An Epistemic Theory of Democracy

Bob Goodin is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Australian National University. He is Founding Editor of the Journal of Political Philosophy and was General Editor of the eleven-volume series of Oxford Handbooks of Political Science. Goodin's work centres on political theory and public policy. He is co-author of, most recently, On Complicity and Compromise and Explaining Norms, both published by OUP in 2013.

Kai Spiekermann is Associate Professor of Political Philosophy at the London School of Economics. Among his research interests are normative and positive political theory, philosophy of the social sciences, social epistemology and environmental change. He is particularly interested in applying formal methods, computational simulations, and experiments to problems in political philosophy. His recent publications have focused on mechanisms of norm avoidance, strategic ignorance and moral
knowledge, on information aggregation, jury theorems and epistemic democracy, and on reductionism and holism in the social sciences.

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. But that theorem has typically been dismissed as little more than a mathematical curiosity, with assumptions too restrictive for it to apply to the real world. In An Epistemic Theory of Democracy, Goodin and Spiekermann propose
different ways of interpreting voter independence and competence to make jury theorems more generally applicable. They go on to assess a wide range of familiar political practices and alternative institutional arrangements, to determine what constellation of them might most fully exploit the truth-tracking
potential of majoritarian democracy. The book closes with a discussion of how epistemic democracy might be undermined, using as case studies the Trump and Brexit campaigns.

Winner of APSA Ideas, Knowledge, and Politics Section Best Book Award

This book examines the Condorcet Jury Theorem and how its assumptions can be applicable to the real world. It will use the theorem to assess various familiar political practices and alternative institutional arrangements, revealing how best to take advantage of the truth-tracking potential of majoritarian democracy.

Winner of APSA Ideas, Knowledge, and Politics Section Best Book Award

1: Introduction