Celebrity, Democracy, and Epistemic Power

Epistemic Democracy

The limits of epistemic democracy

The so-called doctrinal paradox reveals that a jury that decides by majority on the truth of a set of propositions, may come to a conclusion that is at odds with a legal doctrine to which they all subscribe. The doctrinal paradox, and its subesequent generalization by List and Pettit (2003), reveal the logical difficulties of epistemic democracy. This paper presents several generalizations of t...

Epistemic Democracy with Defensible Premises12

The contemporary theory of epistemic democracy often draws on the Condorcet Jury Theorem to formally justify the ‘wisdom of crowds’. But this theorem is inapplicable in its current form, since one of its premises — voter independence — is notoriously violated. This premise carries responsibility for the theorem’s misleading conclusion that ‘large crowds are infallible’. We prove a more useful j...

Quality of Government and Epistemic Democracy

Democracy as an overall model for how societies should be governed has been a remarkable success over the last forty years. More countries than ever are now considered to be democratic or at least on their way to becoming democracies (Diamond 2007, Teorell 2010). Various international organizations that have democracy promotion on their agenda should nowadays be very content since there are cer...

Cognitive Diversity, Binary Decisions, and Epistemic Democracy

In Democratic Reason, Helene Landemore has built a case for the epistemic virtues of inclusive deliberative democracy based on the cognitive diversity of the group engaged in making collective decisions. She supports her thesis by appealing to the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem of Lu Hong and Scott Page. In practice, deliberative assemblies often restrict attent...