Equality or Quality? On the Epistocratic Challenge to Democracy

• In Event: Electoral Democracy, Capitalism and Epistography

Abstract

Democracy is often said to be the political system of political systems, the one people through history has strived towards. Francis Fukuyama even denotes the development of (liberal) democracy as “the end of history”. Democracy is default, and to claim otherwise is typically considered a threat to its inherent and non-questionable value. Despite its high praise, however, few would argue that even though democracy is the best of political systems, it is not void of imperfections and flaws. As evident around the world, democracy can well put people with questionable moral and/or epistemic standards in power. This is not an insignificant flaw, and although most hardcore democrats stand by the view that “only more democracy can fix democracy”, recently, one specific line of argumentation has re-emerged. This approach claims that the way to curb the influence of leaders who lack reasonable moral or epistemic knowledge, requires “fresh”, and possibly controversial, solutions. The most challenging and provocative idea – foremost championed by political theorist Jason Brennan – is the one of epistocracy as a replacement for democracy. In an epistocratic system, political power is distributed “…according to competence, skill, and the good faith to act on that skill”. Hence, the challenge towards democracy lies in its’ suggestion to restrict citizens’ voting privileges.
This, of course, is not a novel idea. Plato’s philosopher kings are well known; those would be best suited to rule since the democratic electorate would be too ignorant, irrational, and morally unreasonable to govern well. John Stuart Mill, moreover, worried that too many citizens were too incompetent to make smart decisions at the polls. His solution was a plural voting scheme, where educated citizens ought to be given more voting power than the less educated. Since antiquity, then, epistocracy has had a
certain intuitive appeal. Not only would Plato’s philosopher kings, or Mill’s more educated voters, be superior regarding their pure factual or empirical knowledge; they
would also possess superior moral knowledge. Wisdom was, by Plato and Mill, and is today, by Brennan, seen as a combination of the two; true wisdom requires factual, empirical knowledge, as well as knowledge of moral matters. Manifested most strongly in Brennan’s work, as mentioned, the idea of the rule of the wisest has again emerged as a challenge to democracy. At the heart of this claim lies the instrumentalist view that the content of political decisions is what matters for the quality of government and that the democratic procedure alone does not do much to enhance a high quality of political outcomes.
In light of political science’s empirical proof of both low and further declining voter knowledge, the epistocratic challenge, at the very least, merits thorough examination. The idea that epistocracy would be more just, more moral, and more knowledgeable than is democracy has once again been brought to the table, and highlights the fact that the merits of epistocracy are seen in a comparative light. However, in order to show that the comparative virtues of epistocracy would outweigh the virtues of the democratic system, the comparative virtues of the former have to be powerful. Montgomery Umbers believes that epistocrats, again attributed to the work of Brennan, do not present such powerful arguments. Instead, he notices that there remains a lot to be done in this area: the case for epistocracy needs “… a great deal more evidence of [its] instrumental virtues […] to render any argument for [its comparative value] plausible”. The aim of this paper is to examine (some of) epistocracy’s comparative values. The idea is to examine Brennan’s arguments, to see whether they hold, and, if not, whether the case for epistocracy can be further developed and strengthened. This, of course, will not occur in a vacuum. In order to test the comparative virtues of something, one needs something else to test it against. And democrats do of course respond to the idea of epistocracy by using a plethora of different arguments, linking each response to some specific epistocratic argument(s). Therefore, like with Brennan’s arguments, the aim is to conduct a thoroughly, orderly, and structural examination of the democrats’ counter-arguments to the most challenging epistocratic arguments. Are these arguments strong enough? If not, can they be developed and strengthened in order to better meet the epistocratic challenge? The objective is to uncover which line of arguments fares better, and, to contribute to, at least, a piece of the puzzle of the question: which system outweighs the other, in comparative, normative terms – epistocracy or democracy? Do we have to choose between political equality and political quality?

Author

• Sofia Bosdotter Wiman, University of Gothenburg