THE EPISTEMOLOGY

OF DEMOCRACY
Edited by Hana Samaržija
and Quassim Cassam
The Epistemology of Democracy

This is the first edited scholarly collection devoted solely to the episte-
mology of democracy. Its fifteen chapters, published here for the first
time and written by an international team of leading researchers, will
interest scholars and advanced students working in democratic theory,
the harrowing crisis of democracy, political philosophy, social epistemol-
ogy, and political epistemology.
The volume is structured into three parts, each offering five chapters.
The first part, Democratic Pessimism, covers the crisis of democracy,
the rise of authoritarianism, public epistemic vices, misinformation and
disinformation, civic ignorance, and the lacking quantitative case for
democratic decision-making. The second part, Democratic Optimism,
discusses the role of hope and positive emotions in rebuilding ­democracy,
proposes solutions to myside bias, and criticizes dominant epistocratic
approaches to forming political administrations. The third and final
part, Democratic Realism, assesses whether we genuinely require emo-
tional empathy to understand the perspectives of our political adversar-
ies, discusses the democratic tension between mutual respect for others
and a quest for social justice, and evaluates manifold top-down and
­bottom-up approaches to policy making.

Hana Samaržija is a Ph.D. student in Philosophy at the University of

­Warwick. Her papers on countering epistemic injustice and seeking epis-
temically high-quality alternatives to democracy have been published in
Social Epistemology and other academic journals as well as in the edited
book The Philosophy of Fanaticism: Epistemic, Affective, and Political
Dimensions (Routledge, 2022).

Quassim Cassam is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of ­Warwick,

an Honorary Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the British
Academy.
The Epistemology
of Democracy

Edited by
Hana Samaržija
and Quassim Cassam
First published 2023
by Routledge
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© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Hana Samaržija and Quassim
Cassam; individual chapters, the contributors.
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ISBN: 978-1-032-31725-0 (hbk)

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003311003

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Contents

List of Contributorsvii

Introduction: What the Epistemology of Democracy Is All About 1

HANA SAMARŽIJA

PART I
Democratic Pessimism 15

1 Sexy but Wrong: Diversity Theorem Defenses of Democracy 17

JASON BRENNAN

2 A Belated Failure: Condorcet in Contemporary Epistemic

Conditions 32
HANA SAMARŽIJA

3 Social Epistemic Miserliness: Populism against Democracy 51

NENAD MIŠČEVIĆ

4 Critical Thinking and Trusting Experts in Real-life Democracies 70

SNJEŽANA PRIJIĆ SAMARŽIJA

5 The Dangers of Disinformation 90

ÅSA WIKFORSS

PART II
Democratic Optimism 113

6 The Politics of Resentment: Hope, Mistrust, and Polarization 115

ALESSANDRA TANESINI
vi Contents
7 Against the Individual Virtue Approach in the Epistemology
of Democracy 135
MARKO LUKA ZUBČIĆ

8 Institutional Cynicism and Civic Virtue 152

IAN JAMES KIDD

9 Myside Bias in Individuals and Institutions 170

KEITH E. STANOVICH

10 Listening for Epistemic Community 195

HANNA KIRI GUNN

PART III
Democratic Realism 213

11 Sensemaking, Empathy, and Democracy 215

QUASSIM CASSAM

12 Political Skepticism, Bias, and Epistemic Colonization 233

MICHAEL P. LYNCH

13 Economic Inequalities and Epistemic Democracy 250

IVAN CEROVAC

14 What Political Enemies Are for 270

ROBERT B. TALISSE

15 Top-Down and Bottom-Up Solutions to the Problem of

Political Ignorance 287
ILYA SOMIN

Index 316
List of Contributors

Jason Brennan is the Flanagan Family Professor at the McDonough

School of Business, Georgetown University. He is the author of sixteen
books, including Crack in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher
Education (Oxford University Press, 2019).
Quassim Cassam is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Warwick, UK, an Honorary Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, and a
Fellow of the British Academy.
Ivan Cerovac is an External Research Fellow at the University of Rijeka.
He is the author of Epistemic Democracy and Political Legitimacy
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and John Stuart Mill and Epistemic
Democracy (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022), and he writes and teaches
on a range of topics in ethics and political philosophy, including
political legitimacy, social justice, and democratic theory.
Hanna Kiri Gunn is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Cognitive
and Information Sciences Department at the University of California,
Merced. Her main area of research concerns the applied ethics and
epistemology of epistemic communities and epistemic agency.
Ian James Kidd teaches and researches philosophy at the University
of Nottingham. His research interests include social and applied
epistemology and moral and epistemic virtues and vices.
Michael Patrick Lynch is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of
Philosophy at the University of Connecticut and the author of Know-
It-All Society and The Internet of Us, among other books.
Nenad Miščević is a Full Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Maribor and has, until recently, also been teaching at the Central
European University in Budapest. He has worked on various
philosophical subjects, emphasizing epistemology, philosophy of
language, and political philosophy.
viii List of Contributors
Hana Samaržija is a Ph.D. student of Philosophy at the University of
Warwick. Routledge and Social Epistemology have published her
works on social epistemology, political epistemology, political
polarization, and epistemic injustice.
Snježana Prijić Samaržija is a Professor of Epistemology at the Faculty of
Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Rijeka. The main
areas of her scientific interest are social philosophy, epistemology, and
applied ethics. During her two rector’s mandates, she published her
last book, Democracy and Truth: The Conflict Between Political and
Epistemic Virtues (Mimesis International, 2018).
Ilya Somin is a Professor of Law at George Mason University. He is the
author of six books, including Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration,
and Political Freedom (Oxford University Press, rev. ed. 2021),
Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is
Smarter (Stanford University Press, 2nd ed. 2016), and The Grasping
Hand: Kelo v. City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain
(University of Chicago Press, rev. ed. 2016).
Keith E. Stanovich is a Professor Emeritus of Applied Psychology at the
University of Toronto. He is the author of The Bias That Divides Us
(MIT Press, 2021) and has received the Thorndike Career Achievement
Award from the American Psychological Association.
Robert B. Talisse is W. Alton Jones Philosophy and Political Science
Professor. at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He
specializes in democratic theory, emphasizing justice, citizenship,
public deliberation, and political disagreement.
Alessandra Tanesini is a Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University.
Her latest book is The Mismeasure of the Self: A Study in Vice
Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2021).
Åsa Wikforss is a Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at Stockholm
University and researches the intersection of epistemology, philosophy
of mind, and political psychology. She is the author of two popular
books and a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Science and
the Swedish Academy.
Marko Luka Zubčić is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for
Advanced Studies South East Europe at the University of Rijeka and
an associate lecturer at the Faculty for Humanities and Social Sciences
in Rijeka. His research field is institutional epistemology, focusing
on the economic and institutional design conditions of epistemic
reliability in complex social systems.
Introduction
What the Epistemology of
Democracy Is All About
Hana Samaržija

0.1 Introduction
This volume is the first international publication devoted exclusively
to the novel field of the epistemology of democracy. The contemporary
significance of the epistemology of democracy is difficult to overstate.
Democracy is at a crossroads, with recent volumes spelling out its proce-
dural failures and the frequency of its collapses (Brennan 2016; Levitsky
and Ziblatt 2018). Ever since venerated political philosophers first penned
their classic theses, the wisdom of crowds appeared as the best way to
resolve the problem of political governance (Mill 1982; Locke 1988;
Rousseau 2003). A diverse group of informed citizens cognizant of their
interests, seeking the common good while guarded by the division of pow-
ers and canceling each other’s biases, was guaranteed to arrive at the best
possible conclusion about their joint problems (Goodin and Spiekermann
2018). However, these presuppositions have recently received a more criti-
cal reading, albeit long taken for granted. Profoundly disquieting decisions
made by multi-million electorates cast doubt on the hitherto unchal-
lenged and seemingly perennial belief in the wisdom of crowds (Cassam
2019). Deliberation between political parties essential to representative
democracy, allegedly the most procedurally just political system we are
acquainted with, repeatedly fails to deliver what many would regard as
sensible policies (Ahlstrom-Vij 2012). In their contemporary epistemic
conditions, liberal representative democracies depend primarily on their
voters, who are often accused of being ignorant, ideologically biased,
uninformed, and prejudiced (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; Delli Carpini
2005; Fricker 2006; Caplan 2007; Ahlstrom-Vij 2018). If those concerns are
correct, irresponsible citizens cannot select responsive and epistemically
responsible governments (Ahlstrom-Vij 2020). Accordingly, numerous
elected politicians seem unconcerned by expert scientific warnings about
oncoming recessions, the climate crisis potentially injurious to our life on
Earth, and stealthy pandemics that have cost us millions of lives. It came
as little wonder political epistemologists instinctively focused on probing
democracy for its professed commitment to electoral equality and political

DOI: 10.4324/9781003311003-1
2 Hana Samaržija
inclusion. For the last fifteen years, scholars have been divided on the ques-
tion of whether the solution to democracy’s struggles is fewer democratic
processes, such as restricting the electorate to more knowledgeable citizens
(Brennan 2020), or more inclusive democratic processes open to referenda
and direct democracy (Landemore 2012, 2020). Others have argued that
the resolution lies in educating the electorate by appealing to their agential
interests or introducing monetary incentives for learning about cardinal
democratic facts and procedures (Somin 2023).
Methodologically, the epistemology of democracy is consciously
interdisciplinary and eclectic (Goldman 2003). Knowing it has much
to learn, it interacts with political studies and their more specialized
branches, such as political behavior research and political psychol-
ogy (Dalton and Klingemann 2009). It also borrows insights from the
cognitive sciences, psychology, sociology, anthropology, probability
theories, and mathematics. Consequently, this volume comprises chap-
ters devoted to studying cognitive biases inherited from the cognitive
sciences (Stanovich 2021a), assessments of civic knowledge based on
painstaking reviews of decades of political behavior studies (Kuklinsky
and Peyton 2007), portrayals of empathy that conjoin psychology and
sociology with materialist philosophy (Marx 2000), and discussions of
differential economic capital as an obstacle to democratic equality heav-
ily involved with economics and welfare studies. Nonetheless, despite its
refreshing interaction with other sciences, the epistemology of democ-
racy remains profoundly philosophical in its fundamental methods,
aims, language, and argumentation. Furthermore, not all epistemolo-
gists of democracy are equally committed to preserving or sustaining
democracy (Talisse 2021).
On the contrary, while some defend democracy for the supposedly ben-
eficial epistemic effects of diversity in resolving complex problems and its
fair maintenance of ideological pluralism, others repudiate the supposed
wisdom of crowds, underline the significance of deference to experts
(Ahlstrom-Vij 2013; Prijić-Samaržija 2017), and seek epistemically better
justified alternatives to democracy that preserve its pledge to civic inclu-
sion and equality. Some epistemologists of democracy remain impartial
toward its objective epistemic value and instead inquire about how to
understand people whose views we deem reprehensible properly and how
economic inequality impacts ostensibly fair democratic processes. Even
in its earliest steps, the epistemology of democracy tackles issues that
concern us all. And that is why it merits our effort and attentiveness.

0.2 The Advent of the Epistemology of Democracy:

A Very Short Story
Traditional analytic epistemology has undergone several significant
expansions throughout its lengthy and turbulent history. Initially, it
 Introduction 3
presupposed a single, genderless, and disembodied epistemic agent who
resided in something akin to a social vacuum. In such an asocial and
apolitical environment, there was nothing to obstruct the acquisition of
essential sensory and inferential knowledge (Prijić-Samaržija 2018, 3).
The sole goals of early analytic epistemology’s abstruse epistemic agent
were truth and knowledge. However, it was not long before numerous
more contemporary epistemologists found the idea of truth and knowl-
edge acquired by an asocial and disembodied epistemic agent excessively
limiting. Traditional analytic epistemology’s first expansion into virtue
epistemology replaced this truth monism with a plural account of epis-
temic values embodied in an agent’s epistemic or intellectual virtues
(Battaly 2008). We could best describe epistemic virtues as dispositions,
character traits, and modes of thinking that assist us in making proper
assessments and acquiring, maintaining, and disseminating knowledge.
Although Ernest Sosa drew the first sketch of a pluralistic account
of the faculties capable of delivering true beliefs as the solution to the
impasse between foundationalism and coherentism in his canonical arti-
cle “The Raft and the Pyramid” (Sosa 1980), Linda Zagzebski finally set
a plural account of epistemic values on solid ground in her now classic
book Virtues of the Mind (Zagzebski 1996). As in every novel investiga-
tive field, virtue epistemologists immediately separated into two diver-
gent camps. Virtue reliabilists argued that intellectual virtues amount
to dependable innate gifts such as acute perception, a razor-sharp intel-
ligence, and a staunch memory (Sosa 2001). In contrast, virtue responsi-
bilists held that epistemic virtues are normative character traits we can
dynamically work to acquire and cultivate. Both accounts of epistemic
virtues comprised characteristics such as responsibility and caution with
evidence, respect for epistemic authorities (Zagzebski 2012), conscien-
tiousness with our work, earnest interest in learning, charity toward
opposing viewpoints, epistemic justice toward marginalized knowers,
and intellectual humility in the face of our inevitably limited knowledge
(Hazlett 2012). Perceiving epistemic virtues as normative faculties capa-
ble of cultivation rather than innate genetic predicaments later became
the prevailing outlook, although alternative approaches such as reliabi-
lism remain (Battaly 2020).
Subsequent work focused on epistemic vices, understood as character
traits, attitudes, and ways of thinking that obstruct or otherwise impair
knowledge acquisition, retention, and transmission. Quassim Cassam
first named the field of vice epistemology in his paper “Vice Epistemology”
(Cassam 2016) and developed it in his book Vices of the Mind: From the
Social to the Political (Cassam 2019). It was further advanced in works
by Heather Battaly, Ian James Kidd, Alessandra Tanesini, and others.
Epistemic vices include both recognizable and proverbial everyday epis-
temic failings, such as dogmatism, closed-mindedness, and epistemic
arrogance, or more obscure vices unfamiliar to the layperson, such as
4 Hana Samaržija
Miranda Fricker’s testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, failures to
ascribe vulnerable persons the trust they are due or to acknowledge their
perspectives in our collective intellectual resources (Fricker 2007). Of
course, vice epistemology did not arise out of the blue or develop solely
as the abstract conceptual opposition to virtue epistemology: it was
preceded by a lengthy and self-consciously international history of stud-
ying positive and negative character traits in different ancient, medieval,
and renaissance traditions (Kidd, Battaly, and Cassam 2020, 3). However,
we can grasp the most concrete link between intellectual virtues and vices
in Fricker’s much discussed Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of
Knowing, a book that essentially described two severe intellectual vices –
testimonial and hermeneutical injustice – that the author endeavored to
resolve by stimulating agents to develop the matching virtues of testimo-
nial and hermeneutical justice. Most significantly, the legacy of virtue
and vice epistemology finally brought epistemology down from its ivory
tower and cradled it closer to our genuine experiential world.
Owing largely to the work of Alvin Goldman, virtue and vice epis-
temologists have increasingly come to accept that philosophy ought to
interact with the cognitive and social sciences to broaden its scope and
significance (Goldman 2003). As a result, both virtue and vice epistemol-
ogy have acquired a social dimension and established links with social
epistemology, the study of the social conditions and obstacles to knowl-
edge acquisition (Goldman 1990). Social epistemology dealt with ques-
tions such as the necessary conditions for trusting and distrusting others’
testimonies (Lackey 2010), fruitfully resolving ostensibly unending dis-
agreements between scientific peers, the social environment’s influence
on epistemic injustice toward stigmatized social groups (Fricker 2007),
institutional rather than agential solutions to differential epistemic capi-
tal (Samaržija and Cerovac 2022), and collective epistemic agents such as
smaller groups, entire democratic electorates, political parties, or institu-
tions (Brady and Fricker 2016). Even as social epistemology branched out
into more specialized research fields, it did not relinquish its interest in
subjects such as the necessary and sufficient conditions for testimony to be
reliable, the optimum stance to assume when two equally prominent aca-
demics fail to find common ground, and the realistic probability of rely-
ing on flawed individuals rather than institutions to abolish entrenched
epistemic injustices (Fricker, Graham, Henderson, and Pedersen 2020).
Several of social epistemology’s subjects branched into fecund and
self-standing research fields. For instance, now we can speak of the estab-
lished field of applied epistemology, which employs social epistemology’s
conclusions to tackle concrete social problems, such as petrified disputes
in the scientific community (Coady 2020), the self-­explanatorily titled
ignorance studies committed to coping with the social side effects of dis-
information in democracies dependent on informed electorates, and an
entire intersectional field devoted to epistemic injustice that fruitfully
 Introduction 5
interacts with feminist, racial, and post-colonial studies (Kidd, Medina,
and Pohlhaus Jr. 2019).
Several decades later, this interest in politically pertinent epistemic collec-
tives, myriad alarming policy decisions, blatant climate inaction impervi-
ous to despondent scientific warnings, and the Internet’s development into a
notoriously unregulated yet compelling platform for political and informal
socialization incited the advent of political epistemology (Edenberg and
Hannon 2021; Hannon and de Ridder 2021). Political epistemology is “a
newly thriving field at the intersection of epistemology and political philos-
ophy” (Hannon and de Ridder 2021, 1). It examines and studies its ancient
predecessors, who tackled similar issues without an opportune umbrella
term to encompass their views. Plato and Aristotle made significant con-
tributions to what would today be known as political epistemology (Plato
2007; Aristotle 2013). Today, political epistemologists study political dis-
agreement and polarization (Edenberg 2021; Iyengar 2021), the epistemic
consequences of disinformation and misinformation (Gelfert 2021), epis-
temic virtues and vices in politics (Tanesini 2021), the Internet’s influence
on political decision-making (Gunn 2021), political rationality and irra-
tionality (Friedman 2021; Somin 2021), cognitive biases that stymie under-
standing (Stanovich 2021b), and the epistemic justification of democracy as
a collective decision-making system (Prijić-Samaržija 2018). De Ridder and
Hannon’s accessible Handbook of Political Epistemology trailed decades
of arduous labor in introducing novel topics and innovating the present
approaches to perennial political issues. Nevertheless, political epistemol-
ogy’s concern for fallible and painlessly manipulable democratic processes
branched political epistemology onto the novel, fruitful, and more special-
ized territory of the epistemology of democracy.

0.3 The Structure of the Volume

This volume comprises three thematic sections, each representing a differ-
ent conceptual, ethical, and epistemic attitude toward democracy’s epis-
temic value. The sections are not methodologically unified, as each author
proffers their unique perspective and approach to the chosen problem.
While some stay true to standard analytic philosophy’s rigorous deduc-
tive reasoning, intentionally bereft of enigmatic formulations, others
conjoin analytic philosophy’s cutthroat clarity with a more continental
historicism and stylistic eclecticism and speckle their papers with elegant
passages rich with wry humor. This diversity of approaches contributes to
the volume’s popular appeal and significance to the scientific community.
Although the initial distribution among pessimists, optimists, and realists
may appear provisional – as not all pessimists are equally committed to
expert rule or other alternatives to democracy, and most optimists and
realists are justifiably critical of democracy’s present state – it is valuable
in navigating the volume and its elaborately nuanced contents. Whether
6 Hana Samaržija
they advocate expert rule or dissimilar surrogates for democracy, all pes-
simists share distinct anxiety about the conceivable consequences of the
emergent culture of ignorance and its correlation to social networking in
obstructing present and future democratic processes. Likewise, optimists
are cohesive in seeking the answer to an enhanced democracy in more gen-
uinely democratic procedures: deliberation ameliorated with the compe-
tencies of empathizing and listening to adversaries or electoral processes
ornated with more diverse participants. In the end, realists share a joint
perspective on democracy’s presently dissatisfactory condition but do
not venture to reform it. Instead, they focus on specific problems within
democratic coexistence, such as the ostensible stipulation for empathy
and compassion for our political rivals, or review varied assortments of
pessimistic and optimistic proposals to amend democratic practices. This
volume is also geographically inclusive in uniting political philosophers
from all over Europe and the United States, underlining that a healthy
governmental system is a subject essential to all of us.
The first section, Democratic Pessimism, comprises five chapters that
maintain a skeptical attitude toward democracy’s epistemic value and its
quantitative defenses, question the professed epistemic value of self-reliant
critical thinking and civic engagement, reconsider the negative effect of
biases on democratic processes, or ponder upon the future of democracy
in the context of the advent of social networking, filter bubbles, and echo
chambers. The second section, Democratic Optimism, poses a formidable
challenge to the first. While some authors hold that hopeful trust and hon-
est communication, both eroded by polarization, constitute and enhance
democracy’s epistemic value, others argue in favor of the epistemic ben-
efits of diversity in resolving problems and attenuating myside bias or
claim that an appropriate dose of cynicism toward institutions can fortify
democratic engagement. The third and final section, Democratic Realism,
maintains a neutral stance toward the perennial dilemma between truth
and political values. Instead, the five included epistemologists argue that
democracy encourages us to endeavor to make sense of viewpoints we
deem reprehensible and maintain civil relationships with our political
enemies, that truth and justice are not in conflict unless we make them so,
and that economic inequalities in the informal political sphere can erode
the political equality at the foundations of a healthy democracy.

0.4 Summary of Chapters

0.4.1 Democratic Pessimism

Political epistemologist and philosopher of economics Jason Brennan
opens the volume with a meticulous repudiation of the Hong-Page
Theorem of Diversity over Expertise, frequently utilized to defend dem-
ocratic or collective decision-making. In Brennan’s reading, the theorem
 Introduction 7
endeavors to show that the miscellany of a decision-making group is a
more significant predictor of the decision’s epistemic value than the reli-
ability or the competence of individual epistemic agents. Brennan argues
that the theorem’s ostensible proofs are questionable in most epistemic
settings and that the proof itself is frivolous and mathematically unsub-
stantiated. He, therefore, determines that we should not engage the theo-
rem in discussions concerning the epistemic value of democracy. Political
and social epistemologist, and the primary editor of the volume, Hana
Samaržija continues with the subject of rebutting theorems in ostensive
favor of democratic decision-making. She carefully assesses Condorcet’s
Jury Theorem, another mathematical proof often utilized in defenses
of democracy, and its central claim that the probability a decision will
be correct increases with the number of decision-makers, regardless of
their expertise on the chosen topic. Samaržija argues that Condorcet’s
three critical requirements expected from his imagined decision-makers –
­competence, independence, and sincerity – cannot outlive the contempo-
rary epistemic circumstances of extreme political polarization, heightened
enmity among the electorate, ambiguous algorithmic sorting on social
networks, social epistemic structures such as epistemic bubbles and echo
chambers, and strategic voting driven by a desire for material gain. She
thus concludes that Condorcet’s Jury Theorem can no longer be sensibly
employed as an epistemic justification of democracy. In the section’s third
chapter, eclectic political philosopher and philosopher of mind Nenad
Miščević tackles politically hazardous epistemic vices with substantial
sociopolitical corollaries, such as closed-mindedness, epistemic arro-
gance, cowardice, dishonesty, and dogmatic epistemic self-affirmation.
He then associates them with the advent of populism in global politics and
endeavors to explicate them by commenting on cognitive miserliness, the
systematic human intellectual failures liable for regular defects in cogni-
tive processing. Miščević terminates his chapter with the stance that such
miserliness-based vices are the most noteworthy systematic hindrance to
fruitful political deliberation. Political, institutional, and social episte-
mologist Snježana Prijić-Samaržija proceeds with an innovative reading
of critical thinking as a cognitive attitude that is only virtuous if it entails
deference to objective epistemic authorities. Prijić-Samaržija acknowl-
edges that social epistemology’s interdisciplinary perspective has allowed
us to rethink the epistemic justification of democracy and the notion of
critical thinking, which has become an educational platitude barren of
meaning. She asserts that in the current culture of ignorance, replete with
disinformation, misinformation, fake news, and conspiracy theories, peo-
ple’s autonomously formed beliefs do not possess the epistemic value they
would enjoy in idealized epistemic circumstances. Prijić-Samaržija then
argues that the seemingly permanent animosity between critical thinking
and regard for experts, founded primarily on ­modernity’s reverence for
autonomous reflection and later postmodern critiques of expertise, posits
8 Hana Samaržija
a particular threat within the current culture of ignorance and the ideol-
ogy of each person’s unique judgment-based truth. As an alternative, she
offers critical thinking based on justified deference to objective epistemic
authorities as an essential constituent of democratic decision-making.
Prijić-Samaržija closes her chapter by underlining the disquieting effects
of identifying critical thinking with arbitrary and often misinformed or
conspiratorial beliefs in the contemporary culture of ignorance. As the
opening section’s final point, philosopher of mind and political episte-
mologist Åsa Wikforss closes the unit with the argument that the recently
undependable information environment poses a grave threat to demo-
cratic practices. She recognizes that specific scholars hold that philos-
ophers concerned about post-truth epistemic circumstances and their
effect on democracy are erroneous in presuming that truth is essential
to democracy. In their reading, truth is intrinsically an anti-democratic
concept, as it does not hinge on the values and opinions of the masses.
However, Wikforss underlines that such objections are misconstrued, as
truth and knowledge play an indispensable role in sustaining democra-
cies. Although democratic decision-making involves objective facts and
values, diminishing the significance of expertise remains deleterious for
democracy. To illustrate her point, she concludes the first section by dis-
cussing the damages that disinformation and misinformation pose to
present liberal democratic societies.

0.4.2 Democratic Optimism

Social, virtue, and vice epistemologist Alessandra Tanesini commences
the section by analyzing a pertinent aspect of our emotionally charged
political climate, a phenomenon she dubs “the politics of resentment.”
This concept depicts a political perspective effectively articulated by the
immediate attitude or moral emotion of resentment, a quality conspicuous
in those who feel left behind or forlorn by their nation. Their resentment is
an embittered response to an identified vitiated social status and to alleged
or actual threats to the world which had once ensured their self-esteem.
Epistemic agents engaged in the politics of resentment fear a further hier-
archical collapse, frequently witness worsened economic conditions, and
are losing privileges hitherto conferred to them due to their dominant eth-
nic and gender identities. Tanesini proffers an explanation for the affective
reaction with resentment as a direct retort to the experience of losing some
identity-defining hopes and emboldens scholars striving to examine the
most significant hazards confronting democratic institutions to broaden
their focus on the emotional rather than solely on the rational aspects of
political life. In the second chapter, political and social epistemologist
Marko Luka Zubčić proceeds by asserting that it has become philosophi-
cally prevalent to justify democracy by centering on the incidence of indi-
vidual epistemic virtues within an electorate. In contrast, he claims that
 Introduction 9
the epistemic value of institutional systems hinges on collective rather than
agential virtues and endorses democracy by arguing it displays these col-
lective epistemic virtues. Zubčić constructs his first case by establishing an
explanatory structure based on institutional epistemology and the division
of cognitive labor. As we can divulge none of these properties in individ-
ual epistemic agents, he maintains that systems based on agential exper-
tise suffer from collective epistemic vice. Zubčić continues by arguing for
Anderson’s experimentalist model of the epistemic justification of democ-
racy as a paradigm of democracy satisfying the central requirements of
institutional epistemic reliability. Finally, he criticizes present representa-
tive democracies that fail to exhibit his reading of group epistemic virtues.
Prominent character epistemologist Ian James Kidd continues by diagnos-
ing that philosophers and related theoreticians remain ambiguous about
political cynicism. In his chapter, he establishes and supports a concept he
dubs “institutional cynicism,” indicating it can promote a virtuous civic
demeanor in present democracies. While Kidd acknowledges that specific
forms of cynicism can be deleterious for healthy democratic practices, he
asserts that institutional cynicism renders us more engaged citizens by
augmenting our sensitivity to the defects of present political institutions.
He, therefore, determines that institutional cynicism can contribute to
our knowledge about how institutions genuinely operate without resulting
in defeatism or despondency. Professor Emeritus, who pioneered myside
bias in academic literature, Keith Stanovich proceeds by clarifying that it
occurs when epistemic agents assess evidence and test hypotheses in a man-
ner biased toward their prior opinions and attitudes. Myside bias does not
discriminate, as we can divulge it in agents from all demographic groups.
It is demonstrated even by highly educated and astute experts whom we
expect to suppress their biases. Another way myside bias is an outlier bias
is that it shows signs of very little domain generality and appears highly
content-dependent. As intelligence and education do not seem to prevent
mysided thinking and data assessments, elite research faculties studying
divisive issues cannot be expected to attain objective conclusions unless
they have employed a process of an adversarial collaboration. Stanovich
criticizes ideological monocultures at universities for further preventing
confrontational viewpoints. He concludes his chapter with the attitude
that public trust in social science evidence will continue to deteriorate
unless we employ measures to ensure that we are evaluating social issues
using various frameworks. Lastly, social epistemologist Hanna Gunn
argues that the hypothetical epistemological crisis suggests that, due to
the hazard of heightening polarization, we might have lost the capability
to engage effectively in democratic deliberation. A particularly perturb-
ing concern is that democratic decision-making has become either futile
or impossible, as it hinges on the quality of the interaction within dem-
ocratic societies. Gunn notes that former social epistemological inquir-
ies into public discourse traditionally attended to speakers, discussing
10 Hana Samaržija
their dispositions, obligations, and relative social power. In comparison,
she argues, there has been meager talk of listening and public discourse.
According to Gunn, this chasm has grave effects as communication cannot
occur without active and productive listening. She argues that numerous
social epistemological analyses of public deliberation already presuppose
we have listening obligations. Therefore, she asserts that we have a dem-
ocratic duty to cultivate our listening competencies or skills as listeners.
Given these competencies’ complex and somewhat ambiguous nature,
Gunn argues that sustaining them requires both agential and collective
actions that can be accomplished, among other pathways, through edu-
cation. She claims her proposal builds on preceding examinations of the
connection between classroom and liberal democratic competencies. As a
final point, Gunn concludes that her proposal aligns with critical pedagog-
ical work that adopts an analogous position on the relationship between
the classroom structure and the quality of liberal democratic societies.

0.4.3 Democratic Realism

The vice epistemologist, extremism scholar, and co-editor of the volume,
Quassim Cassam opens the concluding section by assuming a critical
stance against the view that emotional empathy is vital for democracy
or an antidote to polarization. Empathy is a form of what Cassam calls
“sensemaking,” but making sense of a political opponent’s beliefs and
actions does not require one to adopt their perspective in a way that
engages one’s emotions. According to Cassam, active listening rather
than emotional empathy is indispensable for political sensemaking and
democratic legitimacy. He notes that mutual understanding will not nec-
essarily overcome political polarization since political adversaries might
understand one another only too well. He cites Amos Oz’s view that some
conflicts are actual and much worse than a misunderstanding. When
socially or economically marginalized individuals appear blind to their
interests, this might result from “false consciousness,” which Cassam
defines as “a mode of consciousness that misrepresents socio-economic
reality while also being determined by that reality.” A generalization
about highly unequal societies is that they are often kept on an even
keel by their ability to induce large numbers of socially and economi-
cally marginalized people to believe that the status quo works for them.
However, historical observation rather than empathy reveals the truth of
this generalization. Political epistemologist Michael Lynch proceeds in
the same vein by conceding that epistemic agents inquisitive about poli-
tics frequently feel despondent about our failure to conceive a more just
and equitable society. According to Lynch, the idea of political progress
presupposes we know where we are heading and assumes we desire to
approach genuine justice but lack knowledge on how to reach it. In his
reading, the idea of political progress is inevitably tied to the much more
 Introduction 11
complex question of whether there is truth in politics. He dubs the view
we are incapable of comprehending political truths “political skepticism”
and reviews several of its arguments, suggesting the reality of a specific
form of epistemic corruption often called epistemic colonization. Lynch
concludes by asserting that the skeptical threat should motivate politi-
cal engagement and inclusion rather than quietism. On the other hand,
political philosopher and epistemic democrat Ivan Cerovac tackles the
influence of inequitable economic power on fair democratic procedures
and their epistemic outcomes. Cerovac correctly remarks that equal elec-
toral influence has been a vital political norm for over a century and is
commonly deemed essential to democratic legitimacy. However, accord-
ing to Cerovac, considerable imbalances in earnings, wealth, and capital
ownership recurrently spill over from the economic and social spheres to
the political arena. Therefore, his chapter catalogs and analyzes the pro-
cesses that transform economic into political power, such as campaign
donations, ownership of prominent media outlets, or lobbying to demar-
cate the political agenda or curb the scope of feasible political decisions.
Cerovac elaborates his chapter by contrasting two manifestly epistemic
approaches to economic inequality’s impact on democracy’s epistemic
outcomes, the liberal epistemic and the egalitarian approach, and argues
in favor of the latter. Ultimately, the chapter evaluates two comprehen-
sive strategies to preserve democracy’s epistemic value. While the first
approach strives to curb the mechanisms that relocate inequality from
one sphere of life to another, the second advocates for a more egalitarian
economic system and endeavors to mitigate present economic dispari-
ties. In the end, Cerovac observes that resolving the problem in subop-
timal epistemic circumstances might necessitate harmonizing policies
implemented from both approaches. In the penultimate chapter, political
philosopher and epistemologist Robert Basil Talisse argues that demo-
cratic citizenship comprises two comprehensive moral directives. First,
citizens must endeavor to pursue justice by engaging in the democratic
process. Second, as all democratic citizens are political equals, they must
remain responsible to one another. When discordant concerning politics,
they must give their adversaries a fair hearing and acknowledge their
equal entitlement to agential political beliefs. In real-world politics, how-
ever, treating agents whose views we deem reprehensible seems to con-
cede something substantial to their opinions, which contradicts the first
directive on working at justice. Therefore, politically engaged citizens
face a dilemma. When it comes to tangible politics, why not treat one’s
ideological adversaries as enemies rather than fellow citizens? Talisse’s
chapter builds upon empirical research regarding belief polarization to
suggest an epistemic underpinning for treating our political adversar-
ies as equals. In short, to sustain the epistemic conditions under which
one can pursue justice with their political allies, Tallise concludes they
must also preserve civil relations with their rivals. Philosopher of law and
12 Hana Samaržija
political epistemologist Ilya Somin concludes the volume by accepting
the popular accord that pervasive voter ignorance and irrational assess-
ments of political data are solemn hindrances to a healthy democracy.
However, scholars differ in their approaches to the problem. “Top-down”
strategies, such as expert rule and augmented deference to epistemic
authorities, strive to diminish ignorance by giving way to more knowl-
edgeable segments of an electorate. Conversely, “bottom-up” tactics,
such as tutoring citizens and endorsing deliberative democracy, endeavor
to heighten the common public’s political competence or proffer them
enhanced inducements to make reasonable decisions than standard bal-
lot box voting. Somin then reviews and criticizes an assortment of top-
down and bottom-up strategies, determining that top-down approaches
entail detrimental shortcomings that render our democratic environ-
ment even more malign. He concludes the volume by arguing for what
he names “foot-voting” and the prospect of reimbursing voters to tackle
their dearth of political knowledge.

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Part I

Democratic Pessimism
1 Sexy but Wrong
Diversity Theorem Defenses
of Democracy
Jason Brennan

Since Aristotle’s time, democratic theorists have argued that democracy

or inclusive decision-making tends to be intelligent. They claim that two
heads are better than one and many decision-makers are better than two.
Aristotle says:

The best man, then, must legislate, and we must pass laws, but these
laws will have no authority when they miss the mark, though in other
cases retaining it. But when the law cannot determine a point at all,
or not well, should the one best man or all decide? According to our
practice, assemblies meet, sit in judgment, deliberate, and determine,
all of which relate to individual cases. Now any member of the group,
taken separately, is certainly inferior to the wise man. But the state
is made up of many individuals. And as a feast to which all guests
contribute is better than a banquet furnished by a single man, a mul-
titude is a better judge of many things than a single individual.1

Aristotle provides little evidence that these claims are valid, but many
theorists find the sentiment appealing. (They think this despite, I take
it, having gone to many lousy potlucks and seen extensive first-hand dis-
confirmation of Aristotle’s example.) Maybe Aristotle is right. Perhaps a
large crowd beats a small group even if the individual people in the small
crowd are more intelligent, more capable, or better informed.
In 2004, Lu Hong and Scott Page published what appeared to be pow-
erful proof of a remarkable theorem that could support this argument.
The theorem claims that in collective decisions, increasing the cogni-
tive diversity inside the group more strongly contributes to the group’s
tendency to choose the correct answer than increasing the reliability or
competence of individual decision-makers.2 At some margin, it is better
to have a more diverse but less competent crowd than a less varied but
brighter crowd.
Diversity is an ascendant value in academia. You are not supposed to
challenge diversity, and you are supposed to conclude diversity is good.
Indeed, people can be ostracized, investigated, or fired for critiquing
DOI: 10.4324/9781003311003-3
18 Jason Brennan
diversity as a goal. The Hong-Page theorem seems to provide a robust
theoretical backing for something people want to believe is true. So, it
is unsurprising that this conclusion was widely lauded, and the paper
received extensive uptake. Therefore, many prominent recent defenses of
democracy rest upon it. For instance, Hélène Landemore uses it to argue
that democracy always beats any form of decision-making by experts.3
Elizabeth Anderson argues it supports democratic decision-making,
though she regards other models of collective decisions as superior.4
Scott Page himself uses the model to defend increased diversity and dem-
ocratic decision-making in corporations.5 The 2004 paper has over 1635
citations as of April 2022, most of which appear to accept its conclusions
and apply them to argue for increased diversity here or there.
This chapter explains that we should not use the Hong-Page theorem
to defend democracy. The proof of the Hong-Page theorem in the 2004
paper is trivial and question-begging. Hong and Page do not “prove” that
diversity trumps ability in group decision-making; instead, they come
closer to assuming it. Further, even if the proof were not trivial, apply-
ing the theorem to democracy is problematic because “diversity trumps
ability” only when people behave in specific ways. Real-life democratic
participants do not meet the behavioral requirements of the theorem.
So, the theorem is not well-grounded a priori and cannot be applied to
democracy a posteriori.

1.1 Problems with the Assumptions of the Proof

Let’s examine the assumptions of their proof. Note carefully that these
are the assumptions or premises of their evidence.

