ABSTRACTThe idea that the crowd could ever be intelligent is a counterintuitive one. Our modern, Western faith in experts and bureaucracies is rooted in the notion that political competence is the purview of the select few. Here, as in my book Democratic Reason, I defend the opposite view: that the diverse many are often smarter than a group of select elites because of the different cognitive tools, perspectives, heuristics, and knowledge they bring to political problem solving and prediction. In this (...) essay I defend my epistemic argument against proceduralist democrats; the value of model thinking against empiricists; the bracketing of fundamental value diversity against critics who see such diversity as an essential feature of politics; the intelligence of the masses in the face of voter ignorance and systematic biases; and the normative priority of democracy over market mechanisms. I also consider challenges to my use of Hong and Page's formal results, the epistemically proper selection method for representatives, and the role of deliberation in problem solving. I finally chart three avenues for further research. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe Hong-Page theorem holds that a group of low-ability, cognitively diverse problem solvers can outperform a more uniform group of high-ability problem solvers. Abigail Thompson’s recent mathematical criticisms of the theorem are incorrect, misleading, or irrelevant to the validity of the theorem. A common thread running through Thompson’s objections is a lack of appreciation for how mathematics is used in social science. One element of her critique that has considerable value for the epistemic democracy literature, however, is her discussion of (...) the importance of randomization for the Hong-Page result. (shrink)

ABSTRACTNormative political epistemologists, such as epistemic democrats, study whether political decision makers can, in principle, be expected to know what they need to know if they are to make wise public policy. Empirical political epistemologists study the content and sources of real-world political actors' knowledge and interpretations of knowledge. In recent years, empirical political epistemologists have taken up the study of the ideas of political actors other than voters, such as bureaucrats and politicians. Normative political epistemologists could follow this lead (...) if they were to focus on the technocratic orientation of nearly all political actors in the West: that is, on their desire to solve social and economic problems. Since most technocratic policy is made by political elites, the reliability of elites' knowledge of the causes of and cures for social and economic problems is a natural topic for normative political epistemology. (shrink)

The normative and metanormative pluralism that figures among core self-descriptions of democratic theory, which seems incompatible with democratic theorists’ practical ambitions, may stem from the internal logic of research traditions in the social sciences and humanities and in the conceptual structure of political theory itself. One way to deal productively with intradisciplinary diversity is to appeal to the idea of a meta-consensus; another is to appeal to the argument from cognitive diversity that fuels recent debates on epistemic democracy. For different (...) reasons, both strategies fail, such that a metatheoretical step aside may be desirable, one that entails modeling democratic theory after the public justification approach. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOn September 4, 2015, the Political Epistemology/ideas, Knowledge, and Politics section of the American Political Science Association sponsored a roundtable on ideational turns in the four subdisciplines of political science as part of its annual meetings. Chairing the roundtable was Jeffrey Friedman, Department of Government, University of Texas, Austin. The other participants were Jeffrey Checkel, Department of Political Science, Simon Fraser University; Matthias Matthijs, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University; and Rogers Smith, Department of Political Science, University of (...) Pennsylvania. We thank the participants for permission to republish their remarks, which they were offered the opportunity to edit after the fact. (shrink)

On August 30, 2013, the American Political Science Association sponsored a roundtable on political epistemology as part of its annual meetings. Co-chairing the roundtable were Jeffrey Friedman, Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin; and Hélène Landemore, Department of Political Science, Yale University. The other participants were Scott Althaus, Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Mark Bevir, Department of Political Science, University of California at Berkeley; Rogers Smith, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania; and Susan (...) Stokes, Department of Political Science, Yale University. We thank the participants for permission to republish their remarks, which they subsequently edited for clarity. (shrink)

Democracy has been widely claimed to be the best form of government there is. One reason for which is the power that it confers to the people. But what happens if the people do not have the correct knowledge to exercise that power? This is the problem of knowledge in a democracy. Every election, the electorate has the power to vote certain political candidates into office, a clear exercise of democracy, but just like any other power, this can be misused. (...) In this paper, I seek to advance a framework to guide the electorate in voting the suitable political candidates into office. I call this framework political meritocracy and lay out its components. While this framework is commonsensical, I bring out some of its political implications, which are largely counterintuitive. Then, I explore how this framework can be inculcated through formal education and what I call enlightened political discourse. While the framework of political meritocracy does not wipe out the problem of knowledge, it goes a long way towards lessening it. (shrink)