Episteme 17 (4):498-518 (
2020)
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Abstract
Epistemic justifications for democracy have been offered in terms of two different
aspects of decision-making: voting and deliberation, or ‘votes’ and ‘talk.’ The
Condorcet Jury Theorem is appealed to as a justification in terms votes, and the
Hong-Page “Diversity Trumps Ability” result is appealed to as a justification in
terms of deliberation. Both of these, however, are most plausibly construed as
models of direct democracy, with full and direct participation across the population.
In this paper, we explore how these results hold up if we vary the model so as to
reflect the more familiar democratic structure of a representative hierarchy. We
first recount extant analytic work that shows that representation inevitably weakens
the voting results of the Condorcet Jury Theorem, but we question the ability of
that result to shine light on real representative systems. We then show that, when
we move from votes to talk, as modeled in Hong-Page, representation holds its own
and even has a slight edge.