TY - JOUR
T1 - Representative Democracy as Defensible Epistocracy
AU - Landa, Dimitri
AU - Pevnick, Ryan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2019A.
PY - 2020/2
Y1 - 2020/2
N2 - Epistocratic arrangements are widely rejected because there will be reasonable disagreement about which citizens count as epistemically superior and an epistemically superior subset of citizens may be biased in ways that undermine their ability to generate superior political outcomes. The upshot is supposed to be that systems of democratic government are preferable because they refuse to allow some citizens to rule over others. We show that this approach is doubly unsatisfactory: although representative democracy cannot be defended as a form of government that prevents some citizens from ruling over others, it can be defended as a special form of epistocracy. We demonstrate that well-designed representative democracies can, through treatment and selection mechanisms, bring forth an especially competent set of individuals to make public policy, even while circumventing the standard objections to epistocratic rule. This has implications for the justification of representative democracy and questions of institutional design.
AB - Epistocratic arrangements are widely rejected because there will be reasonable disagreement about which citizens count as epistemically superior and an epistemically superior subset of citizens may be biased in ways that undermine their ability to generate superior political outcomes. The upshot is supposed to be that systems of democratic government are preferable because they refuse to allow some citizens to rule over others. We show that this approach is doubly unsatisfactory: although representative democracy cannot be defended as a form of government that prevents some citizens from ruling over others, it can be defended as a special form of epistocracy. We demonstrate that well-designed representative democracies can, through treatment and selection mechanisms, bring forth an especially competent set of individuals to make public policy, even while circumventing the standard objections to epistocratic rule. This has implications for the justification of representative democracy and questions of institutional design.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85072110888&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85072110888&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1017/S0003055419000509
DO - 10.1017/S0003055419000509
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85072110888
SN - 0003-0554
VL - 114
SP - 1
EP - 13
JO - American Political Science Review
JF - American Political Science Review
IS - 1
ER -