Stability in Liberal Epistocracies

ABSTRACT

In this article, I argue that stability is one of the enabling conditions for epistocratic arrangements to function well and justify their claim right to rule. Against this backdrop, I demonstrate that advocates of strategies to allocate exclusive decision-making power to knowledgeable citizens fail to demonstrate that in a context marked by the fact of pluralism, liberal epistocracies will be stable. They could argue that liberal epistocracies will be stable because epistocratic arrangements are better equipped than democratic decision-making bodies to produce outcomes that approximate the common good. They could argue that liberal epistocracies will be stable because there is a shared meritocratic set of values and ideas. Furthermore, they could opt for two standard liberal strategies, such as overlapping consensus and modus vivendi. Yet, in all cases, the argument for the stability of liberal epistocracies is not persuasive.

KEYWORDS:

• Epistocracy
• Brennan
• stability
• legitimacy

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor of Social Epistemology for valuable comments. I have also benefitted from comments by participants at the 2021 ECPR Joint Session “Democratic Equality and Voting Rights: Should All Votes Count the Same?”. I am also grateful to Cyril Hédoin and Andrea Pellegrini for their written feedback. Finally, I would like to thank Michele Giavazzi and Valeria Ottonelli for valuable discussions on the merits and demerits of epistocratic arrangements.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The term epistocracy has been recently used with reference to representative democracy (Landa and Pevnick 2020). Yet, according to Brennan (2016, 208), a system is said to be epistocratic when it formally (as a matter of law or policy – that is, de jure) allocates decision-making power on the basis of political competence. By law, such a political system distributes fundamental political power to the most competent people.

2. To be sure, epistocrats support different variants of the liberal tradition. Yet, a common ground can be found in the fundamental commitment to two liberal pillars: the idea that all citizens should be treated as free and equal, and the harm principle (Brennan 2016, 9, 127, 137).

3. For another argument on the transition to epistocratic arrangements, see (Lepoute 2021).

4. To my knowledge, the only non-instrumentalist defense of epistocratic arrangements is Giavazzi (2020).

5. This claim is also valid for attempts at reforming democratic decision-making processes. It is also for this reason that some advocates of lottocratic experiments envision a slow and gradual process of expansion from a limited set of powers in existing legislations (Gastil and Wright 2019).

6. On the connection between disagreement and normative justifications of democracy, see Valentini (2013).

7. There is disagreement on the exportability of the meritocratic model. Bell (2015) thinks that it is exportable, while Bai (2020) is skeptical.

8. To borrow from Estlund’s Demographic Objection, it may be the case that decision-makers, who are legitimated by a meritocratic worldview, have epistemically damaging features, such as implicit biases, which neutralize the benefit of education (Estlund 2008, 215–16). Brennan (2016, 2018) addresses this objection by recalling the idea that voters lack the knowledge to evaluate how representatives perform. I believe that in certain cases, a meritocratic worldview can be so dominant to cover up a long series of bad decisions. It is also for this reason that it is important to study the role of ideology in discourses on authority and whether a meritocratic worldview is hegemonic in present-day liberal democracies.

9. The competence principle holds that ‘high-stakes political decisions are presumed to be unjust, illegitimate, and lacking in authority if they are made incompetently or in bad faith, or by a generally incompetent decision-making body’ (Brennan 2016, 21).

10. ‘We instead should ask’, as Brennan (2016, 206) puts it, ‘given what we know about political behavior, including what we know about rent seeking, corruption, and abuses of power, which is likely to deliver better results, some form of epistocracy or some form of democracy?’.

Additional information

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research of this article. This work has been carried out as part of the project “Reconstructing Democracy in Times of Crisis: A Voter-Centred Perspective,” which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement [No 870996].

Notes on contributors

Corrado Fumagalli

Corrado Fumagalli is an assistant professor in political philosophy at the University of Genoa. He also is a Research Associate at the African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science (ACEPS). He has published on pluralism, democratic theory, and counterspeech. His work appeared in journals such as the European Journal of Political Theory, Political Theory, Political Studies, and Social Theory and Practice.