1 They assume that all agents in the collective decision have the same
value function: the exact ranking/ordering of possible outcomes for
better or worse.6
Every social scientific or physical model contains simplifying
assumptions which render it an imperfect fit for the real world. That
is not inherently a problem. For instance, in physics, we might model
many fundamental particles as points though they may have some
spatial extension. The ideal gas law describes gases with no molec-
ular or atomic attraction toward one another, but in the real world,
gases have some magnet even under low pressure. Gases are not gen-
uinely ideal. Thus, one problem with modeling is assessing whether
the simplifying assumptions assume something important, which
renders the model impotent or irrelevant. Sometimes the simplify-
ing assumptions are acceptable, and sometimes the things studied
depart so far from the model that the model becomes useless.
The Hong-Page model does not prove that citizens who deliberate
together will come to share the same values. Instead, it assumes at
 Sexy but Wrong 19
the outset that their values are the same. They agree on the problem,
have the same values, and decide on what would count as a solution.
Still, as we will see, the model presumes they have different problem-­
solving capabilities and differing degrees of reliability. However,
because of the assumption of a lack of diversity in the decision-­
makers’ value function, the theorem is applicable only in exceptional
cases where people share the same value function.
In some cases, such as when a group of corporate leaders is trying
to choose a business strategy to maximize profit, assuming every-
one shares a value function seems appropriate. But in others, such as
when diverse citizens with diverse values cast votes for political par-
ties or candidates, it does not apply. Oddly, the theorem is often used
to defend democratic decisions, but this is one of the cases where the
theorem is least applicable. In the real world, agents making a col-
lective political decision often possess different values and thus rank
distinct states of affairs differently. They do not agree on what counts
as a solution to the problem and usually do not agree on the issue. If
a Marxist, a libertarian, a Rawlsian, and a conservative deliberate
on tax policy, they have different ordinal rankings of states of affairs.
2 Hong and Page assume that the problem these agents are trying to
solve is so tricky that no agent can solve the problem alone.7
In their general mathematical proof of their theorem, Hong and Page
begin with the assumption that any agent in the group cannot solve
the problem the group intends to solve. Accordingly, their proof con-
cludes that many will outperform one because it simply assumes that
one cannot solve the problem themselves. So, using the Hong-Page
theorem to argue against the rule of one expert is question-begging
because the proof presupposes no individual can solve a problem
alone.
Whether the Hong-Page model applies to any real-world decision
is an open question. There may be some problems, such as fixing the
leak behind the toilet, where an individual agent can find the solu-
tion alone. There may be others where they cannot. It is an empirical
question, not a question to be settled a priori or by stipulation.
3 They assume that every agent in the decision-making process has one
“heuristic” or method she uses to solve the problem.8
Thus, they assume if that agent uses that heuristic, she gets stuck on
some answer or remains stuck until someone else helps her. This is,
in part, a straightforward conclusion of their difficulty assumption
and their assumption about agents’ abilities. Agents are described
by having search rules that they use to find the answer to the group’s
problem, and they are stipulated to be unable to solve the problem
alone. Accordingly, on their own, when given numbers to try to map
onto a value function, they find a local optimum but not necessarily
the true optimum.
20 Jason Brennan
Oddly, Hong and Page thus characterize their agents as lacking
internal “cognitive diversity.” Each agent in their model has a par-
ticular problem-solving technique given their mental model and
reliability.
This part is where the proof starts to become problematic. The
assumption that each agent has only one problem-solving method
strongly partly trivializes the claim that two heads are better than
one, that committees can outperform individuals, or that many
heads are better than fewer.
After all, we might imagine instead that each agent has a variety
of heuristics and distinct mental models of the world. For instance,
both natural and social scientists have diverse models which can be
employed to describe the world. Individual high-ability people often
have varied problem-solving methods and heuristics. When one
strategy fails or is imperfect, they switch and try another. I, for one,
have multiple modes and skill sets. But Hong and Page model their
decision-makers, both the low- and high-ability agents, as having
only one way of approaching a problem and being unable to switch
methods to improve their work.
This assumption thus reduces the value of what we might call “high
ability” agents. The high-ability agents in their model are stipulated
to have a highly reliable but imperfect heuristic or problem-solving
method. When they get stuck, they can become unstuck when others
help them. It is assumed that they cannot spontaneously adopt the
search function of a different agent; they cannot switch to a distinct
perspective on their own.
Whether one finds this inappropriate or not depends partly on
how one wants to characterize individual problem-solving agents in
the real world. One might argue that we all have precisely one heu-
ristic or method of solving a problem. When switching heuristics or
procedures, we have just one bigger meta-level heuristic or problem-­
solving approach. The choice to use a hammer or a wrench, a soci-
ological or an economic model, or quantum mechanics or general
relativity collapses into one super-heuristic. But that seems implau-
sible and question-begging. After all, what is the real difference
between two agents with two methods and one with two approaches
we call a “super-heuristic”?
Their paper is sparse in describing agents’ individual deci-
sion-making functions, but it does not appear to accommodate inter-
nal diversity. After all, if, as they presume (see below), agents who
get stuck can learn from other agents who have different methods,
we could imagine individual agents instead spontaneously adopt-
ing those methods independently. Instead of a stuck agent needing
another agent with a different approach to use a distinct heuristic,
we can imagine the stuck agent himself using that same heuristic on
 Sexy but Wrong 21
his own. The only reading that makes sense of their proof is that they
are modeling agents as having relatively unique and straightforward
methods rather than having the ability to switch strategies. If, on the
contrary, they want to collapse the idea that switching among modes
is a single complicated method, then their assumption that another
agent can permanently save a stuck agent (see below) would be
unwarranted as then individual agents’ search functions will already
contain other agents’ heuristics.
This last paragraph repeatedly mentions that if an agent gets stuck
on a solution, another agent with a different method can always help
them. Let’s examine this assumption next.
4 Hong and Page assume that whenever one agent gets stuck, there is
“always” another agent who can improve upon the first by using a
different heuristic.
Here is the direct quotation from their paper:

{ }
Assumption 2 (Diversity). ∀x ∈ X \ x* , ∃θ ∈θ such that φ ( x ) ≠ x.

This assumption is a simple way to capture the essence of

diverse problem-solving approaches. When one agent gets stuck,
another agent can always find an improvement due to a different
approach.9

This assumption is part of what renders their proof trivial and

question-begging. The authors stipulate that whenever one compe-
tent agent – an agent who also by stipulation uses only one method
to solve a problem which she cannot solve alone and can only get
unstuck with help from others – gets stuck, there is always another
agent who can improve the situation by using a different approach,
method, or heuristic. They do not prove this conclusion; they stipu-
late it as an assumption.
Notice that this is what they use the word “diversity” to signify in
their proof. The term “diversity” here does not stand for and is not
analogous to what campus or corporate diversity officers mean by
“diversity.” It does not signify diverse racial or demographic identity,
diversity of life experiences, mental models, memories, categories
and ideas, conceptions of reality, philosophies, or whatnot. It instead
means “having a different heuristic or problem-solving method which
can improve the solution to the problem.” It certainly does not sig-
nify diverse values because, on the contrary, they presume all agents
have the same value function and values; their proof only applies to
cases that lack value diversity.
Thus, “diversity” in the “diversity trumps ability” theorem does
not mean what most of us mean by “diversity.” It means having a dif-
ferent problem-solving heuristic or method. To prove that “diversity”
22 Jason Brennan
helps group decision-making, Hong and Page assume rather than
prove that there is always another person with another technique or
heuristic that can improve upon whatever anyone else has done. In
other words, diversity helps because they use the term “diversity”
to refer to the stipulated existence of another agent with a different
method that can shake the first agent out of their rut. (Note, on their
behalf, that this need not be because the second agent has an overall
more reliable method, but just a different one that uncovers some-
thing the first agent missed.)
In academia and the corporate world, it is considered very sexy
and enlightened to promote diversity as a value. There may indeed
be good reasons for doing so. Sometimes variety is invoked because
people believe increasing the diversity inside a group will improve the
group. For instance, increased racial, ethnic, gender identity, class,
or other demographic diversity inside a university may enhance the
quality of research or help overcome biases. While this belief may
be accurate, we should not invoke the Hong-Page theorem lightly in
favor of this conclusion. The Hong-Page theorem describes a collec-
tion of agents working together on the same problem, while academia
mainly comprises individual agents working separately on distinct
issues. Even when academics write on the same subject, they work
separately. Second, the theorem describes agents as having differ-
ent mental models and methods. At best, demographic diversity can
improve collective decision-making on the Hong-Page model if this
demographic diversity leads to distinct viewpoints and methodological
diversity. If we have fifty people who represent six hundred different
demographic groups but all think alike – for instance, if they are all
Rawlsians, critical race theorists, or libertarians – then the theorem
does not apply to them. The kind of diversity that matters for it is
cognitive, not demographic.
Accordingly, a good illustration of what Hong and Page have in
mind is this: Imagine a corporation needs to solve public relations
problem. For instance, the public mistakenly thinks that GMO foods
are unhealthy, but the corporation sells GMO foods. The Hong-Page
theorem suggests (if we accept its assumptions) that bringing in a mix
of marketing professionals with different skill sets, designers, engi-
neers, philosophers, and others of different methodologies, ontolo-
gies, and ways of seeing the world and that problem would improve
the group’s decisions. But suppose we instead have a group that per-
fectly matches the demographic diversity of the world as a whole, but
they all have the same ideas and methods. The theorem would say this
group lacks the right kind of diversity and does not apply.
5 Hong and Page assume all agents defer to other agents when those
other agents can improve the group decision. They presume agents
always recognize when someone else has produced a better solution/
 Sexy but Wrong 23
improved upon the current best solution and then always defer to
that improvement.
Hong and Page are less explicit about this, but it is a necessary
condition of their proof. After all, they have already described indi-
vidual agents as having a single but imperfect method. They stipulate
that there is always another agent with a distinct heuristic or proce-
dure that the first agent can use to improve their decision. In short,
their model involves individual imperfect agents learning from each
other and seeing what others have to offer.
If we want to map this onto real-world decision-making, this is
a questionable assumption. Instead, we could imagine that when
agents apply their search functions/methods/heuristics/whatnot,
they get stuck at local optima but not the best overall solution. We
can then imagine that there is always another agent with a method
that could improve their group decision when combined with the pre-
vious agents’ work. But we could also imagine that agents refuse to
learn from or listen to others.
This point is not unmotivated or fanciful. In real-life group
decision-­making, people do not always (and in politics, even often)
defer to the cognitive value of diverse perspectives or methods.
Sometimes they insist they are right despite overwhelming evi-
dence to the contrary. Sometimes they fail to see the value in others’
approaches despite wanting to be open-minded. Sometimes when
they try to work together, they misuse methods. Sometimes everyone
conforms to the most popular or high-status practice, even if it is
unreliable. They may react to diverse perspectives by polarizing and
become even more rigid or extreme. There is, in fact, extensive litera-
ture in psychology, political science, and other fields examining how
real-life groups or collectives react.10
Hong and Page’s proof presumes they react the way we want them
to, but this presumption may be unwarranted in the real world. In
the real world, it may be that increasing the diversity (as Hong and
Page define it) inside a group impedes collective decision-making
even though, in principle, it adds information and skill which could
improve it, simply because group dynamics and political psychology
are often dysfunctional.
So, the Hong-Page theorem “shows” that group decision-making
leads to improved decisions because they assume that agents learn
from each other rather than react badly. This presumption frequently
does not map onto real-world agents. We will return to this issue below.
6 They assume there is always a wide range of heuristics/methods we
can use to solve a problem, rather than just one or a few.
This assumption is less troubling than the others, but it may be false.
Perhaps specific problems require or can be solved with only one method.
7 They assume that the agents are trying to solve one problem.
24 Jason Brennan
The authors describe agents trying to solve one problem rather than
balancing multiple issues simultaneously. Again, we can ask whether this
assumption maps onto certain real-world decisions which friends of the
Hong-Page theorem take to illuminate.
Consider a simple problem. Suppose we have a simple business that
sells only one product: plain donuts. Suppose they are considering one
issue: whether lowering the price by 10 cents will increase profits. Here,
the Hong-Page model of the decision problem might seem to apply.
However, what if we consider, say, a democratic election? Here, it
seems more plausible that agents – even if contrary to the fact these
agents shared the same values – are trying to solve multiple problems at
once rather than one big problem. Indeed, it is unclear whether they are
even trying to solve a problem.
Those are some, if not all, of the assumptions underlying the proof
of the Hong-Page theorem. However, given all these assumptions, it
becomes trivial rather than interesting that when agents are tasked with
solving a problem, they can improve decision-making by adding more
heads. It still takes mathematical proof involving computer simulations,
and many critics think they go wrong there.11
Here is what the proof says: Assume that there is some problem every-
one agrees on, both on what the problem is and what counts as a solu-
tion. Assume people have different ability levels in solving that problem,
but no one can solve the problem alone. Assume that everyone accepts
any improvement or better solution offered by anyone else. Assume that
every individual uses the only method to solve the problem and can never
switch approaches. They can only change practices or perspectives if
prompted by a second agent. Assume that if anyone gets stuck, there is
always someone out there with a new method that can improve upon the
currently offered solution. (Remember, this is what Hong and Page call
“diversity.”) As we add more and more people to the group, our chances
of adding a person who will help (remember – we stipulated that these
helpful people exist) become higher and higher. After all, Hong and Page
stipulated that when we add people to the group, they can either improve
the group’s decision or have no effect.
Their proof establishes that diversity trumps ability by relying on
question-begging assumptions. In their proof, diversity trumps ability as
ability is insufficient, and diversity is stipulated to be a thing that always
helps.
We can learn some general lessons here. If we are trying to model
decision-­makers, our assumptions determine whether “diversity” beats
ability or vice versa. It depends on the nature of the problem we stipulate,
what kinds of methods we prescribe that agents use, whether we spec-
ify that agents learn from each other, might disagree, or might become
dumber upon interacting with each other, and whether we stipulate that
they agree on what counts as a solution or not, and how much internal
 Sexy but Wrong 25
“diversity” we prescribe agents have. A priori, we can concoct scenarios
in which twelve agents outperform hundred (which includes the twelve)
or vice versa. It depends on the assumptions we model about what agents
know, how sophisticated they are, how they react to one another’s meth-
ods, and what methods the agents use. The more important question will
be which of these infinite possible models we can construct best explains
actual group decision-making in various contexts.

1.2 Behavioral Assumptions

Above, I have primarily focused on describing the proof in plain English.
My main goal was to establish the proof is mainly trivial as it more or less
assumes what it means to prove. Throughout doing so, I flagged some of
the behavioral assumptions of the proof and said I would return to them
later to ask whether they were correct.
For argument, let’s imagine the proof was other than it was. Let’s
imagine that Hong and Page had a non-question-begging mathematical
model showing that cognitively diverse agents working together on what
they recognize is a shared problem would turn out to tend to benefit from
one another’s cognitive diversity and, as a result, would as a group tend to
become more reliable and proficient. Nevertheless, even if they had pro-
duced such a proof, it would be an open question whether actual agents
behave the way needed for the proof to work. As an analogy, the previous
pages argued that they have not even established, say, the equivalent of
the ideal gas law for ideal gases. But now we need to ask, by analogy,
whether the gases in democracy behave in clearly non-ideal ways.
Page says their model works when decision-makers are reasonably
well-informed and reasonably sophisticated, if not as sophisticated as
experts. Page’s modest conclusion is that many diverse and good predic-
tors are more successful than just a few excellent predictors.12 Page says
in a lecture, “If we don’t get collective wisdom, it’s going to be because
either people lack sophistication – that’s the garbage in, garbage out – or
they lack diversity.” He adds that people need not just diverse informa-
tion but diverse and good “models” or methods to interpret that informa-
tion.13 He writes: “For democracy to work, people need good predictive
models. And often, the problems may be too difficult or too complex for
that to be the case.”14
This point is crucial because comprehensive empirical evidence col-
lected over many decades shows that most voting citizens are unsophis-
ticated and extensively ignorant. I will not belabor this point because I
presume it is well-known now. In general, voters know very little basic
political information, such as who their representatives are, what their
representatives did in office, what they can do, what they propose to do,
or the expected effects of their proposals. It’s not as though getting your
neighbors to deliberate about politics is like getting a physicist, engineer,
26 Jason Brennan
and chemist to discuss satellite repair. It’s more like getting three middle
scholars to discuss how to build a quantum computer.
Note another problematic behavioral issue when applying the theorem:
The theorem is meant to defend cognitive diversity in group decision-­
making. As we saw above, the model involves problem-solvers trying to
solve a singular problem with different methods. Still, they defer to oth-
ers who use a different approach to improve the group’s current decision
upon getting stuck. So, properly applied, this involves well-functioning
group deliberation and decision-making by review. Think of a commit-
tee meeting going well. It does not apply to aggregative voting as done
in elections. In an election, people show up and vote. They are not stuck
on that date while trying to solve a problem and then reacting smartly to
others’ superior methods. To apply this theorem to aggregative democ-
racy and mass elections, we would need to show that when deciding how
to vote, voters deliberate with one another, respond to each other’s meth-
ods, and so on in the right way. That is far from obvious.
Indeed, it is likely to be false. This is another place where the theorem
to defend democracy breaks down significantly. Let’s take a closer look
at people’s behavior inside a democracy. In particular, consider two sig-
nificant theories of voters voting and what they try to do when they vote.
What we might call the “popular sovereignty” view holds that voters
behave as follows: First, voters have a sense of their values and concerns.
Second, they learn about how the world works, what politics can and
cannot do, and what policies achieve what ends. Based on these values
and information, they form an ideology or at least some set of somewhat
coherent policy preferences. Here, their policy preferences reflect their
goals, in the sense that they support those policies because they think
implementing those policies will produce desired outcomes and goals.
Third, they examine the candidates and parties on offer and vote for
them based on shared ideology and policy preferences. Since everyone is
doing this, the winning parties will thus tend to share the ideology or pol-
icy preferences of a large population segment. Indeed, to win, they must
promote ideas that voters like. Fourth, as a result, the parties will imple-
ment the policies the voters want. Finally, the fifth, come the next elec-
tion, voters will punish bad performance and reward good performance.
On this model of voter behavior, elections convert popular opinion
into policy. Elections are a means by which the government is made to
do what many people – especially middle-ground voters – want the gov-
ernment to do.
However, a large body of empirical work in political science challenges
the claim that most voters behave that way. Instead, we have strong evi-
dence that politics is not about policy for most citizens.
Consider an illustrative example: Imagine you live and work in an
environment where everyone says they believe that aliens created the
Washington Monument. The belief is absurd, but everyone around you
 Sexy but Wrong 27
thinks it. You cannot effortlessly move or work elsewhere. If you do not
share this belief, they will tend to avoid you, ignore you, mock you, and
mistreat you. So, if you want to form business partnerships, get a job,
have romantic relationships, find friends, join clubs, and so on, you need
to express that you share that belief. Further, suppose that people who
exhibit strong credence in that belief – by wearing T-shirts or putting
bumper stickers on the car – tend to get higher status. In this environment,
you might well come to hold or express that belief because you want to
consume the social benefits and avoid the social costs of nonconformity.
The point of this example is that we can have social incentives to
believe things or at least act as we believe them. Our reasons for belief are
not always about tracking the truth.
Now consider a popular sociological theory of religion. People face a
problem of collective action and distrust. We need to cooperate to suc-
ceed, but we also know that others have the power and sometimes the
incentive to free-ride on group efforts, renege on contracts, break the
word, or take advantage of us. What we want, then, is some reliable signal
that people are committed to the group’s welfare and to the norms that
make cooperation possible. Shared religion partially solves this problem
as religions require adherents to exhibit some mix of either expensive
belief (adherents must claim to accept bizarre claims about supernatural
metaphysics) or costly behaviors (devotees must participate in expensive
rituals, avoid particular fun behaviors, modify their bodies, and so on).
This works. A common religion facilitates trust inside the group, though
it can sometimes demote trust between groups.
To understand the value of signaling, consider non-doxastic forms that
serve the same purpose. MS-13 gang members need to be able to work
together and trust one another. But they face a problem: all of their mem-
bers are violent criminals. It needs some mechanism to facilitate trust
and cooperation. It needs to ensure members attend meetings, do their
jobs inside the gang, contribute to the gang’s club goods, and do not steal
from the unit itself. MS-13 solves the trust problem by requiring members
to do horrible things – this screens out the insincere and uncommitted.
It also requires them to display face tattoos and other external signals.
Getting face tattoos is strong evidence one is committed to the gang.
Further, because outsiders will no longer trust them, members have even
stronger incentives to remain steadfast and in good standing inside their
group. Each thinks, “I need to keep trust with the gang because no one
else will trust me.” It works.
Similar remarks apply to sports fandom.15 Sure, many people find sports
fun to play and watch. But sports fandom also serves a signaling function.
Wearing team clothing and loudly parroting absurd beliefs – such as that
an apparent out was safe – signals commitment to one’s town. By publicly
engaging in sports rituals and affirming silly beliefs, fans find it easier to
make friends, make deals, and gain each other’s trust.
28 Jason Brennan
A great deal of empirical evidence shows that for most citizens, pick-
ing a political party, voting for a candidate, and even affirming political
beliefs is about trying to signal to other members of their identity group
and their in-groups that they are good and loyal members of that group.
As Kwame Anthony Appiah says, “People don’t vote for what they want.
They vote for who they are.”16 For most voters, politics is less like picking
a plumber to fix a pipe than waving a sports team’s banner. It’s less like
trying to score baskets and more like wearing Air Jordans to impress
others. For most Democratic voters, voting Democrat is the same thing
as getting an MS-13 tattoo as a Southern evangelical claiming the Earth
was created 6000 years ago is the same as an Eagles fan painting his face
green and shouting obscenities. Because individual votes do not mat-
ter, individual voters are liberated and incentivized to use their political
beliefs and behavior to promote non-political ends. They vote for other
purposes.
Now consider some bizarre empirical findings about voters: Most are
poorly informed. They do not know what their preferred party has done
in the past, stands for now, or plans to do in the future.17 Most voters are
ideologically innocent; they do not have stable political beliefs and do not
have much in the way of policy preferences, period.18 Most voters who
appear to have fundamental ideologies do not; instead, they will parrot
whatever their party is saying today. If their party changes policies, they
will immediately switch to defending those without awareness that they
have changed.19 For instance, before Trump, Republicans were hawkish
and distrustful toward Russia, and Democrats were dovish, but after
Trump, Republicans switched to having soft attitudes, and Democrats
became hardline and conspiratorial. As Achen and Bartels say, one
might think Americans have pretty “ingrained” views about Russia after
the past century, but they don’t.20
Voters cluster their political beliefs around whatever the party happens
to endorse. As psychologist Dan Kahan says,

Whether humans are heating the Earth and concealed-carry laws

increase crime, turn on wholly distinct bodies of evidence. There is
no logical reason for positions on these two empirical issues – not to
mention myriad others, including the safety of underground nuclear-­
waste disposal, the deterrent impact of the death penalty, the efficacy
of invasive forms of surveillance to combat terrorism to cluster at all,
much less form packages of beliefs that so firmly unite citizens of one
set of outlooks and divide those of opposing ones. However, there is
a psychological explanation […] That explanation is politically moti-
vated reasoning.21

These issues are logically independent, yet if you take a stance on

one point, we can predict what perspective you have on all the others.
 Sexy but Wrong 29
Thus, it seems that people adopt whatever their party’s view is. They
advocate policies because their party supports them; they do not choose
a party because they share its policy ideas.
Further, we have extensive evidence that citizens generally engage in
motivated reasoning. They avoid, evade, and ignore evidence that con-
tradicts whatever political beliefs they currently profess but then actively
seek out evidence that reinforces those beliefs.22
These behaviors are hard to explain if citizens follow the popular sov-
ereignty behavior model. If that model is correct, citizens are voting to
intend to get the government to implement policies that will promote
their goals and ends. The findings on ignorance and irrationality suggest
that they are not very good at it. But the results of ideological innocence,
parroting the party – including by switching positions overnight – make
little sense, period, on that model.
However, if citizens use politics for social purposes – as a form of social
signaling meant to prove their commitment to their group – these behav-
iors make sense. If they attach themselves to parties for the social ben-
efits of doing so, their ignorance, tribalism, and irrationality help them.
Consider the sports or religion analogies again: Being a sports hooligan
enables you to keep and make friends because it shows locals you are one
of them. Firm commitments to religious rituals and beliefs do the same – it
is a way of proving pro-sociality. Politics seems to function the same way.
Indeed, voters are free to use politics this way because their votes do not
matter much. The chances of a ballot breaking a tie or having any other
effect on political outcomes are small. Political scientists and economists
have long argued that this explains why voters are ignorant and irrational;
they lack the incentive to behave better. But while this seems true, it also
appears not fully understand the implications of voters’ perverse incen-
tives. Because their votes do not matter, they are not only liberated to
be ignorant or biased. Instead, it makes little sense for them to use their
votes for the goal of promoting outcomes through policy, period. Instead,
it makes more sense to use their political behavior for non-political pur-
poses, such as signaling a commitment to their identity groups.
Suppose the Hong-Page theorem is true (remember, we are ignoring
the quality of the proof). In that case, it says that group decision-­making
can be made more reliable by increasing the cognitive diversity of its
members. But as we saw above, the proof does not posit that increasing
cognitive diversity in any group decision always increases group relia-
bility. Instead, the theorem describes group reliability growing because
group members work on a common problem, want to solve the problem,
and defer to one another’s better methods whenever the group gets stuck
at a point where a principal solution exists.
What we see when we look at actual voter behavior in elections,
though, is that people engage in essentially expressive behavior, are not
trying to solve a problem, are not doing much deliberation with one
30 Jason Brennan
another, and are primarily innocent of ideology or mostly parrot what-
ever their thought leaders say today. They do not defer to better methods
but instead try to arrive at a standard set of often absurd claims to prove
fidelity to the group. There is little methodological diversity because
signaling requires they prove loyalty by fixating on the same things.
They do not take criticism well from each other and ignore and evade
different ideas rather than defer to them. Voters are, in fact, tribalistic,
pig-headed, conformist, cognitively biased, unsophisticated, and close-
minded. When they vote, they are not trying to solve a problem but rather
express their identities or engage in public signaling. If so, the Hong-Page
theorem would not apply to such group “decisions.”23

Notes
1. Aristotle, The Politics and the Constitution of Athens, 2nd edition, trans.
Stephen Everson, pp. 23–31 (New York: Cambridge University Press), 1285.
2. Lu Hong and Scott Page, “Groups of Diverse Problem Solvers Can Out-
perform Groups of High-Ability Problem Solvers,” PNAS 101 (2004):
16385–16389.
3. Hélène Landemore, Democratic Reason (Princeton University Press, 2012).
4. Elizabeth Anderson, “The Epistemology of Democracy,” Episteme 3
(2006): 8–22.
5. Scott Page, “Making the Difference: Applying a Logic of Diversity,” Acad-
emy of Management Perspectives 21 (2007): 6–20.
6. Hong and Page (2004, 16,386). They describe all decision-makers as trying
to map the same “function V that maps a set of solutions into real num-
bers.” In their computational experiment, they again program all agents
with the same value function. On page 16,387, they say, “For our analysis,
we assume that all agents have the same v and that v has full support.”
Here, “v” refers to the agent’s value function.
7. Hong and Page 2004, 16,387 offer as starting point that “The problem is
difficult: no agent can always find the optimal solution.” Page confirms this
interpretation is correct in Scott Page, The Difference (Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2008), 159–165.
8. Hong and Page (2004, 16,387) describe each agent using a single search rule
or mapping rule.
9. Hong and Page (2004).
10. Drew Westen, The Political Brain (Perseus Books: New York, United States,
2008), Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind (Penguin Books, London:
United Kingdom, 2013), Milton Lodge and Charles Taber, The Rationaliz-
ing Voter (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, United Kingdom, 2013),
Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists (Princeton
University Press: New Jersey, United States, 2016), Lilliana Mason, Uncivil
Agreement (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, United States, 2017).
11. Abigail Thompson, “Does Diversity Trump Ability?,” Notices of the AMS,
69 (2014): 1024–1031. It argues that their computer simulation is flawed and
their mathematical proof contains errors.
12. Page (2007, 346–347). Page (2007, 147) says, “The best problem solvers tend
to be similar; therefore, a collection of the best problem solvers performs
little better than any of them individually. A collection of random but intel-
ligent problem-solvers tends to be diverse. This diversity allows them to be
collectively better. Or to put it more provocatively, diversity trumps ability.”
 Sexy but Wrong 31
13. Page (2012).
14. Page (2007, 345).
15. Haidt (2012).
16. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/people-dont-vote-for-want-
they-want-they-vote-for-who-they-are/2018/08/30/f b5b7e44-abd7-11e8-
8a0c-70b618c98d3c_story.html
17. Ilya Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2013); Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, Democracy
for Realists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Michael X.
Delli-Carpini and Scott Keeter, What Americans Know about Politics and
Why It Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Jason Brennan,
Against Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).
18. Donald Kinder and David Kalmoe, Neither Liberal Nor Conservative:
Ideological Innocence in the American Public (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2017); Lillian Mason, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics
Became Our Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Lil-
lian Mason, “Ideologues without Issues: The Polarizing Consequences
of Ideological Identities,” Public Opinion Quarterly 82: 280–301; Lil-
liana Mason and Julie Wronski, “One Tribe to Bind Them All: How
Our Social Group Attachments Strengthen Partisanship,” Political Psy-
chology 39 (2018): 257–277; Angus Campbell, Philip E Converse, Warren
Miller, and Donald E. Stokes, The American Voter (New York: John
Wiley, 1960).
19. Achen and Bartels (2016, 267–296); see also Gabriel S Lenz, “Learning and
Opinion Change, Not Priming: Reconsidering the Priming Hypothesis,”
American Journal of Political Science 53 (2009): 821–837; Gabriel S. Lenz,
Follow the Leader? How Voters Respond to Politician’s Policies and Perfor-
mance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
20. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/6/1/15515820/donald-trump-
democracy-brexit-2016-election-europe
21. Dan Kahan, “The Politically Motivated Reasoning Paradigm, Part 1:
What Political Motivated Reasoning Is and How to Measure It,” in Emerg-
ing Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Interdisciplinary,
Searchable, And Linkable Resource, 2016, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/
doi/abs/10.1002/9781118900772.etrds0417
22. Kahan (2016); Dan, Kahan, Ellen Peters, Eric Cantrell Dawson, and Paul
Slovic. “Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government,” Behav-
ioral Public Policy 1 (2013): 54–86; Charles Taber and Milton R. Lodge,
“Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs,” American
Journal of Political Science 50 (2006): 755–769; Drew Westen, Pavel Blagov,
Keith Harenski, Clint Kilts, and Stephan Hamann, “The Neural Basis of
Motivated Reasoning: An fMRI Study of Emotional Constraints on Polit-
ical Judgment during the US Presidential Election of 2004,” The Journal
of Cognitive Neuroscience 18 (2006): 1947–1958; Bryan Caplan, The Myth
of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2007); Dennis Choong, “Degrees of Rational-
ity in Politics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, eds. David
O. Sears and Jack S. Levy, pp. 96–129 (New York: Oxford University Press,
2013); Milton Lodge and Charles Taber, The Rationalizing Voter (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
23. For example, see Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2016); Ilya Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance (Stanford
University Press, 2016).
2 A Belated Failure
Condorcet in Contemporary
Epistemic Conditions
Hana Samaržija

2.1 Introduction
It is outmoded news that democracy has misplaced a substantial portion
of its former epistemic appeal, with dozens of publications enumerat-
ing its failures and collapses (Brennan 2017; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2019).
Instead of governments present for their nations, democratic elections
worldwide have generated epistemically irresponsible and unresponsive1
regimes that do not react to civic needs. The final blow to ventures to
corroborate the epistemic justification of democracy with empirical facts
came in 2016. Then we witnessed the successful referendum for Great
Britain to depart from the European Union, an initiative based exclu-
sively on and effortlessly refutable falsities and a misconstrued value
of sovereignty as separation, and the United States’ infamous elections
when Donald Trump scored a landslide victory against his adversary by
relying on the ideological contempt between liberals and conservatives
(Cassam 2019). Earlier, the first democratic elections in hitherto com-
munist states did not yield epistemically responsible regimes eager to
make the most of the apparent promises of the free market. Instead, they
obtained corrupt and nepotist administrations fervid exclusively about
manipulating the privatization of social resources. Suppose we wished to
defend democracy by appealing to its epistemic virtues rather than just
the political value of civic equality. In that case, it seems we would need
to make an additional effort.
Today’s representative democracies2 with parliamentary and pres-
idential elections are contingent primarily on their voters’ epistemic
capacities. However, political science’s findings indicate that electorates
are uninformed about politically pertinent issues, ideologically biased,
burdened by identity prejudice, and inept at establishing lasting pref-
erences (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; Kuklinsky and Peyton 2009).
Nonetheless, before any such research, the oldest persuasive quanti-
tative epistemic defense of collective decision-making was Marquis
Nicolas de Condorcet’s 1785 theorem, now famous as Condorcet’s
Jury Theorem and commonly known as CJT. In the eighteenth

DOI: 10.4324/9781003311003-4
 A Belated Failure 33
century, Condorcet pioneered a mathematical approach to politics and
parliamentarism. In short, CJT stipulates two challenging arguments.
First, the outcome of a majority vote of a group of citizens, each of
whom is sounder than random at selecting the correct option, is likelier to
be epistemically valuable than any individual citizen’s judgment. Second,
as the number of such voters nears infinity, the probability that their
collective decision will be epistemically valuable approaches certainty
(Goodin and Spiekermann 2018). However, CJT exposes its fictitious cit-
izens to three arduous conditions. First, they must be competent. Their
likelihood of making the correct choice must surpass randomness or the
statistical value of p = 0.5. In the polar scenario, the majority vote of a
group of citizens worse than chance would yield a disastrously incorrect
decision. Second, Condorcet’s citizens must be independent. This kind of
autonomy means that their decisions must be founded exclusively on their
critical exploration of the available evidence rather than by acquiescing
with other citizens or reflecting the choice of some dubitable authority.
Third, they must be sincere. Condorcet’s genre of sincerity requires that
voters select that option they genuinely deem epistemically and ethically
best instead of voting for the lesser evil or a clientelist option that might
bring them material gain.
CJT’s unpretentious mathematical equation has endured centuries of
philosophical progress and has become the quantitative cornerstone of
democracy’s epistemic justification. The second alluring mathematical
theorem favoring democracy arrived in 2004. It acquired intellectual
fame as the Hong-Page theorem of diversity over ability. The theorem
attempted to confirm that a group of citizens with diverse epistemic
capacities and background knowledge would collectively produce an
epistemically higher-quality decision than a single expert (Hong and Page
2004). Tragically, dutiful academic mathematicians contested its trivial
proof, the equation’s impropriety for the desired conclusion, and the ten-
dentious usage of lousy mathematics in the social sciences (Thompson
2014: 1024). On the other hand, CJT is still indisputably correct, so why
it does not function in empirical life – as multimillion electorates seldom
select the most ethical and epistemically responsible option – must be
sought elsewhere. This chapter will argue that Condorcet’s requirements
of competence, independence, and sincerity do not hold in the present
epistemic conditions of the culture of ignorance, digital media’s obfus-
cating informational environment, epistemic bubbles and echo cham-
bers, ideological polarization, and strategic voting for clientelist political
options.
In Section 2.2, I review more than four decades of political behavior
studies and contemporary political epistemology, showing that average
citizens are apathetic toward political topics, poorly acquainted with their
representatives in administrative bodies, impassive about their coun-
try’s constitutional principles, and unable to maintain stable ideological
34 Hana Samaržija
preferences. The tiny minority of citizens knowledgeable about politics,
having absorbed substantial ideological beliefs, tends to perform com-
plex cognitive strategies to retain their present preferences in the face of
opposite information and exhibits ample myside bias (Stanovich 2021;
Taber and Lodge 2006). It is symptomatic to mention that the same sur-
vey of civic knowledge about politics that political epistemology consid-
ers bitterly defeatist (Ahlstrom-Vij 2020: 406), Delli Carpini and Keeter’s
study of the political ability of American citizens, is regarded as one of
the more optimistic collections of empirical data in political behavior
studies. From the perspective of political scientists, the finding that the
best-informed fifth of citizens possesses only mediocre knowledge of pol-
itics muddles earlier and even more pessimistic projects (Kuklinsky and
Peyton 2017: 55). In the eyes of the political epistemologist, the average
citizen was always far removed from Condorcet’s ideal of the engaged cit-
izen whose reflections are more reasonable than random. It is worth men-
tioning that Delli Carpini, writing alone, repeated their survey in 2005.
He came across similar or worsened results, mainly due to the altered
epistemic conditions of baffling new information sources (Delli Carpini
2005). Regardless, the competence requirement crumbles exclusively if
all citizens err similarly so that their mistakes do not cancel each other
out (Goodin and Spiekermann 2018: 4). Luckily for those renouncing
CJT, the cultural prejudice we mechanically perpetuate guarantees that
everyone will stumble in an equal way (Fricker 2006, 2007; Samaržija and
Cerovac 2021).
In Section 2.3, I assess the independence requirement. It will become
evident that CJT’s independence cannot outlast decades of psychological
work on the common knowledge effect. This tendency implies that the
prevalent attitude in a group’s deliberation will not be the stance best
supported by evidence. Instead, it will be the one most discussants hold
before the debate begins (Gigone and Hastie 1993). Although it is doubtful
whether there are hypothetical affairs where the independence require-
ment would be sustainable, it is especially endangered in the epistemic
environment of social networks and algorithmic information sorting,
which yields both epistemic bubbles and malign echo chambers (Nguyen
2018). Epistemic bubbles and echo chambers are two distinct social epis-
temic filters with dramatically different effects on our intellectual lives.
For instance, although epistemic bubbles stem from restricted informa-
tional milieus, they do not prevent us from considering alternatives or
accepting opposing attitudes. Contrarily, echo chambers are political
pundits and ideological media’s active intention to ensnare their follow-
ers in a reality of alternative facts. In his seminal article, Nguyen sug-
gested that echo chambers are problematic because their followers start
perceiving their ideological adversaries as ethically defective (Nguyen
2018). I have added that the analysis of the extreme right’s communi-
cational methods Nguyen bases his argument on also entails members
 A Belated Failure 35
of echo chambers to commence perceiving strangers as epistemically
deficient, naïve, and inclined to fall for liberal politicians’ superficial
dishonesties (Samaržija 2023). Finally, the essential obstacle to the inde-
pendence requirement is our general epistemic dependence, as we sel-
dom receive our knowledge on our own. Our intellectual growth depends
primarily on learning from others or interacting with society (Goldman
1990). Condorcet’s ideal of the citizen who acquires and elaborates on
their political preferences without interacting with others emerges as an
unattainable thought experiment.
Section 2.4 tackles the sincerity requirement, which seems the least
empirically suspect of CJT’s three normative demands. Even if they are
neither competent nor independent, it appears as if citizens vote for the
options that they believe will successfully handle urgent social prob-
lems, even if their choices are wrong. Nonetheless, research has estab-
lished that voters will continue supporting candidates they perceive as
deficient if they are emotionally attached to having once selected them
(Swire-Thompson et al. 2019). Finally, loathing over party lines is so emo-
tionally obliging that voters will continue reinforcing their select party
even if they concede it is not the epistemically optimal political choice
(Iyengar and Westwood 2014). Hence, even the most trivial requirement
of Condorcet’s Jury Theorem cannot outlive the brutality of empirical
facts.
Finally, Section 2.5 evaluates the implications of the fact that collective
decision-making and, thus, democracy may be epistemically indefensi-
ble. Before proceeding to a detailed rebuttal of CJT’s conditions, it is
worth noting that repudiating the competence provision would render
the theorem empirically nonfunctional. As we have already sketched, the
soaring curve of the probability of reaching a perfectly correct decision
by compiling voters sounder than random has its darker side. The sum of
votes cast by people less competent than random will result in a descend-
ing curve leading to an entirely wrong democratic decision (Goodin and
Spiekermann 2018: 51). Nonetheless, our goal here is more ambitious.
By establishing that none of CJT’s normative requirements can survive
the current epistemic conditions, we completely annul it as a quantita-
tive defense of democracy. This finding enables us to open the space for
discussions about different political models of creating a just, wise, and
egalitarian society.

