Democracy, Equality and Stupidity

 

For reasons that I can't quite put my finger on (maybe you can help?), during the last couple of months, I have been almost obsessed with how to reconcile democracy with an overabundance of uninformed (not to follow Charlie Pierce and say "idiotic") voters. As readers of this blog must know, I am a confirmed majoritarian, and unlike those alleged members of the Democratic Party on whom Donald Trump weirdly cast aspersions upon the other day for preferring the Electoral College to the popular vote(!), I absolutely object to anything that results in some votes being given more weight than others. I hate "epistocracy" -- the idea that polities should be ruled by the wise, or "guardians," or "philosopher kings," or even the psychology experts that Asimov pushed in Foundation.

But I mean, really. As Kelly Weill demonstrated in her excellent Off the Edge, some people (even those who have flown around it multiple times) simply can't be convinced that the earth is round. Others insist that sometime after Moses received any golden tablets, but before he built his arc, dinosaurs were ambling around waiting to be domesticated. (Maybe because King Kong was punching them into submission.) I suppose these cuckoo views are relatively harmless -- or would be if they were not often conjoined with theocratic dreams -- but when the craziness involves the removal of FDA approval for vaccines that have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, things get scary.

From the perspective of democratic theory, though, we're all equal....aren't we? Well, what does this "equality" mean? And what does it imply for governance? “Democracy” might be used to express something like

The political organization of any group wherein each (or perhaps each sane, non-felonious, adult) member is provided with equal political power, and no other person or thing is provided with any that is not ultimately derivable from such provision.

Here, voting is plausibly seen as just one sort of exercise of political power among many. One reason electoral power has had traction here because the right to vote is one of the simplest example of political power that groups can distribute to their members.

One reason equality of votes and voters has been considered essential by democratic theorists of various kins is that "jury theorems," which rely on the idea that, at least with big bunches of sincere, independent people who are at least more competent to decide things than just spinning a wheel, the more people that think X the more probable it is that X is true. Given that assumption the following might be claimed on behalf of democratic practices:

1. All and only democratic regimes are essentially characterized by their distribution of equally weighted votes to each citizen and a denial of all political power (not ultimately derived from such votes) to anything or anybody else.

2. The soundness of jury theorems shows that democratic regimes are more likely to produce correct policies than other type of political arrangement.

3. Therefore, the best manner of achieving correct public policies are those in which every person is provided with (and perhaps also uses) their equally weighted votes to determine public policy.

4. It is natural for people to want to live in just those places where public policies are usually correct.

5. Therefore, democratic regimes are best—or, at least, it is natural for people to want to live in and obey their edicts rather than under any other sort of rule.

However, there may be a problem with insisting that it is precisely “equality of political power among citizens” that ought to be considered a criterion for being democratic. For political power seems to be built up out of elements which do not all seem democracy-constitutive, or at least they are not so in the same ways. So, for example, intelligence, eloquence, and wealth may all be important parts of what makes someone “politically effective,” but it seems absurd to require of good democracies that they attempt to equalize every one of these constitutive elements in order to equally distribute political power to each citizen.

Furthermore, it might be possible to equalize total political effectiveness between two individuals by piling up one element in one of them and a different element in the other. That can be seen not to work if one is attempting to make democratic merit a strict function of citizen equality of total political effectiveness, because one of the relevant constituents of political power seems more critical here than any of the others: the weight of one’s vote.🗡 In this way, individual voting power resists being counted as just one item in the democracy-constituting batch. It is, for example, intuitively objectionable to suggest the removal of anyone’s authority to vote from who has an overabundance of intelligence, eloquence, or cash.

The same sort of problem arises if one selects equal “community status” or “public regard” rather than political power as the key to democratic arrangements, for, again, the constituents of such status or regard may be piled up in various ways that arguably make equal totals, even though some, but not all, of these elements seem to be essential to democracy, or to be essential in a different way.*

As it is undeniably difficult to determine the exact ways in which citizens of democratic polities must be at least roughly equal, one may wonder why equality is thought to matter so much to epistemic democrats. The answer is not hard to find. Those familiar with the stirring words of French and American revolutionaries will of course realize that the idea that citizen equality is essential to democracy must go back at least to the Eighteenth Century. But, of course, so do Jury Theorems. And the connection is clear. wherever such theorems claims that it is in majority opinions that one will find epistemic advantage, they requires vote equality.

Anyhow, for those who (like me) don't think democracy must essentially involve equal outcomes (of wealth, for example), it has generally been vote weights (as well as equal treatment/protection and non-discrimination) that has been settled on. This means that nobody's vote can be discounted, if they think there were saddled triceratops roaming the American plains at the time "the founders" were fannying about with the U.S. Constitution.

What, if anything can be done about this? Does it mean that democracy isn't such a great thing after all? That's the stuff I've been thinking about lately. It's thorny and confusing, to me anyhow, but it has resulted in a paper I have just completed and sent off to a journal (please keep your fingers crossed for me!) as well as a review of a book by Nobutaka Otobe, called Stupidity in Politics: Its Unavoidability and Potential that will soon be up here:

___________________

🗡Parity of political power among group members is insufficient on its own, of course, since each person might be given precisely none at all. The idea of equality of something between each group member has long been attractive to democracy supporters. One political philosopher, Steven Wall, in his 2007 paper "Philosophy and Equality," mentions each of the following as an item that might be included as a principal constituent of the concept of democracy, or as a characteristic that can be expected to result from a democratic structure and can therefore be suggested as a good reason for endorsing such a form of government: equal moral importance, equal moral worth, equal regard, equal standing, equal political liberty, equal political standing, political equality, fair equality of opportunity for equal political influence, basic equality, equal rational political authority, equality of the social basis of self-respect, equal civil liberties, equality of protection from social insults or like offenses, and the equal availability of reasonable inferences regarding one’s personal worth.

* This issue is used for comic effect in a recent episode of a television situation comedy (Amy Schumer’s Life and Beth: see video above.) Beth, who is pregnant, asks her gynecologist, “Let me get to the important issues: how many drinks?” and receives the unwelcome answer, “No alcohol, no marijuana, no coffee…Well, one cup a day is okay.” Beth quickly responds with, “Okay, but if I don't have the coffee, then it’s probably fine to have a glass of wine, right? I think we’re all in agreement on this.” The point is that democracy advocates will not allow the absence of equal voting rights to be counterbalanced by things like a history of debate club victories or a close friendship with a local election official. Like Beth’s gynecologist, political theorists are expected to understand that some sorts of properties are essentially such that they can only be inappropriately (if perhaps humorously) redistributed in counterbalancing attempts.