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The Case for Modelled Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 May 2020

Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij Open the ORCID record for Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij [Opens in a new window]
Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij*
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UK
*
Email: k.ahlstrom-vij@bbk.ac.uk
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Abstract

The fact that most of us are ignorant on politically relevant matters presents a problem for democracy. In light of this, some have suggested that we should impose epistemic constraints on democratic participation, and specifically that the franchise be restricted along competency lines – a suggestion that in turn runs the risk of violating a long-standing condition on political legitimacy to the effect that legitimate political arrangements cannot be open to reasonable objections. The present paper therefore outlines a way to solve the problem of public ignorance without restricting the franchise. The proposal involves filtering the electoral input of a universal franchise through a statistical model that simulates what the public's political preferences would have been, had they been informed on politically relevant matters. The result is modelled democracy. A case is made that such democracy both solves the problem of public ignorance and satisfies the aforementioned condition on legitimacy.

Keywords

political epistemologydemocracyenlightened preferencespolitical legitimacy
Type
Article
Information
Episteme , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , March 2022 , pp. 89 - 110
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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