Doesn’t the superiority of crowds to individuals provide a very strong justification for democracy?
It might seem odd to think that democracy stands in need of justification, given its current status as the world’s favourite political idea.
But, in fact, political theorists have always found it hard to explain exactly what it is about democracy that is so great.
The difficulty can be summarised like this. There are, broadly speaking, two potentially strong defences of democracy, one of which focuses on people’s preferences, the other on their cognitive capacities.
The preference-based approach insists that democracy is the best way of finding out what people want. It doesn’t matter whether democratic decisions are right or wrong; what matters is that there is no other plausible way to track the desires of the majority. The problem with this is that it has become increasingly clear over the last fifty years, since the pioneering work of Kenneth Arrow, that there is no simple way to discern the preferences of the majority. All majoritarian voting procedures turn out to be vulnerable to various inconsistencies and contradictions, whenever there are more than two options to choose from.
A cognitive defence of democracy, by contrast, argues that democracies really do provide the likeliest means of making the right political choices, because only democracies allow for the diversity of opinion and freedom of information on which correct decision-making depends.
The difficulty here, however, is the widely accepted ignorance and fickleness of the masses. Cognitive defences of democracy tend to put the emphasis on elite forms of representation and a ‘filtering’ of public opinion, in order to protect political decision-making from the unthinking preferences of the general public; as a result, they often sound distinctly undemocratic.
There are perils in democratic governments of filtering expert opinion in order to prioritise. What if the armchair experts who are wheeled out to opine like oculars on every dilemma for a democray. What, if we relied more on the 'ignorance; of the masses, that sans culotte brigade, who might turn out to be not a weakness but a strength.
It might seem odd to think that democracy stands in need of justification, given its current status as the world’s favourite political idea.
But, in fact, political theorists have always found it hard to explain exactly what it is about democracy that is so great.
The difficulty can be summarised like this. There are, broadly speaking, two potentially strong defences of democracy, one of which focuses on people’s preferences, the other on their cognitive capacities.
The preference-based approach insists that democracy is the best way of finding out what people want. It doesn’t matter whether democratic decisions are right or wrong; what matters is that there is no other plausible way to track the desires of the majority. The problem with this is that it has become increasingly clear over the last fifty years, since the pioneering work of Kenneth Arrow, that there is no simple way to discern the preferences of the majority. All majoritarian voting procedures turn out to be vulnerable to various inconsistencies and contradictions, whenever there are more than two options to choose from.
A cognitive defence of democracy, by contrast, argues that democracies really do provide the likeliest means of making the right political choices, because only democracies allow for the diversity of opinion and freedom of information on which correct decision-making depends.
The difficulty here, however, is the widely accepted ignorance and fickleness of the masses. Cognitive defences of democracy tend to put the emphasis on elite forms of representation and a ‘filtering’ of public opinion, in order to protect political decision-making from the unthinking preferences of the general public; as a result, they often sound distinctly undemocratic.
There are perils in democratic governments of filtering expert opinion in order to prioritise. What if the armchair experts who are wheeled out to opine like oculars on every dilemma for a democray. What, if we relied more on the 'ignorance; of the masses, that sans culotte brigade, who might turn out to be not a weakness but a strength.
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