Citizens, experts, and democracy
Fact-checking, content moderation, and the difference between democratic participation and technocratic regulation in the public sphere.
One of the attractive features of democracy as a system of government is its egalitarianism. At least theoretically, the political equality embodied in ‘one person, one vote’ gives each citizen an equal say in how their society is run, transforming collective governance into self-governance.
This egalitarianism resonates with many people’s intuitions about justice. However, it also plausibly has instrumental benefits. For example, citizens might be less inclined toward violent revolution if they feel included in collective decision-making. Moreover, some argue that political equality ensures democracies integrate a maximally diverse range of perspectives, enabling them to benefit from the “wisdom of crowds” and other forms of information aggregation.
At the same time, giving everyone an equal say in politics runs up against the obvious problem that people are highly unequal in their virtues and abilities. Political equality ensures that collective decision-making will be hampered by the input of citizens who are ignorant, irrational, selfish, or callous. It seems evident within other organisations that effective decision-making depends on allocating influence according to merit and competence, not assuming that everyone’s input is equally valuable. Why would the political organisation of society be any different?
Democracy and Technocracy
This tension between the virtues and vices of political equality has always been present in thinking about democracy. However, it has become particularly acute over the past several centuries as the scale and complexity of political problems have exploded. Writing in the early twentieth century, John Dewey observed that
“the local face-to-face community has been invaded by forces so vast, so remote in initiation, so far-reaching in scope and so complexly indirect in operation that they are, from the standpoint of the members of local social units, unknown. . . . They act at a great distance in ways invisible to [them]”.
In relatively small-scale societies, the problem of political inequality—the fact that citizens differ significantly in their abilities to improve collective decision-making—results primarily from differences in people’s virtues, intelligence, and skills. With the unimaginable scale and complexity of political problems in the modern world and the development of esoteric bodies of knowledge designed to cope with them, differences in expertise have become increasingly relevant.
Most citizens lack the ability even to understand most social, political, economic, and environmental issues pertinent to large-scale governance, let alone the expertise necessary to make accurate judgments about them. In such contexts, the wisdom of crowds and the alleged benefits of “cognitive diversity” appear irrelevant. Aggregating ordinary citizens’ judgements about monetary policy, geopolitical conflict, vaccines, climate change, or many other complex topics seems more likely to produce gibberish than wisdom.
Technocracy
One obvious solution to this problem is for societies to become more technocratic—to allocate more political influence to a narrow elite of technical experts. In practice, this is the solution that most real-world democratic societies have opted for. Elections still occur, but as Walter Lippmann observed in ‘The Phantom Public’ (1925), this is mostly a matter of semi-random mass mobilisations for and against the small groups of “insiders” and experts who really govern:
“To support the Ins when things are going well; to support the Outs when they seem to be going badly, this, in spite of all that has been said about tweedledum and tweedledee, is the essence of popular government.”
However, technocracy is explosive. Even if experts were infallible, it violates the egalitarian intuitions that make democracy attractive. Moreover, experts are obviously not infallible. They are frequently and sometimes catastrophically wrong, and—like all other human beings—they are biased in countless ways in their understanding of the political universe.
This tension is central to modern debates about “populism” and the “crisis of expertise”. On one side, there are those who “have had enough of experts… saying they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong”. On the other, there are those so baffled by this rejection of expertise that they view it as an attack on truth itself, a bizarre “post-truth” rejection of the very existence of objective reality.
Trust the experts
Another solution is for experts not to influence policy directly but to influence the opinions that citizens bring to bear in making democratic decisions. Here, rather than handing over power to a narrow elite of technical experts, experts attempt to provide citizens with the knowledge necessary to make good decisions themselves. In practice, this means the decisions favoured by technical experts.
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