An Epistemic Theory of Democracy

Democracy has many attractive features. Among them is its tendency to track the truth, at least under certain idealized assumptions. That basic result has been known since 1785, when Condorcet published his famous Jury Theorem, which has typically been dismissed as little more than amathematical curiosity, with its assumptions being regarded as too restrictive to apply to the real world. In An Epistemic Theory of Democracy, Goodin and Spiekermann show that those assumptions can be substantially weakened and majoritarian democracy's truth-tracking properties still be preserved.The authors propose different ways of interpreting voter independence and competence that make jury theorems genuinely applicable to the real world, and assess wide range of familiar political practices and alternative institutional arrangements, to determine what constellation of them might mostfully exploit the truth tracking potential of majoritarian democracy. The book concludes with a discussion of how epistemic democracy might be undermined, using as case studies the Trump and Brexit campaigns.