Theories of epistemic democracy are therefore 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.
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.
[4][5] 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.
(ibid, p. 60)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 (discussed further below).
A clearer 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.
Rather than seeing it as synonymous with formal political institutions, Dewey instead thought of democracy as a "mode of associated living" which occurred when people came together to identify and solve their collective problems.
The second category, considered in following sections, is work focused on the more practical task of showing why democratic institutions can in fact track these independent standards, or why we should have confidence that they will make better decisions than non-democratic alternatives.
Instead of a correctness theory, Estlund claims that epistemic democrats can see democracy as legitimate because of its ability to produce good decisions over time.
Jose Luis Marti, alternatively, argues that our normal practices of democratic debate and deliberation tends to implicitly assume some independent standards of correctness.
For instance, they may be dependent on an idealised procedure – such as John Rawls' original position or Jürgen Habermas' ideal speech situation – or on the norms and practices of a particular community.
Nor are epistemic democrats committed to any crude form of consequentialism as the independent standards may themselves involve deontological or virtue constraints, such as respect for basic human rights.
The first faces the problem that people often reasonably disagree over how to define the procedure-independent standards of correctness, and it therefore risks making the justification of democracy dependent on a controversial account of justice or the common good.
Sean Ingham, for instance, argues that if democratic procedures could discover the correct answer to political questions, then they would seem to bring an implausibly swift end to our deeply held and persistent disagreements.
Although this argument does not reject the existence of independent standards, it does suggest that their acceptance may be in tension with the idea that there is deep and reasonable political disagreement in society.
The diversity trumps ability theorem was first developed by Lu Hong and Scott Page, but most prominently applied to epistemic democracy by Hélène Landemore.
The application of the diversity trumps ability theorem by Hong, Page, and Landemore in the context of epistemic democracy has been met with substantial skepticism from various quarters of the academic community.
The core of the contention is that the theorem's mathematical formulation serves to obscure rather than clarify the true, straightforward nature of the relationship between diversity and problem-solving efficacy.
This rigorous scrutiny aims to demystify the purported complexity of the theorem, warning against its uncritical adoption in socio-political theories and advocating for a more discerning use of mathematics in the exploration of democratic processes.
[24] The second is the issue of complexity and the idea that participants may disagree over the best solution, even if they agree on values, because political problems allow for multiple plausible interpretation.
[26] Rather than rely on formal theorems as the previous arguments do, the experimental model instead sees the democratic institutions of regular elections as allowing for a process of trial-and-error learning.
One issue concerning this model is the quality of the feedback signals provided by democratic elections, their frequency, and the extent that they may be affected by such things as voter ignorance or irrationality.
The reflexivity of democratic arrangements derives from the fact that they require "relevant parties to assert, defend, and revise their own views and to entertain, challenge, or accept those of others.
Based on such work, he argues that uninformed voters subject other members of society to an undue level of risk and therefore violate their supposed right to a competent government.
This approach of incorporating epistemic weights while ensuring all votes count, albeit not in the same proportion, addresses potential concerns about disrespect or exclusion in the democratic process.
They have been argued to offer an incomplete and overly pessimistic reading of the empirical literature on voter competence,[35] to rely too heavily on rational choice theory,[36] to not give significant attention to potential democratic reforms, and to underestimate the dangers involved in political exclusion and the empowerment of a knowledgeable minority.
Advocates of such systems, such as Daniel Bell and Tongdong Bai, argue that political leaders require intellectual and academic abilities, effective social skills and emotional intelligence, as well as ethical virtues.
These authors often look to China and Singapore as imperfect contemporary examples of political meritocracy, and commonly draw on Confucian philosophy in defending the value of meritocratic procedures.
Ilya Somin, for instance, argues that democratic voters have little incentive to become informed about political matters, as their one vote among thousands is very unlikely to affect the outcome.
While political decentralisation does not offer a complete alternative to democracy, it is thought to help increase the epistemic quality of government by supplementing mechanisms of voice with exit.
Hayekian authors, such as Mark Pennington, have therefore argued that there are important epistemic advantages to systems based on price signals rather than voters and deliberation, and advocate for expanding the role of markets into otherwise political domains.