2.2 Condorcet’s Competence Requirement

I will begin my analysis with the first requirement that ostensibly warrants
CJT’s empirical accuracy, the competence prerequisite. In short, compe-
tence demands that citizens cast their votes more precisely than random
or the statistical value of p = 0.5. The aggregated voices of such mini-
mally competent voters steer their decision’s correctness to immaculate
36 Hana Samaržija
certainty. Conversely, compiling people’s votes worse than random would
yield an incorrect conclusion. The pronounced question is whether empir-
ical voters can meet this ambitious requirement. Regardless of empirical
studies of political behavior, apprehensions about civic epistemic capaci-
ties are as old as the foremost debates about epistemically optimal polit-
ical systems. Probably the first and the most famous epistemic pessimist
about democracy was Plato. In his Republic, he advocated the expert rule
of a philosopher-king cognizant of the idea of good governance. John
Stuart Mill partly inconsistently voiced similar doubts. Although he first
claimed that even the most detrimental attitudes should circulate so that
the free market would surface the epistemically most valuable beliefs,
his discussion about parliamentary democracy urged for plural votes for
epistemically better equipped voters (Mill 2007).
In empirical data, the average voter’s ignorance is “one of the best-­
documented facts of modern politics” (Bartels 1996: 194). Bartels speaks
exclusively about American citizens, the objects of his analysis of civic
knowledge of politics before presidential elections. Nonetheless, he is
also talking about American citizens before the advent of social media,
which partially explains why today’s studies about the civic knowledge
of politics are even more devastating. From his perspective of the late
nineties, Bartels notes that “the greatest contribution of more than half
a century of research in political science is documenting how the aver-
age citizen is a woeful approximation of the classic ideal of the informed
democratic citizenry” (Bartels 1996: 195). To approach this ideal, the
said citizen would have to be at least reasonably acquainted with the
structure of their state – for instance, whether it is presidential, semi-­
presidential, or parliamentary, and how often elections are held – and
lobby for their interests. However, decades of research have generated an
image of the voter so ambivalent toward politics that they can scarcely
cast a vote every four or five years and do so without knowing what they
are choosing. The average citizen does not understand the symbolic divi-
sion between the left and the right and does not care what it represents,
so they are incapable of ideological self-identification and unchanging
political preferences (Converse 1964). Suppose journalists interview them
about their political values. In that case, they will promptly answer and
then forget or replace those values with others (Zaller 1992). To make
matters worse, that minuscule minority of citizens interested in politics
tends to become so ideologically fraught that they will perform convo-
luted cognitive escapades to maintain their beliefs in the face of dissident
evidence (Taber and Lodge 2006).

2.2.1 Civic Political Sophistication

Bartels speaks about political scientists’ endeavors that officially
began with Converse, who in 1964 published a seminal essay about the
 A Belated Failure 37
American voters’ political knowledge (Converse 1964). In his original
work, Converse relied on the concept of a “political belief system,” a
steady ideological structure that enables citizens to identify with political
parties, notable individuals, and pertinent policies. An ideological belief
system is represented by the metaphorical divide between the progres-
sive left and the conservative right (Converse 1990, 2000). By surveying
American citizens with an assortment of open and closed-ended ques-
tions in 1956, 1958, and 1960, Converse concluded that a mere tenth of the
electorate – twelve percent of them – genuinely manages to locate their
values between the left and the right. Converse also examined whether
they consistently exhibit progressive or conservative political attitudes,
allowing the surveyed agents to evade explicit political self-identification
that would block them from potentially valuable options and policies.
Predictably, the answer was negative. In addition, examinees could not
locate individual policies on the left and right ideological landscape.
They casually selected mixtures of progressive and reactionary ­policies
that canceled each other. Converse’s research’s essential upshot is that
citizens do not understand what is liberal and conservative, making
them both politically unsophisticated and challenging to inform. While,
therefore, nine-tenths of the electorate is utterly ambivalent toward pol-
itics and its effects on their everyday lives, which they do not wish to
engage with, twelve percent of citizens are remarkably interested, ide-
ologically polarized, and politically literate. From today’s perspective,
Converse’s study’s essential value is that he did not only measure polit-
ical informedness, which may or may not be relevant for reliable civic
conduct. Suppose someone, for instance, knows the name of their prime
minister and all ministers. In that case, it does not automatically render
them able to accurately assess their mandate’s ethical and epistemic suc-
cesses. Converse measured citizens’ political sophistication: the capacity
to grasp the political spectrum and employ this knowledge to form last-
ing political beliefs.
Five decades later, political scientists have continued surveying civic
political sophistication and informedness and have yielded results like
Converse’s. Nevertheless, political scientists now mention Converse
alongside three leading revisions of his conclusions: “the downbeat,
the really downbeat, and the upbeat revision” (Kuklinsky and Peyton
2007: 46). Here, it is worth reiterating that the supposedly upbeat revision
of Converse’s work is the survey by Delli Carpini and Keeter that politi-
cal epistemologists deem a pessimistic epistemic disaster (Delli Carpini
and Keeter 1996). Namely, political scientists have recognized that half
the electorate can answer every other politically pertinent question as
a promising result that renews faith in democracy. To understand how
that could encourage optimism, we must first deal with the downbeat
and the cynical revisions. As Kuklinsky and Peyton correctly under-
line, Converse did not accompany his empirical finding that only twelve
38 Hana Samaržija
percent of citizens understand the landscape between the left and the
right with a normative attitude that this minority of knowledgeable cit-
izens should become the bearers of democracy (Kuklinsky and Peyton
2007: 49). Still, his findings entail fruitful implications for the sustaina-
bility of today’s form of democracy.
Four decades after Converse’s seminal study, Taber and Lodge decided
to deal with those twelve percent of particularly politically sophisti-
cated citizens whom Converse had described as ideologues or partial
ideologues (Taber and Lodge 2006). It concerned them whether their
understanding of the ideological spectrum is beneficial or disadvanta-
geous in democratic participation. By exploring their motives from the
perspective of the budding branch of political psychology, the authors
concluded that ideologically literate epistemic agents are at the same
time excessively ideologically laden. Such citizens, restricted to their
solidified stances, lose the capacity to select an option that is perhaps
epistemically more advantageous but incompatible with their calcified
ideological self-identification. Simply put, their political sophistication
enables them to reverse contrary arguments, advocate alternative facts,
and relativize data to preserve their beliefs in the face of new informa-
tion. As social epistemology explored simultaneously, Taber and Lodge
discovered that examinees who consider themselves thorough leftists or
conservatives automatically accept arguments consistent with their cur-
rent stances while employing resources to oppugn the legitimacy of con-
flicting information. In their words, “intensely partisan and politically
astute respondents show an especially strong proclivity to rely on these
processes” (Kuklinsky and Peyton 2007: 50). Although, according to
Taber and Lodge, we might justify a mild dose of skepticism exhibited by
an outstandingly knowledgeable agent, “skepticism becomes bias when
it becomes unreasonably resistant to change and especially when it leads
one to avoid information” (Taber and Lodge 2006: 22).
So, if we link Converse to his younger colleagues, nine-tenths of citi-
zens do not know enough about politics to make responsible decisions.
That remaining erudite tenth reduces their knowledge to extreme ideo-
logical partiality and obedience to their chosen party. However, Zaller’s
“really downbeat” revision proffered an even darker image of the average
citizen’s epistemic capacities (Zaller 1992). By analyzing data collected in
pre-election polls and articles published in the New York Times, Zaller
showed that civic responses to surveys are not the product of stable
beliefs and values but merely the first thing that pops into their minds
after reading the daily news. Referring to Zaller, Bartels differentiated
attitudes and preferences (Bartels 2003). According to Bartels, voters
may have short-lived and associative attitudes, vulnerable to change, but
not lasting and evidentially supported preferences. Far more dramatic
in tone than Converse and Zaller, Bartels concluded that “popular rule
is impossible but (…) citizens can exercise an intermittent, sometimes
 A Belated Failure 39
random, and even perverse popular veto on the machinations of political
elites” (Bartels 2002: 74).

2.2.2 Civic Political Informedness

According to Kuklinsky and Peyton’s instructive review, we should seek
these dismal numbers’ more hopeful counterparts in Converse’s work
upbeat revision, Delli Carpini and Keeter’s (1996) survey of civic polit-
ical informedness (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996). Unlike Converse,
who focused on the civic understanding of the ideological spectrum,
Delli Carpini and Keeter tackled the interplay of political informed-
ness and sophistication, so they also questioned citizens with quizzi-
cal queries about notable politicians and the rules of the game. Their
inquiries encompassed a spectrum of knowledge about democratic insti-
tutions, issues, and procedures. For instance, they asked their exami-
nees “how a bill becomes a law, or what rights are guaranteed by the US
Constitution, (…) whether there is a federal budget deficit or surplus, or
the percentage of Americans living in poverty” (Delli Carpini 2005: 29).
The researchers, combining their results with data collected within five
decades of pre-election polls, reported that “more than a small portion”
of American citizens are moderately well acquainted with present politi-
cal issues and socioeconomic indicators (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996:
269). The exact value of this more significant portion, which seems unlike
Converse’s twelve percent, has been the target of social epistemologist
Ahlstrom-Vij’s sardonic commentary for over twenty years. In his review
of the epistemic justification of democracy, Ahlstrom-Vij concludes that
less than half the citizenry answering questions necessary for partaking
in democratic practice is depressing (Ahlstrom-Vij 2020: 406). Likewise,
according to Delli Carpini and Keeter, “many of the facts known by
small percentages of the public seem critical for understanding – let alone
acting in – the political world” (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996: 101–102).
Delli Carpini returned to their original research in 2005 and noted that
studies of political sophistication and informedness keep reinforcing the
image of an average voter as “woefully uninformed about political insti-
tutions and processes, substantive policies and socioeconomic condi-
tions, and important political actors such as elected officials and political
parties” (Delli Carpini 2005: 28).
Finally, regardless of whether we prefer Converse’s initial research
or its pessimistic and optimistic revisions, we will ultimately conclude
that most citizens do not know the facts essential for orienting within the
world of politics and cannot grasp the spatial metaphor of the left and
the right. Moreover, they cannot position themselves ideologically and
reduce their potential political sophistication by performing cognitive
stunts to avoid the burden of changing their opinion. Nevertheless, for
Condorcet’s competence requirement to crumble, all citizens must err
40 Hana Samaržija
similarly. Otherwise, their mistakes might cancel each other out (Goodin
and Spiekermann 2018). Luckily for rivals of justifying democracy with
jury theorems, behavioral economists have spent decades enumerating
the prejudices and heuristics we all use when evaluating data (Kahneman
2012). The concept of epistemic injustice signals another avenue of
similar or same mistakes: due to implicit or implicit prejudice toward
epistemic agents with marginalized identities – women and ethnic and
sexual minorities – we often underestimate their credibility and cogni-
tive capacities (Fricker 2006, 2007; Samaržija and Cerovac 2021). Since
the ascribed lack of credibility to marginalized groups is now minutely
documented, we can assume that most voters would, when assessing
minority politicians or policies related to their rights, get it wrong the
same way. Moreover, as Condorcet taught us, the aggregated votes of
citizens wronger than random inevitably lead to an incorrect democratic
decision. In the following section, I will show that genuine citizens do
not only make countless mistakes but do so according to predictable and
matching patterns.

2.3 Condorcet’s Independence Requirement

First, we must establish what political independence would presume to
disprove Condorcet’s independence requirement. According to Goodin
and Spiekermann’s recent interpretation, Condorcet’s independent epis-
temic agents do not lean on “the same opinion leader, the same shared
ideology or prejudice, the same shared psychological mechanisms, the
same shared cues, on the same more fundamental shared properties,
and on the same shared evidence, background information, or theories”
(Goodin and Spiekermann 2018: 55). This inventory leads to the intui-
tive inference that there are no people who, when making political deci-
sions, do not depend on “the same shared psychological mechanisms,”
“the same background information,” or “the same shared ideology.” It is
difficult to imagine an epistemic agent whose reasoning does not involve
human cognitive capacities or who does not share background beliefs
with concurring peers. Nevertheless, a comprehensive rebuttal of the
independence provision will necessitate something more than mere intu-
ition or our creative capabilities.

2.3.1 The Common Knowledge Effect

The first empirically founded obstacle to the independence requirement
is the psychological common knowledge effect. Since the nineties, the
social sciences have acquiesced about the common knowledge effect’s
epistemic consequences. During the deliberation of a group of epistemic
agents, the group will not concur about the truest or the most empir-
ically supported belief but about the view that most participants held
 A Belated Failure 41
before the debate had even started (Gigone and Hastie 1993: 959). In
their authentic work, the authors remarked that the discussants failed
to realize that their arguments ended with consensus about the attitude
that enjoyed the most support from the beginning. This fact is the most
integral hindrance to the epistemic justification of the once fashionable
concept of deliberative democracy. Deliberative democracy is not based
on today’s political representation but on the discussions of interested
and politically engaged citizens (Bohman 1998). As compelling as this
concept might sound in theory, deliberation’s empirical fiascos to make
epistemically valuable decisions in representative democracy’s delibera-
tive bodies led to a gradual waning in interest in the concept. Today we
can ascribe similar trendiness to the notions of epistemic (Cerovac 2021)
and open (Landemore 2020) democracy.
We establish deliberative bodies from the assumption that groups will
make better decisions than individuals as they have compiled informa-
tion from diverse sources. Gigone and Hastie tested such debates’ efficacy
in the real world. Their group, tasked with deciding upon psychology
students’ final grades, did not share information given to each debater
but finally agreed on the judgments suggested to the highest number of
participants before the experiment began (Gigone and Hastie 1993: 961).
Suppose we generalize this finding to realistic voters’ collective politi-
cal decision-making. In that case, discussions with others do not leave
us independent. Instead, we consent to the stance ardently endorsed by
most discussants. Given these conclusions, it is evident – if deliberative
bodies automatically reduce to assemblies of blind sycophants – why the
notion of deliberative democracy had progressively lost its philosophical
charisma. Although the reasons behind such futility of information shar-
ing are numerous, we might want to consider Sunstein’s suggestion that
epistemic agents with unpopular stances are uneasy with sharing their
knowledge with the group out of fear that their beliefs might render them
ostracized (Sunstein 2015).

2.3.2 Epistemic Bubbles and Echo Chambers

On the other hand, the independence of Condorcet’s agents is now imper-
iled by far more tempting hurdles than the common knowledge effect.
According to Nguyen’s hugely popular analysis, “something in the flow
of information has gone awry” (Nguyen 2018). Epistemic agents are
exposed to radically filtered information that reinforces their current
beliefs, regardless of how irrational they might be. Friends who share
our values and social networks now foster two kinds of social epistemic
structures that we must distinguish due to the divergence of their conse-
quences. First, we can find ourselves in an epistemic bubble due to asso-
ciation with people who ideologically fit us and social networks’ often
condemned tendency to offer us content equivalent to our previously
42 Hana Samaržija
displayed preferences. In this social epistemic structure, outside voices
are accidentally excluded due to omission. Within an epistemic bubble,
due to the constant reiteration of the same information, we commence
thinking those are the sole facts possessing any legitimacy. This effect,
officially known as bootstrapped corroboration, is manifestly logically
worthless. As Wittgenstein cynically remarked, if we spot the same title
on every copy of some daily newspaper, the repetition of that header
does not render it any more valid. A restatement would have to comprise
additional evidence or an alternative form of supplementary epistemic
value to make a claim more accurate. In the real world, it habitually
happens that our friends, media we trust, and algorithmic sorting derive
their information from the same sources, so we erroneously perceive the
same data’s recurrence as additional evidence in favor of its truthfulness.
Nevertheless, epistemic bubbles are consoling as we do not feel automatic
antagonism against contrary information.
Let us employ a simple example. Imagine an epistemic agent sincerely
unsure about the safety of rapidly produced vaccines and whose friends
and acquaintances exhibit similar concerns on social networks. After
noticing dozens of recurrences of the same arguable article about the
connection between quickly generated vaccines and lethal blood clots
in vulnerable patients, our epistemic agent accepts these identical repe-
titions as added proof against vaccines. However, when scrolling down
a reliable news site they seldom visit, our agent runs into a prominent
doctor’s lecture about the safety of the newest inoculations. As they
are not wary of dissimilar information, watching the speech alleviates
our agent’s concerns about the safety of recent vaccines. In short, we
can burst epistemic bubbles by exposing epistemic agents to impartial
and dependable sources of scientific and non-scientific information
(Samaržija 2023). In today’s epistemic conditions of constant virtual
communication and exposure to various algorithms, we all belong to a
lower or higher number of epistemic bubbles. Still, we can endeavor to
rupture our pseudoscientific or prejudicial beliefs by exposing ourselves
to impartial information sources.
On the other hand, echo chambers are far more resilient. According
to the leading definition, echo chambers are social epistemic structures
where outside voices are deliberately excluded and depicted as ethically
and epistemically defective (Nguyen 2018; Samaržija 2023). In his work,
Nguyen holds that ideological leaders persuade their followers that their
foes are morally questionable – dishonest and unreliable – and thus
unworthy of their trust. Additionally, I have appended that, within an
echo chamber’s narrative, ideological adversaries are illustrated as epis-
temically defective, regardless of whether it is due to their inherent stu-
pidity or mere naivete (Samaržija 2023). Echo chambers’ established title
reflects their central feature. All we can hear is the echo of our own and
concurring agents’ attitudes. Unlike epistemic bubbles, which are the
 A Belated Failure 43
random byproduct of our ideologically close friends and the functioning
of social media algorithms, echo chambers are influential politicians’ or
news sites’ purposive effort to ensnare their followers in a reality of alter-
native facts. Echo chambers lean on an epistemic effect formally known
as preemptive evidencing. In simpler terms, ideological trailblazers and
biased information sources preemptively convince their followers that
the outside world wants to dispute their subversive truth out of malign
intents or inherent idiocy. When the outside world genuinely does deny
their reality, as it is empirically unsupported, biased, interwoven with
prejudice, or oppressive toward disadvantaged social groups, agents
entrapped within an echo chamber will perceive it as a verification of its
narrative. After all, their ideological pundit had presaged them it would
happen. Of course, although echo chambers are more frequent on the
right, they can and do appear in liberal, green, and left-wing political
communities. So, while bootstrapped corroboration makes epistemic
agents believe that related information sources are unrelated and com-
prise additional epistemic value, members of an echo chamber are per-
suaded that unrelated information sources are associated with a complex
conspiracy. While more radical echo chambers encompass cults and con-
spiracy theorists, we can find similar behavioral patterns in groups gath-
ered around particular political ideas, lifestyles, or social goals.
Let us revisit our past example of the vaccine skeptic whose antago-
nism toward inoculation is alleviated by interaction with a reliable con-
trary opinion. We can reflect upon what such a scenario would look like
if we substituted the epistemic bubble with an echo chamber. Again,
let us envision an epistemic agent apprehensive about hastily produced
vaccines’ safety. However, this time our epistemic agent believes we
are dealing with a conspiracy of global pharmaceutical industries, so
patients would have to purchase costly drugs for ailments caused by
injections. Our epistemic agent shares this conviction with intimate
groups of virtual sycophants. At the same time, their ideological leader
explicitly cautions them that their mainstream clinicians will endeavor
to dissuade them but that such efforts are unworthy of their trust. Within
their echo chamber’s structure, medicinal laypersons who have faith in
vaccines are depicted as naïve morons incapable of penetrating the veil
of fabrications woven by the pharmacological industry. In this case, our
epistemic agent cannot exit their echo chamber by encountering impar-
tial scientific facts, as they preventatively consider them a fallacy, nor
by conversing with genuine medicinal experts as they perceive them as
epistemically defective.
Most social and political epistemologists working on echo chambers
now agree that it is, in theory, only conceivable to exit such robust epis-
temic structures by renewing your trust in voices outside our subservi-
ent group and that such instances have seldom been empirically verified
(Nguyen 2018; Samaržija 2023). Of course, although our examples of
44 Hana Samaržija
epistemic bubbles and echo chambers dealt with inoculation and phar-
macology, the political polarization distinctive of today’s partisan rep-
resentative democracies is fecund soil for such epistemic structures
(Boutyline and Willer 2016). Perhaps the most suggestive instances of
political echo chambers come from the United States’ bipartisan pres-
idential democracy, where political philosophers and political scientists
have recorded conspicuous fear and loathing across party lines (Iyengar
and Westwood 2014).
In a related article, Nelson and Webster argue that epistemic bubbles
are fictional, as empirical followers of digital media visit a broad spectrum
of news sites and social networks, including those they fervently oppose.
Nonetheless, such dissimilar reading material does not affect their polit-
ical preferences (Nelson and Webster 2017). Still, even if epistemic bub-
bles are genuinely contentious, as such a media setting would rupture
them, miscellaneous information sources are not a menace to echo cham-
bers founded on profound distrust. Unlike Nelson and Webster, Sunstein
has spent over a decade authenticating epistemic bubbles and portray-
ing them as one of the causes of political polarization. This epistemic
effect arises when agents endorsing some attitudes become highly sure
of it (Sunstein 2011). Suppose we supplement the frequency of epistemic
bubbles and echo chambers’ empirical support with the abovementioned
phenomenon of epistemic injustice when agents of marginalized identi-
ties are deprived of the credibility their aptitudes deserve. It is justified to
assume that citizens of modern representative democracies look nothing
like Condorcet’s independent voters (Fricker 2006, 2007; Samaržija and
Cerovac 2021). Quite the reverse, they employ the same heuristics, exhibit
the same prejudice, passionately depend on the same ideological leaders,
and frequently find themselves in the sturdier or the less sturdy structures
of echo chambers and epistemic bubbles.

2.4 Condorcet’s Sincerity Requirement

Finally, we are left with Condorcet’s sincerity prerequisite. Condorcet
postulated that his competent and independent voters would also sin-
cerely elect the political option they deem ethically and epistemically
optimal. On the surface, this provision appears the most unsophisticated
but, simultaneously, the most challenging to repudiate. Do epistemic
agents not elect political options they genuinely regard as ethically and
epistemically the finest choice? We could presume that advocates of all
political options hold they shield them from some more significant peril,
such as the advent of communist or nationalist terror or the gradual rise
of some profoundly deplorable party. As for the electorate’s actual sin-
cerity, sociological, psychological, and political studies of voting behav-
ior disclose persistent patterns of pragmatic and insincere voting for the
lesser evil, despite being cognizant of their epistemic and ethical defects,
 A Belated Failure 45
we anticipate parties we are affectively bound to acquire us financial gain
(Ilišin et al. 2018; Swire-Thompson et al. 2019).
Regarding the question of voting for the lesser evil, Condorcet’s sin-
cerity would have agents choose a politically hopeless option they deem
ethically and epistemically best rather than calculate between two prom-
inent parties likely to win the race. In a study cynically titled “They
Might be a Liar, But They are My Liar,” Swire-Thompson and col-
leagues (2019: 1) tested whether an epistemic agent’s sentiments toward
politicians and the likelihood of reelecting them would alter once they
comprehended the candidates had purposely fed them disinformation.
The authors oriented their examinees toward false information and rec-
tified them. They then chronicled whether the surveyed agents would
cease trusting their preferred candidate once they recognized they had
defrauded them. Fortunately for our present argument, the outcome was
negative. Even once they had cognized that they believed disinformation
and accepted the amended fact, which is a considerable mental effort,
the examinees remained equally eager to vote for their hitherto favored
political option (Swire-Thompson et al. 2019: 6). Thus, although they
had conceded that their political option does not represent the epistemic
ideal and would perhaps not make decisions of pristine epistemic qual-
ity, the voters continued choosing it. Such a manifestly erroneous choice
empirically invalidates Condorcet’s sincerity principle. However, we do
not have to constrain ourselves to such contemporary research, fraught
with the epistemic environment of partisan media and social networks.
For instance, an alternative analysis of the electorate also points toward
opting for a party whose epistemic privations we are more than aware of
(Jost et al. 2004). According to Jost and his collaborators, voters ascribed
the presiding party far more credibility than it had objectively merited
out of mere inertia and dread of change. Such unconscious bolstering
of the epistemically problematic status quo is best documented among
marginalized social groups of poor economic standing, whose adaptive
preferences render them even more enthusiastic about excusing their cur-
rent political representatives (Jost et al. 2004: 908).
Regarding insincere voting founded on mere material pragmatism,
there is a well of pertinent information to be found in Ilišin and col-
leagues’ recent analysis of the Croatian youth’s3 political preferences.
In the research, the number of examinees who reported affiliation with
some political party statistically significantly surpassed those who stated
that, in the Croatian political arena, there is a party whose ethical and
epistemic character they sincerely trust (Ilišin et al. 2018: 64). As Croatia
is, like many other post-communist states, still ascertaining how to
relinquish nepotist and clientelist models of governance, it is not ardu-
ous to conclude what had incited the young examinees to join a party
whose epistemic character they do not trust in. We can derive analogous
inferences from Vuković’s study of Croatian local governments’ political
46 Hana Samaržija
economy. He established that corrupt politicians, whose debased actions
are empirically documented and publicly known, will more likely be ree-
lected than their more ethical adversaries (Vuković 2017).

2.5 Conclusion
In the closing part, we can abridge and reconsider our discussion.
Condorcet’s Jury Theorem is an unpretentious quantitative proof advanc-
ing the argument that the collective decision-making of many epistemic
agents sounder than random will produce an epistemically more valuable
decision than any erudite individual agent. However, Condorcet encum-
bered his decision-makers with three formidable provisions. First, they
must be more knowledgeable than random or go astray in ways that can-
cel each other out. Second, they must not be subject to the same ideolog-
ical leader, the same information sources, the same background beliefs,
or equal cognitive mechanisms (Goodin and Spiekermann 2018: 55).
Third, they must elect that political option they sincerely deem the ethi-
cal and epistemic optimum. Unlike the Hong-Page theorem of diversity
over ability, which was mathematically disproven shortly after its vastly
popular advent (Thompson 2014), which some political epistemologists
determinedly ignore (Landemore 2020), CJT’s mathematical proof has
endured the test of time. It is still utilized as a quantitative argument
favoring aggregative democratic decision-making.
In the previous twenty pages, I have endeavored to prove that not even
one of CJT’s requirements – competence, independence, or s­incerity –
can be sustainable in today’s epistemic conditions. Regarding the compe-
tence requirement, citizens are satirically unacquainted with the essential
facts necessary for partaking in democratic life. The median voter also
ostensibly lacks the political sophistication required to locate their place
on the ideological spectrum and understand the difference between pro-
gressive and conservative values (Converse 1964; Delli Carpini 2005).
The small minority of citizens capable of articulating substantial ideo-
logical preferences or partisan self-identification misuses this political
sophistication to execute convoluted cognitive strategies to uphold their
beliefs in the face of conflicting empirical findings (Taber and Lodge
2006). Ultimately, epistemic injustice insinuates that most citizens will
misstep similarly. Social epistemologists have spent decades detailing
deficits of trust ascribed to marginalized or minority groups, which
speaks of embedded stereotypes and prejudices in our collective epis-
temic resources (Fricker 2006, 2007).
The independence requirement, whose description already indicates it
is discernibly overly arduous, is easily refuted by the empirically verified
common knowledge effect (Gigone and Hastie 1993: 691). The common
knowledge effect discloses that the epistemically most valuable or best
evidentially sustained stance will not perfunctorily prevail in a group
 A Belated Failure 47
discussion. Conversely, the attitude that most discussants held before
the debate had even started will retain the upper hand. Suppose that is
not a satisfactory argument in today’s epistemic conditions of constant
connection on social networks. In that case, epistemic agents are also
imperiled by the alluring structures of epistemic bubbles and echo cham-
bers. The first class of epistemic bubbles develops due to our selection
of friends and trustworthy information sources. Regardless, they are
effortlessly punctured by mere exposure to conflicting information. In
contrast, echo chambers are ideological pundits and partisan media’s
calculated efforts to ensnare their followers in a world of alternative facts
(Nguyen 2018). Ultimately, the mentioned notion of epistemic injustice
toward minority and disadvantaged social groups, due to which they are
perceived as epistemically incompetent or unworthy of trust, denotes
the electorate will approach topics interspersed with identity matters by
erring in precisely the same way.
As we have already remarked, the conclusive sincerity requirement
seemingly appears the most challenging to repudiate due to its intui-
tiveness. After all, we can assume that voters will, even if they are mis-
taken, vote for that political option they sincerely deem the ethical and
epistemic ideal. Nonetheless, empirical studies contradict this intuition.
First, voters effectively attached to their selected political option will not
decrease their affection for a favored politician after conceding they have
calculatingly lied to them (Swire-Thompson et al. 2019: 6). Over a decade
ago, political scientists recorded instinctive sustaining of the currently
presiding political party out of apprehension of change, even if that rul-
ing faction is disreputable for its epistemic failures (Jost et al. 2004: 908).
According to sociologists, constituencies politically cultivated in states
whose corruption renders them flawed democracies will elect and join
parties whose ethical and epistemic character they do not confide in if
they expect it will bring them economic advantages (Ilišin et al. 2018: 64).
It turns out that robust emotional bonds or pragmatic behavior habitu-
ally make us cast insincere votes for options we identify as epistemically
substandard or incapable of generating valuable decisions.
However, this conclusion leads us to a series of open questions rather
than a comprehensive answer. Suppose CJT’s requirements cannot sur-
vive current epistemic conditions, and the Hong-Page theorem of diversity
over ability has been mathematically refuted. In that case, there is no epis-
temic justification of democratic decision-making more promising than
the theoretical optimism of specific epistemologists. Nevertheless, even
if it is epistemically substandard, democratic decision-making is unde-
niably still the fairest and the most inclusive tested procedure of political
decision-making, unlike more epistocratic approaches that fare better in
theory. Suppose we, as epistemologists resolutely committed to the neces-
sity of democracy’s epistemic justification, adjudicate that the sole valid
conclusion is cynical democratic pessimism (Ahlstrom-Vij 2020). In that
48 Hana Samaržija
case, we are obliged to offer no less than a sketch of a decision-making
procedure that would appease both our epistemic and ethical criteria.
Fortunately, numerous social epistemologists, political epistemologists,
and political economists have already begun reflecting upon alternative
configurations of political decision-making. While some would restrict
the electorate to those citizens who have satisfied minor epistemic cri-
teria (Brennan 2011), others ponder upon divisions of epistemic labor
between citizens and experts (Goldberg 2011) or hybrid models of polit-
ical decision-­making. A fruitful epistemic renunciation of democratic
decision-­making is not the culmination of our epistemological inquiry but
merely the beginning of thorough work on cultivating a decision-making
procedure fit for contemporary epistemic conditions.

Notes
1. Political theory and political philosophy utilize the concept of an “unre-
sponsive government” to depict administrations whose policies do not
answer to their citizens’ explicitly stated needs. The governments do not
respond to evident civic requirements.
2. Parliamentary representative democracy’s institutions of the electorate’s
formal equality within the election process, the freedom of choice and
speech, and the absence of an autonomous presidential figure distinctive of
presidential democracies are its fundamental ethical and political values,
which merited its place as the ostensibly most just political configuration.
3. In Europe, the youth category, somewhat unintuitively, encompasses per-
sons up to thirty years of age, so it is fallacious to imagine a surveyed group
of high-school students and undergraduates.

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3 Social Epistemic Miserliness
Populism against Democracy
Nenad Miščević

3.1 Introduction
Our subject will be populism’s struggle against reasonable democratic
deliberation and the cognitive-epistemic forces enabling and sustaining
it. This fray itself is a widespread phenomenon: like Chávez in Venezuela,
elected leaders worldwide have subverted democratic institutions in
Georgia, Hungary, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia,
Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Ukraine. Democratic backsliding today begins
at the ballot box. Democracy’s erosion is, for many, almost impercepti-
ble. Let us deploy the example of Hungary. Its president, Viktor Orban,
has spent several years leading a campaign against George Soros, a
Hungarian Jew by birth who has contributed enormously to Hungary’s
intellectually advantageous profile, directing, and financing the Central
European University (CEU) in Budapest. Soros has been consistently
critical of Orban’s populist politics, and the CEU has paid for this inso-
lence by being exiled from Hungary. Orban’s populist campaign against
Soros used explicitly anti-Semitic allusions to block free democratic
deliberation exercised by CEU’s intellectuals and broadly propagated
by CEU leadership. On May 19, 2022, Orban summarized his illiberal
political program in twelve points while speaking at CPAC Budapest. He
delivered a twelve-point “open-source” guide for conservatives looking
to repeat his party’s recent electoral success.
We shall also be pointing to other examples, particularly Donald
Trump’s nationalist populism and Brexit propaganda. Overall, populism
is the most pertinent present-day threat to democracy. And, if one does
work on the epistemology of democracy, one should also examine stances
and views that represent a menace to it. Therefore, the epistemology of
populism and research into epistemic vices constitutive of it is relevant
for the epistemology of democracy. In addition, we should investigate
hazardous epistemic vices with significant social consequences, such
as close-mindedness, sloth, intellectual arrogance, cowardice, dishon-
esty, epistemic injustice, and dogmatic intellectual self-affirmation.
They all have individual and social incarnations: close-mindedness has

DOI: 10.4324/9781003311003-5
52 Nenad Miščević
historically been a characteristic of powerful secular and religious insti-
tutions, often accompanied by sloth, the unwillingness to inquire into
epistemic alternatives. Academy has often suffered from intellectual
arrogance and exhibited cowardice and dishonesty in more totalitarian
times. This chapter will point to a general cognitive defect underlying
epistemically vicious features. Here is the preview.
The following Section 3.2 is dedicated to characterizing populism. We
start with some recognizable examples and then turn to Jean Cohen’s
(2019) concise definition of it, comparable to proposals by other promi-
nent researchers investigating populism. It demonstrates that populism is
a threat to democratic deliberation. Section 3.3 introduces three groups of
cognitive phenomena denoting imperfect cognitive processing. We borrow
from cognitive scientists the term “miserliness” for such processing and
employ the phrase in the broadest possible sense for all systematic defects
of cognitive processing. The three groups differ in their scope. First, there
are imperfect methods of understanding and reasoning, the so-called
“heuristics and biases” in general. Second, the distinct bias we are curi-
ous about is called “myside bias,” notorious for favoring the present con-
victions and attitudes of the relevant subject and their group. Third, the
heuristics of stereotyping and the long route to polarization and radicali-
zation often block democratic deliberation. Section 3.4 finally turns to the
cognitive-epistemological grounding of populist thought and discourse,
using the three groups delineated in the previous chapter to character-
ize the epistemology of populism and linking them to populism’s charac-
teristics listed in Section 3.2. For instance, populism’s insistence on the
contrast between “us,” the exemplary people, and “them,” alienated elites
or foreigners, is tied to myside bias and aided by stereotyping. Epistemic
vices support the political ones and vice versa in a vicious circle leading
to increasingly anti-democratic results. In conclusion, we summarize our
results and point to the necessity of divulging possible remedies to pop-
ulist pathology. Let me conclude the introductory part by briefly delin-
eating the theoretical framework of our project. It combines cognitive
science and political epistemology. As the former has been well-known
for almost a century, let me say a few words about the latter. Indeed, most
chapters in the present volume belong to this research project and to its
critical component. Analytic philosophy recently resurrected this project
with a prolonged history. The much-needed resurgence was presumably
provoked by catastrophically ideological recent events, including Trump’s
escapades and the Brexit farce, belonging to the populist wave.
As Michael Hannon and Jeroen de Ridder note in their 2021 volume,
“Political epistemology is a newly thriving field at the intersection of epis-
temology and political philosophy, but it has old roots.” And they cite
illustrious predecessors such as Plato, John Stuart Mill, Hannah Arendt,
and John Rawls. Political epistemology is an exemplary case of engaged
philosophy, looking to utilize the taxonomy developed by Jonathan Wolff
 Social Epistemic Miserliness 53
(2019). As Wolff describes it, engaged philosophy starts from concrete
social problems, in contrast to “applied” philosophy, which begins from
a lofty theoretical framework. In applying philosophy, “the philosopher
identifies relevant values, in the context of a problem, current facts, his-
tory, and contemporary alternatives. There is a certain amount of sifting
and balancing to articulate the messy public debate’s moral dilemmas.
Then the identification and evaluation of possible solutions, before making
recommendations, may or may not affect actual policy” (Wolff 2019: 22).
Political epistemology’s central element is the study of the cognitive or
epistemic obstacles to correct epistemic functioning and a just organiza-
tion of society, primarily in its present form.
It addresses perilous epistemic vices, primarily those with momentous
social consequences, such as close-mindedness, sloth, intellectual arro-
gance, cowardice, dishonesty, epistemic injustice, and dogmatic intel-
lectual self-affirmation. Other parts study positive or realist aspects of
political life – see Chapter 11 of this book on sense-making in demo-
cratic politics. A related epistemological problem is the status of political
thought experiments, from Plato to contemporary contractualist think-
ers, geared at identifying crucial positive features of political arrange-
ment. It is helpful to apprehend the epistemological project’s levels of
inquiry to locate the present chapter’s purpose. On the descriptive side,
one has an ordinary understanding of politics embodied in everyday
discourse. At this level, the central example of philosophical interest is
Cassam’s pioneering work on epistemic vices, stressing and occasionally
correcting regular dialogues about them. At the next level, there is the
inclusion of cognitive research. The present chapter will discuss the epis-
temological consequences of cognitive psychological insights into typical
human mental weaknesses. Many research programs and results at this
level, such as social psychology and the study of practices like stereo-
typing, have tremendous political-epistemic consequences. We need an
epistemology of such procedures to place the psychological result into a
more philosophical context. The third level is philosophical, where criti-
cal political epistemology typically sets itself.
This differentiation brings us to the normative side of the project. When
confronted with the wealth of factual explanatory material on all three
levels, philosophers must assume a normative stance and discuss and
defend it. Which qualities and consequences, both epistemic and politi-
cal, make a given practice abominable or unsatisfying, and which would
make it normatively correct, appropriate, or even exemplary? Here, the
critical epistemologist has a choice of several normative frameworks. The
approach I assume in this chapter is based on virtue epistemology and, in
the concrete case, focuses on epistemic vices to be avoided in the political
domain. Vice epistemology appears appropriate to the issue we are inter-
ested in, the role of cognitive biases and the underlying cognitive miser-
liness in blocking democratic discourse. These tendencies seem to be a
54 Nenad Miščević
clear example of epistemic vices. Once we have chosen a fitting normative
framework, we can turn to a given practice’s concrete harms and benefits,
with a particular interest in epistemic harms and epistemic benefits and
their political aspects. In this chapter, we join other colleagues in dis-
cussing specific injuries to democratic practices stemming from cognitive
imperfections and scrutinizing feasible potential remedies.

3.2 The Populist Threat to Democracy

We can now turn to the populist threat. We start with a few examples and
then turn to general characteristics. The American and British people have
examples of Trump and Brexit in their countries. Here is a typical quote
from Trump, manifesting the standard features of populist discourse:

The US has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.

[Applause] Thank you. It’s true, and these are the best and the finest.
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re
not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people
that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with
us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.
And some, I assume, are good people.

The quote starts with a stark contrast between us, the US, and the
Mexicans. The Mexicans arriving in the US are not potential workers
who desire to work and survive but narcos and criminals. And they are
rapists. All of them? While it is not stated with a universal quantifier, the
term “they” suggests “all of them.” Well, some are good people, Trump
says, in conflict with the leading suggestions of his talk. Similarly, across
Europe, populists claim that Muslim refugees are conquering Christian
territories for a future Muslim empire. Populist news fills the media. One
might think of the old description of the Fame, proposed by Virgil, who
succinctly summarizes what she does in two verses:

Things done relates, not done she feigns, and mingles truth with lies.
Talk is her business, and her chief delight
(IV, 189, Dryden’s translation)

But what truth is here mingled with lies, and what lies do the populist
media spread? Consider the features analyzed by researchers (J. Cohen,
C. De La Torre) as populism’s characteristics, borrowing the list from
Jean Cohen (2019):

First, there is the appeal to “the people” and “popular sovereignty.”

