Since it’s likely my final “scholarly publication”….

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I thought I’d try to get comments from some of my old buddies at TSZ. It’s my attempt at a takedown of “epistemic democracy,” which is probably the predominent view of the matter at present. There’s an intro here: https://luckorcunning.blogspot.com/2025/06/is-democracy-good-because-it-tracks.html? and a couple of links to the paper can be found there.

(Don’t worry, I’m not imminently in danger of either expiring or being deported to El Salvador, I just can’t stand dealing with journals anymore. I expect to keep blogging and reviewing Democracy books for 3:16 AM Magazine.)

Hope y’all are doing well!

 

22 thoughts on “Since it’s likely my final “scholarly publication”….”

  1. Hi there, Walto. It’s good to hear from you again.

    I do actually follow your blog in my RSS reader, so I had already seen that post.

    On democracy, I tend to agree with Winston Churchill, that is far from perfect but not as bad as the other systems that have been tried.

    As for scholarly publication: I share your concerns. They say we should think outside the box. But if we think too far outside the box of the journal editorial staff, we won’t get published.

  2. Hi walto,

    I haven’t read the paper yet, but I do have a couple of preliminary questions/comments based on your intro.

    You write:

    First, I don’t think the idea of public policy truths makes much sense;

    It’s certainly an odd phrase, and not one I’ve run across before, but perhaps that’s just because this topic is out of my wheelhouse. On a naive reading, you could take it to mean asking questions like “is progressive taxation true?”, which makes no sense. I assume (hope?) that that’s not what people mean by it.

    If “true” means something like “best”, so that a policy truth is a truth regarding which policy is best, then the obvious question is “best in what sense?” A utilitarian might favor a policy that maximizes some utility function across the population. Someone else might favor a policy that is maximally rights-preserving. Donald Trump would undoubtedly favor a policy that redounds to his personal benefit.

    If you go the utilitarian route, you have to pick a utility function. Who gets to pick it, and what should it favor? GDP? Happiness? Law and order?

    What do people usually mean by ‘public policy truths’?

    In your abstract, you say:

    According to supporters of epistemic democracy, the most important virtue of democratic forms of government is that they provide the best method for determining correct public policies. On their view, this does not primarily result from the fact that any policy a democratic government enacts will reflect conjoined citizen interests and so be more likely to satisfy them, but from the fact that, as they believe Condorcet has demonstrated, majorities are more likely to get things right than any minority is.

    A ‘wisdom of the crowd’ thing, I take it. Are they arguing that given broad agreement on policy goals, the crowd is more likely to favor policies that best achieve those goals? If there isn’t broad agreement on policy goals, how do you decide which policies are “correct”? Are they taking representation into account? According to a poll I saw today, Americans oppose the “big beautiful bill” by a huge 53 to 27 margin (and even among Republicans, only 67% support it). The GOP is nevertheless plowing ahead with it. Representative democracy doesn’t work very well if the representatives refuse to represent.

    I argue that any such view fails to capture what is usually meant by self-government, and that, due to this critical shortcoming, epistemic rationales for democracy should be abandoned in favor of voluntaristic, aggregative theories of the kind that were popular prior to mid-20th Century objections generally claiming either that collective preference aggregations are necessarily incoherent or that pervasive injustices must result from unconstrained, and hence tyrannical, majorities.

    I look forward to seeing your argument. Hopefully I’ll find time to read the paper in the next couple of days.

  4. I think I agree with all of what you say here, Keith.

    The idea of public policies being “true” (or even “correct”) is indeed odd. Dangerous too, I think. Votes are more like value judgments than factual claims, IMO.

    Hope you’re well, and I look forward to your comments.

  5. We live in an age when any proposal could be voted on by the people, directly, within hours of its introduction.

    We in fact have direct votes on laws and amendments in some states. I can recall a state constitutional amendment being voted in directly, and then rescinded. Fortunately it was just a spending project and had no consequences.

    For most of my life, most consequential laws have been embedded in multi-thousand page omnibus bills that are introduced hours before being voted on.

