Introduction
[497] Epistocrats propose quasi-democratic electoral systems that amplify the voices of competent voters while silencing the voices of those deemed incompetent.
To amplify the voices f the competent, we first should know what counts as political competence.
Even with a theory of political competence, the epistocrat cannot yet implement his preferred electoral system since he must identify who the politically competent are.
[498] There are three ways for him to respond to this challenge:
- He might propose something besides a suffrage exam that can determine whether someone is sufficiently morally motivated;
- He might argue that we need not identify those who are morally motivated, as most people are morally motivated when they enter the voting booth;
- He might concede that there is no way to identify those who are fully politically competent, while epistocracy would still outperform democracy if those who are at least partially politically competent have their voices amplified.
I end by offering reasons to doubt that an imperfect epistocracy outperforms democracy, while more empirical work is needed.
Epistocracy and Its Varieties
Brennan (2011, 2016: Ch. 6) offers the most compelling argument in defense of epistocracy.
Five cases: (1) ignorant jury; (2) irrational jury; (3) impaired jury; (4) immoral jury; (5) corrupt jury
In all of them, it is obvious that a misfire of justice occurs. Furthermore, there is a strong intuition that defendants who go on trial have a right to not to be subject to a jury matching one of the cases.
Yet the same sort of cases that inspire the right to a competent jury also appear in democratic politics.
[499] If we grant that Brennan's argument succeeds, how do we ensure that citizens enjoy a competent electorate? => Many ways of institutionalizing epistocracy - most methods involve amplifying the voices of the competent.
Versions: J. S. Mill's plural voting; universal suffrage with veto; simulated oracle (=modelled democracy).
On Political Competence
[500] Brennan's propose of competent voters:
- "act on widely available, good information, if not always the best information available anywhere"
- "avoid mass superstition and systematic error"
- "evaluate information in a moderately rational, unbiased way"
- "aware of their limits, and thus always look for more and better information on any high-stakes decision" (Brennan 2016: 165)
Breaking his definition of political competence down into three components:
[501]
- The ability to reason well;
- Knowledge of current events;
- Social scientific knowledge.
The problem with this definition is that it does not eliminate all possible ways in which electorates can behave incompetently.
[502] Two further components must be added:
- Competent voters must possess moral knowledge concerning the policies that may permissibly be implemented;
- They are also motivated to vote in accordance with this knowledge.
Finding the Politically Competent
How can we identify all people who possess these characteristics, so their votes can be amplified?
[503] Keep in mind: The question is distinct from a similar question in social epistemology which asks how non-experts can identify experts.
How will the expert bureaucrats find the competent voters?
Brennan's proposal is: Bureaucrats use their skills and expertise to craft an exam that test for political competence.
Can a suffrage exam identify the politically competent? Testing for moral knowledge will be tricky.
[504] The big issue is how to test for moral motivation.
=> Suffrage tests do not allow us to identify those who have the right kind of motivation.
Finding the Morally Motivated
The epistocrat might propose something other than a suffrage exam to find those with the proper moral motivation as a response to the challenge laid out in the prior section: there might be features of people we can easily measure that are highly correlated with moral motivation.
Two issues with this proposal:
- Which comes up with a list of characteristics that tightly correlate with moral motivation: even if we identify the list, we might wonder how tight the relation is; and even if the epistocrat could find such a characteristic that make people tend to be morally motivated with a high degree of frequency, the signal characteristic c conveys will, over time, become less reliable, until it is no longer informative about people's moral motivation.
[505] Generalized underlying dynamics: for any characteristic c that highly correlates with moral motivation, using c to select the competent will incentivize those who wish to exercise political power to acquire c, which results in c being no longer highly correlated with moral motivation.
- Possible response: "Spending time to acquire the characteristic is irrational."
- Whether it is rational to engage in a costly activity depends on why one votes in the first place.
- [506] Will expressive voters go through the trouble of acquiring the relevant characteristic just so they can vote?