These phrases with little content are deployed to unify heterogene-
ous demands and grievances.
 Social Epistemic Miserliness 55
Second, their pars pro toto logic extracts the “authentic people”
from the rest of the population and is very apparent in the populist
nationalistic rhetoric.
Third, their discourse pits the people against elites: the political-­
economic and cultural “establishment” are cast as usurpers who cor-
rupt, ignore, or distort the “authentic” people’s will.
Fourth, we can identify the solid frontier of antagonism along the
lines of a Schmittian friend/enemy conception of the political that
identifies alien others who violate the people’s values.
Fifth, there is unification, typically through strong identification
with a leader claiming to embody the authentic people’s will and
voice, incarnating their unity and identity. Let me add an illustration
I like a lot: “Chavez is the people, the people are Chavez” has been a
slogan of Venezuelan identification with their leader.
Sixth and seventh, populism’s less prominent focus is on politi-
cal representation’s symbolic dimensions and a performative leader-
ship style that mimics the authentic people’s habitus (dress, speech,
manners).
Eighth, populism exhibits rather dramatic and rhetorical forms of
argumentation linking talk about making the nation great to dis-
courses about the restoration of honor, centrality, and political influ-
ence to the authentic people.
Ninth, we can locate a focus on alleged crises, a national decline,
and an orientation to the extraordinary dimensions of politics.
Tenth, populism genuinely has a thin character: dependence on a
host ideology for content and moral substance.
(2019: 13)

Here are some illustrations. Le Pen’s slogan “Nationalists of all coun-

tries, unite!” plays with the classical Marxist slogan “Proletarians of all
countries, unite!” It abstracts from the fact that nationalists of different
nations have conflicting interests (Ukrainian nationalists against Russian
ones, Turkish nationalists against Kurdish ones, and so on), thus sug-
gesting an impossible program. Or consider the “solution” strongly indi-
cated in the Brexit campaign: “Let’s take back control.” Vote “Leave.”
The unemployed British worker is to believe they will be “taking control”
if they vote “Leave!” Currently, we can add to the list of such pseudo-­
solution proposals the establishment of a puppet pro-­Russian govern-
ment in Ukraine to prevent the West from interfering with Russian
interests. Such propositions are cognitively deficient, and we should scru-
tinize their defects.
These examples bring us to the central epistemic puzzle of populism’s
popularity: why do people opt for such an irrational, epistemically
vicious, and anti-democratic interpretation of politics? Here, we shall
join the authors who divulge a comprehensive explanation of human
56 Nenad Miščević
cognitive mechanisms. For instance, Judith Glück, in her 2019 paper
with the telling title “Wisdom vs. Populism and Polarization: Learning
to Regulate Our Evolved Intuitions,” suggests that we should scrutinize
cognitive heuristics and biases that “may” offer a good lens for under-
standing the increasing polarization currently happening in the most
prosperous democracies of this planet (2019: 87). We now turn to detect-
ing the cognitive weaknesses-vices underlying populist discourse and
populist threats to democracy.

3.3 Cognitive Miserliness – A Brief Overview

We shall divide these cognitive weaknesses into three categories: those
characterized in an exclusive individualist way, those partially associated
with social or group behavior, and social ones. The first category has
been prominent since the very beginnings of cognitive research, while the
second and third have appeared somewhat later. We need a general term
to cover the three categories. Contrary to positive, epistemically virtu-
ous rationality, we have decided to use “cognitive miser” and “cognitive
miserliness” in this broadest possible sense. Here we thus apologize for
using the terms perhaps somewhat more extensively than standard cog-
nitive literature.
We shall take the work of Keith Stanovich as our guiding source. In
fact, we borrow his label of cognitive miserliness to portray the functioning
of our mental apparatuses that produce biases of any kind (see Stanovich
2018). Cognitive miserliness goes rather far. It might be constitutive for
the normal functioning of our cognitive system, particularly concerning
reasoning and inference. Daniel Kahneman, one of the pioneers in these
areas, has proposed his model of heuristics and biases as exemplifying
such miserliness. We shall be using the term in the broadest possible sense
for all systematic defects of cognitive processing. So, we shall start with a
classical instance of miserly processing, namely heuristics and biases in
ordinary reasoning. Then we shall pass to a broad bias, called “myside
bias” in the literature, and end with the politically critical biased process
of stereotyping. We shall argue that miserliness comprises all these defects.

3.3.1 The Classical Cognitive Biases and Heuristics

Remember the classical example of cognitive bias offered by Daniel
Kahneman, using the model of Italy and France competing in the 2006
final of the World Cup. Suppose the average fan is asked what they think
about the probability of Italy winning. In that case, they will give a far
different response than if they are asked what they think about France
losing, even though both questions request their response to the very
same event (2012: 354). The cognitive system responds differently to ques-
tions framed in terms of gain than equivalent ones depicted as losses.
 Social Epistemic Miserliness 57
We might further acknowledge the relevance of framing by examining
the given examples of populist discourse. Take Marakesh: to the average
reader, the name sounds neutral. However, populists create an associa-
tion with Christian martyrs, Franciscans killed by a Muslim ruler some
seven centuries ago. The name is thus framed: whatever is done at this
place, especially if it favors Muslims, must be harmful to us here. The
same goes for Eric Zemmour’s latest tactics, the leader of the most potent
populist party in France, launched on December 5, 2021. Zemmour pro-
posed a “reconquest of the greatest country in the world” in front of
15,000 people and the name “Reconquest” for his party. The term refers
to the so-called reconquest of Spain and part of France from the hands
of Arabs in the Middle Ages. The negative attitude to the French of Arab
origin and Muslim refugees is thus framed in terms of medieval “glorious
victories,” all celebrated at the renowned medieval church of St. Denis,
the sacred place of French culture and history.
Framing is just one example of heuristics that generates biases.
Kahneman and Tversky famously argued that our cognitive system
exhibits many similar tendencies. They often supersede a more straight-
forward question for a difficult one, overestimate low probabilities,
respond more strongly to losses than to gains (loss aversion), frame deci-
sion problems narrowly, in isolation from one another, and exaggerate
emotional consistency. Kahneman and Amos Tversky have been analyz-
ing the consequences of such experiments since the seventies, concluding
that our mind is composed of two systems. System 2 is the conscious one.
It is who we are: it is cautious but not very active. The other, System 1, is
automatic, unconscious, and swift. He writes:

The defining feature of System 2, in this story, is that its operations

are effortful, and one of its main characteristics is laziness, a reluc-
tance to invest more effort than is strictly necessary. Consequently,
the thoughts and actions that System 2 believes it has chosen are often
guided by the figure at the center of the story, System 1. However,
there are vital tasks that only System 2 can perform because they
require effort and acts of self-control in which the intuitions and
impulses of System 1 are overcome.
(2012: 33)

System 1 does not reflect. It just proceeds automatically with little

effort. Kahneman notes that “it sometimes answers easier questions
than the one we asked it, and it has little understanding of logic and
statistics.”
(2012: 27)

We have just listed some of the typical heuristics and biases that cog-
nitive scientists argue are the work of System 1. This system sometimes
58 Nenad Miščević
replaces a more straightforward question for a difficult one, overesti-
mates low probabilities, manifests loss aversion, frames decision prob-
lems narrowly, in isolation from one another, and falls victim to the halo
effect. And it reacts more strongly to losses than to gains. We could des-
ignate the tendency to supersede a more straightforward question for a
difficult one in terms of laziness (as Kahneman does) or sloth, using a
classical label for one of the central human vices. Nevertheless, Keith
Stanovich has introduced the more precise term “cognitive miserliness”
and explained that humans are cognitive misers due to their fundamen-
tal tendency to default to processing mechanisms of low computational
expense. He quotes his colleagues saying that the rule that human beings
seem to follow is to engage the brain only when all else fails – and usually
not even then. All animals are under selection pressure to be as stupid as
they can get away with. Thus, we shall retain his terms “cognitive miser”
and “miserly processing” and use them in what follows. In other words,
we shall accept his research’s central thesis: miserliness is the main char-
acteristic of everyday reasoning and inference. And here, we shall be
interested in vices derived from human miserliness.
Let me briefly turn to one aspect of miserliness: System 1’s laziness or
sloth. It might be seen as the general category of demotivating epistemic
vice. It appears more extensive than epistemic insouciance (Cassam) or
being a slacker (Battaly). Insouciance could be a matter of mere super-
ficiality or could be motivated by haste, whereas sloth is a solid trait
underlying various epistemic mistakes. Insouciance, being a slacker, and
having other similar epistemic defects could result from one’s sloth. Sloth
is more of an epistemic kind, encompassing more inertial (“passive”) and
“self-assertive” individual and collective varieties, and both Cassam’s
stance and posture types. But doesn’t genuine dogmatism require more
than mere sloth, one might ask. However, it is not “mere”: it is a self-­
assertive sloth. Sloth is usually seen as a phenomenon of epistemic pas-
sivity, a lack of motivation to investigate. However, one can think of a
more involved version of sloth, an active refusal to question and inves-
tigate. Understood in this broader sense, with a passive and an active
component, sloth is the cornerstone of epistemic dogmatism.
Dogmatism is probably responsible for blocking the central epistemic
motivation of democratic discussion and deliberation. If we accept, fol-
lowing Mercier and Sperber (2017), that the average human is intellectu-
ally vigilant only when facing others from which one distances oneself
and is non-vigilant with one’s ingroup, we might hypothesize that this is
a further motive for social dogmatism, as alongside its ruinous political
consequences. In this sense, a central demotivating vice would be funda-
mental for an entire system of epistemic vices. If this seems correct, we
can appeal to the fact that sloth is an epistemic vice and conclude that it is
a rudimentary epistemic vice. Snježana Prijić Samaržija has asked me in
a discussion if dogmatism could be an epistemic virtue. Her question was
 Social Epistemic Miserliness 59
inspired by reading Ahlstrom-Vij and his claim that, if we are consequen-
tialists concerning truth, we should consider the issue of whether dogma-
tism can lead to or preserve truth an empirical question. I agree about
the partly empirical character of the issue, but I believe we have enough
empirical grounds to doubt its alleged advantages. So much about classi-
cal heuristics and biases.

3.3.2 Myside Bias and Stereotyping

A distinctive miserly tactic we now turn to is what Stanovich, including in
the present volume, calls “myside bias” (we shall remain with Stanovich
as our guide for cognitive science’s views). The primary characterization
of the bias is simple: it occurs when people evaluate evidence, generate
proofs, and test hypotheses in a manner biased toward their prior opin-
ions and attitudes. A typical illustration comes from a study showing
that American examinees believed that a dangerous German vehicle in
America was far more deserving of prohibition than an unsafe American
vehicle in Germany. Nobody should ban our cars. This belief, however,
does not extend to foreign automobiles. In work co-authored by West
and Toplak, Stanovich rightly concludes that the study “demonstrated a
sizable myside bias” (Stanovich et al. 2013: 262).
If you need an illustration from the populist folklore, think of Trump’s
incredible comment: “I think everyone is a threat to me” (Kellner
2016: 8). No wonder the authors add that the avoidance of myside bias is a
component of the “multifarious concept of rational thought” (Stanovich
et al. 2013: 263). We may add that prejudice is not only irrational but also
is a paradigmatic epistemic vice. Otherwise, we can remain brief here
and kindly ask the reader to study Chapter 9 of this book for further
information. Stanovich and his collaborators note that political parties
and ideologies have become present-day equivalents of tribes, and these
“tribes” run roughshod over the nation’s cognitive life, positioning non-
intellectual strategies for scoring points ahead of objective debate (2021:
125). No wonder the interview with Stanovich on the Wissenschaft &
Komunikation blog1 and his Myside bias book feature as illustrations
a photo of Trump and a poster inviting the viewers to vote for Brexit.
The most critical further point is that myside bias trails membership in a
group: Stanovich stresses the importance of group membership in “fos-
tering mysided thinking” (2021: 47).
Since the bias for the group attitude is politically essential and crucial
for our present purposes, let me extend its name to “our-side bias”: it is
merely myside bias extended to my group as an entity. One can assume
that in the experiment we just commented on, the American subjects’
prejudicial thinking in favor of the American car is an example of such
our-side bias. Stanovich talks about identity costs and group identity
gains in this context (Ibid.). The famous injunction “Make America great
60 Nenad Miščević
again” suggests that “we,” Americans, should make “our country” great
again. One can take it almost as the political slogan of our-side bias, illus-
trating how populism goes well with typical dispositions associated with
cognitively imperfect processing. We may end by pointing to stereotyp-
ing as an essential populist tactic. Traditionally, a stereotype has been
defined as overgeneralized attributes related to the members of a social
group, such as the reserved Englishperson or the geeky engineer. Here is
a more comprehensive quote:

Stereotypes are problematic because they are negative, inaccurate,

and unfair – they would be part of the study of person perception
more broadly if they weren’t.
Regarding negativity, the data is precise, and we probably should
acknowledge it more fully, as we generally do regarding prejudice.
Although they can be positive, stereotypes are primarily negative.
When asked to do so, we generate many more negative than posi-
tive stereotypes, and even expressing positive stereotypes is not seen
positively. Consider how we might react to people who have claimed
that African Americans have the positive traits of being athletic and
musical. The problem, in part, is that if we express positive stereo-
types, it is assumed that we hold the negative ones, too.
(Stangor 2009: 2)

3.4 From Cognitive Miserliness to the Attractions

of Populism
We might then hypothesize that various aspects of cognitive miserliness,
in the broadest sense, from ordinary sloth to our-side bias and stereotyp-
ing, will play a role in the populist blocking of democratic deliberation
and that the siege will have a systematic nature. First, there must be a
place for the most general cognitive activities of the miserly processing
system, heuristics, and biases: the confirmation bias, the heuristics of
superseding a more straightforward question for a difficult one, the strat-
egy of responding more strongly to losses than to gains, and the exagger-
ation of emotional consistency (the halo effect). Next comes the specific
feature of myside bias, which is reasonably fit for a role in contrasting “us”
with “them,” assigning preferences to “our” views and a negative value
for what comes from the “other.” Even more socially relevant are social
heuristics and biases, concentrated upon the strategies of stereotyping.
The process can begin with the typical myside bias and continue with
stereotyping. I already quoted a fine summary of the latter method. It is
easy to see the crucial role of stereotyping in central populist strategies.
Suppose my biases and stereotyping come together in the interac-
tion of the “us”-group and the “they”-group. They will typically lead
 Social Epistemic Miserliness 61
to a polarization that can subsequently become less or more radical.
The crucial phenomenon in this domain, both political and epistemic,
is the dynamics of polarization. The epistemology of populism is there-
fore further characterized by increasing radicalization. Let us restate
the epistemic characterization of the process. The process might start
with simple myside bias on the side of the relevant group’s members, an
ordinary, non-problematic type of bias. And the conflictual situation will
lead to a strengthening of the group-centered tendency, with activities
such as negative stereotyping as their main cognitive manifestations.
These internal, cognitive-affective developments and external circum-
stances can increase polarization and radicalization. As we noted above,
epistemic vices support the political ones and vice versa in a vicious cir-
cle leading to increasingly anti-democratic results. Thus, the threats to
democratic deliberation grow and become dramatic, as is often noticed
in the literature.
So, let us start with classical cognitive biases and heuristics derived
from around sloth or, to use Cassam’s term, insouciance. Both Cassam
and Aberdein have noticed the relevance of insouciance, to stay with the
word they use, for populism and populist argumentation. Aberdein notes
that we may understand several factors to which the rise of populism
has been attributed as arising from vices of poor argumentation, includ-
ing arrogance, emulousness, and insouciance. Conversely, the virtues of
argument, such as humility and good listening, offer some prospect of a
constructive response to populism. Cassam, followed by Aberdein, links
insouciance directly to populism by illustrating his account with a famil-
iar quotation from the British politician Michael Gove, a reference often
interpreted as an overt appeal to populism. Gove famously remarked that
he thinks the people in this country are fatigued of experts: of organiza-
tions with acronyms saying they know what is best and consistently get
it wrong. Aberdein comments that populist arguments are characteristi-
cally accusations of vice against the elite. Still, they are also the subject
of charges of vice by other parties, so the roles of the critic and the target
can be played by either populist arguer or their adversary.
One can add that in populist argumentation, one finds a lot of appeal
to pre-judgment, that is, a judgment made or maintained without proper
regard to the evidence, first on the side of the arguer and then on the side
of the listener(s). In our example from the journal “Demokracija,” this is
illustrated by the claim that Muslims are aggressive and dangerous: they
hate us as members of the Christian civilization. The inertial sloth will
prompt the reader of such populist texts to accept the accusations against
Muslim migrants without questioning them. This kind of self-assertive
sloth will govern the practice of the author and editor of the populist
press. We shall add a few more examples of the relevant biases below. We
now pass to a brief analysis concerned with the other two categories of
miserly thinking we noted, the myside bias and the stereotyping. So, let
62 Nenad Miščević
us further document the connection between such cognitive factors and
the anti-democratic political program of populism by taking a brief look
at the features identified by researchers as characteristics of populism
and examining their conceivable cognitive underpinnings. Please return
to the features identified by Cohen and De La Torre as populism’s char-
acteristics and look to their cognitive reinforcements. Stay with Cohen’s
list of ten criteria to identify a movement, leader, or party as more or less
populist. Recall the list:

First, there is the appeal to “the people” and “popular sovereignty.”

These phrases with little content are deployed to unify heterogene-
ous demands and grievances.
Second, their pars pro toto logic extracts the “authentic people”
from the rest of the population and is very apparent in the populist
nationalistic rhetoric.
Third, their discourse pits the people against elites: the political-­
economic and cultural “establishment” are cast as usurpers who cor-
rupt, ignore, or distort the “authentic” people’s will.
Fourth, we can identify the solid frontier of antagonism along the
lines of a Schmittian friend/enemy conception of the political that
identifies alien others who violate the people’s values.

Note the immediate connection to myside bias and stereotyping with

features two to four. Start with feature two. The “authentic people” car-
ries the positive we-stereotype, while the caricatures of the elites and
the enemy category carry the negative ones. It thus immediately intro-
duces polarization. Next, the division pointed to in characterization
number two advances our-side bias as a pertinent psychological source
and supporting force. The people are “us,” and our-side bias is seen as a
pro-people attitude: a good American has it for Americans, an excellent
Slovenian for the Slovenian people.
This elaboration helps us to comprehend characterization number
one better. The words “the people” and “popular sovereignty” indeed
have little content, as used in the populist discourse; theoreticians
sometimes classify them as “empty signifiers.” This feature, however,
nicely combines two dimensions of the use of the pronoun “we” and of
our-side bias. The first is its emotional power: if person A belongs to
my “people,” he is one of us, worthy of expressing our-side bias. The
force of the bias supports A, supports A’s views and actions, and moti-
vates me to join A in their efforts. The second is its plasticity: if the
opposition is between Croats and Serbs, “the people” stand for national
belonging: my people are people of the same nationality. If the oppo-
sition is overwhelmed by some other contrast, say Croats-and-Serbs
versus Arab refugees, the “the people” will denote “us Christians” as
against “the Muslims.” The our-side biases follow the line: the our-side
 Social Epistemic Miserliness 63
preference for my co-nationals is replaced by our-side discrimination
against Muslims.
Here is a further example. A funny-looking poster by the populist
“Alternative for Germany” (AfD) tells the viewer the following: “Burkas?
No, thanks, we prefer bikinis. Germany, have confidence in yourself.”
The accompanying illustration features three young white women wear-
ing bikinis. Preferring bikinis to burkas can be seen as characterizing
“our” culture in contrast to the traditional Muslim one, but what is the
connection with Germany having confidence in itself? The plasticity of
“us” connects the two desiderata, first, the aversion to Muslim prohibi-
tion, and second, the love of German nationality. The empty signifier
“us” is doing its work rather well. So much about the first two features.
Feature three adds another plastic signifier to the list, the word “elites.”
Who counts as “we” and who counts as belonging to the “corrupt elite”
depends on circumstances: the president of Hungary or Turkey belongs
to the people, and his government can be seen both as his helpers or as
the corrupt elite, depending on his immediate political needs. The our-
side bias just follows the rulers designed as being “we.” The important
anti-democratic feature of populism, its intolerance of pluralism, ana-
lyzed in detail by William Galston (2018) in his book with the telling title
“The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy,” is clearly in line with the
solid our-side bias that we can recognize as characterizing it.
Feature four takes us directly from our-side bias to stereotyping and
polarization. We quoted social psychologists claiming that stereotypes
“optimize the balance between the minimization of differences among
people in the same group and the maximization of differences between
ingroup and outgroup (or non-ingroup).” Prototypes define and prescribe
the properties of group membership (perceptions, attitudes, feelings,
behaviors) in such a way as to render the ingroup distinctive and high
in entitativity. In the context of populist discourse, the crucial frame-
work is the one of intergroup threat, when the we-group is presented as
being threatened by the “them group.” For instance, Muslim refugees
threaten the home working class, or Muslim refugee men imperil “our”
white women with sexual violence. A dramatic example is the invention
of the word “Rapefugees,” which suggests the rapist stereotype for the
refugee population, of course, setting aside the fact that at least half of
the people are women and children, and then projecting the halo effect
of this nasty caricature of male refugees onto their entire large group.
Social psychologists note that cognitive responses to intergroup threats
include changes in perceptions of the outgroup, mentioning changes in
stereotypes and dehumanization.

Cognitive biases in intergroup perceptions should also be triggered

or amplified by threats. For example, a threat may increase the
occurrence of the ultimate attribution error (…), in which harmful
64 Nenad Miščević
acts of the outgroup (and positive acts of members of the ingroup)
are explained in terms of member characteristics. In contrast, pos-
itive outgroup acts (and hostile ingroup acts) are attributed to the
situation.
(Stephan et al. 2009: 50)

This quote carries us to additional features characterizing populist strat-

egies (we repeat the sections here to aid the reader):

Fifth, there is unification, typically through strong identification

with a leader claiming to embody the authentic people’s will and
voice, incarnating their unity and identity.
Sixth and seventh, populism’s less prominent focus is on politi-
cal representation’s symbolic dimensions and a performative leader-
ship style that mimics the authentic people’s habitus (dress, speech,
manners).
Eighth, populism exhibits rather dramatic and rhetorical forms of
argumentation linking talk about making the nation great to dis-
courses about the restoration of honor, centrality, and political influ-
ence to the authentic people.

Of course, they all go with stereotyping: indeed, they require the exist-
ence of stereotypes of authentic people and their leaders. But also note
that the features listed require other classical negative heuristics and
biases: the confirmation bias helps the subject jump from one presented
example (a dark-skinned foreigner who once attacked a homegirl at a
New Year party at a public square transformed into “all dark-skinned
foreigners”). Similarly, the heuristics of substituting a more straight-
forward question for a difficult one might lead the populist subjects
to focus on the apparent characteristics of easily noticeable young
male refugees, forgetting the predominance of women and children
in the refugee population, the tactics which will not be available for
Ukrainian refugees. We mentioned that naïve subjects respond more
strongly to losses than gains: the populist condemnation of foreign-
ers thus abstracts from the revenues for an aging Europe in terms of
a young and capable workforce. Similarly, a further characteristic of
miserly processing: it frames decision problems narrowly, in isolation
from one another, and exaggerates emotional consistency (the halo
effect). All these three features would be impossible without the halo
effect heuristics and bias. This discussion brings us then to the penulti-
mate and ultimate characteristics:

Ninth, we can locate a focus on alleged crises, a national decline, and

an orientation to the extraordinary dimensions of politics.
 Social Epistemic Miserliness 65
We noted that the leading cognitive sub-system reacts more strongly
to losses than gains. “We lost our ability to influence the economy, and
Ukrainian politics” might appear more important than the gains from
the peaceful coexistence of two neighboring countries; once the appear-
ance is well-established, it might survive even in the face of economic
threats from the EU and the US.

Tenth, populism genuinely has a thin character: dependence on a

host ideology for content and moral substance.

Indeed, the nine crucial characteristics point to vital features of miserly

processing in the term’s broadest sense; the last quality suggests a way of
connecting the result to various ideologies that offer a more comprehen-
sive framework. No strict rules govern the connection itself; take as an
example the move performed by Maduro, supposed to be a leftist populist
in favor of Putin’s Russia, which is not leftist even in their wildest dreams.
It suffices that it is anti-US directed to gain the support of an allegedly
leftist Venezuelan leader. So much about the cognitive mechanism sup-
porting populist strategies. The reader might have noticed that some of
the components of miserly processing can support other political options:
stereotyping appears in all sorts of political approaches. For instance, it
figures in the stereotyping of the “class enemy” in Stalinist ideologies or
harmful stereotyping of women in any patriarchal ideology. Our char-
acterization suggests that what is typical of populism is the combination
of all the traits listed and the cooperation of various miserly strategies
supporting each of them. With this brief analysis of the cognitive bases
of the negative features of populism in mind, we can appreciate the diag-
noses given by authors like Judith Glück (see her quoted 2019 paper). She
notes that “dual-process theories (…) argue that people can reflect on their
decisions and moral judgments in a relatively objective, unbiased way.
However, this type of reflection requires time and mental effort, while
intuitive judgments are fast and automatic” (2019: 87). And she reminds us
that people do not always engage in conscious reflection and that a “good-
enough decision” should be sufficient for most of the everyday situations.
The process of antagonization, to recapitulate, can begin with ordi-
nary myside bias. Of course, arrogance and emulousness then strengthen
the attitudes and practices involved. Remember the stereotyping general-
ization “dark-skinned refugees are rapists.” It commences from the usual
miserly heuristics and biases, jumping from one or two cases reported
by newspapers to all dark-skinned refugees, contributing to the highly
negative stereotype. The crucial phenomenon in this domain, both polit-
ical and epistemic, is the ensuing dynamics of polarization, strongly sup-
ported by populist propagandists. The process thus goes from the vice
of miserliness to the populists’ perverting of democratic deliberation.
66 Nenad Miščević
Remember the previously mentioned Trump quote, claiming that Mexico
sends people bringing drugs and crime and are rapists. It exemplifies
most of the features we listed: negative framing, stressing of potential
losses (our country is a “dumping ground for everybody else’s problems”)
rather than potential gains, hasty overgeneralizations supported by neg-
ative halo effect, pointing to our-side bias and stereotyping, and an incen-
tive to polarization.
Of course, the process of populist manipulation needs a broader
social-political framework in which it can take place. The framework
required is the one in which the “people” can make political decisions:
in the opposite situation, say of an aristocratic rule, the mobilization of
the masses can hardly have similar political effects. The same with a solid
one-party bureaucratic government, say in the classical Stalinist frame-
work. Here, the march of the groups is controlled by a strict hierarchy of
the ruling power, blocking in advance the spontaneous reaction of the
“masses.” Similarly, on the opposite right-wing extreme, the classical
dynamics of Nazi success can begin with populist dynamics but will soon
end in a complex, hierarchized system. This phenomenon has attracted
some attention in studies of right-wing populism; authors often talk of
populist elements or components in the Hitler or Mussolini type systems
without classifying the whole system as populist. In other words, what is
needed for the populist scenario is a kind of proto-democratic framework
where people can exercise intense pressure on the structures in power.
Urbinati notes that the central tenets of populism “are embedded in the
democratic universe of meanings and language” (Urbinati 2019: 95).
Here is the quote in its broader context:

Populism is a revolt against a pluralist structure of party relations

in the name not of no-party or a “partyless democracy,” but of the
power of “the part” that populism declares to be superior or that
deserves supremacy because it is “good” part. This feature makes
populism a form of factionalism that collides fatally with constitu-
tional democracy, even if its central tenets are embedded in the dem-
ocratic universe of meanings and language.
(Urbinati 2019: 95)

Populism thus perverts the proto-democratic context in which it usu-

ally appears. It is essential to keep this in mind to answer a broader and
more vital question. Given that cognitive miserliness, with heuristics and
biases, stereotyping, and polarization, is a general and all too human
aspect of us human beings, why would it contribute to a particular polit-
ical phenomenon like populism? In specific proto-democratic contexts,
it contributes to circumstances of economic crises, unemployment, and
the like, very extensively analyzed in the studies concerning the success
of Trump, the Brexit, or the Latin American sociopolitical troubles. The
 Social Epistemic Miserliness 67
typical structure suggested by populist rhetoric is one of a singularly
active leader and very passive “people,” and it goes well with epistemic
miserliness. However, this is a topic requiring a separate paper. The
available literature on populism offers a range of answers that delimit
the everyday context in which epistemic vices of miserliness are relevant
and support populist practices. This chapter is just a brief introduction
to this vast area, and much more work is being done and has yet to be
done on the topic. To sum up, epistemic vices linked to miserly cognitive
processing produce and support the populist caricature of democratic
deliberation, threatening real democracy.

3.5 Conclusion: Populism and the Roles of Social

Epistemic Miserliness
Democratic deliberation essentially depends on the rationality of active
deliberators and the rationality of their audience. We have looked at the
phenomenon that is the most harrowing present-day threat to democracy,
arising from the contemporary world’s proto-democratic framework,
the danger of populism, and populist propaganda. Populists appeal to
their “people,” co-national and co-religious, to advance their political
objective of maintaining or increasing support for the leader. Cassam is
right about stressing the goal or function of the given epistemic-political
movement. See his book Conspiracy Theories (2019: 15).
They usually do it by installing hatred of some specific group, typi-
cally foreigners or elite constituents, thereby developing polarization and
possibly radicalization. We have examined the cognitive-epistemic roots
of the whole process, concentrating on the social role of miserliness of
ordinary human reasoning as the typical vice underlying the populist
program. A virtue-theoretic, or, more precisely, vice-theoretic account of
reason, can enhance our understanding of the phenomenon of populism
and offer some lines of response. We looked at the cognitive-epistemic
ground of the whole process and the role of cognitive miserliness in the
populist efforts’ central features. We started with general cognitive par-
simony, a kind of sloth, unwillingness to engage in reflection that also
points to a dogmatism that might be responsible for blocking the cen-
tral epistemic motivation for democratic deliberation. Suppose we accept
that the average epistemic agent is intellectually vigilant only when inter-
acting with agents they disagree with and non-vigilant with like-minded
peers. In that case, this might be an additional motive for social dog-
matism and its catastrophic political consequences. There might also be
a structural perspective: as sloth is the opposite of curiosity, which is
the central motivating virtue, we might perceive sloth as its opposition,
a central demotivating epistemic vice, and the grounding pillar of the
culture of ignorance. We noted at the beginning that we are here using
the term “miserliness” in the broadest possible sense for all systematic
68 Nenad Miščević
defects of cognitive processing, including “myside bias” in the literature
and the politically crucial biases process stereotyping. We have counted
all these defects as cases of miserliness.
Next, we have sketched the road from general cognitive miserliness
and heuristics and predilections characterizing miserly reasoning,
through specific myside or our-side biases, to stereotyping and polariza-
tion, which can lead to radicalization, catastrophic for any democratic
project. The exact negative contribution of human cognitive weaknesses
to such an anti-populist project requires a clear political framework with
enough democratic potential that then gets abused and “perverted” in
the successful program of populist rule. This insight concludes our dis-
cussion on the harmful component of the critical social epistemology in
this chapter. We started from the “bottom,” from concrete problems bur-
dening a wide range of countries, and tried to sketch a broader, theoret-
ically more affluent picture at a general level; the project thus belongs to
what Wolff describes as the bottom-up or “engaged” philosophy.
The next task awaiting the theoretician is at least as demanding as
accounting for populist success, namely the assignment of identifying
possible remedies. Some of them might be more local. For example, the
anti-Semitic hysteria of Orban’s propaganda could be blocked by the
awareness of the Hungarian belonging of the local Jews (and we could
perhaps stop the anti-Soros propaganda by raising awareness of his con-
tribution to Hungarian cultural, intellectual, and political life). Some
may be more global; for instance, the Marrakesh advice about the refugee
movement suggests strengthening international cooperation and global
partnerships for safe, orderly, and regular migration or providing access
to essential services for migrants. Some significant contributions by the
authors represented in this volume – such as the ones by Ilya Somin and
Robert Talisse, and Jason Brennan in his many works – point in an excit-
ing direction. But the task is enormous, and this is what awaits us soon.

Note
1. See the blog at: https://a-g-i-l.de/the-virus-of-myside-bias-is-spreading-
among-cognitive-elites-interview-with-keith-e-stanovich/

References
Cassam, Q. 2019 Conspiracy Theories. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Cohen J. L. 2019. “Populism and the Politics of Resentment”. Jus Cogens 1: 5–39.
Galston, W. 2018. The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy. Yale: Yale
University Press.
Glück, J. 2019. “Wisdom vs. Populism and Polarization: Learning to Regulate
Our Evolved Intuitions”, in Applying Wisdom to Contemporary World
Problems, Sternberg, R. J.,·Nusbaum, H. C., and Glück, J. (eds.). Cham:
Palgrave Macmillan. 81–110.
 Social Epistemic Miserliness 69
Hannon, M. and De Ridder, J. (eds.) 2021. The Routledge Handbook of Political
Epistemology. London: Routledge.
Kahneman, D. 2012. Thinking Fast and Slow. London and New York: Penguin
Books.
Kellner, D. 2016. American Nightmare Donald Trump, Media Spectacle, and
Authoritarian Populism. Brill: Sense Publishers.
Mercier, H. and Sperber, D. 2017. The Enigma of Reason. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Stangor, C. 2009. “The Study of Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Discrimination
Within Social Psychology: A Quick History of Theory and Research”, in
Handbook of Prejudice, Stereotyping, and Discrimination, Nelson, T. D.
(ed.). Oxfordshire: Psychology Press Taylor & Francis Group.
Stanovich, K. E. 2018. “Miserliness in Human Cognition: The Interaction of
Detection, Override and Mindware”. Thinking & Reasoning, 24(4): 423–444.
Stanovich, K. E. 2021. The Bias That Divides Us: The Science and Politics of
Myside Thinking. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Stanovich, K. E., West, R. F., and Toplak, M. E. 2013. “Myside Bias, Rational
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Stephan W. G., Ybarra, O., and Morrison K. R. 2009. “Intergroup Threat
Theory”, in Handbook of Prejudice, Nelson T. (ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum. 43–59.
Urbinati, N. 2019. “Antiestablishment and the Substitution of the Whole with
One of Its Parts”, in Routledge Handbook of Global Populism, Carlos de la
Torre (ed.). London: Routledge. 77–97.
Wolff, J. 2019. “Method in Philosophy and Public Policy: Applied Philosophy
versus Engaged Philosophy”, in The Routledge Handbook of Ethics and
Public Policy, Lever, A. and Poama, A. (eds.). London: Routledge. 13–24.
4 Critical Thinking and Trusting
Experts in Real-life Democracies
Snježana Prijić Samaržija

4.1 Introduction
As the epistemic justification of democracy did not start as a subject
epistemology has traditionally dealt with, novel debates within political
epistemology and the epistemology of democracy inevitably encounter
conceptual and disciplinary ambiguities. Epistemology has undergone
several genuinely significant expansions of its interests and topics in the
last couple of decades. From standard analytical epistemology preoccu-
pied with defining knowledge and its presuppositions, it first expanded to
discussions about epistemologically pertinent cognitive processes such
as perception, reasoning, memory, and testimony (Audi 1998; Huemer
2006). This expansion was accompanied by the value shift that substi-
tuted truth monism as the only genuine epistemic value with a pluralist
account of epistemic values such as understanding, epistemic achieve-
ments, empirical adequacy, or the reliable usage of available evidence
(Kvanvig 2005). However, the second essential expansion comprised
virtue epistemology, which shifted the target of epistemic evaluations
from the truth and epistemic justifiedness of a particular proposition to
epistemic agents and their intellectual virtues (Greco 2002; Sosa 2007;
Zagzebski 1996). The third and final extension of epistemic topics was
the long-awaited legitimacy of social epistemology, which centered on
epistemological investigations and evaluations of social processes, prac-
tices, and institutions. Social epistemology concerned itself with the epis-
temic features of interpersonal, collective, and institutional procedures
(Goldman 1987, 2010, 2020). This opening brought attention to the inter-
disciplinary area and the relationship between epistemic and political or
ethical virtues. The final pair of extensions denoted epistemology’s final
departure from the starkly defined area of the beliefs held by individ-
ual, isolated, and idealized epistemic agents to a domain of real-world
epistemic practices where the epistemic agent is always and inevitably
situated in distinctive epistemic circumstances. Especially as they imbue
epistemology with an entirely new and desirable element of applicable-
ness or even engagement, we must understand these extensions toward

DOI: 10.4324/9781003311003-6
 Critical Thinking and Trusting Experts in Real-life Democracies 71
regulative epistemology as “(…) a response to perceived [perennial] defi-
ciencies in people’s conduct, and thus is strongly practical and social,
rather than just an interesting challenge for philosophy professors and
smart students. This kind of epistemology aims to change the (social)
world” (Roberts and Wood 2007: 21). This extended epistemological
framework focused on the agency and virtues demonstrated by epistemic
agents who form beliefs and make decisions in suboptimal socially for-
matted epistemic conditions. And this fact about socially determined
nonideal epistemic circumstances where agents acquire, consider, and
revise their opinions and conclusions is the necessary framework for
questioning and resolving the epistemic justification of democracy.
The general attitude long was that democracy is closest to the ideal
conditions for making epistemically valuable decisions, as free and equal
citizens – through fair deliberation, where they engage in independ-
ent and autonomous critical thinking – make decisions that solve their
problems or that are true, correct, truth-sensitive, or truth conducive.1
Democracy’s epistemic legitimacy is founded upon the assumption that
it is an optimal social system precisely because it guarantees equality
in sovereign belief-formation and decision-making by ensuring fairness,
equality, and freedom in making political choices. According to this
argument, democracy is a system that enables us to reap the fruits of col-
lective intelligence (the wisdom of crowds). It thus generates the epistemi-
cally most valuable beliefs and decisions. So, the first step in the epistemic
justification of democracy is the claim that democracy ensures the epis-
temic circumstances for public critical thinking liberated from coercion
to consent to authority opinions or remain docile to political elites. The
second step emphasizes the political, ethical, and ostensibly epistemic
inferiority of the alternative expert-based approach to decision-­making
and the inferiority of individual intelligence to the collective. Large
groups of people are superior at solving problems than individual – or
even gathered – experts, regardless of their factual knowledge and specific
training, as collective public intelligence stems from their random diver-
sity: the natural and disorganized accumulation of perspectives, interpre-
tations, evidence, and experiences. Ostensibly, these features guarantee
more valuable decisions than those garnered by experts in the isolation
of their proficiency in some domains. The deficit of experts’ epistemic
position – individually but also as a collective of experts – is a chronic
and unfixable dearth of diversity or the necessary number of different
perspectives. Experts are limited by the facts of their high education,
comparable material statuses, and belonging to the category of socially
recognized intellectual authorities. In conclusion, regardless of its polit-
ical benefits, the mere epistemic potential of free, critical, and redundant
disagreement constitutes an essential element of the epistemic quality of
democratic decisions (Brennan and Landemore 2022; Landemore 2013,
2020; Peter 2008, 2016). Before introducing the problematic nature of the
72 Snježana Prijić Samaržija
ostensible opposition of the epistemic virtue of critical and free-thinking
compared to the epistemic vice of obedience to experts, it would be wise
to question whether people’s critical and free-thinking is always and in
all social epistemic circumstances virtuous.

