How Smart is Democracy? You Can't Answer that Question a Priori

ABSTRACT

Hélène Landemore claims that under certain conditions, democracies with universal suffrage will tend to make smarter and better decisions than epistocracies, even though most citizens in modern democracies are extremely ignorant about politics. However, there is ample empirical evidence that citizens make systematic errors. If so, it is fatal to Landemore's defense of democracy, which, if it works at all, applies only to highly idealized situations that are unlikely to occur in the real world. Critics of democracy will find little in Landemore's defense of democracy to make them change their minds.

Notes

1. For instance, David Estlund (2008, 136-58) doesn't dispute the mathematics of Condorcet's Jury Theorem, but denies that it tells us anything about real-life democracies. Similarly, even though it would be ideologically convenient for me if the CJT applied to actual democracies (because I think democracies are largely incompetent and because I think I can prove that average and median levels of competence among voters is <0.5), I also think it is just a mathematical curiosity.

2. One problem with Page's work is that he tends to treat experts as non-diverse, as if they all have the same models of the world. But perhaps Page's work makes a better argument for having many diverse experts make decisions rather than for having many diverse non-experts make decisions.

3. Page's models work best for cases where issues are easily quantified or where qualitative answers to questions can be easily separated into distinct categories. It's not as clear how they apply other kinds of issues. Note also that Page does not mean that including more people from different vocations or different races tends to lead to group wisdom. Rather, what he means is that having many people with diverse sophisticated models of the world tends to lead to group wisdom. Also, insofar as uneducated people tend to have simplistic, unsophisticated models of the world, their input into collective decision-making tends to lead to less accuracy. Page seems to recognize this at times, but then often appears to overreach in how well his models of diversity apply to actual democratic decision-making. See Tetlock 2007 for a quick but sharp criticism of Page on this point.

4. Page (2007, 147) says, “The best problem solvers tend to be similar; therefore, a collection of the best problem solvers performs little better than any one of them individually. A collection of random, but intelligent, problem solvers tends to be diverse. This diversity allows them to be collectively better. Or to put it more provocatively, diversity trumps ability.”

5. For empirical confirmation of these claims, see Bartels 1997.

6. I summarize the studies on this issue in Brennan 2012, 150-54.

7. See http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2005/12/tackling_tetloc_1.html. Caplan cites Tetlock 2005. See also Caplan 2007b.

8. Confirmed via personal correspondence.

9. From personal correspondence.