- The expressive theory says that an individual votes "simply for the sake of the expression itself and without any necessary implication ... Revealing a preference is a direct consumption activity, yielding benefits to the individual in and of itself" (Brennan and Lomasky 1997: 33).
To be clear, my claim is that enough people will be driven by the desire to vote to acquire c such that the pre-existing pool of people with c becomes significantly diluted by those who may (not) possess moral motivation.
Abandoning Moral Motivation
One response of the epistocrat: We need not worry about identifying the morally motivated since most people already have the proper motivation when they enter the voting booth. <= According to Brennan, this is a well-established social scientific fact [507] (Brennan 2016: 49-50).
Later, Brennan says: The voters are "altruistic" and "want their elected officials to serve the common good of their country..." (Brennan 2016: 50)
- The claim is that, based on the available research, most people tend to behave morally when they enter the voting booth specifically.
Piero Moraro's criticism of epistocracy: People typically vote in a moral manner in existing democracies by default (Agreement with Brennan). But it is unlikely that the politically competent will continue to vote morally motivated, since an individual's vote is unlikely to decide the outcome of an election, which makes him indulge his moral values, and by doing so, he can feel good while not sacrificing anything of importance to himself. In other contexts, indulging one’s moral values will come at a cost, thereby making moral behavior far less likely. The key thing to note is that the political context resembles the market context more and more as the electorate shrinks. (Moraro 2018)
But Moraro's objection fails: in epistocracy, it is unlikely the electorate will shrink enough such that voters are incentivized to begin voting in a self-interested 4. manner. => Experimental work (Feddersen et al. 2009: 176).
[508] The easiest way to respond to the epistocrat's claim that we need not worry about identifying the morally motivated is to deny the empirical claim that people tend to vote in a moral manner by default.
Problems
- Many of the papers Brennan cites do not talk about voting at all. The point is that public opinion polling and perceptions are not always accurate indicators of how people vote.
- The studies he cites by no means suggest that people vote morally.
- The most compelling case he can make is by appealing to papers that show voters tend to vote in the national economic interest (e. g. Kinder & Kiewiet 1979), but even here, voting in the national economic interest is not the same as voting in a moral manner.
- There is research that cuts against his claims about moral voting (e. g. Sears & Lau 1983; [509] Sears & Citrin 1982).
Abandoning Moral Motivations, Again
One final response available to my challenge is: Though it is not ideal, an epistocracy with partially politically competent voters is still preferable to democracy (partially politically competent group=informed about current events, etc., but who may (/not) be morally motivated).
The comparison between democracy and non-ideal epistocracy was made by how many sources of injustice they permit.
- But what matters is how frequently injustice occurs in both systems.
- Non-ideal epistocracy would produce it more frequently than democracy if the partially competent electorate makes more immoral and corrupt decisions.
How might this happen: 1. It could be that voters who are partially competent tend to have especially low moral motivation (e. g. Gibbons 2022; Hannon 2022).
[510] 2. Another possible mechanism need not assume this. The partially politically competent vote for candidates and policies that benefit their demographic at the expense of demographics who are disenfranchised; and this would qualify as an immoral a/o corrupt electorate.
In response to 2., one might say: Democracy has its own version of this problem since different demographic groups vote at different rates.
While democracy’s version of this problem is troubling, it is less troubling than epistocracy’s version of it: because in a democracy, even if a certain demographic group consistently chooses to vote at a low frequency, the group can still vote.
[511] =It could be that the skewed demographics among those enfranchised in a non-ideal epistocracy will lead to more immoral and corrupt decisions.
- The above mechanisms are possible explanations as to how this could happen.
It is clear that the epistocrat cannot simply claim that non-ideal epistocracy outperforms democracy, since some sources of electoral incompetence are eliminated when only the partially politically competent are enfranchised.
Epistocracy can only exist in non-ideal form, and who wins in the fight between democracy and non-ideal epistocracy is far from clear.
