on such abilities, democracy is said to be able to track some standard of correctness, such as the truth, justice, the common good, or the collective interest. Epistemic democracy as such does not recommend any particular form of democracy – whether it be direct, representative, participatory, or deliberative – and epistemic democrats themselves disagree over such questions. Instead, they are united by a common concern for the epistemic value of inclusive and equal political arrangements. Epistemic democrats are therefore often associated with ideas such as collective intelligence and the wisdom of crowds.
Epistemic arguments for democracy have a long history in political thought and can be found in the work of figures such as Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Nicolas de Condorcet, and John Dewey. In contemporary political philosophy and political science, advocates of epistemic democracy include David Estlund, Hélène Landemore, Elizabeth Anderson, Joshua Cohen, Robert Goodin, and Kai Spiekermann.
Overview Theories of epistemic democracy see the value of democracy as based, at least in part, on the ability of democratic procedures to make good or correct decisions, where 'good' and 'correct' are normally defined in respect to some procedure-independent standard. This independent standard may be the truth, justice, the common good, or the collective interest. Epistemic democrats therefore claim that democracy is not valuable solely because it embodies or expresses certain intrinsic values. Instead, it is thought to also take decisions which can track some conception of the truth, justice or the common good. Such views therefore often take there to be an important instrumental component to any defence or justification of democratic government.
Views along these lines are contrasted with purely procedural theories of democracy. Pure proceduralism refers to the view that the value and justification of democracy rests solely in the fairness or intrinsic value of democratic institutions. What matters on these views is that democracy embodies or expresses important values – such as equality, freedom, or autonomy – rather than the quality of the outcomes they produce. The only way to evaluate the quality of a political decision on such a view is therefore to look back at the procedure which produced it. They ask whether the decision was taken in a free and fair manner, and if so, judge it to be a good decision. In contrast, epistemic democrats think that political decisions can be judged by some standards which are independent of the procedures which produced them. They can therefore ask, irrespective of whether the decision was taken in a free or fair way, if it tracked some conception of the truth, justice, or the common good.
Epistemic democracy is therefore analogous to what John Rawls referred to as "imperfect procedural justice." Rawls states that imperfect procedural justice takes there to be independent criteria which define whether an outcome is correct or better. Unlike perfect procedural justice, however, which takes there to be a procedure which can guarantee the right outcome, imperfect procedural justice looks for procedures which can achieve the right outcomes to some level of reliability. An example is trial by jury where legal guilt or innocence are the standards of correctness which the jury aims at in their decision. While there is no guarantee that juries will always convict the guilty and not the innocent, they are thought to track these standards most of the time and therefore with some level of reliability.
For epistemic democrats, then, democracy is analogous to a criminal trial but where the independent standards are not legal guilt or innocence, but truth, justice or the common good. While there is no guarantee that democratic decisions will always track these standards, epistemic democrats argue that they will tend to track them, or that they will tend to track them more often than their alternatives. An argument for the epistemic merits of democracy will therefore be probabilistic. They claim that democracy 'tends' to produce good decisions, not that it always will.
Because it sees independent standards as an important part of democracy, epistemic democrats reject forms of pure proceduralism where democracy is valuable for exclusively intrinsic reasons. They do not, however, necessarily need to deny any procedural or intrinsic value to democracy. Arguments about the ability of democracy to achieve independent standards are freestanding and conceptually independent of procedural arguments. Epistemic democracy therefore includes positions which take democracy to be solely justified on epistemic grounds, and positions which combine epistemic and procedural considerations.
While epistemic democracy is commonly defined in respect to the importance placed on procedure-independent standards, there are a range of epistemological accounts of democracy which do not clearly fit this description. One example is pragmatist inspired views which focus on how the justification of democracy is based not on certain moral or ethical values but rather epistemic commitments. For instance, if people wish to have correct beliefs, it may be that they should be open to all objections and arguments against their existing views, and this then commits them to an open and inclusive process of inquiry. Contemporary advocates for this kind of view include Robert Talisse and Cheryl Misak. Jürgen Habermas' democratic theory similarly involves an epistemic component in that he sees deliberation as a process for testing validity claims, such as to empirical truth or moral rightness, which aim to gain acceptance. He, however, considers his view to be a pure proceduralist one. Fabienne Peter also offers a view she calls "pure epistemic proceduralism" which does not rely on independent standards of correctness. Instead, she argues that a decision is legitimate "if it is the outcome of a process that satisfies certain conditions of political and epistemic fairness." As a result, the definition of epistemic democracy may be drawn more broadly to include not only accounts which involve procedure-independent standards, but other kinds of epistemic considerations.
Historical background
Hélène Landemore argues that epistemic arguments for democracy have a long pedigree within the history of political thought. She suggest that these arguments date back at least to the Greeks and can be found in a diverse range of authors including Machiavelli, Spinoza, Rousseau, Condorcet, John Stuart Mill and John Dewey.
In what Jeremy Waldron has referred to as "the doctrine of the wisdom of the multitude", for instance, Aristotle offers a version of such an argument focused on democratic deliberation. This can be found in book III, chapter 11, of the Politics:
Aristotle also refers to the feast analogy in chapter 15:
For Waldron, these passages seem to suggest that group deliberation may allow for better results than can be produced by any one individual because it allows for the pooling of information, arguments, insights, and experiences. Just as people will make different contributions to a feast, they will offer varied contributions to political decision making so that the group is superior to the one. It is unclear, however, whether Aristotle meant this argument as a defence of democracy. This is because an oligarchy or aristocracy may also benefit from this collective pooling of talents when compared to the decisions of a single king or dictator. Waldron therefore suggests that while a strong interpretation of Aristotle's wisdom of the multitude would see it as defending democratic deliberation over the deliberations of any smaller group, a weaker interpretation would see it as only rejecting rule by one.
According to Landemore, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's account of the general will may also be interpreted as offering an epistemic argument for democratic rule. In The Social Contract, for instance, he writes:
According to this interpretation, Rousseau describes the idea that citizens should vote based on their judgements about whether a proposal coheres with an independent standard of correctness, such as the common interest or good, and that the outcome of a majority vote will offer the correct judgement. This is also suggested in Rousseau's claim that those whose judgement differed from those of the majority should conclude that they there therefore mistaken. In another passage, Rousseau also appears to appeal to the statistical benefits of aggregation and large numbers. In comparing the "general will" to "the will of all" he writes:
Rousseau's appeal to pluses and minuses cancelling out is similar to the theory of the Miracle of Aggregation found in more recent work in epistemic democracy. This miracle refers to the idea that if errors are randomly distributed, then they will tend to cancel each other out when votes are aggregated, and therefore the majority decision is only influenced by correct votes. These epistemic readings of Rousseau are controversial, however, given that he can also be interpreted in more procedural terms where the general will refers simply to whatever the people want.
Another appeal to the benefits of large numbers can be found in Nicolas de Condorcet's Essays on the Application of Mathematics to the Theory of Decision Making. Providing a mathematical account of the benefits of large groups to decision making, Condorcet argued that majoritarian decisions are all but certain to select the correct option on a simple yes-no decision. This claim required three assumptions to be met: (1) voters make their decisions independently of each other; (2) voters make their decisions sincerely rather than strategically; and (3) each voter has a probability of selecting the correct answer which is greater than 0.5. As long as these conditions hold, then as the voting group becomes larger, the probability that they will select the right answer moves towards 1. While Condorcet developed this theorem with the aim of determining the optimal size of a jury – hence it often being referred to as Condorcet's jury theorem – it has also been applied to the votes of a democratic electorate including all of the population rather than a subset.