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 certainly many reasons to be enthusiastic about this historically remarkable development. The enthusiasm is, however, dampened by the fact that empirical research show that there is no guarantee that procedural democracy will produce policies that improve the general human well-being of its citizens. As I will show below, established measures on various aspects of human well-being that now exists for a great many countries either have a very weak, or no, or sometimes even negative, correlation with measures of the level of democracy. The reason, I will argue, is that electoral-representative democracy does not automatically translate into what I define as quality of government (which is close but not identical to what usually is labeled " good governance "). For example, the noted democratization researcher and promoter Larry Diamond had the following to say when the U.S. based National Endowment for Democracy celebrated its first twenty-five years of operations: There is a specter haunting democracy in the world today. It is bad governance—governance that serves only the interests of a narrow ruling elite. Governance that is drenched in corruption, patronage, favoritism, and abuse of power. Governance that is not responding to the massive and long-deferred social agenda of reducing inequality and unemployment and fighting against dehumanizing poverty. Governance that is not delivering broad improvement in people's lives because it is stealing, squandering, or skewing the available resources (Diamond 2007:199) It is noteworthy that Diamond here makes a distinction between democracy and good governance. One aspect of the " specter " that haunts democracy is that a procedurally correct democratic system may produce decisions that are ill-informed and not in line with what 3 according to the factual matters is true. The idea behind what has become known as epistemic democracy theory is that the decision taken by a democratically elected legislative assembly should not only result in decisions that are in accordance with procedural fairness based on, for example, Robert Dahl's idea of politically equality. Instead, epistemic democracy requires that the decisions are also based on what according …