Purely Epistemic Conceptions of Democracy

Abstract

This chapter considers purely epistemic conceptions of deliberative democracy. For advocates of this approach the value of democratic procedures is a function of the quality of their outcomes. They also assume that the quality of outcomes is a function of the quality of the knowledge generated by the best decision makers. On this basis, epistocrats recommend that citizens blindly defer to the political decisions of experts (be it political elites or a representative sample of the population) to reach better political outcomes. This approach misses the democratic significance of public deliberation. By reducing the epistemic function of deliberation to the aim of figuring out the best policies, it disregards another crucial epistemic function of deliberation—ensuring that the policies in question can be justified to those who must comply with them and without whose cooperation the intended outcomes will not materialize. Thus, if we care about outcomes we must abandon the temptation of the “expertocratic shortcut” and focus on improving the processes of opinion- and will-formation in which citizens participate so that better outcomes can actually be achieved.