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Representative Democracy as Defensible Epistocracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2019

DIMITRI LANDA Open the ORCID record for DIMITRI LANDA [Opens in a new window]  and
RYAN PEVNICK Open the ORCID record for RYAN PEVNICK [Opens in a new window]
DIMITRI LANDA*
Affiliation:
New York University
RYAN PEVNICK*
Affiliation:
New York University
*
*Dimitri Landa, Professor, Department of Politics, New York University, Dimitri.Landa@nyu.edu.
†Ryan Pevnick, Associate Professor, Department of Politics, New York University, Ryan.Pevnick@nyu.edu.
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Abstract

Epistocratic arrangements are widely rejected because there will be reasonable disagreement about which citizens count as epistemically superior and an epistemically superior subset of citizens may be biased in ways that undermine their ability to generate superior political outcomes. The upshot is supposed to be that systems of democratic government are preferable because they refuse to allow some citizens to rule over others. We show that this approach is doubly unsatisfactory: although representative democracy cannot be defended as a form of government that prevents some citizens from ruling over others, it can be defended as a special form of epistocracy. We demonstrate that well-designed representative democracies can, through treatment and selection mechanisms, bring forth an especially competent set of individuals to make public policy, even while circumventing the standard objections to epistocratic rule. This has implications for the justification of representative democracy and questions of institutional design.

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Type
Research Article
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American Political Science Review , Volume 114 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 1 - 13
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2019 

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Footnotes

We are grateful to Bernard Manin for helpful comments. Additionally, participants in a seminar at the University of Virginia provided useful discussion of an earlier version. Finally, we appreciate the work of the journal’s reviewers, who helped us to improve the manuscript.

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