4.2 Critical Thinking and the Epistemic Circumstances

of the Culture of Ignorance
As critical thinking and intellectual independence genuinely seem like
an epistemic agent’s epistemic virtues, our inquiry is whether that is
indeed so and whether practicing these virtues is unconditional. Is it pos-
sible that in nonideal conversational contexts, people’s free and critical
thinking frequently does not have the epistemic power it has in idealized
circumstances? Is it possible that factual or existing democratic circum-
stances or real-life democracy (Talisse 2019) are not at the same time
those epistemic circumstances that transform free and critical thinking
into epistemically high-quality decisions?
We do not learn nor cognize in epistemically ideal conditions. As a
rule, epistemic agents are not strongly motivated to seek out facts and
the truth, either out of epistemic immaturity because of which they are
not aware of epistemic norms and values, out of an incorrect under-
standing of what objective epistemic quality and facts are and how they
are achieved, or out of a mere lack of time and socially conditioned
existential conditions that disable such ventures (Goldman 1990, 1991;
Goldman and Cox 1996). We can describe such suboptimal epistemic
circumstances as a state where factual ignorance is not infrequent, as
low levels of informedness and a lack of political knowledge required for
informed decision-making and belief-formation are widespread. Ample
empirical findings corroborate that people lacking knowledge about
political issues form their beliefs without relevant knowledge about the
problem at hand (Achen and Bartels 2016; Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996;
Somin 2015, 2020; Sunstein 2011, 2015). Understandably, most citizens
are unskilled at many pertinent topics that decisions are made about as
they are uneducated in many sophisticated areas. It is equally plausi-
ble to be moved primarily by random information, interests, and back-
ground beliefs. Genuine ignorance or the existence of social epistemic
differences, including prejudices and stereotypes, is not unrecognized in
diversity-based approaches. Still, biases are treated as resources or desir-
able and potent redundant disagreements.
On the other hand, there are scholars unambiguously cognizant of
deficient decision-making stemming from ignorance and biases who
stress that such ignorance and irrationalities possess a rational founda-
tion in the present conditions of democratic voting. The median voter,
aware of the diminutive role of their vote for the final decision and the
fact they cannot alter decisions they dislike, may lack the motivation to
 Critical Thinking and Trusting Experts in Real-life Democracies 73
become adequately informed, meticulously check whether their informa-
tion sources are reliable and coherent, and ponder upon whether their
beliefs and decisions are biases. This phenomenon is called rational igno-
rance, while the indisposition to detect or control one’s biases is charac-
terized as rational irrationality (Caplan 2007; Somin 2015, 2020).
Democracy’s present social moment is commonly reduced to terms
such as the culture of ignorance and the cult of amateurism, concepts
that underline the radical suboptimality of our epistemic conditions,
more broadly known as post-truth.2 However, the term “culture of igno-
rance” refers not only to rational and motivational ignorance (the lack of
motivation to acquire relevant information), and solely to factual igno-
rance, the dearth of knowledge, or even the possession of wrong answers
that are considered correct or whose correctness an agent is apathetic
toward (Nottelmann 2016). The culture of ignorance refers primarily to
ignorance of ignorance, normative ignorance (Peels and Blaauw 2016),
or ignorance’s ideology as the epistemic circumstances where the norms
and standards for deeming something intellectually virtuous agency
have been altered and mutated. We speak of epistemic circumstances
that radically deflate the value of truth or objective epistemic value and,
consequently, display distrust toward expertise or resistance to epistemic
authorities – precisely as their expertise rests upon ostensibly inexistent
accurate epistemic value. The culture of ignorance refers to frequent
practices of confidently autonomous belief-formation about questions
we possess no relevant knowledge of but remain convinced that our
judgments are the only relevant knowledge. Epistemic agents knowingly
rest upon their “accidental” and disorganized knowledge, and pervasive
stereotypes and prejudices are the sole conclusive beliefs justified by the
fact they are theirs, formed in a free-spirited bout of critical thinking.
They deliberately overlook and undervalue rational and responsible
exploration and reflection, followed by an utter misunderstanding of the
vitality of appropriate evidential material during belief-formation and
decision-making: “(…) the culture of ignorance reflects an elevation of
will over reason, the loss of a credible concept of objectivity, and a rad-
ical change in democratic epistemology” (DeNicola 2017: 9). Within the
culture of ignorance, the epistemic value of truth disappears underneath
the epistemic significance of “my own truth” founded on critical thinking
and resistance to all guidance by authorities. We are speaking about the
demand to legitimize a private, personal insight into the “genuine truth,”
which includes the inability to assume epistemic responsibility for one’s
attitudes and the consequences they might entail for others.
Here it is crucial to note that the culture of – both factual and
normative – ignorance is characterized by the fact that their understand-
ing of autonomous and critical thinking is entirely cut off from epistemic
quality related to objective epistemic value or truth-sensitivity and bound
solely to the reality of creating your attitude. In the culture of ignorance,
74 Snježana Prijić Samaržija
critical thinking refers to an ethical, political, and epistemic “right to
believe,” that is, truthfully, each citizen’s right to be heard regardless
of truth, her expertise, and the expertise of other epistemic authori-
ties (DeNicola 2017; Nichols 2017). One of the “culture of ignorance’s”
key constituents is the active cognitive and affective resistance toward
experts’ opinions. This opposition genuinely reflects a self-­protective atti-
tude regarding the right to an uninformed opinion or advocating for your
theories and interests.
The epistemic circumstances I have termed the culture of ignorance
significantly determine the epistemic quality of the collective intelligence,
which affects the attitude that democracy always generates epistemically
valuable decisions or that critical thinking is always a virtue. The pres-
ent epistemic environment is determined by a dearth of informedness
about facts relevant for decision-making and a lack of knowledge about
epistemic standards or norms related to justified or epistemically respon-
sible belief-formation and belief-revision. The epistemic justification of
democracy should not be based upon idealizing or misunderstanding
the severity of how genuinely suboptimal our epistemic environment for
decision-making and belief-formation is. Therefore, autonomous and
critical thinking – which would be an epistemic virtue in ideal or bet-
ter epistemic conditions lacking the culture of ignorance – demonstrates
that it depends on the context where it is practiced.
In the remainder of this chapter, I will attempt to explore two ques-
tions. The first question regards a conceptual clarification of what it
means to think critically. More precisely, I will inquire about what ren-
ders critical thinking an epistemic virtue. The second question is what
aspect of the definition of critical thinking severs it from guidance by
epistemic authorities. The retorts to these questions should help us com-
prehend when critical thinking practiced by free and equal individuals
genuinely is an epistemic virtue and an essential constituent of demo-
cratic decision-making and when it is not.

4.3 Critical Thinking and Intellectual Autonomy

The usage of the term “critical thinking” in philosophy is frequently
related to John Dewey, who defined critical or reflexive thinking as an
active, persistent, and thorough assessment of a belief or an assumed
form of knowledge in the contexts of the available evidential material
supporting the view, but also what the said belief entails and which con-
clusions it can produce (Dewey 1933/1998). Dewey’s clarification of what
is not critical thinking is instructive for our endeavor to understand it:
a brisk acceptance of an idea that might be an answer or a solution to a
question or the automatic suspension of a judgment at the slightest hint
of doubt. Critiques from doctrinaire political or religious ideologues
are not critical thinking just as much as deducing conclusions using an
 Critical Thinking and Trusting Experts in Real-life Democracies 75
algorithm (Dewey 1933/1998). Genuine critical thinking is tightly bound
to the ability to assess reasons, evidence, and arguments as good reason-
ers (Siegel 1988). In recent elaborations, critical thinking also comprises
a “critical spirit,” which includes creativity and imaginative and observa-
tional aspects of cognition (Bailin and Siegel 2003).
More and more frequently, authors link critical thinking to intellectual
virtues and the intellectual character of an epistemic agent to be curious,
open-minded, and attentive (Baehr 2020). Critical thinking is a vital ele-
ment of all intellectual practices that can be described as epistemically
responsible conduct or as “epistemically good mental activity” (Baehr
2020). For instance, love toward knowledge presupposes critical discus-
sions that include meticulous attention to the speaker, articulating sound
judgments, accepting objections, and replying to them. Intellectual firm-
ness presupposes a crucial attitude as a cure against dogmatism and
gullibility. Intellectual courage, vigilance, and humility aim to critically
challenge different kinds of irrationality. In more detail, intellectual
humility is the same as openness toward others’ critical attitudes. Finally,
phronesis is nothing other than inclusive meta-reflection that assesses the
justifiedness and consequences of possible conflicts between intellectual
virtues (Roberts and Wood 2007).
It is interesting to note that, in its generic sense of “good thinking” or a
substrate for every intellectual virtue, critical thinking is often conceptu-
ally bound to epistemic autonomy or independence from another agent’s
guidance. This bind is so sturdy that independence from epistemic
authorities and even resistance toward intellectual regulation is com-
monly considered a crucial characteristic of critical thinking. Critical
thinking – or the autonomous assessment and evaluation of the relevant
evidential material and arguments – is thus contra-posed to the cognitive
strategy of trusting experts and accepting their positions based on their
skill set, as well as the epistemic attitude of skepticism or the cessation
of looking for an answer (Huemer 2005). This feature is evident in mani-
festations of the culture of ignorance, such as recent movements against
vaccination celebrating freedom festivals, conspiracy theories, and an
excessively demeaning attitude toward institutional scientific authorities.
We ought to seek sources of the internal conflict between critical
thinking and credulity in experts precisely in conceptualizing critical
thinking with intellectual autonomy. This tension is why examining the
origins and presumptions included in or hidden by this abstract link is
compelling. I will show that this conceptual connection is not accidental
but dominates within two conflicting epistemological traditions: stand-
ard analytic epistemology and postmodern revisionist epistemology.
Traditional analytic epistemology maintains the assumption of an ideal-
ized epistemic agent who cognizes and acts in non-social epistemic cir-
cumstances (e.g., Alston 1989; BonJour 1998; Gettier 1963; Nozick 1993;
Plantinga 1993). This approach entirely disregards the social dimension
76 Snježana Prijić Samaržija
of cognition. Namely, an epistemic agent practices rational and justi-
fied reasoning based on reliable epistemic dispositions and capacities.
Their almost unlimited cognitive abilities endowed with full access to
relevant evidence always lead to epistemically optimal outcomes. In this
purely normative approach, epistemology has nothing to do with belief-­
formation processes that include social stereotypes, prejudice, and other
invisible and visible derivatives of social power structures. However, we
reason in nonideal epistemic circumstances where epistemic agents have
personal cognitive and affective biases and limitations, which their social
position can often explain. As I have mentioned, critical thinking or rely-
ing solely on your mental powers is nothing like a procedure involving
an idealized epistemic agent and idealized conditions in such a nonideal
and realistic epistemic environment. Conversely, in a nonideal epistemic
environment, knowledge is often trumped by ignorance, and epistemic
agents do not understand epistemic norms and standards and more fre-
quently rely on a self-protective insistence on their attitudes and interests.
The second assumption comes from the opposite clan of postmodern-
ists and social constructivists who maintain a revisionist perspective on
the epistemological tradition and negate the existence of truth or any
other objective epistemic values. Quite the reverse, they endorse the
end of epistemology and traditional epistemic values in favor of merely
describing different conversational practices or practicing sociology of
knowledge (e.g., Barnes and Bloor 1982; Latour and Woolgar 1986; Rorty
1979; Shapin 1994). Suppose there are no epistemic standards or norms
for differentiating the epistemic values of different beliefs. These circum-
stances would render all views equally epistemically valuable, so there
is no need to rely on experts and other epistemic authorities. The sole
epistemic value that remains relevant is a socially critical attitude toward
relationships of domination, and primarily the dominance of experts
as privileged elites or symbols of social power (Foucault 1980). These
presuppositions – (i) the presupposition of the circumstances of knowl-
edge rather than ignorance and (ii) the presumption of the absence of
any objective epistemic value – each bolsters the conceptual link between
critical thinking and intellectual autonomy. In both traditions, for unre-
lated reasons, the ideal of epistemic self-reliance as critical thinking is
counterposed to trust in experts or other epistemic authorities.

4.4 The Social Dimension of Cognition: Analytic

and Postmodern Epistemology
In the following chapter, I will devote more detail to some of the argu-
ments that gave rise to these presuppositions at the root of linking criti-
cal thinking and epistemic autonomy. Plato, Descartes, Locke, and Kant
claimed that the search for truth is closely related to epistemic autonomy
and autonomous exploration, which always stressed the philosophical
 Critical Thinking and Trusting Experts in Real-life Democracies 77
ideal of a self-reliant epistemic agent dependent solely on their intel-
lectual forces (Plato 1973; Descartes 1967/1985; Locke 1690/1975; Kant
1785/1997). Critical thinking is conceptually bound with the endeavor
to assess the available arguments and evidential material autonomously
carefully, instead of mechanically accepting everything from others or
epistemic authorities. Deference to others, including the pertinent expert,
was considered an inferior epistemic procedure deficient in intellectual
weight. Suppose there is an opportunity to make a personal judgment or
become the obedient imitator of somebody else’s attitude. In that case,
it seems evident that the latter represents an excessive example of intel-
lectual weakness, gullibility, epistemic dependence, intellectual laziness,
and incompetence. Moreover, we could even treat it as a morally prob-
lematic act of servility or humbleness.
Here we ought to note that the foundational epistemic reason for
this attitude stems from the mentioned presumption about the ideal-
ized epistemic agent, the theory’s traditional focus on their cognitive
mechanisms, and a general epistemological restraint toward assessing
the social sources of knowledge. We customarily considered trusting
another informer’s testimony less reliable than relying on our obser-
vations. As a rule, other people and their testimonies are less reliable
because there is always the open option of deceit. The said dishonesty
can be either deliberate or accidental; we often cannot gauge the level of
their competence for the transmitted judgments, they possess interests
that might compel them to make us concede to their false attitudes, they
can be capricious or malicious, or they might be burdened by emotional
rationales we are entirely unaware of. These are reasons to question the
trustworthiness of another epistemic agent’s attitudes and testimonies.
Consequently, they are also reasons to prefer the practice of epistemic
autonomy (E. Fricker 2006).
On the other hand, on the side held by postmodern philosophers and
social constructivists, the most prevalent attitude is that the epistemic
ideals of objectivity, truth, and neutrality have no resilient theoretical
basis. Truth is merely a social fabricate and a construct crafted by social
elites rather than an objective epistemic value. This element of the revi-
sionist epistemological presupposition regarding the social construction
of objectivity and the epistemic significance of truth represents a theoret-
ical underpinning for the attitude about the need to rely on your forces
and reject domination by any authority, including experts. If there is no
objective epistemic value, experts lose their statuses of epistemic author-
ity and their beliefs, just like everyone else’s, merely reflect their inter-
ests and socio-political positions. In such cases, the desired ethical and
political egalitarianism entails epistemology. The virtue of autonomy or
relying solely on your reflections thus gains precedence over deference
to experts, primarily due to the repulsion of the idea of being unjustifia-
bly dominated by another person or that we must concede to the beliefs,
78 Snježana Prijić Samaržija
desires, or attitudes of somebody else. This value system is equally true
for our intellectual conduct and views on morals or politics (Foucault
1980, 1991).
Both presuppositions – one about the socially isolated epistemic agent
endowed with immaculate cognitive abilities and the other that there is
no objective epistemic value – are, in a different manner, reflected in con-
temporary debates about the epistemic justification of democracy that
derive epistemic value from just democratic procedures. Given that there
is no objective epistemic value, a collective of sufficiently informed and
independent individuals – although not perfect – will indeed arrive at
the most epistemically valuable belief or decision. Both the assumption
about the wisdom of crowds and Condorcet’s Jury Theorem contain the
idealized attitude that a collective of people bearing different stances will
generate higher epistemic quality than the stances of isolated individuals.
In more recent debates about the epistemology of democracy – especially
in discussions about deliberative democracy, but also about pop-cultural
phenomena such as Wikipedia and opinion surveys – discussants fre-
quently hold that the benefits which citizens lose in the epistemic value
of an individual (expert) belief is compensated through amassing a diver-
sity of dissimilar attitudes (Goodin and Spiekermann 2018). The ethically
and politically valuable inclusion of large collectives and the justifiedness
of not favoring anyone thus emphasize the epistemic value encompassed
by different perspectives and evidential material (Landemore 2020; Peter
2008, 2016). At the same time, the authors assume that fairness and inclu-
sivity will automatically meld into epistemic quality, which cannot be
defined outside the belief-formation procedure and is not objective or
external to the very social process. In short, it is commonly held that it
is a better epistemic choice to practice a crowd’s autonomous (and cog-
nitively biased) critical thinking than concede to expert opinion, as a
collective’s participation and deliberation will yield epistemically higher
quality solutions than an expert’s intellectual guidance.
It appears, then, that the dominant understanding of the nature of crit-
ical thinking as intellectual self-reliance stems both from (i) a shift from
the social dimension of cognition and blindness toward how epistemic
circumstances affect the epistemic quality of decisions and (ii) overstat-
ing that very social dimension, which then negates the objective epis-
temic value of different beliefs. Both approaches lack a more complex
comprehension of cognition’s social dimension, which would accept the
epistemic agent’s social situatedness within specific epistemic circum-
stances but would not reduce the entire value of the cognitive agency to
procedures or power relations.
As an already well-established discipline, social epistemology has
enabled us to take a more precise look at the social dimension of cog-
nition and maintain a position between traditionalism (analytical
epistemology) and reductionism (postmodern nihilistic epistemology)
 Critical Thinking and Trusting Experts in Real-life Democracies 79
(M. Fricker 1998). This more vigilant analysis of the social dimension’s
role in belief-formation unmasked traditional analytical epistemolo-
gy’s ardent focus on the cognitive conditions where an entirely isolated
individual epistemic agent can acquire knowledge. The epistemic agent
is, in fact, not an asocial creature, and social circumstances are not
wholly irrelevant to their belief-formation. While traditional analytic
epistemology deliberately evaded the exploration of epistemic environ-
ments, movements such as postmodernism, the sociology of knowledge,
and cultural studies gained popularity – given their hermetic wording,
quite surprising – in intellectual circles specifically by emphasizing this
deficit in conventional accounts of knowledge. Again, it is precisely
analytical social epistemology – which did not ignore this popular
albeit relevant epistemological trend but embraced it – that allowed
us to comprehend their desire to overthrow epistemology’s normative
dimension, and especially the objective epistemic value of a belief’s
validity in favor of exploring the social conditions of belief-formation
exclusively. Postmodernism’s overwhelming emphasis on knowledge’s
social character led to an unacceptable reduction of opinions on the
social conditions of their construction, demoted the epistemic agent
to a mere function of power relations, and downgraded their beliefs to
sociocultural constructs so that epistemology’s only task was to decon-
struct or analyze these social conditions. Given that both traditions
do not treat the social dimension of knowledge and the impact of epis-
temic circumstances on the quality of beliefs in an appropriate man-
ner, social epistemology’s novel framework invites us to re-evaluate the
conceptual link between critical thinking and intellectual autonomy, or
the attitude that critical thinking is the complete opposite to deference
to experts.

4.5 Critical Thinking and Epistemic Authorities

Is intellectual deference to experts indeed an epistemic vice? I am com-
mencing from, I assume, the universally acceptable presumption that
experts are the best available individual guides to epistemic quality.
Of course, experts do not possess truths. They do not have an objec-
tive and neutral insight into the posed questions, yet they enjoy more
factual and normative knowledge than other epistemic agents. They are
better at tracking truth, detecting erroneous beliefs, solving problems,
or practicing epistemic virtues than the median epistemic agent. Experts
not only possess more (highly specialized) factual knowledge and data
but are also superior at structuring, contextualizing, and applying it.
Moreover, experts are trained to use appropriate and reliable methods
when researching, articulating arguments, resolving difficulties, and fac-
ing alternative solutions (Goldman 2001). In short, compared to other
epistemic agents, they are closer to normative knowledge and farther
80 Snježana Prijić Samaržija
removed from normative ignorance. They are undoubtfully closer to the
side of learning and farther from conceding to ignorance.
Consequently, regardless of the required insights into the epistemic
reach of expert attitudes, it would be genuinely deleterious to question
their general reliability in favor of the mindset that everyone can develop
an equally valuable attitude by merely reflecting upon a given question.3
Conversely, non-experts are, by definition, epistemically dependent on
experts to resolve their problems and aid them in the belief-formation
process. Analyzing the social sources of knowledge has become entirely
legitimate within social epistemology and the epistemology of testimony,
unlike traditional epistemological discussions. Accordingly, while main-
taining all the dilemmas regarding the reliability of accepting other
people’s testimonies, it is a brute fact we are inevitably epistemically
dependent on the testimonies of others, and in particular expert testi-
monies. It is another brute fact that most of our beliefs have been formed
owing to other people and that our epistemic successes rest primarily on
accepting expert opinions. Of course, it is necessary to define the con-
ditions when we should embrace expert testimonies clearly, but merely
rejecting or devaluing them in favor of relying solely on our epistemic
forces would not bring us to truth but a circumstance of utter epistemic
impoverishment (Reid 1785/1983).
Second, experts are, like everyone else, susceptible to value-laden,
ideological, theoretical, and other person presuppositions that can con-
taminate their approach to a specific question. However, they are not
disproportionately more vulnerable to such influences than others. On
the contrary, there are grounds to believe that experts are, due to their
lengthy education, better epistemically equipped to reflect upon and rec-
ognize their limitations and deal with them in the best manner oriented
toward divulging optimal solutions. While the critique of the myth of the
neutral expert is not unfounded, its popularity far exceeds its justifica-
tion. This stance’s broad support is certainly a motive to wonder to what
extent the attitude about biased experts is precisely an attitude founded
on a, perhaps justified, extra-epistemological fear of privileging elites.
However, it is bolstered by the power-hunger of specific perilous anti-­
enlightenment currents instead of the unquestionable value of expertise.
Either way, there does not seem to be a rational epistemic reason for
excluding expert viewpoints.
On the other hand, it becomes vital to make an even more precise dis-
tinction between the political and the epistemic domain when it comes to
the tension between elitism and egalitarianism. While respecting the sen-
timents of injustice and resentment toward being dominated by others, we
need to realize that in the epistemic domain, the plea for egalitarianism
rapidly uncovers itself as intellectually irresponsible epistemic egoism.
Zagzebski has clearly articulated the absurdity of epistemic egalitarian-
ism: “We all admit that some persons have more inherited intelligence
 Critical Thinking and Trusting Experts in Real-life Democracies 81
than others or have honed their intellectual skills to a greater degree than
others, or have greater access to information in some domains, but we
take for granted that these differences are not important for the way epis-
temologists approach epistemological issues, and they are not enough
to ground authority in the domain of belief in an interesting and robust
sense” (Zagzebski 2012: 6).
In other words, there is something epistemically unjustified in the
fact that we are all aware that some of us are better guides to truth but
remain opposed to being dominated by them and prefer to retain per-
sonal beliefs that are likelier to be incorrect. Although it might be a rea-
sonable demand from perspectives external to epistemology in highly
particular circumstances, it is evident that such an epistemic decision
is not intellectually responsible. The sole way to insist on your personal
belief – because it is ours, regardless of how valuable it might be – is to
embrace the epistemically revisionist or even nihilistic attitude that there
are no such things as epistemically better or worse beliefs. Nonetheless,
this assumption is far removed from being both a commonsensical atti-
tude and a matter of coherent and acceptable argumentation. From the
definition of critical thinking, it follows that debasing expertise or expert
knowledge is uncritical thinking.
Finally, it is ill-advised to unconditionally embrace the stance that the
“wisdom of crowds” automatically transforms political value into epis-
temic. An aggregate of a collective’s stances and mere participation that
comprises and assembles a multitude’s dissimilar beliefs does not possess
an inherent feature that would guarantee epistemic quality (Goldman
1991, 1996, 1999, 2010). Aggregating many people’s stances is not an
“invisible hand” that generates an epistemically high-quality belief if
the starting attitudes are not adequately epistemically valuable. There is
much empirical evidence in favor of a specific pessimism regarding the
multitude’s stances precisely due to inadequate informedness, low cogni-
tive capacities, and different motives that might give rise to unacceptable
epistemic stances (Ahlstrom-Vij 2020; Brennan 2020). It has repeatedly
been shown that ignorance entails a forceful meta-perspective. Those
with less knowledge are less critical of their stances, competencies, and
limitations. The capacity to form correct beliefs is disproportional to
epistemic self-confidence and the readiness to revise one’s attitudes when
confronted with different or more complex perspectives (Kruger and
Dunning 1999). Besides, many social limitations – such as the so-called
hegemony of common knowledge – also probe the epistemic quality of
collective discussions. Namely, the individuals partaking in a debate
are likely to form their beliefs independently and regardless of another
agent’s influence based on the same data. Laypersons commonly share the
same information that everyone can comprehend in the circumstances of
ignorance. They are repeated throughout multiple shared debates. They
gain an additional allure and significance they objectively do not possess.
82 Snježana Prijić Samaržija
Finally, this lowest common denominator known and acceptable to all
participants, including experts and non-experts, becomes the conclusive
joint belief or judgment (Prelec, Seung, and McCoy 2017). Such an out-
come is far removed from the epistemic quality we could have attained
in a manner different from mere belief aggregation. In short, “the wis-
dom of crowds” – despite its immense democratic epistemic potential
in idealized circumstances of comprehensive cognitive preparation and
affective disinterest – ought to be evaluated in the light of our actual
epistemic conditions. The wisdom of crowds will possess significant epis-
temic relevance only because all participants already flaunt epistemically
high-quality beliefs, remain open to other epistemically valuable ideas,
and are cognizant of their limitations.
After all, classifying deference to epistemic authorities as an epis-
temic vice is unjustified if we care about epistemic quality in realistic
epistemic circumstances. This resistance toward authorities stems from
an uncritical transition of political and ethical motivations into the epis-
temic domain. We can mark it as political instrumentalism that sacrifices
epistemic values to the political. It is further nourished by the epistemo-
logical limitations of both influential epistemological traditions. Given
the necessity of optimally positing epistemic agency in the social con-
text of factual epistemic circumstances, the remainder of my chapter will
attempt to demonstrate that there is no need to stress the tension between
these two epistemic strategies – critical thinking and deference to experts.
Quite the reverse, I will try to show that trust in experts should not only
be forcefully pitted against critical thinking but that it is a crucial ele-
ment of a proper understanding of it.

4.6 Trusting Experts as Critical Thinking

Epistemic autonomy or reliance on one’s intellectual strengths is a
responsible epistemic agent’s indubitable virtue, but only if they reside
in idealized epistemic circumstances. Practicing intellectual autonomy is
not necessarily a virtue under the assumption of factual, normative, cog-
nitive, and affective ignorance. Epistemic autonomy or reliance on one’s
personal free and critical thinking is purely not an unconditional virtue.
In specific epistemic circumstances, such as our real-life epistemic con-
ditions, it is neither intellectually responsible behavior nor does it lead
to truth. When defined as vigilant, systematic, reason-sensitive, and evi-
dence-based reflection, critical thinking cannot be conceptually linked
to intellectual autonomy and is understood as an unyielding exclusion
of any form of intellectual guidance. While critical thinking includes
intellectual independence, which refers to independent conscientious-
ness, vigilant understanding, questioning, and reflecting upon an issue,
it can sometimes result in the epistemic decision to trust someone we
judge to know more and better than we do. With careful reflection upon
 Critical Thinking and Trusting Experts in Real-life Democracies 83
arguments, reasons, and evidential material, critical thinking does not
necessarily preclude deference to experts. Intellectual autonomy and
thus derived critical thinking have epistemic value solely if they include
the possibility of intellectually autonomously deciding to trust experts.
There can be no epistemically responsible critical thinking founded on
insisting on your attitude, neglecting relevant evidence and reasons, and
repudiating intellectual guidance which can support them. If we know
less about the subject than some experts, our stance cannot possibly pos-
sess the same epistemic quality. It is also not epistemically responsible for
being oblivious to your intellectual deficiencies and accepting the illusion
of personal superiority regardless of comparatively worse knowledge and
education. Quite the reverse, deference to experts who represent epistemic
authorities in each domain is necessary for an epistemically responsible
practice of epistemic autonomy. “(…) Epistemic authority does not refer
only to experts (people who are reliable sources of information in some
domain) but to the more complex situations in which it is a person in
which beliefs (and testimonies) we trust that is better to believe her than
me based on conscientious self-reflection” (Zagzebski 2012: 5)
In short, it seems vital to properly understand the roles of the social
context of epistemic agency and reality-based epistemic circumstances.
It is equally essential to overcome the limitations of the traditionalism of
the conventional analytic approach and postmodernity’s ardent reduc-
tionism, aiming to acquire a more complex and comprehensive view of
epistemic virtues and vices. In this way, we gain a better understanding
of the concept of critical thinking and intellectual autonomy that does
not exclude deference to epistemic authorities. Thus understood, free
and critical thinking can be an unconditional epistemic virtue in con-
temporary epistemic circumstances. Conversely, in opposition to guid-
ance by epistemic leaders, free and critical thinking reveals itself as a
vital constituent of the culture of ignorance. An epistemic justification of
democracy that overlooks the culture of ignorance’s radically suboptimal
epistemic circumstances and that displays a propensity to bar experts’
comparatively superior knowledge from decision-making processes
in favor of collective intelligence rests on an entirely fallacious under-
standing of the virtue of critical thinking. Critical thinking practiced by
free and equal individuals is an epistemic virtue and democratic deci-
sion-making’s essential constituent solely when it is open to the option of
guidance by epistemic authorities.

4.7 Conclusion
A vigilant re-evaluation of the virtue of critical thinking, autonomous
reflection, and epistemic autonomy has shown that we must not define
them as mere reliance on one’s intellectual capacities in opposition to trust
in experts but as a demand for a heightened sensibility to the epistemic
84 Snježana Prijić Samaržija
quality of the resulting beliefs. In reflection, we must not understand
epistemic autonomy as epistemic egoism or egocentrism but as a space of
individual judgment about attaining optimum views. Epistemic deference
to others is not irresponsible if founded on a conscientious assessment of
the belief’s final quality. We do not become less critical, independent,
or autonomous if we decide that deference to experts is justified. We do
not automatically turn more independent or autonomous by refusing to
understand the definition of trust and epistemic dependence on experts.
The essence of epistemic virtue – epistemic responsibility or the search
for truth – is epistemic quality as the highest epistemic achievement, and
not acceptance or non-acceptance to have our epistemic lives regulated
by others, including legitimate epistemic authorities. Finally, we must
keep in mind that the virtues of curiosity and learning are also grounded
on epistemic deference to experts. The rejection of trust in experts shad-
ows any openness to understanding and education. In opposition to the
hyper-individualism of the quasi-solipsism offered by traditional analytic
epistemology and postmodernity’s socio-political determinism or social
fatalism, we must consider the novel idea of “independent dependence.”
An epistemic agent to whom we can ascribe epistemic virtues is a person
who wishes to be appropriately “regulated” by others while remaining an
independent critical thinker and analyst. If critical thinking is an epis-
temic or intellectual virtue, it must incorporate elements of intellectual
deference and humility without slipping into the epistemic vice of irre-
sponsible dependence on others (Roberts and Wood 2007).
As paradoxical as it may sound, the culture of ignorance stems pri-
marily from an understanding of critical thinking as an unconditional
practice of independent reflection or intellectual autonomy. Moreover,
it appears as if it has been solidified that independent thinking that
excludes deference to experts is always an epistemic virtue. In contrast,
trust in experts or epistemic authorities is inevitably an intellectual defi-
cit. It is difficult to imagine both traditional analytic epistemologists
and postmodern thinkers perceiving a public display of the culture of
ignorance as a proper practice of independent reflection and epistemic
autonomy. When they spoke of the need for epistemic independence and
intellectual self-reliance in conflict with authorities, they were undoubt-
fully not thinking about justifying ignorance and neglecting data and
rational discussions or epistemic exchanges. However, it now appears
justified to seek one of the culture of ignorance’s theoretical underpin-
nings – although undoubtedly not the only one, given various political
and social factors – in insisting on each epistemic agent’s unconditional
independence and epistemic autonomy.
To conclude, the epistemic justification of democracy must reveal the
culture of ignorance as comprehensive epistemic circumstances that do
not contribute to the epistemic quality of the decisions generated through
collective intelligence. In addition, we must appropriately comprehend
 Critical Thinking and Trusting Experts in Real-life Democracies 85
the significance of expertise in practicing the virtue of critical thinking.
When epistemically justifying democracy and decisions made employing
democratic deliberation, we must perceive deference to expert knowledge
as a crucial constituent of critical thinking and intellectual autonomy.

Notes
1. In this chapter, I use the concepts of “truth,” “truth-sensitivity,” or a pro-
cedure’s epistemic value of being “truth-conductive” as generic terms that
refer primarily to the attitude there is objective epistemic value or epistemic
quality. It is beyond my current task to discuss truth monism, pluralism,
or epistemic values that comprise justifiedness, rationality, understanding,
coherence with the available evidence, and problem-solving. I will also
refrain from the debate on whether the pluralism of epistemic values jeop-
ardizes the value of truth. It is customary to understand epistemic values
in the sense of epistemic achievements articulated through the traditional
epistemic value of truth (although an epistemic achievement genuinely
comprises a far broader spectrum and includes all the mentioned epistemic
accomplishments). The term “truth” in this chapter relates to the more
comprehensive framework of virtue epistemology, which does not primar-
ily bind truth to a proposition’s feature but to epistemic agency and moti-
vation striving to attain true beliefs.
2. The culture of ignorance’s more common manifestations is various pseu-
doscientific movements, such as those against vaccination and teaching
creationism at schools, conspiracy theories, and climate change deniers.
Likewise, we must acknowledge a budding skepticism towards science with
all the features of a new crisis of enlightenment. Skepticism towards sci-
ence correlates with political ideologies, religious attitudes, moral beliefs,
lifestyles, and fundamental scientific insights. Finally, there are open proc-
lamations of anti-intellectualism, criticisms of “bookish” knowledge, and
repudiations of institutional standards of expertise in favor of glorifying
informal amateurism. Many social circumstances, such as social media,
have contributed to this crisis through the phenomena of informational
epistemic bubbles and more malicious echo chambers (Samaržija 2023).
The culture of resentment towards evidence-based methodologies, which
equalizes veridic and fake reports to guarantee the leveling of every inter-
pretation’s epistemic value, is another paramount constituent of the phe-
nomenon I have termed the culture of ignorance.
3. I must define specific limitations regarding the persons possessing an expert
status. First, not all experts are “real” experts. There are persons in public
positions that ought to be occupied by experts who do not possess the perti-
nent epistemic qualities. Such individuals are not objective but merely repu-
tational experts. Second, an expert is never an expert concerning everything,
as there is no such thing as a universal expert. An expert in one area is always
a layperson in another. Third, the definition of an expert does not entail the
privileged social position of a fundamental authority but exclusively derived
authority based on trust in the area where there are knowledge-based results.
According to our understanding, experts are not a privileged social elite and
should not be conflated with political positions (Prijić-Samaržija 2017, 2018).
However, there is no doubt that non-experts can generally recognize who is
an objective expert in the field, whose expertise is merely reputational, and
who is biased by their elite status, ideology, values, or like (Collins and Evans
2007; Goldman 2001; Guerrero, 2016; Somin 2020).
86 Snježana Prijić Samaržija
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5 The Dangers of Disinformation
Åsa Wikforss

5.1 Introduction
Democracy is in decline worldwide. In its Democracy Report 2022, the
V-Dem Institute concludes that the level of democracy enjoyed by the
average global citizen in 2021 is down to 1989 levels.1 The wave of democ-
ratization that ensued after the fall of the Soviet Union reached its peak
in 2012 and is now down to the lowest levels in over twenty-five years.
In 2021, a record number of nations were moving toward autocracies,
harboring 36% of the world’s population. This includes six of the twenty-­
seven EU member states and three EU neighbors to the East.
It is striking that the period of democratic backsliding, starting around
2010, coincides with the appearance of a new media landscape. The old
ways of distributing information about current events that emerged dur-
ing the 20th century, in step with the development of modern democracy,
have been turned upside down. The new information technology has
caused a severe loss of advertisement revenue for traditional media, which
has led to the death of local journalism in particular. In contrast, count-
less other sources have emerged on the scene, claiming to spread infor-
mation about current events – alternative news sources, public Facebook
pages, blogs, and web pages run by political actors. In addition, some
social media functions as a source of information (as when someone
posts a video from a war scene) and as a distributor of the information
provided by other sources. The result is that the traditional gatekeepers
have been circumvented and that the choice of sources increasingly falls
on the individual, leaving plenty of room for psychological biases, prior
beliefs, and emotions to determine what content we consume. Add to this
the fact that how things spread on social media, where we primarily con-
sume our news, is determined by algorithms designed to feed us content
that keeps us on the platforms. Indeed, it has been suggested that these
algorithms are the new gatekeepers of the flow of information. They are
not designed to prioritize reliable content, as the old gatekeepers were,
but content that keeps social media users engaged.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003311003-7
 The Dangers of Disinformation 91
Whether this striking correlation between the decline of democracy
and the emergence of a new information landscape is one of causation is
a complex empirical question that we cannot determine without extensive
empirical studies. It has been argued that explaining democratic decline
requires appealing to factors such as demographic changes, increas-
ing economic inequality, and failing welfare systems.2 This seems very
plausible, as radical societal changes are rarely the result of one factor
alone, and the harms done by disinformation need to be understood in a
more extensive societal context. However, some scholars further suggest
that focusing on the so-called post-truth era is a mistake. After all, they
argue, what does truth have to do with democracy? In this chapter, I
shall take on this challenge. I shall reflect on the role of truth, or knowl-
edge, in democracy and examine how mis- and disinformation can harm
democracy. I shall argue that there are reasons to take very seriously the
hypothesis that the threats to knowledge resulting from the new media
landscape also threaten democracy. Mis- and disinformation also play a
central role in the ongoing autocratization process.3
The chapter is structured as follows. I begin by addressing the chal-
lenge that knowledge does not have much to do with democracy (Section
5.2) and the related suggestion that there is something profoundly
undemocratic about the very idea of truth (Section 5.3). I then examine
some central harms done by disinformation to democracy. After having
clarified the main concepts of mis- and disinformation (Section 5.4), I
consider two types of injuries: the use of disinformation to influence vot-
ers (Section 5.5) and the role played by disinformation in contributing to
irresolvable disagreements (Section 5.6).

