Deliberative democracy is unrealistic, but so are rational-choice models of democracy. The elements of reality that rationalistic theories of democracy leave out are the very elements that deliberative democrats would need to subtract if their theory were to be applied to reality. The key problem is not, however, the altruistic orientation that deliberative democrats require; opinion researchers know that voters are already sociotropic, not self-interested. Rather, as Schumpeter saw, the problems lie in understanding politics, government, and economics under modern—and postmodern—conditions. (...) Modernity entails levels of complexity that stymie voters' attempts to be well informed about which political promises will actually solve social problems. Postmodernity adds to complexity an overabundance of fragmented information experienced impatiently and fleetingly by citizens who confuse entertainment with knowledge, and whose political demands are as unrealistic as their personal desire for a unique identity. These factors can be added, one by one, to the minimalist rational-choice model of politics, with each step leading us farther away from deliberative democracy. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAlthough Thomas Piketty is largely known for his recent empirical contributions to the study of inequality, his work on epistemology has been substantial. It remains relatively unreferenced in the political epistemology literature both because it has been overshadowed by his work on inequality and because it was written for an audience of economists rather than political scientists. Piketty’s work on these themes can be divided into analyses of political belief formation and analyses of the epistemic properties of democratic institutions. Capital (...) in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty’s recent book, also reflects his long-standing interest in epistemological questions. The major epistemic claim of that book is that political knowledge is an endogenous phenomenon: policy generates new knowledge over the course of its administration. One of the benefits of the primary policy proposal of Capital, the global wealth tax, is that it will generate new knowledge about wealth inequality. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn Against Democracy, Jason Brennan argues that public ignorance undermines the legitimacy of democracy because, to the extent that ignorant voters make bad policy choices, they harm their own and one another’s interests. The solution, he thinks, is epistocracy, which would leave policy decisions largely in the hands of social-scientific experts or voters who pass tests of political knowledge. However, Brennan fails to explain why we should think that these putative experts are sufficiently knowledgeable to avoid making errors as damaging (...) as those made by voters. Given the strong link between political knowledge and ideological dogmatism, as well as the tendency of social scientists to disagree with one another, the case for epistocracy is deeply implausible, at best. Moreover, given that there are important non-instrumental justifications of democracy—justifications of which Brennan appears to be radically ignorant—the epistocratic alternative would be unnecessary even if it were viable. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Political scientist James Fishkin has devised “deliberative polling” as a means to better informed, more autonomous, and more reflective participant opinion. After a deliberative poll, this improved form of public opinion can be disseminated to the general public and to policy makers so as to influence public opinion (as it is normally construed) and public policy. Close examination of the results of deliberative polling, however, suggests no evidence of a normatively desirable gain in informed, autonomous, or considered opinion—as opposed (...) to minor gains in participants' general political knowledge and in ideological constraint, which is likely attributable to the pre-packaged “expert” views set forth in the briefing materials provided to the participants. (shrink)

A political epistemology that enables us to determine if political actors are likely to know what they need to know must be rooted in an ontology of the actors and of the human objects of their knowledge; that is, a political anthropology. The political anthropology developed in Power Without Knowledge envisions human beings as creatures whose conscious actions are determined by their interpretations of what seem to them to be relevant circumstances; and whose interpretations are, in turn, determined by webs (...) of belief built from somewhat heterogeneous streams of incoming ideas. This anthropology, then, has two components. Ideational heterogeneity undermines the aspiration of technocracy to predict human behavior and the aspiration of social science to arrive at lawlike generalizations about it. Ideational determinism, however, which is less important than ideational heterogeneity to the critique of technocracy, may be more important to generating epistemological approaches to other forms of politics, all of which involve the actions of human beings who, as such, are largely at the mercy of the fallible ideas to which they have been exposed. (shrink)