Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.26362/20250101
Before and After Epistemic Democracy: A Critique of the Supposed Externality of “Correct” Public Policies and the Rehabilitation of a Strictly Voluntarist/Aggregational Approach to Elections
Walter Horn
orcid.org/0000-0002-0257-9138
Abstract
According to supporters of epistemic democracy, the most important virtue of democratic forms of government is that they provide the best method for determining correct public policies. On their view, this does not primarily result from the fact that any policy a democratic government enacts will reflect conjoined citizen interests and so be more likely to satisfy them, but from the fact that, as they believe Condorcet has demonstrated, majorities are more likely to get things right than any minority is. I argue that any such view fails to capture what is usually meant by self-government, and that, due to this critical shortcoming, epistemic rationales for democracy should be abandoned in favor of voluntaristic, aggregative theories of the kind that were popular prior to mid-20th Century objections generally claiming either that collective preference aggregations are necessarily incoherent or that pervasive injustices must result from unconstrained, and hence tyrannical, majorities.
Keywords
Arrow’s theorem; democratic theory; epistemic democracy; jury theorems; political philosophy; preference aggregation; tyranny of the majority; voting rules
Hrčak ID:
331680
URI
Publication date:
4.6.2025.
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