Brennan: Response to Landemore

Jason Brennan responds to Landemore’s main argument in Debating Democracy. He argues that the proof the Hong–Page Theorem is largely question-begging, and that the concept of “diversity” in the proof does not correspond to the concept as used by democratic theorists. He argues that Landemore must accept that voter knowledge matters, but doing so prevents her from being able to say democracy always outperforms democracy. He also argues that democracy performs as well as it does because it tends to come together with liberalism. He finally offers additional criticisms of open democracy.

Does Public Reason Liberalism Rest on a Mistake? Democracy’s Doxastic and Epistemic Problems

Public reason liberalism is a normative theory meant to adjudicate citizens’ conflicting beliefs about the right and the good. However, it rests upon controversial and likely mistaken empirical claims about voter psychology and voter knowledge. In political science, there are two major paradigms—populism and realism—about the relationship between voters’ beliefs and political outcomes. Realism holds that most citizens lack the kinds of beliefs and attitudes which public reason liberals believe are normatively significant. If so, then most citizens lack the kinds of ideological disputes which public reason liberalism is supposed to adjudicate. Worse, most citizens lack the kinds of normatively significantly beliefs upon which public justification must rest.

Knowledge and Communication in Democratic Politics: Markets, Forums and Systems

Epistemic questions have become an important area of debate within democratic theory. Epistemic democrats have revived epistemic justification of democracy, while social scientific research has speared a significant debate on voter knowledge. An area which has received less attention, however, is the epistemic case for markets. Market advocates have developed a number of epistemic critiques of democracy which suggest that most goods are better provided by markets than democratic institutions. Despite representing important challenges to democracy, these critiques have gone without reply as democratic theorists have tended to exclude markets from consideration. This article responds to these critiques and argues that there are good epistemic grounds for granting a much greater role to democracy than its market critics have claimed. It argues that there is a broad range of goods, including important ethical goods, which are better provided by democracy than markets due to the particular epistemic burdens they create.

Competition in Media Systems and Voter Knowledge: An Agent-Based Model

This paper presents an agent-based model (ABM) that shows that variation in voter knowledge can in part be driven by competition among media outlets. Using a set of simple behavioral rules implemented by voters, parties and media outlets, the model predicts that stronger media competition increases political knowledge of quality-minded voters vis-a-vis motivated reasoners although aggregate differences are small. This is because these voters are most likely to consume news even when it is of low quality. Not only do these results contribute to a larger (empirical) debate about media competition and political knowledge, but the model also serves as a theoretical starting point for exploring these patterns further.