5.2 The Concept of Democracy

“In a post-truth world, there is no democracy.” That is the headline of
an opinion piece published in the Washington Post in 2018.4 The article
is one of many on the same theme following the inauguration of Donald
Trump as president in 2016. The widespread dissemination of disinfor-
mation and Trump’s transience regarding the truth gave cause for con-
cern. There was talk of a truth crisis, and the peculiar term post-truth
was named word of the year by the Oxford English Dictionary in the same
year.5 The word was also defined in a way linked to democracy, reflecting
the prevailing circumstances in which objective facts are less influential
in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.
When French President Emmanuel Macron addressed a joint meeting
of Congress in April 2018, he expressed this concern. Before continuing,
he stressed that we must protect democracy and fight against fake news:
“Without reason, without truth, there is no real democracy – because
democracy is about true choices and rational decisions.”6
92 Åsa Wikforss
As for Trump, we now know what was to come. He disseminated
approximately 30,000 false or misleading statements during his four
years as president. His presidency was characterized by constant attacks
on media outlets that were undesirable to him, judges who ruled against
him, and researchers who published uncomfortable scientific truths.7 The
whole affair ended very much in keeping with the entire presidency with
a lie so big and so harmful that it is uncertain whether American democ-
racy will survive – that during the 2020 election, the Democrats engaged
in widespread electoral fraud. At the same time, the question about the
role of truth in democracy is complicated. Why should reason and truth
be so central to democracy? Indeed, democracy is about the will of the
people.
These questions constitute the starting point of Johan Farkas and
Jannick Schou’s book Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy (2020),
where they stake out their opposition to the perspective on democracy
they believe was expressed by Macron in his address to Congress. The
purpose of their book is to critically examine what they describe as the
dominant narrative around democracy and the post-truth era and to
explore the assumptions that are made vis-à-vis the relationship between
democracy and truth. Among these is the premise that the concepts of
reason, truth, reality, and democracy are essentially interconnected.8
Adherents to this school of thought, they argue, forget that democracy
is about popular government and about giving people political influence
in their day-to-day existence. Farkas and Schou suggest that the criti-
cal thing for a well-functioning democracy is not that it is based on rea-
son and truth but that it enables various groups and political projects to
make themselves heard. Democracy, they write, is about different visions
for how society should be organized, it is about affect, emotions and
feelings.9
Democracy is not just about reason and truth. It is possible to envisage
a “truth state” whose primary purpose is to produce as much knowledge
as possible and to make all decisions based on this knowledge without
necessarily being a democracy. A state of this kind would be an out-and-
out technocracy or quite simply a dictatorship led by an omniscient des-
pot (if there were any in existence). The truth can, therefore, never be
sufficient for democracy precisely because a democratic form of govern-
ment requires widespread influence. If Farkas and Schou object to the
thesis that truth is sufficient for democracy, they are attacking a straw
man.
However, another more interesting assertion is that truth, knowledge,
and reason are necessary for democracy – they are a prerequisite for
democracy to work. This is probably what Macron is getting at when he
says that without truth and reason, we have no democracy.10 To examine
this statement, we must start by further clarifying the concept of democ-
racy. According to Farkas and Schou, the debate around democracy and
 The Dangers of Disinformation 93
truth stems from different perceptions of what characterizes a democ-
racy: it is a contradiction between democracy in the sense of being a
popular government on the one hand and liberal democracy with roots
in the Enlightenment on the other. Looking at research in the field of
political science, we quickly realize that things are more complex than
that. Rather than just two concepts of democracy, there are several, and
they are all based on the idea that democracy is – in some sense – about
popular government.
In its measurements of the development of democracy, the V-Dem
Institute employs five different concepts of democracy. Two of these are
fundamental: electoral democracy and liberal democracy.11 This relates
to democracy as a decision-making process, that is, the opportunity
to influence politics through free and fair elections with universal and
equal suffrage. The concept is based on Robert Dahl’s ideas about the
principle of political equality as lying at the foundation of democracy.12
This principle means that all participants should be regarded as equally
qualified to participate in the political decision-making process, and
respecting it requires that several criteria are met. This includes not
just the requirement for universal and equal suffrage but also what
Dahl refers to as enlightened understanding – that everyone has equal
opportunities to obtain knowledge about relevant alternative policies
and their likely consequences.13 Political equality is an ideal, and few
decision-making processes live up to the ideal in full. Still, for a pro-
cess to be regarded as democratic, it must meet the criteria for political
equality to a high enough degree. In the case of groups the size of a
nation, Dahl argues that this requires many institutions to be in place,
including free and regular elections, freedom of association, freedom
of expression, and freedom of the press.14 V-Dem uses the role of these
institutions in its measurements of electoral democracy conditions in
any given country. For example, they track the degree of state censor-
ship, harassment of journalists, reliability of the electoral system, and
academic freedom.
The second concept of democracy used by V-Dem is the term Farkas
and Schou oppose and frequently appears in the contemporary debate –
that of liberal democracy. Liberal democracy encompasses more free-
doms and rights than electoral democracy, including civil rights such as
freedom from torture, freedom of movement (a liberty many countries
deprived their citizens of during the COVID-19 pandemic), and freedom
from slavery.15 The concept of liberal democracy also incorporates a
functioning rule of law, the absence of corruption in public administra-
tion, legal restrictions on the executive, and so on. According to V-Dem’s
measurements, Sweden has been at the top of the table since the 1970s
regarding both metrics (electoral and liberal democracy). In compari-
son, a country like Hungary recorded a steep rise during the early 1990s
before then seeing an almost equally precipitous fall in the 2010s.16
94 Åsa Wikforss
Taking these two basic concepts of democracy into account, we can
note two things immediately. First, as emphasized by Dahl, there is a
direct link between electoral democracy and knowledge. Dahl argues in
favor of the importance of an enlightened understanding of democracy
by referring to the idea that the point of this form of government is that
it makes it likelier that people get what they want, and this, in turn, pre-
supposes knowledge of various kinds.17 In this way, knowledge becomes
part of the most fundamental dimension of democracy – the opportunity
to influence politics via the ballot box. I shall return to this below when
discussing the harms that mis- and disinformation can inflict on democ-
racy. Second, this makes it clear that the suggestion made by Farkas and
Schou that there is a fundamental contradiction between democracy,
in the sense of being a popular government on the one hand, and liberal
democracy on the other, is misleading in potentially harmful ways. It
means they ignore the concept of electoral democracy and the idea that
majoritarianism without fundamental political rights does not respect
the idea of political equality and is, therefore, not adequately described
as a democratic process. No doubt, a liberal democracy will involve fur-
ther rights that limit the people’s will in protecting minorities. It is a topic
for political debate when and to what extent such limitations are justifi-
able.18 However, a system that involves decision procedures that do not
respect the criteria of political equality, as outlined by Dahl, is not even
an electoral democracy.
The potential harm of simplifying the concept of democracy the way
Farkas and Schou do is illustrated by the neologism of illiberal democracy
employed by autocrats such as Victor Orban. It’s clever rhetorically since
the concept recalls a democracy (which we all like) minus a few things
only liberals believe in. In practice, it is about something completely
­different – about wanting to get rid of the foundations of both electoral
and liberal democracy. What remains is an illusion of democracy where
people go to the polls to cast their votes without the presence of demo-
cratic institutions, as is the case in Hungary. V-Dem’s designation of this
type of society is electoral autocracy.

5.3 Is Truth Undemocratic?

However, Farkas and Schou’s critique of how Macron and others dis-
cuss the post-truth era also seems to have different grounds. They worry
that what is driving these discussions is a problematic view of truth and
knowledge – a view that is undemocratic by its very nature – and they
object to the way that truth is described as being something “out there”;
as something that “is seen as having a necessary, essential and universal
content.”19 Farkas and Schou want to replace this view of truth as objec-
tive with a statement that rejects the idea that there is a truth that tran-
scends geography, epochs, and subjectivities (what they describe as truth
 The Dangers of Disinformation 95
with a capital T). Instead, they stress that historically there have been
many different truths resulting from social and political contradictions.20
This concern is common and is repeated by many (non-philosophers)
involved in the debate around democracy and truth. For example, the
political scientist John Keane warns against unreflective references to
the truth and argues that the real discovery is that there is no objec-
tive truth and that what counts as true varies from place to place.21 He
argues that we must question both truth and post-truth, seeing them
as companions rather than opposing each other. According to Keane,
those who claim we now need more truth and objectivity, including aca-
demics and journalists, fail in this regard and predicate their thinking
on naive understandings of the truth. Democracy is our best defense
against the abuse of power camouflaged as claims to truth and against
the illusion of certainty. Keane argues it should remind us that no truths
are apparent and that what counts as true is a matter of interpretation.
He concludes by saying that democracy assumes no man or woman is
good enough to claim that they know the truth and to control others
permanently.
It is perhaps a bit surprising, from the point of view of philosophy, that
controversial ideas about the nature of knowledge and truth are employed
to argue against the connection between truth and democracy. What is
being opposed is not simply the idea that truth is crucial to democracy
but also a particular outlook on truth and knowledge, a perspective con-
sidered dangerous to a democratic society. The objection is that defend-
ers of the truth (Macron, fact-checking journalists, and researchers such
as myself) have as a point of departure a problematic view of truth and
knowledge that naively assumes that truth is objective, universal, and
timeless. Moreover, it is held this view of truth is not only philosophically
problematic but also fundamentally undemocratic.
Now, it is difficult to determine precisely what concept of truth is being
offered instead of the idea that truth is objective. Indeed, it needs to be
clarified what notion of objectivity one is objecting to. After all, the talk
of truth with a big T could be more illuminating. Let me reflect on what
seems to be driving this type of reasoning. First, there is a mix-up between
truth and certainty. This is basic epistemology. The fact that knowledge
requires truth does not mean that knowledge entails certainty. That is to
say, it is possible to know that p is based on evidence that does not entail
the truth of p but only makes p (sufficiently) probable.22 In the case of
knowledge about our society and the surrounding world, we seldom have
proof, that is, the evidence so compelling that we cannot be mistaken. This
means that we need to be open to the possibility that we are mistaken
(even if the fact that one may be wrong is not in and of itself a reason to
doubt a belief). After all, as the history of science shows, there are plenty
of examples of how we have been wrong in situations where we have had
good but inconclusive evidence. Second, most theories of truth taken
96 Åsa Wikforss
seriously by philosophers (whether correspondence theories, coherence
theories, etc.) accept that truth is an objective property in the following
sense. Whether or not a statement or thought possesses this property is
not up to us.23 For example, the statement “Whales are mammals” was
true even when everyone believed that whales are fish. It is important to
note that this notion of objective truth does not encourage dogmatism.
On the contrary, because the truth is objective and not up to us, we have
every reason to be humble and open to objections – meaning we may be
wrong. On the other hand, if the truth were a subjective ­characteristic – if
the truth were up to me as an individual – I would never have any cause
to be humble and listen to objections.24
Moreover, the feeling that an objective conception of truth would be
undemocratic is based on confusion. Keane puts this feeling into words
when he writes that no person is good enough to claim that she, in par-
ticular, knows the truth and thereby has a permanent right to rule over
others. However, this is mixing up two different things. The fact that
some people are better placed to find out certain truths – for instance,
people who are trained experts in a field of research – means that they
(when they have sufficient evidence) are entitled to claim that they have
knowledge. Their claim would be justified in light of the expertise they
possess and the evidence they present. However, it does not follow that
they are excused from arguing for their position. And this does not mean
they are entitled to rule over others. In a democracy, such a right is not
given by virtue of expertise but by virtue of elections.
In a sense, of course, it is somewhat trifling to say the truth is undemo-
cratic. Precisely because the truth is not up to us, it cannot be determined
by a majority decision. Even if all citizens believed that carbon dioxide
emissions did not cause climate change, it would remain true that those
emissions impact the climate. Keane asserts that the truth assumes a des-
potic nature in politics and concludes that democracy must stand for a
world beyond truth and post-truth.25 The claim that the truth is despotic
comes from Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the totalitarian state. But
she makes a different point – she does not argue that the authoritative
nature of truth makes it incompatible with democracy, but instead that
the despotic nature of truth poses a threat to totalitarian leaders. In her
famous essay Truth and Politics (1967), she writes: “Truth, seen from the
viewpoint of politics, has a despotic character. It is therefore hated by
tyrants, who rightly fear the competition of a coercive force they cannot
monopolize.”26 The fact that truth is something objective, independent
of us and our opinions, means that it represents a threat to all of the
world’s autocrats. They know that if the truth comes out – for instance,
concerning their political actions and consequences – their power will be
under threat. This is why they use all means possible to try and control
what can be controlled: people’s access to the truth. Democracy does not
stand for a world beyond truth, as suggested by Keane, but for a world
 The Dangers of Disinformation 97
where truth has a genuine opportunity to come out and be used as a basis
for political decisions.
Moreover, we should note that the reasoning itself has it backward.
Let’s assume that democracy was incompatible with truth being an objec-
tive characteristic. Does it follow that we should give up on the claim
that truth is objective? Obviously not. If it were the case that democracy
was incompatible with the nature of truth, this would clearly not consti-
tute an argument against a particular theory about the nature of truth.
The philosophical question is not determined by our desires, just as our
desires do not define scientific questions.27
Next, I shall develop the idea that knowledge is essential to electoral
democracy by examining the threats posed by disinformation to democ-
racy. I will start by clarifying the central concept of disinformation.

5.4 What Is Disinformation?

Claire Wardle has compiled a lexicon for the post-truth era, Information
Disorder: The Essential Glossary.28 “Disinformation” is defined as false
information that is intentionally created and disseminated to cause
harm. This definition provides a helpful starting point as it permits us
to distinguish unintentional errors from disinformation. However, the
description is overly narrow. First, disinformation is created and dis-
seminated for various reasons, not just to cause harm. For instance, it
is well known that a large part of the fake news spread in connection
with the US presidential election in 2016 was produced by entrepreneur-
ial teenagers in North Macedonia who found that it was a good way of
making advertisement revenue. Second, disinformation does not always
have explicit content that is false, which is a requirement of Wardle’s defi-
nition. Propagandists throughout the ages have always known that the
best propaganda insidiously mixes truth and falsehoods. The important
(and dangerous) thing about disinformation is that it makes the recipient
believe something false, and it is perfectly possible to do so by telling the
truth.
This may sound strange, but it is a commonplace. An example dis-
cussed in the philosophy of language is how we use assumptions about
communication, such as Grice’s relevance maxims, to implicitly commu-
nicate a false message. If I am asked whether I’m coming to the party
tonight and I reply that I have to work, the implication is clear – I’m not
coming – and if I go to the party, I would rightly be accused of having
misled my interlocutor. Don Fallis (2015) defines disinformation as bet-
ter suited to capturing this, employing the notion of misleading informa-
tion. This information is likely to create false beliefs (but need not do
so). Disinformation is then defined as misleading information that has
the function of misleading someone. This, Fallis stresses, is a nonacciden-
tal feature of disinformation – it is intended or designed to be tricky. It
98 Åsa Wikforss
should be clear that this definition, as Fallis also notes, allows for true
information to be used to disinform, that is, if the true information is
designed to cause false beliefs. Misinformation, then, is simply mislead-
ing information where there is no intention to cause false belief.
A complication in the current information landscape is that disin-
formation is typically spread on social media by people who take it to
be true. Is it still disinformation, then? I believe it is because the con-
tent spread is designed to mislead, even if the user who unintentionally
spreads it cannot be accused of disinforming anyone. To some extent, of
course, this is a mere terminological question. However, I think there are
reasons to stick to this classification. Thus, it has been shown that inten-
tionally deceptive information has some distinctive content features, such
as partisan bias, the use of negative emotions to provoke fear or anger,
low levels of verifiability, long and sensational headlines, and the use of
informal language.29 These are features that explain why disinformation
tends to go viral and potentially harms democracy in ways that misinfor-
mation usually is not. In other words, the category of disinformation, as
defined here, is useful for research.
That true information can be used to disinform is of some importance
when discussing the harms to democracy, since a central propaganda tool
consists precisely of a certain way of disinforming by telling the truth –
what I have previously referred to as the false narrative.30 This is about
cherry picking, which involves making a skewed, misleading selection of
facts, taking them out of context, and communicating an overall false
message. For example, the false narrative is commonly used to under-
mine confidence in the democratic institutions of a country. By opting to
consistently spread nothing but information about everything negative
in the country, about what works poorly, and altogether avoid informing
people about what is good, the message is spread that the country is on
the verge of a breakdown. The individual claims are true, while the over-
all statement is false, which poses serious difficulties regarding standard
fact-checking efforts.31 In Fallis’s sense, this is disinformation since the
information is such that it is probable that it will cause false beliefs in
the recipient and that it is intentionally designed to fulfill this purpose.
And here, too, assumptions of relevance play a role in communicating
the false message since the audience expects the selection of facts to be
relevant to the topic of the communication – the state of society. I shall
return to this type of disinformation below.
We should perhaps stress that propaganda is not only about disin-
formation. At the bottom, propaganda is about manipulation, about
intentional efforts to get us to react and act in ways that suit the sender’s
agenda. This can be achieved by influencing our factual beliefs or manip-
ulating our emotions and desires. And it is typically done without pro-
viding the subject with proper reasons, evidence, and arguments. Marlin
(2013) defines propaganda along these lines: “the organized attempt to
 The Dangers of Disinformation 99
affect belief or action or inculcate attitudes in a large audience in ways
that circumvent an individual’s adequately informed, rational, reflective
judgment.”32 Disinformation, thus, is a tool for propaganda but not the
only one. For instance, in the current era, it has been noted that memes
and jokes are frequently used to promote right-wing perspectives and
radicalize people. In what follows, however, I shall focus on the dangers
of disinformation, particularly regarding voter influence and factual
disagreements.

5.5 Voter Influence

In an electoral democracy, voters have two important tasks: to demand
responsibility from their representatives for policies pursued (a retrospec-
tive task) and to issue a mandate by electing new representatives for the
next period (a forward-looking task). Both tasks require knowledge and
the ability to process political information. To hold politicians account-
able, we must, for instance, know how they have done their jobs, what
they have undertaken, and the consequences of which, but we also need
knowledge about at which political level a decision was made. When it
comes to issuing mandates, there is a body of knowledge that is crucial:
this includes knowledge about which political alternatives are available
to choose from, what the different parties stand for, their outlooks on
society, and how they wish to change it.
Of course, how we vote depends not only on what we believe about the
world but also on what we value, our ideological beliefs, and our emo-
tions. However, how we vote is not independent of what we believe about
the world, so the ideal of the enlightened citizen plays a central role in the
theory of democracy. And if we can influence society’s development in a
way that is in line with our preferences, we must have knowledge about
relevant facts. As Carpini and Keeter (1996), put it, political knowledge
is the currency of citizenship – it allows us to exchange our preferences for
political power.33 And just as with real money, they emphasize, this cur-
rency is unfairly distributed in society. Whether you obtain the required
knowledge depends not only on individual ability but also on how society
is organized, for example, whether everyone has equal opportunities to
receive a good education and access reliable sources of information.
This relates to how disinformation can be used to influence voting
behavior. An example that has received widespread attention in recent
years is the Brexit referendum held in the UK. The journalist Carole
Cadwalladr visited her hometown in Wales to find out why there had been
such a significant vote in favor of Brexit in that area.34 She was confused,
given that in recent years the area had benefitted from a large influx of
EU funding to regenerate a run-down mining community: a new sports
hall, a new bridge, a research center, railway stations, and so on. When
she interviewed local community members, they all referred to one thing
100 Åsa Wikforss
as decisive in guiding their vote. They feared that Turkey was on the cusp
of EU accession and that more than one million immigrants would over-
run the UK. The village was home to almost zero immigrants, but they
were nonetheless worried. The claim that Turkey was on the fast track to
EU membership was false, and Cadwalladr wondered where it had come
from. The answer was Facebook. Using political adverts on Facebook,
the Leave campaign circumvented laws governing how much money can
be spent in an electoral campaign in the UK and customized intention-
ally false messages designed to influence voters. Detailed focus group
work and digital data collection were used to find the right messages to
appeal to voters in low-income areas, such as Cadwalladr’s hometown.
Two messages were selected (both false) that seemed to stick even with
voters who were uninterested in politics: withdrawal from the EU would
deliver an extra £350 million a week to the National Health Service, and
Turkey was about to become an EU member. A total of more than one
billion Facebook adverts were deployed at a meager unit cost.35 An opin-
ion poll carried out shortly before the referendum showed that 47% of
voters believed the claim about the NHS to be true (just 39% believed it
to be false), and in studies carried out after the vote, 20% of voters gave
this as their main reason for voting in favor of Brexit.36
A fateful choice for the UK with incalculable consequences for the
union and Europe as a whole may have been decided based on disinfor-
mation. If it were true that leaving the EU would deliver an extra £350
million to the National Health Service, this would be a reason to vote
against EU membership (one of many reasons, of course, and there may
be more substantial reasons to remain). Still, if the statement is false, it
does not constitute such a reason. The manipulation of voter preferences
is not just an attempt to make it difficult for voters to carry out their civic
duties – it also risks leading to poorer decisions. There is much to say
about what “poorer” means in this context, but a decision made based
on false assumptions will always be worse because it was not made based
on good reasons. If such a decision brings about something good, it is
nothing more than pure good fortune.37
Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 American election have been
well documented.38 They involved a plethora of initiatives. This ranged
from hacking into Hillary Clinton’s emails to spreading disinformation
via fake Facebook accounts and using Facebook groups to organize
demonstrations on controversial issues (such as race, religion, and guns).
The fundamental goal was to deepen divisions in American society and
help secure the election of Trump. At the heart of it all was the Internet
Research Agency based in St Petersburg, a troll farm funded by the
Kremlin, where they worked systematically to produce disinformation.
Personnel based there were set productivity goals. If the number of mes-
sages hostile toward Clinton was not high enough, the staff were subjected
to harsh criticism. In the summer of 2018, Robert Mueller filed charges
 The Dangers of Disinformation 101
against thirteen Russian citizens and three Russian firms, including the
Internet Research Agency, for conspiring against the USA. Russia’s activ-
ities were described in detail in the twenty-nine-page indictment. Among
other things, it was noted that on 27 July 2016, Russian hackers sought
access to Clinton’s email server. Trump had publicly urged them to do
just that on the same day.39
Even those who confine themselves to a very minimalist concept of
democracy ought to be worried about these possibilities of manipulating
the will of the people. One might object that as long as people are able
to vote as they please without any external coercion, everything is fine.
Indeed, it is up to everyone to elect whomever they like, regardless of
what happens to be true. This may sound seductive, but things are more
complicated than that. Suppose that you are trying to persuade me to
come with you to a new bar in Stockholm’s Old Town. I’m not keen, but
you tempt me with the fact it has the best locally brewed beer in the city,
and since I like beer, I come along. Now I do want to visit that bar in
the Old Town. However, it transpires that you lied to me – the venue is a
wine bar without a pint glass in sight. In one sense, I did what I wanted
(you didn’t force me to go there), but in another sense, I didn’t do what I
wanted – you lured me there under false pretenses. My true will is argua-
bly how I would have acted had I owned all the relevant facts.
Admittedly, it is hard to say how I would have acted had you not
deceived me into believing the bar served good beer. Perhaps I would
have come along anyway simply because you were so persistent. In the
same way, it is difficult to say how people would have voted had they been
better informed.40 Political scientists usually emphasize how difficult
it is to answer these hypothetical questions precisely because how we
vote depends on values and emotions. For instance, it would be naive
to believe that if everyone had been in possession of all the facts, then
Trump would have lost massively. But no one denies that what we believe
about society and politics is one of the factors that determine how we
vote, so disinformation can determine elections.41
We should also note that how much disinformation can influence elec-
toral outcomes depends on the electoral system. In this perspective, the
US system is particularly vulnerable, given that the states hand out elec-
tors following the principle of “winner takes it all.” It may be enough
to move a few thousand votes in a (populous) state where the election
is close to determining the presidency.42 Similarly, the effects are more
significant in a referendum where there are two simple options, in or out,
yes or no, and where factual beliefs arguably play a more prominent role
than traditional party loyalties (as seems to have been the case in the
EU referendum). In multi-party, proportional systems of the type that
Sweden exemplifies, where the number of representatives for a party in
parliament reflects the number of votes in the general election, it is harder
to move large parts of the population.
102 Åsa Wikforss
In this context, one should view the dangers of the false narrative men-
tioned above. Unlike individual pieces of fake news, it has the potential
to cause significant shifts in people’s worldviews and determine what
goes on the agenda in public debates in a way that has the potential to
change the voting landscape fundamentally. Indeed, the activities of the
Swedish Populist Party, The Swedish Democrats, provide a good illus-
tration of this. The party has its roots in the neo-Nazi movements from
the 1990s, and for a long time, it was well below the threshold required to
be part of the Swedish Parliament, 4%. This all changed with the growth
of social media and alternative news channels. In 2010, the party made it
across the threshold for the first time (5.7%), and in 2014 it had grown to a
sizable party (12.9%). This growth continued in 2018 (17.53%), and in the
last election, 2022, they became the biggest of the four parties on the con-
servative side of Swedish politics, with 20.5% of the votes. The Swedish
Democrats have systematically used alternative media and social media
to spread the narrative of Sweden as a country in decline. Recently, it was
also exposed that they use tax money to run troll factories, employing
some of Sweden’s most significant political Facebook pages. The method
is simple: by making a highly skewed selection of facts, mainly focused
on crimes committed by immigrants, they have managed to commu-
nicate the overall message that Sweden is a country on the verge of a
system collapse.43 This, it should perhaps be noted, is disinformation,
plain and simple. While Sweden has severe gang violence problems, it is
by no means a country on the verge of collapse. Indeed, a recent study
found that Sweden was one of the most well-functioning countries in the
world.44
The fact-checking site EU vs. Disinfo, which monitors the impact of
Russian disinformation on Europe, has identified many messages of this
kind – what they refer to as meta-narratives with the purpose of disin-
forming. These relate to an overarching message communicated through
text and images that can be adapted to suit different target audiences.
They observe that pro-Russian sources promote five meta-narratives to
attack democratic institutions in the west, spreading mistrust and getting
people to lose faith in democratic processes. Three of these narratives are
familiar features of right-wing populist movements. The first relates to
an evil elite who do not care about the (true) people and who have taken
over power and are now concealing the truth about critical issues such as
migration. The second is about a threat posed to values – about a deca-
dent, morally rotten western world governed by political correctness and
feminism. The third is that the nation faces systemic collapse and civil
war as a result of overly excessive immigration.
The Swedish Democrats had skillfully combined these three narratives
to paint the picture of a fallen society, an imagined golden past before the
elite ruined everything by allowing too many immigrants, and a current
state of crisis with rampant crime and multicultural chaos. The story is
 The Dangers of Disinformation 103
very similar to that communicated by Sputnik, the Russian news agency.
Charlotte Wagnsson, at the Swedish Defense University, describes how
Russia has systematically used “antagonistic narrative strategies” to
weaken Swedish democracy. A central one is the tale of Swedish decline,
which she summarizes as follows:

On the whole, Sputnik continually places Sweden in a declining spiral

with few possibilities for betterment. The narrative is temporally and
factually selective in terms of appropriated events with an apparent
inclination towards the negative to construct the required presenta-
tion of a “Sweden in decline”. The main plot pictures Sweden, once a
prosperous, thriving country with admirable ethical and moral val-
ues, now as a politically shattered weak state, experiencing political
disorder and social chaos, in what can best be described as a state of
failure.45

This false narrative set the agenda for the political debates leading up
to the Swedish Election in September 2022 – the year that the Swedish
Democrats became one of the biggest right-wing populist parties in
Europe.

5.6 Dangerous Disagreements

Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich have characterized our current
era as one of truth decay.46 They define periods of truth decay in terms of
four trends: a blurring of opinion and fact in media, an increasing volume
of personal experience over fact, declining trust in formerly respected
sources of factual information, and increasing disagreement about facts
and interpretation of data. Therefore, what they provide is more valua-
ble than the vague talk of a post-truth society and the sweeping state-
ment that public opinion is driven more by emotions and feelings than
facts. The focus is not on the truth as such but on societal trends that
impact the dissemination of knowledge and the ability to unite around a
common view of basic facts.
The fourth trend, increasing disagreements, is plausibly seen as a result
of the other three and is closely connected with the new high-choice infor-
mation environment. The blurring of opinion and fact in the new media
landscape, the increasing volume of personal experience and anecdotal
evidence on social media, and declining trust in reliable sources of fac-
tual information (combined with unwavering trust in unreliable sources)
will lead to increasing disagreements. Of course, that there are growing
disagreements need not be a sign of trouble. A democratic society is nat-
urally built on the idea that there are disagreements of various kinds, and
it is well equipped to handle these through public debates and political
compromises. It is only if differences of opinion become so extreme and
104 Åsa Wikforss
profound that genuine discussion is no longer possible and compromises
become unthinkable that democracy is in trouble.
When discussing disagreements in democracy, naturally, we need to
distinguish between two types of differences in opinion: dispute relating
to values and disagreement relating to factual beliefs. Disagreement in a
society is not just about facts and interpretation of data, as mentioned
by Kavanagh and Rich, but also about what is worth striving for. In gen-
eral, all political disagreements stem either from a disagreement on facts
or a disagreement on values (or both). Value disagreements are usually
harder to bridge via discussion and argumentation. There is no generally
accepted method for determining the truth of a value statement (if indeed
these can be true at all), and there are no value experts in the sense that
there are scientific experts. This is one of the reasons why the freedoms
and rights in any democratic society are such central pillars. People have
different ideas about what constitutes the good life, and society permits
them to essentially live their lives in the way they choose. This pluralism
represents the core of modern democracy.47 While value disagreements
are unavoidable, they can be accommodated by democracy (that is, as
long as the disagreement is not one about the system as such). Indeed,
this is arguably one of the greatest strengths of democracy: it allows us to
disagree about values in a civilized way and jointly negotiate our future,
find compromises, and live together despite our disagreements. However,
this presupposes that we do not also end up with intractable factual
disagreements. As Hélène Landemore (2013) emphasizes, political disa-
greements are often based on disagreements about the facts. If the latter
type of disagreement becomes too great within a society, then the polit-
ical disagreement risks becoming unmanageable and poor decisions are
made (in the sense that they are based on false factual beliefs).48
Concerning factual issues, disagreement can stem from an uncertain
knowledge base where the evidence is incomplete or contradictory, as in
the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. In such cases, disagreement
is not a sign of a dysfunctional climate of discourse or irrationality. On
the contrary, in such cases, disagreement is a sign of good health, and
debate is absolutely necessary. This is how knowledge emerges, and we
can gradually transition from the uncertain to the well-founded and reli-
able. We must be willing to listen to each other’s arguments and accept
that there is uncertainty and adjust our degree of certainty according
to how strong the evidence is.49 However, when the available evidence
strongly supports a given proposition, when there is a significant expert
agreement, continued factual disagreement will have other sources and
be detrimental to democracy.
Dan Kahan has argued that people today are more polarised on issues
related to socially relevant facts (e.g., gun control or the climate) than on
classic political value issues.50 He speaks of a form of fact polarisation,
characterized as disagreement on factual issues (admitting empirical
 The Dangers of Disinformation 105
evidence) that cannot be bridged with further information, even though
there is a sizeable expert consensus. The relevant facts tend to be policy-­
relevant, for instance, facts having to do with climate change, gun con-
trol, or vaccines. What explains fact polarization? One hypothesis is that
people are knowledge resistant, and they refuse to accept evidence that
contradicts the factual beliefs that have come to be vital to them.51 This is
also Kahan’s hypothesis, referring to what he labels politically motivated
reasoning. Motivated reasoning is a form of reasoning driven by values –
desires – in place of evidence. In somewhat simplified terms, you believe
what you want to believe instead of having reasonable grounds. It is thus
a type of irrationality, and it can affect us all. It is not about deliberately
setting out not to accept facts but the intervention of subconscious psy-
chological mechanisms. When this happens, we use skewed reasoning to
protect the threatened belief at any cost rather than seeking the truth.
For instance, we weigh the evidence for our position as greater than the
evidence against it.52
In terms of politically motivated reasoning, Kahan asserts it is driven
by the desire to protect opinions that have become identity markers for
our ideological groups. In a famous experiment, he demonstrates that
people on both sides of the political spectrum – conservative or liberal –
tend to read tables of data according to their political identities when the
tables concern relevant policy facts. Conservatives tend to get the num-
bers wrong when the table shows that gun control reduces lethal violence,
while liberals similarly muddle their numbers when it shows that gun
control increases deadly violence. Yet both groups perform following
their mathematical skills when engaging with factual issues lacking polit-
ical charge (e.g., whether a particular skin lotion counteracts eczema).
These results, Kahan argues, cannot be explained as a result of science
comprehension deficits since the data show that numeracy skills strength-
ened motivated reasoning rather than protected against it. Consequently,
the underlying cause is motivated reasoning.
Politically motivated reasoning quite clearly represents a challenge to
a democratic society. When people accept factual beliefs based on polit-
ical affiliation instead of evidence, it is no longer possible to bridge disa-
greements using reason and argument. The more factual beliefs become
markers of political identity, the harder this becomes. The upshot is that
factual contentions increasingly behave like value disagreements – they
become intractable and cannot be overcome by appealing to evidence.
In a society where affective polarization is intense, where people regard
the outgroup with animosity and have low feelings of trust toward it, the
danger of politically motivated reasoning increases.53
However, another source of intractable factual disagreements derives
from the new media landscape and the flow of disinformation. How we
assess the evidence we receive always depends on our background knowl-
edge. Moreover, as stressed by Tappin, Pennycook, and Rand (2020),
106 Åsa Wikforss
political identities co-vary with prior beliefs in a politically polarized
media landscape.54 If a person has been fed a large amount of unreliable
information, the background beliefs formed may make it (subjectively)
rational for this person to dismiss available knowledge. The result will be
a form of intractable factual disagreement along the political fault lines.
Attempts to overcome a dispute the usual way, by appealing to evidence
and arguments, will then easily fail, even without either side engaging in
irrational reasoning. After all, given what this person already believes,
the evidence presented can be dismissed as of low evidential value and
can be done so perfectly rationally.55 The polarized and unreliable media
landscape means we increasingly risk ending up with intractable factual
disagreements that Landemore warns against.
Democracy needs to be rooted in a shared reality – otherwise, the
upshot is a form of intractable political disagreement that stymies pub-
lic debate, strengthens affective polarization, and counteracts political
compromises. And when democracy is radically uprooted from a shared
reality, the field of play is left open to democracy’s enemies. In August
2022, president Joseph Biden delivered a warning about the fate of
democracy. As The New York Times reports, Biden underscored deep
rifts in American society that make it an almost ungovernable moment
in the nation’s history: “Not only do Americans diverge sharply over
important issues like abortion, immigration, and the economy, they see
the world in fundamentally different and incompatible ways.”56 There is,
however, one thing that Americans do agree on, that American democ-
racy is in danger. In a Quinnipiac University poll from August 2022, 69%
of Democrats and 69% of Republicans say that democracy is in danger
of collapse.

5.7 Concluding Remarks

I have argued that democracy depends on truth and knowledge and that
there are strong reasons to suspect that the current democratic backslid-
ing results from the radical transformation in the information landscape.
My argument has proceeded in three steps. First, I have argued that there
is an essential link between electoral democracy and knowledge. The
claim that we can disconnect truth and democracy put forth by Farkas
and Schou, among others, is based on a simplistic understanding of the
nature of democracy and ignores the essential role enlightened under-
standing plays in electoral democracy. Second, the suggestion that there
is something undemocratic about the very idea of objective truth is based
on flawed reasoning. Third, to further elucidate the importance of knowl-
edge to electoral democracy, I have examined some of the harms caused
by disinformation to the democratic society. Disinformation is employed
to manipulate voter preferences, tamper with their political power, and
disconnect the collective decision-making procedure of democracy from
 The Dangers of Disinformation 107
the factual knowledge needed to solve societal problems. Moreover,
disinformation causes increasing factual disagreements, resulting in
unmanageable political disputes and increasing affective polarization.
Currently, initiatives are taken in Europe and elsewhere to strengthen
our defenses against disinformation. The challenges are obvious – how
can this be done while preserving the very freedoms that are an essential
part of democracy? Experts disagree on the answer, but one thing can
be said with some certainty: unless something is done about our current,
poisoned information landscape, it will be challenging to stop the dem-
ocratic decline.

Notes
1. V-Dem stands for Varieties of Democracy. They have a unique approach
to measuring democracy, employing “a multidimensional and disaggre-
gated dataset that reflects the complexity of the concept of democracy as a
system of rule that goes beyond the simple presence of elections.” https://­
v-dem.net
2. See, for instance, Eatwell and Goodwin (2018).
3. Parts of Sections 5.2–5.5 are based on my Swedish book, Därför Demokrati.
Om kunskapen och folkstyret (“The Case for Democracy. On Knowledge
and the Rule of the Many”), 2021.
4. Rubin (2018).
5. Steve Tesich first used it in an article in 1992. According to Tesich, the US
media failed to scrutinize the Iran–Contra scandal, which taught politi-
cians that they did not need to care about the truth. A dictator would rub
their hands together in glee, writes Tesich, given that it appears we have
voluntarily decided to live in some sort of post-truth world.
6. Macron (2018).
7. See Kessler et al. (2021).
8. Farkas and Schou (2020, p. 5).
9. Ibid., p. 7.
10. It is the irony of fate that Macron delivered his address at the Capitol,
which barely two years later was stormed by furious crowds fuelled by wild
conspiracy theories and a president who had spread the lie that Democrats
had stolen the 2020 election.
11. The other three are egalitarian democracy, participatory democracy, and deliber-
ative democracy. These are not independent of the first two concepts of democ-
racy, instead describing dimensions of democracy that allow it to work better.
12. Dahl (1989, Chapter 8) and Dahl (1998, Chapter 4).
13. For a discussion of this issue, see Dahl (1989, pp. 163–175).
14. As Dahl stresses, this is not a matter of arbitrarily stating that these ele-
ments feature in a particular definition of democracy that he likes. Instead,
his point is that all these things constitute necessary prerequisites in purely
empirical terms for democracy to exist.
15. Whether it is right to restrict these freedoms under certain conditions, such
as a pandemic, is a complex matter that I will not discuss here. From the
point of view of democracy, the important thing is that such restrictions
have a time limit. V-Dem reports that autocratization was sped up during
the pandemic since authoritarian leaders across the globe used it as an
excuse for permanent restrictions on fundamental freedoms and rights.
108 Åsa Wikforss
16. See V-Dem Country Graph, https://www.v-dem.net/data_analysis/CountryGraph/
17. Dahl (1989, pp. 111–112).
18. Rosenfeld (2019) describes how there has historically been an opposition
between, on the one hand, populist conceptions of democracy, downplay-
ing the role of truth as well as of rights, and more liberal conceptions of
democracy on the other.
19. Farkas and Schou (2020, p. 52).
20. Ibid., p. 9.
21. Keane (2018).
22. This is called a fallibilist conception of knowledge. Although fallibilism is
not undisputed, it has come to be very widely endorsed within epistemology.
23. According to correspondence theories, truth consists of correspondence
or agreement between a statement (a proposition p) and the world. In con-
trast, according to the coherence theory, a statement is true if and only if it
coheres (in a sense to be specified) with the totality of accepted statements.
Although coherence theories are standardly taken to be problematic since
they lead to some form of relativism, making the truth of a statement rel-
ative to different belief systems, it still allows for a distinction between a
person believing that p and p being true – after all, that the belief has the
property of cohering with the more extensive system is not up to the indi-
vidual. Someone like Keane could try to employ a version of the coherence
theory to argue for the claim that for specific belief systems, at a point in
time, the proposition Whales are fish was true. But they would then need
to address well-known philosophical challenges to this type of relativism.
See, for instance, Boghossian (2007).
24. I discuss this further in my book Alternativa Fakta (“Alternative Facts”),
2017, Chapter 2, Fri Tanke förlag.
25. Keane (2018, p. 13).
26. Admittedly, Arendt is also concerned that experts’ factual knowledge may
have an oppressive impact and prevent open debate. There are concerns
about democracies becoming increasingly epistocratic, but it is a bit diffi-
cult to understand that factual knowledge is oppressive in any problematic
way – knowledge should affect the debate. Otherwise, the discussion is not
truth-seeking.
27. The same applies to the question of the objectivity of values. Some political
scientists have argued that democracy is incompatible with value objec-
tivism (see, for example, Lewin 1990). Whether value objectivism is true
does not depend on what we happen to think about its relationship with
democracy.
28. Claire Wardle is a social media expert and one of the founders of First
Draft, a leading non-profit organization researching disinformation and
how to counteract it. See https://firstdraftnews.org
29. See Damstra et al. (2021).
30. See Wikforss (2018).
31. Of course, its proponents are usually more than happy to mix in plenty of
explicitly false statements when it comes to propaganda. The false narra-
tive, therefore, interacts with fake news in a dangerous manner: once you
have swallowed the story about the country’s imminent demise, you are
more receptive to fake news.
32. Malin (2013, p. 12).
33. Delli Carpini and Keeter (1996, pp. 8, 11).
34. Cadwalladr (2020). She also describes her findings in a TED talk that is
well worth watching: Facebook’s Role in Brexit – and the Threat to Democ-
racy, TED 2019.
 The Dangers of Disinformation 109
35. Further details about this are provided in a piece by Dominic Cummings,
one of the most influential strategists in the Leave campaign, where he
describes how they worked to reverse opinions away from Remain, which
had been prevalent ahead of the referendum. For a link to Cummings’ arti-
cle, see Cadwalladr (2020).
36. This example is discussed in Goodin and Spiekermann (2018, p. 339).
37. In 2018, we learned more about the ability to use targeted political messag-
ing and how this had been exploited during the American election in 2016.
It transpired that a data analysis company, Cambridge Analytica, had har-
vested millions of Facebook profiles before the election and built models
of individual American voters that could then be used to design targeted
advertising campaigns. The company was owned by billionaire Robert
Mercer and its Vice President at the time was Donald Trump’s adviser
Steve Bannon. Among other things, they used different types of personal-
ity tests where people consented to collect their data. This made it possible
to tailor political messages to exploit individuals’ disparate vulnerabilities,
fears, and anxieties. See New York Times summary, Cambridge Analytica
and Facebook: The Scandal and the Fallout So Far, Nicholas Confessore,
4 April 2018.
38. See, for example, US Senate (2019).
39. It is not entirely straightforward to determine in quantitative terms what
the consequences of the Russian campaign were on the electoral outcome.
This issue is explored in-depth in the book Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers
and Trolls Helped Elect a President – What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know,
by Kathleen Hall Jamieson (2018). According to her, it is very likely the
Russian attacks decided the election.
40. This issue is discussed in K. Ahlström-Vij (2021).
41. See Arnold (2012) for evidence that voters’ level of knowledge can play a
decisive role in the outcome of elections. Arnold’s study of elections in 27
democracies demonstrates that electoral results would probably have been
different had voters had more politically relevant information.
42. According to Gunther et al. (2018), there is evidence that this is precisely
what happened in the 2016 election.
43. The efforts have been strengthened by international actors who take
an interest in seeing a liberal democracy like Sweden fail. See Rapa-
cioli (2018) and Becker (2019). Rapacioli, the editor of the English-lan-
guage news site The Local in Stockholm, wrote his book after having
noticed that whenever they reported on adverse events in Sweden, it
was suddenly the subject of global spread, but that the same thing did
not happen when reporting on adverse events that occurred in other
countries such as Denmark or the Netherlands. Rapacioli concluded
that this related to a deliberate and politically motivated campaign of
disinformation.
44. See Strömbäck (2022).
45. Wagnsson (2021, p. 244).
46. Kavanagh and Rich (2018). According to Kavanagh and Rich, other peri-
ods of truth decay were during the 1920s and 1930s with the rise of the
new evening press and radio, as well as the 1960s and 1970s, which were
characterized by extensive political propaganda, including in relation to
the Vietnam war. The most recent period is our present-day – the 2010s and
2020s.
47. See Weale (2018).
48. Landemore (2013).
49. See Angner (2020).
110 Åsa Wikforss
50. Kahan et al. (2017, pp. 54–86).
51. For recent research on the topic, see our research program Knowledge
Resistance: Causes, Consequences, and Cures (funded by Riksbankens
Jubileumsfond). See also our joint volume on the subject, Strömbäck et al.
(2022).
52. A few different things can trigger motivated reasoning. It can relate to con-
flicts of interest (you would very much like to believe that wine is good
for you), fears (you would prefer not to stick a needle in your child), or to
worldview (climate deniers often have a more hierarchical worldview as
opposed to egalitarian). For a good overview, see Hornsey and Fielding
(2017).
53. According to recent assessments, affective polarization in the USA has
reached maximum levels, as measured by standard methods (see V-Dem
Democracy Report 2022). Note that here, too, disinformation may play
a role, as when disinformation about the other side, the outgroup, is
prevalent.
54. As Tappin et al. note, there is an essential confound in the paradigmatic
experiments testing for knowledge resistance, as designed by Kahan’s
team. See also Glüer and Wikforss (2022).
55. It may be that, ultimately, there is irrationality in the subject’s information
history, as when she trusts a source, she knows to be unreliable. For a dis-
cussion, see Glüer and Wikforss (2022).
56. Baker and Hounshell (2022).