    My thought is that it is impossible to devise a perfect system, because good things always attract predators, and good institutions are always corrupted.

    My big question about AI is not whether it will lead us to the promised land, but whether it will be able to read and summarize proposed laws before they are passed, even why the final versions are deliberately delayed.

  6. petrushka, Sadly, there’s not much interest in letting the electorate vote on anything but representatives–and even that is pretty messed up. I agree that there’s no perfect system, but ours is particularly terrible.

    Hope you’re well, petrushka.

  8. Well, Pravda translates as “official truth.” My reading is that an example of a public policy truth is that the Maduro government is emptying its prisons and sending all their violent criminals to the U.S. as part of an active invasion supported by a foreign government. Now, the U.S. intelligence apparatus has said that there is no actual truth to this, and Dan Caine testified the same thing today. And Marco Rubio replied that the intelligence services and the chairman of joint chiefs of staff are simply wrong. Rubio has repeated the “official truth” that Venezuela is in fact invading the US as an act of war. This is public policy truth.

    Another example is the Official Truth that ICE is carefully rounding up only violent gang members, and that community residents shoulder the entire blame for all the protests by illegally interfering with legitimate law enforcement. Like other official truths, this becomes true by incessant repetitions on Fox News and from Caroline Leavitt.

    And of course, you can’t get a job with the US government unless you parrot the Official Truth of the 2020 stolen election.

  10. walto:
    petrushka, Sadly, there’s not much interest in letting the electorate vote on anything but representatives….

    Living in a country still reeling from the Brexit referendum, I’d favour not asking the people to do more! Of course much of the fault there lies with both representatives (for drafting the complex question way too simplistically, and treating a non-binding opinion as binding) and unelected campaigners making promises that weren’t in their power to keep.

  11. I don’t recall saying that. There appears to be a formatting glitch that can make responses look like quotes.

    The original response was not in italics, but the second generation is in italics.

  12. Allan Miller,

    As you may remember, I think Brexit has been mischaracterized as a referendum. I take those to be allowing a populace to strike down some enacted law or other policy by plebiscite. In my taxonomy Brexit was an initiative petition, since it let the electorate do the enacting. I’m not fond of those, but I do think authentic democracy requires both referendum and recall provisions–whether or not the citizenry does things I don’t like with them. In my view, it’s a mistake to think that democracies won’t or can’t do stupid or evil things.

  14. Flint, Hi, Flint! Hope you’ve been well.

    I don’t think anybody–except maybe the “alternative fact” gang–would deny the items you mentioned are “truths.” But it’s not what Condorcet or epistemic democrats generally mean. They are talking about the “correctness” of a public policy choice.

  16. I have lived long enough to see how political choices play out over three or four decades.

    Any non rigid political system will “hunt”, regardless of its nominal form.

    I’ve seen millions of people murdered by politicians in pointless wars and revolutions.

    I consider most policy disputes to be trivial.

  17. walto: …I think Brexit has been mischaracterized as a referendum.

    It was ten years ago and hugely infiltrated by on-line manipulators.

  20. petrushka,

    From statista.com:

    As of May 2025, 56 percent of people in Great Britain thought that it was wrong to leave the European Union, compared with 32 percent who thought it was the right decision.

  21. Hi walto,

    I’m trying to get a better handle on what you’re arguing against in your paper, since epistemic democracy is a new topic for me. The questions that are arising for me are much the same as I described in my earlier comment.

    Is there any sort of consensus among epistemic democracy theorists about what makes a policy “true”, “correct”, or “better” than another? If there’s no consensus, is the idea that no matter what criteria you pick, the votes of the majority will be better at selecting policies that satisfy those criteria than the votes of any minority, including single individuals? What if the minority in question happens to be an ideal coterie of outstandingly ethical, benevolent, knowledgeable and wise people? Do these theorists think that the majority will surpass even such a coterie in its ability to select “true” policies? In other words, do these theorists think that the majority is better than any minority subset of the population (including individuals), no matter how capable and illustrious?

    The fact that Americans elected Trump is pretty devastating evidence against the supposed wisdom of the majority.

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