Must Realists Be Pessimists About Democracy? Responding to Epistemic and Oligarchic Challenges

Epistemic Democracy

Margaret McCartney: We must be smarter about recruitment and retention.

A hundred million pounds is a lot of money. NHS England has pledged to spend as much as this on recruitment agency fees to bring in GPs from abroad. The aim is for 5000 extra GPs. Overseas recruitment will make up a large portion of this new wave of doctors. In the 1960s, general practice in the NHS was saved by Indian and Pakistani doctors, at a time when a third to a half of UK medical gradua...

The limits of epistemic democracy

The so-called doctrinal paradox reveals that a jury that decides by majority on the truth of a set of propositions, may come to a conclusion that is at odds with a legal doctrine to which they all subscribe. The doctrinal paradox, and its subesequent generalization by List and Pettit (2003), reveal the logical difficulties of epistemic democracy. This paper presents several generalizations of t...

Epistemic Democracy with Defensible Premises12

The contemporary theory of epistemic democracy often draws on the Condorcet Jury Theorem to formally justify the ‘wisdom of crowds’. But this theorem is inapplicable in its current form, since one of its premises — voter independence — is notoriously violated. This premise carries responsibility for the theorem’s misleading conclusion that ‘large crowds are infallible’. We prove a more useful j...

Quality of Government and Epistemic Democracy

Democracy as an overall model for how societies should be governed has been a remarkable success over the last forty years. More countries than ever are now considered to be democratic or at least on their way to becoming democracies (Diamond 2007, Teorell 2010). Various international organizations that have democracy promotion on their agenda should nowadays be very content since there are cer...