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Part II

Democratic Optimism
6 The Politics of Resentment
Hope, Mistrust, and Polarization
Alessandra Tanesini

6.1 Introduction
Citizens in several Western democracies have become increasingly polar-
ized (Sunstein, 2009). This phenomenon is exemplified in Britain by the
rancor associated with the Brexit vote and in the USA by angry and
resentful diatribes connected to Trump-style politics. Elsewhere pop-
ulism is also on the rise bringing in its trail acrimonious divisions (Betz,
1993; Eatwell & Goodwin, 2018). Arguably, a distinctive feature of cur-
rent polarized attitudes is their affective character. For instance, Liliana
Mason (2018) has argued that genuine disagreements of opinion are not
now necessarily more pronounced than in the past. In the USA, at least
the average voter of either Democrat or Republican leanings is likely to
hold reasonably centrist views. However, at present, people in opposite
camps dislike and despise each other vehemently. They are, for example,
unlikely to form friendships across these divides (Iyengar et al., 2019).
In this chapter, I explore one aspect of this affectively charged political
climate: “the politics of resentment” (Cramer, 2016; Hochschild, 2016;
Reicher & Ulusahin, 2020). This expression is meant to capture a politi-
cal outlook or perspective shaped by the reactive attitude, or moral emo-
tion, of resentment. Such an outlook is characteristic of those who feel
“left behind” or experience themselves as having become “strangers in
their own land” (Hochschild, 2016). Their resentment is a bitter response
to a perceived loss of status and to apparent (or real) threats to the social
world within which they occupy a position that secures their self-respect.
Those who engage in the politics of resentment fear slipping down the
social ladder, often see their economic conditions deteriorate, and expe-
rience a loss of some entitlements previously conferred to them in virtue
of their dominant ethnic or gender identity.
The chapter has two main aims. The first is to offer an account of the
emotional outlook characteristic of the politics of resentment and to
explain its connection to cruel and wilful hopes. The second is to encour-
age scholars who wish to understand and address some of the main dan-
gers facing Western democratic institutions to focus also on the emotional

DOI: 10.4324/9781003311003-9
116 Alessandra Tanesini
dimension of political life rather than exclusively on its more cognitive
components. Our current problems are not solely or primarily caused by
ignorance, disregard for the truth, and disagreements in belief. Instead,
I argue that the promotion of cruel and wilful hopes is one source of the
corrosion of liberal democratic institutions.1
The chapter consists of five sections. In Section 6.2, I describe the
dynamics of the politics of resentment and present some evidence of its
pervasiveness. In Section 6.3, I briefly explain how the politics of resent-
ment is connected to seemingly paradoxical political behaviors that run
contrary to the economic interests of those who engage in them. These
behaviors are not fully explained by invoking voters’ ignorance caused
by the consumption of partisan and ideological news sources or by vot-
ers’ motivated ignorance that would be a product of cultural identity-­
protective cognition (Kahan et al., 2007). Instead, I show that a complete
analysis rationalizes these seemingly paradoxical behaviors in terms of
political outlooks informed by resentment. The political behaviors that
might seem paradoxical make sense if they are seen as measures designed
to restore one’s social status. In Section 6.4, I explore the metaphor of
standing in a queue while others cut to the front of the line, which cap-
tures the narrative animating the politics of resentment (Hochschild,
2016). I deploy Tajfel and Turner’s (1979) social identity theory to explain
the meaning of this metaphor. In Section 6.5, I show that cruel and wil-
ful hopes are an essential component of the politics of resentment. In
Section 6.6, I conclude by advancing an ameliorative proposal based
on the power of university education to instill hopes and values apt to
reduce defensiveness. I also briefly answer some of the concerns raised
by critics of the politics of hope (Lindroth & Sinevaara-Niskanen, 2019;
Warren, 2015).

6.2 The Politics of Resentment: Polarization and Mistrust

The expression “the politics of resentment” is widely used to refer to
views and sentiments that have been fomented and exploited by nation-
alist and populist politicians in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. This is
a global phenomenon exemplified in the 1990s by the rise of the National
Front in France, the Northern League in Italy, and the Freedom Party in
Austria (Betz, 1993). The same expression has been adopted to describe
the attitudes that have led to Brexit (Eatwell & Goodwin, 2018; Reicher &
Ulusahin, 2020), the rise of the Tea Party, and the subsequent election of
Trump in the USA (Cramer, 2016; Hochschild, 2016), but also the success
of Modi in India and Bolsonaro in Brazil (Eatwell & Goodwin, 2018).2
Whilst there undoubtedly are significant differences between these
cases due to varied economic circumstances, democratic traditions, and
institutions, there are also commonalities. One prominent similarity is
the ability of these parties and movements to capitalize on the resentment
 The Politics of Resentment 117
felt by some sectors of the population toward the government and other
elements of the so-called establishment, but also toward members of dif-
ferent social groups that are perceived as the undeserving beneficiaries
of special treatment. In Italy, for example, the Northern League relies on
the belief widespread among inhabitants of the affluent and industrial-
ized North that their hard-earned cash is stolen when taxes exacted by a
parasite-like state are used to benefit politicians in Rome and citizens liv-
ing in the South (Betz, 1993, p. 418; Ivaldi et al., 2017, p. 365). This belief
is also associated with the conviction that politicians and Southerners
are greedy, or lazy and incompetent, and, therefore, undeserving of
these benefits. Despite some differences, these attitudes are remarkably
similar to those found by Katherine Cramer (2016) in rural Wisconsin.
Cramer’s interviewees do not live in affluent regions, but like Northern
Italians, they self-identify as hard-working and self-reliant people. They
resent their taxes being spent on politicians and workers in the public
sector who, in their view, do not work hard enough to merit their income
and benefits. Their resentment also targets welfare recipients as unde-
serving and lacking grit and determination. This is the same rhetoric,
distinguishing the deserving from the undeserving poor, that features
prominently in the welfare reforms proposed in the UK by the Cameron
government before the Brexit referendum (Hoggett et al., 2013).3
This brief discussion of some expressions of the politics of resentment
highlights three main features. First, those whose politics is infused with
resentment share some social identity that is often geographically and
ethnically circumscribed. This is an identity that, in their view, entitles
them to privileges for which others do not qualify. Hence, for instance,
the moniker of British jobs for British workers deployed to appeal to
Leave supporters before Brexit (cf. Shabi, 2017).4 In some cases, resent-
ful citizens also think of themselves as hard-working, freedom-loving,
and self-reliant (Betz, 1993; Cramer, 2016; Eatwell & Goodwin, 2018;
Hochschild, 2016; Ivaldi et al., 2017). These moral traits would ground
their special entitlements and distinguish them from the undeserving.
Second, these individuals’ political outlooks and understanding pivot
on grievances. They conceive of themselves as the victims of some injus-
tice. This conviction that some wrong has been done to them dominates
their understanding of the current political situation (Cramer, 2016;
Reicher & Ulusahin, 2020). Equally dominant, though, is the affective
tone of their political outlook. This tone is that of the negative moral
emotions of anger and resentment. Both anger and resentment are moral
emotions involving appraisals of situations as circumstances in which
some moral expectations have been violated. The angry (and resentful)
person evaluates her condition as one in which some specific individuals
have wronged or slighted her by depriving her of something she could
legitimately have expected (Martin, 2014, pp. 122–123).5 Anger and resent-
ment are manifested in confrontational behavior directed at the targets of
118 Alessandra Tanesini
resentment singled out as individuals one dislikes, despises, or even hates
because one holds them responsible for the injustice to which one has
allegedly been subjected.6
Third, resentment has two targets. The first are members of the
establishment, including elected representatives and public employees.
The second target comprises members of social groups perceived to
be the underserving beneficiaries of special treatment in welfare, jobs,
and access to education. Often the negative evaluation of these indi-
viduals is based on moral assessments of their characters and belief
systems. Hence, they are perceived as unwilling to work hard enough
or as having views incompatible with Western ideals of freedom and
equality.7
To fully appreciate the connections of the politics of resentment to
affective polarization and distrust of political institutions, however, we
must examine the relationship of anger to resentment. Whilst resent-
ment is closely related to anger, it can also possess undertones of bitter-
ness that anger often lacks. Those whose political outlook is dominated
by resentment are not just angry. They are also embittered because
they think they are being wrongly judged for being angry. They are
frustrated and feel powerless because they experience the moral dis-
approval of the so-called liberal elites as unwarranted and an insult
additional to the initial anger-provoking injury (Walker, 2006, p. 108).8
This experience also gives rise to feelings of being misunderstood, of
having become strangers in one’s own land (Hochschild, 2016). Hence,
the resentment characteristic of a politics based on grievances is asso-
ciated with feelings of powerlessness, alienation, and separation. In
this regard, political anger as a motivation for action is fundamentally
different from political resentment (Cherry, 2021). Anger is compatible
with dialogue, communicative engagement, requests for apologies, and
demands that the wrong or slight be addressed (Tanesini, 2021). But
bitter resentment makes engagement feel pointless and foments hostil-
ity toward those who, in one’s view, have wrongly judged one’s remon-
strances to be unwarranted and against whose judgment one seemingly
has no recourse.
If this is right, the politics of resentment are a component of an unfold-
ing dynamics that lead to affective polarization. The dynamic starts with
a loss of status, entitlements, or benefits (or with fear of such a loss) on the
part of sections of the population that share some social identity such as
ethnicity, religion, gender, or geographical location. This actual or feared
loss is perceived as unfair and thus engenders anger directed toward
those that one holds responsible for the injustice. But socially powerful
constituencies, such as the media, public officials, or other elites, make
it plain that they view one’s complaints as illegitimate and as reflecting
poorly on one’s moral character because they are evidence of bigotry,
sexism, racism, or xenophobia. Further, one sees oneself as powerless in
 The Politics of Resentment 119
the face of these judgments and responds to them with resentment. The
other side perceives the resentment as evidence of the correctness of the
initial assessment and thus responds to the resentment with contempt.
Hilary Clinton’s unfortunate remark describing Trump’s supporters as a
“basket of deplorables” exemplifies these dynamics as it typifies the kind
of moralizing attitude that identifies the other resentful side as deserving
of contempt.9
What starts as anger and moral disapproval – which are emotions that
are consistent with engagement and communication – develops into emo-
tional stances of avoidance. It is possible to be angry with someone and be
prepared to forgive them if they redress the injury that they have caused.
It is also possible to morally disapprove of a person while seeing them as
capable of moral improvement. Bitter resentment is instead incompatible
with engagement. The person who resents in this way thinks there is no
current possibility that the two injustices they have been subjected to
(the initial loss or its threat and the judgment that anger is unwarranted)
are addressed. It is this sense of the finality of the injustices that grounds
the bitterness and the resulting lack of engagement. The contempt expe-
rienced by the other side is also incompatible with engagement. It is a
negative global moral emotion that evaluates someone as being morally
beyond the pale (Bell, 2013). This interlocking of resentment and con-
tempt is what is often described as affective polarization in a society
where different constituencies dislike, despise, or even hate each other
and avoid interacting with each other as much as possible.
The link between the politics of resentment and mistrust of current
democratic institutions runs deep but is complex. On the one hand, those
whose political outlooks are shaped by resentment blame members of the
establishment, including elected representatives and public officials, for
giving unfair advantages to undeserving individuals. They also resent
these same elites for calling them bigoted, xenophobes, or sexists while
depriving them of what they are owed. Therefore, resentful individuals
have lost trust in current liberal democratic institutions, which they per-
ceive as working to further the interests of others who are less deserving
than they are.
On the other hand, those politicians who run the wave of resentment –
be it Bossi, Le Pen, or Trump – always present themselves as democrats.
Whilst this might be a ruse, it is not clear that these politicians are neces-
sarily in favor of authoritarianism. They are, however, not liberals. They
do not see the point of democratic institutions as enabling the peaceful
coexistence of groups of citizens with varied opinions and value systems.
Rather, they think of the role of democratic government as embodying
the will of the people and as offering stability and security. In their view,
democratic institutions should give voice to the opinions and values of
relatively homogeneous settled populations in societies where the flux
of migrants and refugees is severely restricted and within which those
120 Alessandra Tanesini
who are admitted must adopt the values and customs of the host culture
(Eatwell & Goodwin, 2018). It thus would be wrong to assert that pop-
ulism is corrosive of democracy in all its incarnations. Instead, its target
is liberal democracy which it seeks to replace with “illiberal democracy”
(Zakaria, 1997).

6.3 The Paradox of Political Resentment

Often commentators express surprise at the political behaviors of those
whose politics is colored by resentment. In the aftermath of the Brexit
referendum, for example, some journalists were baffled that the constitu-
encies and regions in which the Leave vote was at its strongest were pre-
cisely those that stood out to lose out economically. Thus, for example, a
reporter for The Guardian pointed out that Ebbw Vale, a Welsh town in
the Valleys region which in 2016 was the region with the highest rate of
economic deprivation in the whole of north-western Europe, is “a town
with almost no immigrants that voted to get immigrants out. A town that
has been showered with EU cash that no longer wants to be part of the
EU. [Here,] [t] here’s a sense of injustice that is far greater than the sum of
the facts” (Cadwalladr, 2016). In the article, the reporter also interviews a
resident who appears to justify her vote by expressing the belief that “we
put in [the EU] more money than we get out.”
Whilst it is unclear what the journalist meant when she wrote that the
sense of injustice exceeded the sum of the facts, one is led to two possible
but related interpretations of her words. The inhabitants of Ebbw Vale
felt such a deep sense of injustice at their relative economic deprivation
and loss of status following the closure of heavy industry that they were
easily misled into believing false facts about the EU or that they voted for
change and against the Tory government – because they found the sta-
tus quo unbearable – and rationalized their vote with false claims about
their economic relation to the European Union. Either way, the article is
intended to generate a sense of puzzlement: how could these people vote
in a manner that runs contrary to their interests? They must have been
persuaded by propaganda or, if not, must be blind and wilfully ignorant
of the facts staring at them in the face.
This puzzlement closely resembles that which motivated Arlie
Hochschild (2016) to interview some Louisiana supporters of the Tea Party
whose lives were blighted by pollution but nonetheless opposed environ-
mental regulations. She concluded that these individuals believed they
had a stark choice between good jobs or clean air. They would have liked
clean air, but they preferred jobs. Hence, they voted for candidates who
promised to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency. Hochschild
also shows that the dichotomy between jobs and clean air is false. It is pos-
sible to have both by stimulating other sectors of the economy that have
been displaced by the polluting industries (Hochschild, 2016, pp. 258–260).
 The Politics of Resentment 121
Thus, in Hochschild’s explanation, the Tea Party supporters are good
people who have been, at least partly, misled by politicians.
These explanations for why people living in poverty voted to leave
the European Union and victims of environmental disasters are against
environmental legislation are not wholly without merit. Yet, they fail to
explain the connection between these political behaviors and resentment.
Why would a strong sense of being a victim of injustice make one more
susceptible to propaganda? Why would it make one more likely to ignore
facts pertinent to one’s economic well-being?
Concerning Brexit, at least, there is empirical evidence that voters were
not motivated by a false belief that Brexit would make them or the coun-
try economically better off. On the contrary, a YouGov poll conducted
in 2017 showed that 61% of Leave voters said that even significant dam-
age to the UK economy was a price worth paying to get out of the EU
(Smith, 2017). Whilst Hochschild’s Tea Party supporters might genuinely
believe that they cannot have both jobs and clean air, it is also clear that
their commitment to reducing the size of government is rooted in a belief
in the value of self-reliance and other aspects of their political outlook.
Therefore, we have reasons to suspect that their alleged ignorance cannot
fully explain voters’ seemingly paradoxical political behavior.
Nevertheless, even if these voters are not ignorant of the relevant facts,
there might be a sense in which they choose to ignore them. That is, they
are least very selective about which facts they bring to bear in justifying
their voting behavior. The claim quoted above by the resident of Ebbw
Vale justifying her vote to leave the EU is illuminating and bears repeat-
ing: “we put in [the EU] more money than we get out.” There are at least
two plausible readings of this claim depending on the referent of “we.”
The claim is false when “we” refers to Ebbw Vale or Wales. The claim is
true, though, when “we” refers to the whole of the UK, which before its
exit was a net contributor to the European Union (Office for National
Statistics, 2019). The Guardian journalist appears to have understood
her interviewee as intending the first reading and thus takes her to be
either ignorant or irrational in her anger. But it is equally plausible to
understand her interviewee as making the true claim that the United
Kingdom was a net contributor to the European Union. According to
this interpretation, the Ebbw Vale’s resident implicitly relies on her tem-
porarily salient identification as a United Kingdom citizen rather than
on her more stable identities as Welsh or a resident of the Valleys as a
motivation for her vote.10 Such an interpretation would also chime with
analyses that show that commitment to the sovereignty of the United
Kingdom was one of the motivations of some Leave voters (Eatwell &
Goodwin, 2018, ch. 2).
Still, one might wonder why a resident of an area of Wales with high
rates of economic deprivation would think that the fact that the UK
is a net contributor to the EU is good reason to vote Leave. It is not
122 Alessandra Tanesini
plausible to attribute to her the belief that extra money would come to
Wales as a result. Welsh residents typically think the that UK economy
is lopsided, and most government investments target the affluent South-
East of England (Gray & Barford, 2018; McCann & Ortega-Argilés,
2021). A more plausible interpretation focuses instead on the temporary
salience for this voter of her identification as a UK citizen (additional to
her Welsh identity) in the context of the Brexit vote.
There is good empirical evidence that when people strongly identify
with a social group, especially if that identity is perceived as being
under threat, they evaluate the evidence on identity-relevant topics
in deeply biased ways (Kahan, 2017; Kahan et al., 2007). They are,
for example, strongly motivated to discount evidence that is not con-
gruent with behavior affirming the salient social identity. Thus, since
standing as a proud and independent people is an essential component
of English and British identity, the Leave vote might have been a way
of expressing these identities. It would thus not be surprising if Leave
supporters justified their votes by engaging in reasoning motivated by
the need to affirm their identities as citizens of the United Kingdom,
relying exclusively on evidence that supports expressions of independ-
ence, and ignoring or discounting evidence indicating that leaving
the European Union would be economically damaging.11 Similar atti-
tudes might also explain why supporters of other national populist
parties in Europe usually favor leaving the European Union (Ivaldi
et al., 2017).
I do not doubt that propaganda and motivated reasoning to protect cul-
tural and social identities have played a role in the explanation of Brexit.
They might also partly explain the attitudes of Tea Party supporters. The
latter might be discounting evidence that one can have good jobs and
clean air because their identities as hard-working and self-­reliant people
are invested in supporting unfettered free enterprise.12 These explana-
tions are, however, incomplete. Why would a resident of Ebbw Vale care
about UK sovereignty in the context of Brexit? Why would she wish for
more control to be given to the British Government? After all, Welsh vot-
ers typically feel that Westminster ignores their interests. In addition, the
most prominent members of the Leave campaign were Tory politicians,
while Labour is the vastly dominant political party in Wales, especially
in the South Welsh Valleys.13
There is little doubt that those who felt “left behind” and were resentful
of politicians and migrants largely voted in favor of leaving the European
Union. It is plausible that the rationalizations of their votes exemplify
the patterns characteristic of motivated reasoning. But the appeal to
motivated ignorance is incomplete since it cannot explain the patterns of
social identification that find their expression in Tea Party support and in
some constituencies of the Leave vote. To understand these phenomena,
we must return to the resentment that animates these constituencies.
 The Politics of Resentment 123
6.4 Queue Jumping
I have argued in Section 6.2 that the politics of resentment is initiated by
anger at a perceived injustice that mutates into resentment when indi-
viduals belonging to some powerful social groups appear to dismiss the
initial perception of injustice. I have also begun to explain the nature of
the apparent unfairness in terms of the alleged special treatment afforded
by state agencies to members of some social groups that are perceived as
undeserving by those who are angry because of these government’s ini-
tiatives. In this section, I further investigate the nature of this perceived
initial injustice to understand the outlook that rationalizes welfare pro-
vision for recent migrants or the unemployed and initiatives seemingly
designed to mitigate discrimination against women and people of color
as being unfair.
I am guided in my analysis by a metaphor adopted by Hochschild (2016)
to illustrate the sentiments of the Tea Party supporters, whose alienation
makes them feel as if they are strangers in their own land. This metaphor
is meant to capture the narrative or “deep story” that informs the polit-
ical outlook of her interviewees. It also resonates with the descriptions
used in Britain by those who think of themselves as being “left behind.”
The metaphor represents groups of people standing patiently in line,
waiting for their turn, only to see others (blacks, foreign migrants, refu-
gees) who should be behind them in the queue, cutting in front because of
the government’s assistance. The unfairness that provokes anger is thus
conceptualized as a failure to respect the order in which individuals as
members of social groups should have access to benefits and resources.
That is, the metaphor illustrates a view of society as being stratified by
social groups where members of some groups are entitled to claim some
goods (e.g., housing and jobs) before others who should gain access to
them only once those ahead in the queue have been served. Thus, if recent
migrants secure good jobs, they are perceived as stealing these positions
from long-standing citizens who should have the first pick.
One can invoke different principles to justify the ranking of citizens
according to their entitlement to accessing goods and services before oth-
ers. Some principles, such as prior contribution to the state’s finances
or permanent residence in the country, are, without a doubt, defensible
(Miller, 2016). But other principles, such as giving precedence to men over
women or whites over black and brown people, would be wholly inap-
propriate. I would be astonished, however, if any white man or woman
who experiences the success of some person of color as unfair would ever
explain the perceived unfairness in explicitly racist terms. After all, as I
argued in Section 6.2, their resentment is importantly motivated by their
perception that they are unfairly labeled bigots, sexists, or racists.
Indeed, left-leaning individuals who do not experience the threat
of a loss of status are quick to judge those who do as holding morally
124 Alessandra Tanesini
reprehensible views. In reality, at least some of these claims about lost
but deserved entitlements are, even if perhaps ultimately mistaken, not
unreasonable or bigoted. That said, there is also little doubt that often the
experience of unfairness is justified by relying on false stereotypes about
people who belong to marginalized groups (Fein & Spencer, 1997). These
stereotypes are often myths that supply some appearance of moral legiti-
macy to dominant groups’ sense of entitlement to superiority (Reicher &
Ulusahin, 2020; Tajfel, 2001). For example, a job candidate who resents
the success of a black applicant would not justify their sense of unfair-
ness by claiming that whites should be given preference. But they would
presume that the black candidate got the job not because of their supe-
rior ability or qualifications but because of positive discrimination that
would allow them to cut in front of the line rather than take their place
in the order of merit determined by candidates’ track records and CVs.
According to social identity theory, these patterns of outgroup dis-
paragement and ingroup favoritism, combined with the adoption of
stereotyping to legitimize the status quo, are what we should expect in
situations of social competition. These are circumstances in which social
hierarchies between social groups whose boundaries are impermeable
are widely believed to be unstable and illegitimate (Rubin & Hewstone,
2004; Tajfel & Turner, 1979).14 In these circumstances, the social iden-
tity of members of the dominant group becomes highly salient to them.
This identity is a positive and essential plank of a person’s self-esteem
(Martiny & Rubin, 2016). The desire to preserve this sense of self-worth,
which is perceived as being under threat, leads to the adoption of defen-
sive strategies of identity management (Fein & Spencer, 1997; Jordan
et al., 2005; Rubin & Hewstone, 2004, p. 824). These involve discrimina-
tion and prejudice directed at members of marginalized groups who are
perceived as threatening to replace the previously dominant group.
These features of social identity theory explain some important aspects
of the profiles of the Tea Party supporters interviewed by Hochschild
(2016) and of at least some Leave voters. Contrary to widespread belief,
Leave voters were more commonly found among the affluent and the
older working class who did not think of themselves as struggling to
make ends meet, as well as a smaller group of genuinely economically
deprived individuals, such as some of the inhabitants of the South Wales
Valleys (Swales, 2016). Similarly, many of Hochschild’s interviewees were
white-collar workers with a reasonably comfortable lifestyle that identi-
fied “up” with the wealthy, presumably because of their whiteness, opti-
mism, and enterprise (Hochschild, 2016, p. 217).15 A pattern of upward
identification also partially explains the success of the Leave campaign
among Welsh voters living in poverty. The strategies adopted by Leave
politicians made salient to these voters their dominant identities as UK
native citizens while promoting the perception that such dominance was
under threat (Eatwell & Goodwin, 2018, ch. 2).
 The Politics of Resentment 125
Resentful Tea Party supporters and Leave voters know that they are
not near the top of the social order, but they believe that they share some
of the characteristics of the wealthy and powerful. Some think of them-
selves as self-reliant or hard-working. They are all proud of their national
identities and see themselves as the true representatives of their nations.
Because of their circumstances, these same individuals also know that
their social status could easily slip down. It is because they are under
threat of seeing those who represent the bottom rung of the ladder over-
taking them that they feel first angry and subsequently resentful.16 They
mourn the loss of forms of deference and courtesy that they previously
enjoyed.
To summarize, I have argued in this section that the metaphor of stand-
ing in line only to witness others jump unfairly to the front of the queue
captures the nature of the perceived injustice that causes the initial anger
that mutates into resentment once the individuals who feel victimized are
the targets of moral disapproval. The metaphor is apt because it makes
explicit the hierarchical conception of society at the root of the politics
of resentment. Once we attend to what the metaphor illustrates, we can
appreciate that while some of the ranking principles invoked by those
who feel unfairly demoted are defensible, others are not. Social identity
theory predicts that individuals rely on stereotypes to legitimize prejudi-
cial rankings. The reasons offered by those whose political outlook pivots
on resentment exemplify this pattern.
I hasten to add that these considerations alone do not entail that afflu-
ent liberals are immediately justified in their negative moral judgments
directed at those who are aggrieved. Instead, one is tempted to conclude
that moral disapproval in this instance is hypocritical since were these
liberal-minded citizens to find themselves in a position where their sense
of superiority is threatened, they might also engage in derogatory behav-
ior in the service of self-enhancement. If this is true, they might well lack
the standing required to be entitled to blame others for their shortcom-
ings (Wallace, 2010).

6.5 Cruel, Magic, and Wilful Hopes

Two further aspects of the metaphor of queueing for one’s turn reward
scrutiny. First, the metaphor suggests that what citizens hope to achieve
is not immediately available to them but requires patience. The metaphor
also intimates a kind of competition since even when there is a queue
where everyone is eventually served, some individuals always get what
they want sooner than others. Second, the metaphor also suggests that
one can sustain one’s hope for success by measuring one’s progress in
the queue. Even when one has not been able yet to satisfy their desires,
they can remain optimistic if they are getting closer to the front of the
line. In this section, I argue that to understand why those whose politics
126 Alessandra Tanesini
is colored by resentment think that their situation is aptly described by
the metaphor of going backward within a queue, we need to look at the
nature of the hopes that animate them. These include cruel hopes fos-
tered by an economic system that turns citizens into consumers and wil-
ful hopes promoted by divisive government policies.
Hochschild (2016, pp. 136–137) explicitly connects the metaphor of the
queue with the fulfillment of the so-called American Dream for wealth,
status, and respect. She notes that her interviewees’ anger and resentment
are rooted in the feeling that they are not making any progress toward
fulfilling their hopes. No matter how hard they work, they are no closer
to the front of the line. Instead, they are moving backward because oth-
ers who were once behind them can now be seen ahead.
Many of the aspirations of Hochschild’s interviewees are for the kind of
goods that facilitate a good life. Still, others associated with the dream of
making it are cruel because they trap people into a life of misery (Berlant,
2011). For example, hopes of wealth, fame, and success are obstacles to
the flourishing of those who harbor them. The person whose life plans
are determined by these hopes measures achievement primarily in terms
of promotions, salary raises, and acquiring the newest luxury item. They
work hard to gain these goods. Their hard work creates more highly paid
jobs they do not occupy, wealth they do not have, and material goods
they do not possess. The longer and harder they work, the more goods
become available that they strive to achieve.
Those caught in these dynamics are kept in perpetual misery because
no matter how much they have achieved, there is always something they
lack. Further, even though every promotion or salary rise brings some
immediate pleasure, these individuals are always dissatisfied because
there is invariably another promotion or salary increase that is not within
their grasp. Hence, they never experience themselves as getting closer to
the front of the line where the Dream is fulfilled. On the contrary, they
might feel they are slipping backward despite their hard work if they live
in a society where inequality is increasing. This feeling that their social
standing is being diminished provokes the kind of defensiveness pre-
dicted by social identity theory and expressed by anger and resentment.
Those British citizens who feel they are going backward rather than
forward, no matter how hard they try, often have more prosaic hopes than
their US counterparts. They tend primarily to desire material goods that
facilitate a good life: healthcare, affordable housing, and a decent job.
Hoping for these things is not cruel since these goods promote rather than
obstruct human flourishing. Nevertheless, the way they hope for these
things is being distorted by the divisiveness encouraged by many political
messages. Since 2008, and before the recent pandemic, Conservative and
coalition UK governments introduced austerity measures that have cut
welfare provisions (Poinasamy, 2013). To gain support for these policies,
then Prime Minister David Cameron in 2012 also initiated a sustained
 The Politics of Resentment 127
rhetorical campaign that sought to convince people that many recipients
of the welfare provisions to be cut did not deserve help (Hoggett et al.,
2013). The campaign focused on the claim that hard-working families
should not be worse off than those who were unwilling to work. The strat-
egy was successful as it deflected public attention away from government
actions toward the behavior of people on benefits.17
The success of the government strategy, though, did not directly con-
sist in making people living in poverty believe that the loss in benefits tar-
geted only the undeserving. These same people of modest income were
already distrusting governments and thus likely to be skeptical about the
claims made by politicians. Further, they would have had firsthand expe-
rience of the effects of austerity measures on their prospects and those
of friends and family. Whilst the affluent might have, on the politicians’
saying so, believed in the existence of large numbers of fraudulent ben-
efit claimants, those whose income was supplemented by benefits would
have been more distrusting and less likely to be unaware of the reality on
the ground. Instead, the rhetorical campaign succeeded in gaining the
approval of native British people of modest means for welfare cuts that
harmed them because it supplied these individuals with the discursive
ammunition necessary to cope with the social competition created by
austerity measures combined with social norms proscribing xenophobia,
racism, and sexism. These circumstances made social identities salient
and highlighted the threats to the dominant status of some people who
considered themselves entitled because of their native status and hard
work. This triggering of defensive strategies of identity management
helps to explain the increased stereotyping and derogatory behavior
toward marginalized groups, such as the disabled or recent migrants, that
occurred in the aftermath of Cameron’s rhetorical campaign (Hoggett
et al., 2013, pp. 569–570).
One way of describing some of the effects of the government’s rheto-
ric is as creating the conditions in which some people are put in a posi-
tion where they can only strive to fulfill their legitimate hopes wilfully.
Wilfulness in hoping occurs when one’s aspirations are pursued single-­
mindedly while treating other people as collateral damage or as mere
means to one’s ends (McGeer, 2004). Victoria McGeer (2004, p. 116) links
wilful hoping to fear and an insecure sense of self. In her view, those who,
for whatever reason, are deprived of recognition of their worth as agents
often wholly invest their self-esteem into fulfilling some hoped-for ends.
For this reason, they are prepared to trample over other people’s interests
in the pursuit of these hopes.
Even this brief characterization helps to see the connection between
wilful hoping and the circumstances of those whose political outlook
is colored by resentment. These are citizens whose social groups once
enjoyed public recognition through deference and special privileges.
Subsequent social changes have created situations of social competition
128 Alessandra Tanesini
in which some privileges are widely believed to be morally illegitimate.
In these conditions, members of the once-dominant groups tend to re-­
legitimize their dominance by stereotyping members of marginalized
groups, which are thus portrayed as meriting a subordinate status. We
should understand the divisiveness of UK government policies within
this social psychological context. These policies give some citizens the
moral discursive means required to justify in their own eyes the wil-
ful pursuit of legitimate hopes for good jobs and comfortable housing.
Stereotyping refugees, migrants, black and brown people, or single
mothers legitimizes their treatment as collateral damage in the struggle
to get to the front of the queue.18

6.6 Good Hopes

In this chapter, I offered a diagnosis of some features of polarization,
focusing on its affective character. I indicated that the politics of resent-
ment, fomented by populist politicians in Europe, the USA, and else-
where, have the power to corrode liberal democratic institutions. I
analyzed the nature of this kind of resentment using Hochschild’s (2016)
metaphor of a queue as a guide to explore different aspects of the resent-
ment felt by those who feel alienated and left behind. In the previous sec-
tion, I highlighted another emotive feature of the politics of resentment:
the connection of resentment to bad hoping. Those who are resentful
are experiencing a loss of social status because the dominance of some
of their social identities is now generally believed to be illegitimate. The
resulting real or feared threat to self-esteem triggers ingroup favoritism
and stereotyping of outgroups. These discriminatory behaviors are also
manifest in the way in which people pursue their hopes and aspirations.
When people find themselves in conditions of social competition, their
hoping often becomes wilful and thus harmful to their fellow citizens. In
this section, I conclude this chapter with some brief remarks on amelio-
rative proposals.
In the first instance, it should be possible to make progress toward block-
ing the mutation of anger into resentment if affluent liberal-minded citizens
avoid derogatory expressions of moral disapproval directed toward those
who feel left behind. These expressions are not warranted for at least two
reasons. First, some anger-eliciting circumstances can be reasonably seen
as genuinely unfair. Second, these affluent citizens are sometimes hypocrit-
ical since they would behave in similar ways were they to find themselves
in the situation of their less wealthy counterparts. Here, however, I would
like to propose an ameliorative proposal of a different kind. I suggest that
broadening access to university education can contribute to the reduction
of the politics of resentment.19
Failure to make inroads with people with a university degree is a
common feature of populist movements in the US, UK, and continental
 The Politics of Resentment 129
Europe make. This is especially true of those who have subsequently
developed careers in health, education, welfare, and the creative indus-
tries (Eatwell & Goodwin, 2018, ch. 1). This relation between college edu-
cation and imperviousness to populism and the politics of resentment is
not explained by wealth. Some supporters of populism are affluent, and
many do not think of themselves as struggling financially. It is also not
explained by ignorance and intelligence. There is no reason to believe
that supporters of populism are significantly less informed or able than
their university-educated counterparts. Instead, empirical research
points to socialization into liberal values as the main driver of this signif-
icant difference in outlook (Stubager, 2008). This research suggests that
universities are institutions populated by lecturers with liberal values.
Students learn the same values from their teachers and adopt them partly
out of a motivation to fit in with their social group.20 They retain these
values after they complete their education because values tend to develop
during formative years and remain relatively stable in adulthood.
These same values of tolerance, commitment to justice, and belief in
equality immunize against a tendency to become wilful in the manner of
one’s hoping when facing circumstances of social competition. In other
words, liberal values can scaffold a person’s sense of self-worth, making
one feel more secure (Jenssen & Engesbak, 1994). These considerations
highlight the connection between education and the cultivation of the art of
good hoping (Gross, 2019). Universities are liberal environments that offer
opportunities for frequent endorsement of values of self-­transcendence,
such as benevolence and tolerance.21 The affirmation of these values has
been shown to reduce defensiveness (Critcher & Dunning, 2015; Kim &
McGill, 2018). Hence, if McGeer (2004) is right to trace the genesis of
wilful hoping to insecurity about the worth of the self, then a reduction in
defensiveness should help improve how one pursues one’s hopes.
I would like to conclude by making one concession and briefly answer-
ing an objection. First, I concede that addressing the increasing economic
inequalities in the USA and Europe is a crucial step to ameliorate affective
polarization. Cultivating good hoping by way of being socialized into uni-
versity environments is by itself clearly inadequate to address the issues
that generate the politics of resentment. Second, one might object that the
focus on avoiding defensiveness in conditions of social competition and
reorienting the manner of one’s hoping via socialization in an educational
setting falls right into the trap of the rhetoric of political hope (Lindroth
& Sinevaara-Niskanen, 2019). Focusing on the future fulfillment of hope
would distract from the present need for political action. In response, I
submit that hoping well involves acting rather than waiting. It does not
consist in promising future rewards and incentivizing current passivity.
In addition, by throwing light on those current political circumstances
that encourage citizens to adopt cruel hopes and to pursue their aspi-
rations wilfully, in this chapter, I have offered support for some of the
130 Alessandra Tanesini
claims made by hope skeptics (Warren, 2015). However, recognizing the
damage that bad political hopes can inflict on people should not lead us
to give up on hope but find ways of hoping better.

