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ABSTRACT
Skepticism about citizen competence is a core component of Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels’s call, in Democracy for Realists, for rethinking our model of democracy. In this paper I suggest that the evidence for citizen incompetence is not as clear as we might think; important research shows that we are good group problem solvers even if we are poor solitary truth seekers. I argue that deliberative democracy theory has a better handle on this fundamental fact of human cognition and therefore has a more realistic view of the conditions that might improve citizen competence.
Notes
1 There is some slippage between descriptive and prescriptive (or normative) claims in Achen and Bartels’s criticism of citizenship ideals: “In our judgment, the argument that people typically think as the realists say they do, and not as theorists in the Enlightenment tradition claim—that much is beyond serious dispute” (221-2). Normative ideals do not claim to describe how people “typically think” but how they should aspire to think.
2 In all four areas there is a massive amount of literature and research. I cite only some classic examples.
3 Andrew Sabl (Citation2015) notes that normative democratic theory as a whole has never adopted a responsiveness model of democracy.
4 Brain scans also suggest that we literally think in groups, in the sense that when we solve problems together, our brain waves appear to become synchronized (Healy Citation2017).
5 There are, of course, many more examples.
6 Achen and Bartels do cite data from outside the United States to make their case, but they do not address the temporal dynamics of the pathologization of identity-driven politics.
7 Here I cite some of the most recent literature, but this work is built on a very large and growing body of research that represents the most successful and productive collaboration between empirical and normative theory in democratic studies to date. See Curato et. al 2017 for a brief summary of this work and also the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy edited by André Bächtiger, John Dryzek, Jane Mansbridge and Mark Warren, as well as Bächtiger and Parkinson Citation2018.
8 For a survey of some of this literature see Curato et al. Citation2017.
9 This is the suggested explanation for growing polarized animus that Iyengar, Sood and Lelkes (Citation2012) briefly mention at the end of their seminal essay on identity and ideology.