Abstract

Each chapter of this dissertation develops a standard with which to evaluate and guide the improvement of a different node of a democratic system. In the first chapter, I consider the relationship between citizens, their environment, and the formal infrastructure of democracy. The standard for this node is democratic health, which is a feature of the social epistemic environment in which citizens operate. I argue that a democratically healthy environment is one that is conducive to the development of citizens’ epistemic capacities to reason and communicate about their interests. I then demonstrate how political phenomena such as polarization pose social epistemic challenges to democratic health and argue that an epistemic conception of civic virtue can guide efforts to improve it. In the second chapter, I consider the relationship between representatives and their constituents under non-ideal conditions. The key standard for this node is systemic interest-responsiveness. I argue that observed public opinion and citizens’ values, commitments, and goals can stand in tension, and that representative democracies must be responsive to both factors. On this basis, I argue in favor of pairing independent administrative agencies with expanded forms of public input. In the third chapter, I consider how civic education can promote epistemic civic virtue. The key standard I develop here is the social epistemic public good. I argue that civic education can provide social epistemic benefits through its civic exchange function, which enables citizens to learn about the views and traditions of other citizens, and prepares them to effectively communicate with diverse others. Furthermore, I argue that this function can be pursued in the absence of widespread agreement about which values civic education should promote.