Notes
1. There are others. These include increased wealth inequalities but also the
creation of some international institutions, such as the World Bank, whose
officials are appointed rather than elected (Eatwell & Goodwin, 2018).
2. As Ivaldi et al. (2017) point out, both left- and right-wing populist move-
ments exist in Europe that tap into the same dynamics of resentment. In
this chapter, I rely on examples that exemplify the populism of the right. I
do not intend to imply that these are the only kind.
3. Several right-wing populist parties in Europe are pro-welfare but wish to
restrict access to benefits to settled populations speaking the national lan-
guage (Eatwell & Goodwin, 2018, ch. 2).
4. It is worth remembering, however, that the slogan was coined much earlier
by Gordon Brown when in 2009, he was the Prime Minister in a Labour
Government and endorsed by left-wing trade unions (Summers, 2009).
5. Resentment and anger are moral emotions because they involve moral
evaluations of situations (Ben-Ze’ev, 2002).
6. Various authors identify the kind of resentment at play in the politics of
resentment as the emotion labeled by Nietzsche as ressentiment. See, for
example, Katsafanas (2022). While there are similarities between ressen-
timent and the feeling involved in the politics of resentment, the vital link
between dominant social identity and resentment is missed when focusing
on ressentiment as a getting even of the weak against the strong.
7. European populists often make this latter claim to justify Islamophobia
(Eatwell & Goodwin, 2018, ch. 2).
8. For an account of bitterness as helpless anger, see Cremaldi and Kwong
(2022).
9. Clinton used the expression she came to regret during a speech at a gala
event (Jacobs, 2016).
10. The inhabitants of the South Wales Valleys strongly identify as Welsh and
as residents of the Valleys (Rutter & Cartier, 2018, pp. 44, 211). In England,
those who voted for Leave also tended to identify more strongly as English
(Swales, 2016, p. 7).
11. For evidence that supporters of Leave and Remain engaged in motivated
reasoning about their perceptions of how the British economy is faring
after Brexit, see Sorace and Hobolt (2020).
12. See Kahan (2013) for evidence that motivated reasoning explains why
Republican voters often deny that anthropogenic climate change is real.
13. That said, the Tory Prime Minister at the time campaigned to remain.
14. Boundaries are impermeable when a person cannot quickly move between
social groups. Racial, nationality, or gender groupings are examples of
impenetrable social groups.
15. Eatwell and Goodwin (2018, ch. 1) also observe that the prominent sup-
porters of right-wing nationalism are not necessarily working class but
belong to the once privileged skilled and semi-skilled workers whose social
status is slipping down.
16. See Baldwin (1998, pp. 218–219) on black people representing the bottom
rung of the social ladder.
 The Politics of Resentment 131
17. It also sparked controversial TV programs such as Channel 4 Benefit
Streets, which ran two series aired in 2014 and 2015.
18. Populism is also successful because it brings new hopes that one’s rightful
place in a progressing queue is restored. One of the roots of its success is its
ability to regain optimism in those who experience the sense of impotence
associated with bitter resentment.
19. Broadening access requires a host of policy initiatives to make university
education affordable to people from every socioeconomic background.
20. This process is not one of indoctrination but, at its best, relies on students’
ability to reflect critically.
21. See Schwartz et al. (2012) for categorizing these as values of self-­
transcendence.

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7 Against the Individual
Virtue Approach in the
Epistemology of Democracy
Marko Luka Zubčić

7.1 The Individual Virtue Approach

Recently, a significant amount of research into the epistemology of
democracy has concentrated on individual epistemic virtues while for-
going the systemic analysis paradigmatically advanced by institutional
epistemology (IE). In part, this trend appears to be rooted in an epis-
temic panic that emerged from inaction to the climate crisis, the prolifer-
ation of misinformation on social media, the election of Donald Trump,
and the Brexit referendum. It is frequently inspired by the (delayed)
apprehension of the epistemic suboptimality of median epistemic agents
derived from empirical research on voters’ lack of information and cog-
nitive biases. The relevant normative projects derived from this focus
vary. The much more theoretically sophisticated strand aims to dis-
tribute individual epistemic virtues in the population – for instance, by
advocating for a political epistemology of overcoming intellectual vices
(Cassam 2019), pursuing epistemic perfectionism by fostering a form of
“epistemic capabilities” in individuals (Talisse 2009), or by cultivating
psychological features conducive to epistemically virtuous social delib-
eration (Tanesini 2021). For some more extreme political epistemologists,
if the citizens will not internalize the proper ethos and become subjects
that philosophers can recognize as epistemically virtuous, there is always
the option to regulate their political and epistemic activity to at least
limit their more dangerous excesses. Contemporary “epistocrats” tend to
choose this route – restricting or downgrading franchises to reduce the
influence of the uninformed and irrational public on political decision-­
making (Brennan 2016).
I will group these works in political epistemology under the Individual
Virtue Approach (IVA) to epistemic democracy and subsume their
diverse articulations under the following central thesis, constituting their
inevitable shared underlying commitment.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003311003-10
136 Marko Luka Zubčić
The IVA Thesis
The epistemic powers of representative electoral democracy, or
any governance system, are constitutively determined by individual
epistemic virtues of citizens and fundamentally eroded by individual
epistemic vices of citizens.

This chapter shows that IVA wrongly models the epistemic reliability
of governance systems and democracy, prescribes epistemically vicious
governance systems, and fails to account for the epistemic deficits of real-
world representative electoral democracies.
I will define democracy as a system of universally inclusive self-­
governance of free and equal persons. I will leave the term deliberately
broad – it thus includes a diversity of possible democratic systems but
most relevantly representative electoral democracy. However, I will refer
to representative electoral democracy, particularly its current governing
families under approximately liberal constitutions and variably open or
captured markets, explicitly as representative electoral democracy (RED).
The plan of the chapter is as follows.
In Section 7.2, I argue that IVA incorrectly models epistemic reliability
in dealing with governance problems. Namely, IVA shows that individually
epistemically virtuous agents are more likely to solve governance problems.
This premise holds whether governance problems are simple or complex
problems can be reliably solved by delegating problem-solving to individ-
ually virtuous agents. By building on research on the division of cogni-
tive labor, New Diversity Theory, and, more broadly, governance studies,
I will show that neither assertion holds under scrutiny. As they are more
frequently referred to in planning and governance studies, simple or tame
problems have repeating constitutive features that can be reliably acted
upon by people with appropriate cognitive history and epistemic character.
However, it is uncontroversial that governance problems are not paradig-
matically tame. If issues are complex, they require diversity to be solved, if
they can even be. Introducing complexity entails introducing constitutive
epistemic agent suboptimality, under which diversity becomes the minimal
condition of the possibility of epistemic success. Diversity, further­more,
constitutively requires individually epistemically vicious agents.
In Section 7.3, I argue that democracy is epistemically justified by
its systemic properties, not individual epistemic virtue. By building on
Elizabeth Anderson’s experimentalism, I argue that epistemic powers of
democracy in IE are a result of systemic features of democracy which
model epistemic reliability in solving complex problems appropriately –
namely, its abilities (1) to harvest unpredictably distributed information
and feedback on policies and (2) to protect diversity in its deliberative
and decision-making bodies (3) under restraint by a constitutional liberal
order. I will refer to this as the systemic account of the epistemic powers
of democracy.
 Against the Individual Virtue Approach 137
Lastly, in Section 7.4, I trace the implications of the epistemic reliabil-
ity in dealing with complex problems for institutional and policy designs
supported by IVA – namely, showing that both the universal distribution
of individual epistemic virtues and the delegation of epistemic labor of
governance to individually epistemically virtuous agents constitutes a
collective epistemic vice – and provide brief remarks on the epistemic
deficiencies of representative electoral democracy, notwithstanding its
comparative epistemic advantage to any system derived from IVA.

7.2 Varieties of Epistemic Reliability in Institutional

Epistemology
IVA implies a wrong model of governance problems and their atten-
dant conditions of epistemic reliability. It follows from IVA Thesis
– the epistemic powers of representative electoral democracy are con-
stitutively determined by individual epistemic virtues of citizens and
fundamentally eroded by individual epistemic vices of citizens – that
the individually epistemically virtuous citizens can or are more likely
to solve governance problems both simple (or “tame,” as I will refer
to them, following conventional governance studies vocabulary) and
complex. Epistemic powers minimally include reliable problem-­solving
abilities – being more likely to give correct answers to questions
(Goldman 1983). Thus, either of the following two propositions must
stand for IVA to hold. First, the proposition that governance problems
are tame problems and, therefore, can be reduced to repeating constitu-
tive features which can be reliably recognized by agents with appropri-
ate individual epistemic virtue and acted upon to solve these problems
reliably – I will call this the Simple Governance Thesis (SG).1 Secondly,
the proposition that when solving complex problems, the best groups
will outperform all other groups – I will call this Problem-Solving a
Tournament Thesis (PT). However, neither of these two propositions
holds under scrutiny.
First, tame problems are the paradigmatic epistemic tasks only agents
with appropriate individual epistemic virtues can solve. Epistemic virtue
broadly denotes a property that renders an individual or a collective more
likely to attain knowledge, while epistemic vice indicates the opposite. In
the most fundamental sense, an epistemically virtuous individual agent
is the one who will pursue the “best-up-to-now” strategy in the search for
knowledge. For this chapter, we could delineate thick and thin individual
epistemic virtue – the former requires both epistemic character (the agent
loves the truth and revises their beliefs following the evidence) and cogni-
tive history (education and history of practice), while the latter requires
cognitive history and minimal epistemic character reducible exclusively
to reliable willingness to derive correct actions from this mental history
when appropriate (in other words, a medical doctor who does not want
138 Marko Luka Zubčić
to help the patient even though they could is not epistemically virtuous
under this conception of thin epistemic virtue).
Tame problems can be reduced to repeating constitutive features, and
solving them is a matter of following the instructions derived from the
historical record of successful solutions. Only agents with the cognitive
history required to recognize the constitutive features and act appropri-
ately can solve the tame problem. An epistemically reliable process for
solving tame problems delegates the epistemic labor to the individually
epistemically virtuous agents. I will refer to this as “simple reliability.”
Notably, as Neil Levy and Mark Alfano have shown in detail, this
account of simple reliability does not require thick virtue. A significant
number of epistemic practices of arguably greatest relevance for human
society, namely, practices of “cumulative culture,” which condition
human adaptation and allow for each inherited behavioral repertoire to
serve as a basis for future innovation, rely on over-imitation, conformist
bias, and prestige bias (Levy and Alfano 2020). Indeed, chimps exhibit
more individual epistemic virtue than humans – they experiment while
imitating to improve the received behavioral model. In contrast, children
imitating adults do not experiment to improve and even resist upgrading
their received models even when shown that specific steps could be dis-
carded. Moreover, humans’ tendency to over-imitate appears to increase
with age. However, it is precisely this individual epistemic vice of humans
that conditions the development of cumulative culture (Levy and Alfano
2020). This account presents simple reliability theorists with a particu-
lar conundrum concerning justification. These individually epistemi-
cally vicious practices appear to be epistemically reliable in a relevant
real-world sense (agents can count on being knowledge-conducive) and
thus can serve as a basis for justification. However, these processes need
not have input beliefs justified by anything else, as they are derived from
this same reliable (but vice-based) process. I will not focus here on this
rather curious finding. For this chapter, it is sufficient to posit that even
in cases in which the problem is such that a member of the group knows
the solution, this need not (and frequently is not) be a result of their open-­
mindedness, curiosity, love of truth, or other thick individual epistemic
virtues. It is, however, a result of thin epistemic virtue – an appropriate
cognitive history acted upon appropriately.
However, governance problems are not paradigmatically tame – the
relevant governance problems cannot be reduced to repeating constitu-
tive features. As has been relatively uncontroversial in policy and plan-
ning studies, each governance problem is unique because it is defined
by specific contingent mutually influencing and potentially unknown
factors unique to a particular social situation. For instance, as Elinor
Ostrom shows, there is no panacea to problems of collective resource
governance – each social situation requires its specific configuration of
rules and mechanisms for policy learning (Ostrom 2005). For instance,
 Against the Individual Virtue Approach 139
the ceteris paribus formulation of an economic law under idealized
assumptions is of limited use for actual financial problems (Gaus 2008).
Furthermore, the implementation of any policy will always encounter
an abundance of unknown and unpredictable variables, which may lead
to considerably worse consequences than the problem which the policy
attempted to solve (Gaus 2016) – indeed, it is the critical feature of gov-
ernance that when it comes to policy, “the real benefits usually are not the
ones we expected, and the real perils are not the ones we feared” (Tanner
1996, 272).
Furthermore, it is impossible to determine a priori which cognitive
history should be favored for recognizing and acting upon the supposed
repeating features of the totality of social and governance problems.
Indeed, it is impossible to determine this a priori for any social and man-
agement problem. What kind of knowledge is required to decide whether
to have a vaccine mandate or how to reduce crime (if we were to consider
these as tame problems)? Knowledge about representatives and legislative
procedures (the “empirical substance of politics”) (Ahlstrom-Vij 2021),
moral, situated, technical, strategic, or scientific knowledge? Accordingly,
it is impossible to determine a priori which evaluative standard should
be used to assess the totality of policies or any given policy – should we
exclusively favor “fairness, efficiency, civic virtue, wealth maximization,
individual responsibility, security” (Gaus 2008, 16)? Crucially, as Rittel
and Webber have shown, some governance problems can be wicked – they
cannot be formulated, cannot be tested. The consequences of the “least
bad” attempts to resolve them cannot be assessed because it is impossible
to determine when the waves of repercussions end and how the effects
are linked in a complex social system. Fundamentally, wicked problems
have no solution which can be recognized as the solution according to the
evaluative standards of all involved (Rittel and Webber 1973). Indeed, the
complexity of governance problems is so apparent to anybody willing to
honestly look at the real social world that the burden of proof is on those
who would claim that governance problems are paradigmatically tame.
The Simple Governance Thesis is wrong.
Second, IVA theorists might agree that, of course, governance prob-
lems are complex. Nevertheless, according to IVA supporters, solving
complex issues should require the delegation of epistemic labor to indi-
vidually epistemically virtuous agents.2 While this proposition might
sound intuitive, it does not hold up under closer epistemological analysis.
When dealing with complex issues with unique and unknown constitu-
tive features, “no action is guaranteed to succeed or fail, and no history
determines an optimal action with certainty” (Mayo-Wilson et al. 2011,
662). In other words, in complex situations, epistemic agents bet. Two
fundamental types of complex problems exist: those with a solution and
those without (Zubčić 2022). In institutional epistemology, the former
is referred to as “learning” problems (Mayo-Wilson et al. 2011). These
140 Marko Luka Zubčić
problems have a globally optimal solution, but one that is unknown to all
agents. However, the reliable process for reaching this solution requires
a diversity of search strategies tested and contested for long enough to
avoid getting stuck at suboptimal lock-ins – if we do not know the answer,
we can find it only if we hedge our bets. Call this “discovery reliability.”
Notice the difference between simple and discovery reliability. In simple
reliability, the solution already exists, and some people have it. The task
of an institutional system (or a collective) is to streamline the input of
those who have the solution. Nobody has the answer to discovery relia-
bility, and the group needs to test and contest different proposals to dis-
cover the solution. The instruction to include diversity thus follows from
the definition of the problem.
Diversity entails protecting investigators pursuing the best-up-to-
now and the currently inferior or random3 strategy (Mayo-Wilson et al.
2011). Collective epistemic virtue in learning problems is thus irreduci-
ble to individual epistemic virtue since individually epistemically virtu-
ous bet only on the best-up-to-now theory, as instructed by their shared
cognitive history (in case of thin epistemic virtue) and epistemic char-
acter (in case of thick epistemic virtue). When the problem is complex,
the epistemic nature and cognitive history of the best are insufficient to
solve it – on the contrary, they render those who share them vulnerable
to getting stuck at the same suboptimal lock-in (Kitcher 1990; Page 2008;
Weisberg and Muldoon 2009; Zollman 2010; Mayo-Wilson et al. 2011;
Smart 2018). Diversity, on the other hand, protects from such lock-ins
precisely as it entails a sufficient difference in the cognitive histories and
epistemic characters among the members of the problem-solving group
for agents not to settle for an inferior theory too soon and, hopefully,
to “unstick” each other from their diverse lock-ins. Note that this does
not mean this will happen, nor does it suggest, as Hong-Page theorem
optimistically models it, that the diverse investigators will build on each
other’s lock-ins – all it means is that diversity makes it possible that they
avoid suboptimal lock-ins.
Critically, for a discovery of a solution to be possible when dealing
with learning problems, the group must include members who have dif-
ferent cognitive histories and epistemic characters – and, thus, individu-
ally epistemically vicious agents. Research in the division of mental labor
and, broadly, collective search tasks provide ample evidence that when
the epistemic landscapes have multiple local optima and a single global
optimum, as they do in cases of learning problems (as opposed to exclu-
sively single global optimum, which defines the tame problems), indi-
vidual uninformedness, dogmatism, laziness, biases, and other forms
of apparent individual vices contribute to the epistemic success of the
group. These individual epistemic vices protect the group from locking
in too soon on chance successes of a flawed theory and allow agents to
test and contest different solutions (including sufficiently challenging the
 Against the Individual Virtue Approach 141
best-up-to-now strategy) and explore diverse and distant strategies in
the search for knowledge – more precisely, these individual vices are a
function of diversity (Kitcher 1990; Zollman 2010; Mercier and Sperber
2011; Smart 2018; Levy and Alfano 2020). Indeed, individual epistemic
vices are mere normative diversity4 – the vicious agents search the land-
scape under a different set of rules than the individualist epistemologist
prescribes.
Note here that this does not entail some caricature view that all individ-
ual epistemic vices in all situations are collectively epistemically beneficial,
nor that all individual epistemic virtues are collectively epistemically detri-
mental. Quite the opposite, it entails that in solving learning problems, both
can entail either positive or negative consequences. An a priori determina-
tion of the best distribution of virtues and vices across the totality of situa-
tions is impossible. Crucially, improving on any given individual epistemic
virtue does not increase the epistemic power of a population or a system.
Without diversity, agents may find the global optimum because they
are lucky. This outcome, however, only further strengthens the case for
diversity as the minimal condition of epistemic reliability in learning
problems – as both John Stuart Mill and Miranda Fricker, most promi-
nently, argued, if free and open disagreement is not protected, true prop-
ositions cannot be justified, and thus cannot become knowledge (Mill
2015; Fricker 2015; see also Kelly 2006). Therefore, if we follow only the
best-up-to-now strategy in learning problems, even if it shows to be cor-
rect, this is a case of blind epistemic luck and not of a reliable process.
Nevertheless, in learning problems, the diversity is transient (Zollman
2010) – it collapses into a single strategy when the global optimum, the
actual solution, is found. This characteristic also requires at least an over-
lap in evaluative standards (or at least some of their relevant demands)
of otherwise diverse investigators – they can all agree on the global peak
once it is found. Learning problems may then become tame problems – if
the group discovers the solution, they might also discover the constitutive
features. Scientific issues, once solved, can become technical problems.
This further points to a relevant addition to simple reliability, namely,
that it is conditioned on discovery reliability – if the group reduces the
diversity too soon and mistakes a suboptimal lock-in for a solution, they
will continue to use the same flawed strategy to solve future problems
with constitutive features they recognize as similar or identical.
However, learning problems in governance rarely (or never) become
tame because the constitutive features of social, political, and economic
difficulties rarely (or never) have repeating elements.5 Moreover, it is sel-
dom evident when the learning problem is solved in actual governance.
Indeed, as I will expand on in the next section, and as Elizabeth Anderson
rightly emphasizes, therefore feedback mechanisms and protection of
disagreement after the decision has been made are fundamental to the
epistemic powers of democracy – they allow for the item to return to the
142 Marko Luka Zubčić
agenda if the population signals that the problem persists, or the solution
is suboptimal.
In complex problems, all agents are epistemically suboptimal – their
knowledge and character are insufficient to solve the problem. Thus,
IE analysis assumes what many IVA theorists have recently discovered.
Diversity does not guarantee they will find the solution because no pro-
cess can ensure that a group of epistemically suboptimal agents will solve
a problem. It does, however, make it possible.
The situation complicates further when dealing with complex prob-
lems that do not have a solution – wicked problems. In both learning and
wicked problems, the critical comparative standard of epistemic relia-
bility is how able the system is at avoiding error. In learning problems,
the iteration of this negative reliability constitutes positive reliability –
­conditions that make it possible to prevent error with time leading to
truth. In wicked problems, however, only negative reliability is possible.
Wicked problems can be best described in “complex evaluative spaces”
(CES). Gerald Gaus and Fred D’Agostino’s work in New Diversity
Theory argues for the distinct epistemic value of free diversity for this
type of problem space (D’Agostino 2009; Gaus 2016, 2018). This approach
describes the epistemic situation through modeling the search for “peaks”
in a “landscape.” CES is defined by “rugged landscapes” in which peaks
are scattered randomly, meaning that the closeness of points in the land-
scape does not account for the similarity in their epistemic value. In other
words, the landscape is not “smooth” because the agents are searching
for a solution to keep going to arrive at the peak. CES is also defined by
deep evaluative pluralism, meaning that an object in a domain may be
assessed according to a plurality of evaluative standards, which are inter-
dependent “in the sense that modifying an object in a way which changes
its value against one standard may also change its value against another
standard” (D’Agostino 2009, 104). Thus, no object version can score the
highest according to all evaluative standards. How should boundedly
rational agents search such landscapes? “Myopic” search – for instance,
all agents following exclusively best-up-to-now theory – will get locked in
at a suboptimal peak. “Exhaustive” search – searching the entire land-
scape – is inefficient. We might decompose the object into sub-objects,
problem to sub-problems, and assign a team to work with those search
routines, looking for their local peaks – thus running a “parallel” search.
CES, however, are not highly decomposable – the sum of local peaks
found in a parallel search need not represent a global peak. CES exhibits
interdependencies – a local peak according to M1 is a valley according
to M2. If M1 and M2 went their separate ways and returned to report
to each other, they would find that their respective search results exhibit
very low commensurability, if not outright incommensurability. In such
situations, parallel search is inconclusive “because there is no natural
‘equilibrium’ into which it can rightly settle” (D’Agostino 2009, 112).
 Against the Individual Virtue Approach 143
This is so because the parallel search does not sufficiently partition
the total problem space. By allowing the agents to explore the landscape
according to their evaluative standards and thus performing a “diversi-
fied” search, we increase the group’s effectiveness while decreasing their
chances of a lock-in – they will search the landscape according to an
actual (and not exhaustive) variety of evaluative standards. They will
not all get stuck in the same suboptimal search routine. They might
“cross paths” and discover peaks they share – in other words, they might
encounter unexpected learning sub-problems “sprinkled” through the
landscape. In total CES, however, only the diversification of evaluative
standards and consequent adverse selection (shallow consensus on search
routines that lead to suboptimal lock-ins) exhibit weak epistemic reliabil-
ity. When the problem is such that the solution cannot be recognized, the
best we can do is not choose a single way of solving it and try to identify
how diverse attempts have failed. The only reliable process available for
dealing with wicked problems is thus negative – not betting on a single
strategy but providing conditions for diversifying methods in the search
for knowledge. I will refer to this variety of epistemic reliability as “epis-
temic immunity.”
Critically, discovery reliability is conditioned on epistemic immunity
in social epistemic systems because the latter protects the pool of diverse
investigators, which provides diversity for dealing with learning prob-
lems. In a social epistemic system lacking epistemic immunity, the diver-
sity is already “normalized” according to some controversial evaluative
standards (Gaus 2016) and thus insufficient for reliable problem-solving
in learning problems.
The key takeaway is that complexity and diversity are not incidentally
but conceptually linked, as are diversity and individual epistemic vice.
Complex problems, by definition, require diversity, and diversity, by defi-
nition, requires individual epistemic vice. These conceptual implications
had to be made explicit to show that IVA cannot stand in any governance
system. Instead, the opposite stands – the epistemic powers in govern-
ance systems are not constituted by individual epistemic virtue. To rely
on individual epistemic virtue is to model an unrealistically simple social
epistemic system. To conclude, complex problems are not reliably solved
by delegating problem-solving to individually virtuous agents. Problem-
solving as a Tournament Thesis is then also wrong.

7.3 The Epistemic Powers of Democracy

If SG and PT propositions do not stand, the epistemic powers of a govern-
ance system cannot be based on agents’ epistemic character or cognitive
history. Indeed, they are not. Instead, the epistemology of governance
systems, and thus of democracy, rests precisely on the systemic proper-
ties which mitigate and manage the constitutive epistemic suboptimality
144 Marko Luka Zubčić
of epistemic agents faced with complex problems. In a democracy, these
systemic properties are threefold – I will refer to them as “core epistemic
functions.” They restate Elizabeth Anderson’s fundamental argument on
the epistemic powers of democracy.
In her seminal paper “Epistemology of Democracy,” Elizabeth
Anderson (2006) argues that the epistemic powers of democracy cannot
be accounted for by either Jury Theorem or Diversity Trumps Ability
(DTA). Jury Theorem6 is unsatisfactory for institutional epistemology
(IE) because it models agents as minimally more likely to be correct than
wrong, while the founding insight of IE was precisely that epistemic agents
are constitutively epistemically suboptimal (Hayek 1945; Anderson 2006;
Zubčić 2021), and thus minimally more likely to be wrong than right.
The Jury Theorem’s model then provides the opposite result – it leads
to a worse aggregative outcome. However, as Anderson notes, the Jury
Theorem is an unsatisfactory model of democracy because it fails to
account for the diversity required when problems are complex and needs
feedback on policies.

Surely, an important part of the case for the epistemic merits of

democracy rests on its ability to pool this asymmetrically distributed
information about the effects of problems and policies to devise solu-
tions that are responsive to everyone’s concerns. We, therefore, need
a model of democracy in which its epistemic success is a product of
its ability to take advantage of the epistemic diversity of individuals.
(Anderson 2006, 11)

Furthermore, the Jury Theorem models agents independent of one

another – they do not deliberate together, a collective epistemic virtue
for epistemically suboptimal agents. Both votes and talk – both imper-
fect but robust – condition agents’ abilities to come up with solutions in
unpredictable ways.7 DTA’s core contribution to IE is that it provides
further – admittedly, one of the most popular as well as too epistemolog-
ically optimistic8 – modeling support for the claim that diversity, and the
introduction of randomness in the search for knowledge, is a collective
epistemic virtue when the problem is complex or, more precisely, agents
are suboptimal. However, for Anderson, DTA cannot model epistemic
powers of democracy because it fails to capture the critical systemic fea-
ture of liberal democracy, which renders it more likely to attain knowl-
edge, solve problems or learn – namely, feedback required for a revision
of erroneous commitment. Therefore, experimentalism best models the
epistemic powers of democracy, argues Anderson. The iterative process
of policy and feedback, test and contest, and the protection of disagreement
before, during, and after the decision is made provides liberal democracy
its epistemic powers. Anderson is concerned exclusively with representa-
tive electoral democracy, which, she argues, derives its epistemic powers
 Against the Individual Virtue Approach 145
from its ability to satisfy the experimentalist core epistemic functions
comparatively better than other forms of governance.
Thus, democracy is epistemically robust because it aims to harvest dis-
tributed expertise9 dispersed in the population – feedback on policies and
the unpredictably distributed unique and relevant information relevant
for policy-making. Democracy harvests distributed expertise through its
liberal constitution, which allows for freedom of speech and association,
allowing for disagreement before and after the policy decision. But, crit-
ically, representative electoral democracy (RED) harvests the feedback
through periodic elections on different levels of government.
Note that distributed expertise differs from concentrated expertise of
cognitive history. It moreover requires only minimal individual epis-
temic features of agents – being able to report the truth. The harvest does
not entail that those public members who share relevant information and
feedback exhibit epistemic virtue in any substantial sense. They may have
unique information without being the “best” reasoner in the population
(for instance, due to their social position, which allows them unique
insights into some parts of the causal chain in policy implementation in a
complex social world, or simply because they are on the receiving end of
a policy). They may share the information for non-epistemic reasons (for
instance, simply because it is in their interest to change a policy that they
find harmful). The unpredictability of the distribution of the unique infor-
mation is critical here – the relevance of input cannot be determined by
education, professional track record, or other similar social markers of
epistemic competence. Instead, relevant input can “hide” among people
who tend not to pass the philosopher’s dubious standards of individual
epistemic virtue – people who are “low-skilled” and less formally edu-
cated in areas relating to policy-making or science, and who may exhibit
close-mindedness, gullibility, dogmatism, laziness, or any other of the
individual epistemic vices (Cassam 2017). As in free speech, so with elec-
tions, universal inclusion is the function of diversity. There is no a pri-
ori road map to total governance problems, and universal inclusion is a
robust principle for harvesting unpredictable distributed expertise. I will
later argue that elections of REDs imperfectly satisfy this function.
Second, democracy is epistemically robust because it protects diver-
sity in its institutional deliberative and decision-making body (in repre-
sentative electoral democracies, the parliament) as well as in deliberation
and decision-making “in the wild” (through the liberal constitution).
Diversity protects from suboptimal lock-ins which haunt the homogene-
ous groups of the “best and brightest.” As I will also argue later, RED
imperfectly satisfies this function but indeed outperforms giving power
to the virtuous.
Third, both first functions are quite obviously conditioned by constitu-
tional liberal order. If there is no freedom from oppression and poverty10
(Gaus 2016; Zubčić 2022), neither harvest nor diversity function can be
146 Marko Luka Zubčić
satisfied because the pool for either harvesting unpredictably distributed
information or feedback, or maintaining diversity in the decision-­making
body, is critically limited in an illiberal order. Indeed, an illiberal order
is an epistemic catastrophe. If democratic decision-making overrides the
liberal constitution, democracy is no longer epistemically reliable (see
Gaus 2019 for detailed arguments on the priority of liberal order to reli-
able self-governance).
Relevant collective governance problems that can be solved are learn-
ing difficulties. The first two core epistemic functions mirror discovery
reliability – they protect diversity and harvest feedback and unique infor-
mation required for testing and contesting strategies. The third core epis-
temic function reflects epistemic immunity – it protects free diversity.
The first two core functions (discovery reliability) are conditioned by the
third (epistemic immunity).
Thus, the epistemic powers of democracy are predicated on three core
epistemic functions: (1) harvest of unpredictably distributed information
and feedback on policies, (2) protection of diversity in its deliberative
and decision-making bodies, and (3) restraint by a constitutional liberal
order. These are, notably, systemic properties – collective epistemic vir-
tues. To argue against the epistemic powers of democracy, one must show
how it fails to satisfy these functions.

7.4 Epistemic Capture and the True Vice of

Representative Electoral Democracy
While IVA supporters are numerous, and a separate chapter would be
required to overview their contributions and particularities of their
accounts (many of which are highly insightful and relevant within the
bounds of individualist epistemology), the spectrum of IVA can be
roughly boiled down to two institutional design types derived from its
fundamental commitment. On one end, IVA may lead to instruction
to design policies that aim to distribute individual epistemic virtues in
the population universally. Conversely, IVA may lead to delegating the
epistemic labor of governance to the members of the population deemed
individually epistemically virtuous or at least giving significantly more
weight to their input. These political programs aim to be compatible with
representative electoral democracy, but primarily for non-epistemologi-
cal reasons, and they tend to feature a solid tilt toward third-party gov-
ernance. It follows from the analysis of reliability under complexity in
Section 7.2 that both designs constitute a collective epistemic vice – they
mistake epistemic immunity and discovery reliability for simple reliabil-
ity and thus provide institutional conditions that render the population
less likely to attain knowledge and solve problems or learn. I will refer
to this specific type of collective epistemic vice – namely, epistemically
unjustified reduction of relevant diversity in solving complex issues – as
 Against the Individual Virtue Approach 147
“epistemic capture.” Commitment to IVA is thus committed to epistemic
capture.
However, epistemic capture is not a property only of some imaginary
technocratic, scholocratic, and perfectionist systems – it is very much
a collective epistemic vice present in contemporary representative elec-
toral democracies (RED). Real-world democracies vary significantly
along many axes, and the comprehensive comparative analysis of their
epistemic features requires a separate paper, or more likely a book. I
will focus briefly on three interrelated epistemic deficiencies that plague
them. First, real-world democracies frequently fail to protect free diver-
sity. Secondly, they are commonly run by socioeconomic elites and thus
lack diversity in deliberative and decision-making bodies. Thirdly, elec-
tions, the bedrock of RED, fail to properly harvest feedback because of
unprotected free diversity, epistemic capture by socioeconomic elites,
and lack of subsidiarity.
The most egregious epistemic defect of many actual democracies is that
they fail to protect free diversity because they fail to protect the popula-
tion either from oppression or poverty. The United States of America is
one of the leading examples of this fundamental failure – while formally
a liberal democracy, its systemic racism, exclusionary socioeconomic
inequalities, and lack of social security severely compromise the most
relevant diversity to be protected. Furthermore, one of the most repug-
nant violations of freedom of the 21st century has been the treatment of
refugees and migrants by the European Union and its member states.
Many REDs suffer from epistemic capture by violation of free diversity.
They moreover suffer from epistemic capture by socioeconomic elites.
For one thing, our parliaments consist of the well-off who went to specific
schools, have been groomed to exhibit specific manners of behavior, and
have a specific (limited) insight into the world’s workings. This elite bias,
quite straightforwardly, reduces diversity in governing bodies. However,
affluence influences elections in actual democracies – in the United States
in particular, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page’s work shows that the
outcomes of elections depend on the wealthiest 10 percent (Gilens and
Page 2014). “Representative democracy as we know it, at least in the
United States, is more akin to rule by economic elites – plutocracy, some
might say – than to the rule of the people” (Landemore 2020, 28). While,
in principle, open and constrained mainly by liberal constitutions, con-
temporary REDs tend to be, in effect, much more a system of governance
by competing socioeconomic elites than a system of self-governance.
Lastly, the power of partisan elites in less free democracies may com-
promise their epistemic performance through media, legal system, mar-
kets, and administrative state – however, it is conditioned by elections.
In actual democracies, elections tend to be a robust but flawed mecha-
nism for feedback on policy, particularly under conditions of violated
free diversity and elite capture of governance. For one thing, they are not
148 Marko Luka Zubčić
resistant to hijacking by tyrants and cartels. Nevertheless, more impor-
tantly, they are not sensitive to mapping the polity to the problem – in
other words, highly centralized 1-person-1-vote electoral systems lack
subsidiarity (Weyl 2019).
While upgraded institutional mechanisms for feedback on policy and
diversification of deliberative and decision-making bodies must be and
are currently tested, RED satisfies core epistemic functions comparatively
significantly better than IVA systems. If RED takes place within a lib-
eral constitution, a system of social security, and implemented anti-trust
laws, and if the financing of parties and political activity is well regu-
lated, free citizen association and free media can protect public deliber-
ation and influence policy-making to a relevant degree, and voters can
punish bad governments in elections. While the varieties of technocracy
and scholocracy (including those compatible with representative elec-
toral democracy) may contain some mechanisms for the pooling of infor-
mation from the population (they might have learned that such means are
epistemically instrumental from epistemic democrats and liberals), they
are built on the assumption that some form of individual epistemic virtue
is necessary to allow participation in self-governance on epistemological
grounds. This assumption is wrong, and the systems built on it are inevi-
tably epistemically vicious.

7.5 Conclusion
Individual epistemic virtue is mainly irrelevant to the epistemic powers
of democracy. Indeed, the founding problem of IE is how to design epistem-
ically powerful institutions in the face of constitutive epistemic suboptimal-
ity of individual epistemic agents. Democracy, for its part, is epistemically
robust because it aims to harvest feedback and unique information dis-
persed in the population and to protect diversity in the deliberative and
decision-making body. Policy developers and institutional designers
ought to examine mechanisms that better fulfill these epistemic functions
than the mechanisms of actual representative electoral democracies. On
the other hand, any policy-making or institutional design informed by
IVA Thesis in any of its incarnations would have epistemically detrimen-
tal or catastrophic consequences. Given the epistemic panic plaguing
the academic, media, and policy classes, epistemic capture masked as
an expert rule or epistemic perfectionism presents the most significant
contemporary threat to our search for knowledge.

Notes
1. Jeffrey Friedman has recently provided a detailed analysis of the com-
mitment of both technocrats and populists to governance as a process of
solving simple problems with manifest solutions (Friedman 2020). While I
 Against the Individual Virtue Approach 149
find his account partly precise, convincing, and worth further discussion,
it would require an additional paper to offer a clear and comprehensive
analysis.
2. IVA theorists might argue that the entire delegation of epistemic labor of
governance to individually epistemically virtuous agents cannot be jus-
tified politically or morally. Thus, a softer, quasi-scholocratic approach
should be favored. However, I am concerned exclusively with the instru-
mentalist epistemological aspects of institutional design – namely, an insti-
tutional design that is more likely to lead to knowledge, problem-solving,
or learning.
3. This feature has also been already discovered through cumulative culture:
there is considerable evidence that randomizing for protection against bias
is a hidden function of culturally transmitted religious practices of con-
sulting augurs for relevant social decisions, such as where to plant crops
or hunt, which is itself an epistemically reliable practice which has to be
described by reference to the individual epistemic vice (Levy and Alfano
2020, 903).
4. Normative diversity is where cognitive history and epistemic character
meet – a particular cognitive history conditions agents to focus on different
aspects of the problem, recognize further evidence, and follow additional
abductions.
5. Strategies in learning governance problems may be partially decompos-
able into tame problems. For instance, if the population decides to test
a vaccine mandate, administering the vaccines would constitute a tame
problem.
6. According to Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, if group members are minimally
more likely to be correct than wrong, adding more members to the group
increases the group’s probability of making the right decision.
7. The classical criticism of deliberation is that deliberative groups in the
real world consistently fall prey to epistemic defects. Thus deliberative
­activities do not spontaneously satisfy the ideal conception of deliberation
(Ahlstrom-Vij 2019). However, these “low-hanging fruit” objections miss the
constitutive value of deliberation, as argued for by pragmatists (Brandom
2001; Talisse 2009) and recently prominently by Mercier and Sperber (2011) –
without the exchange in the space of reasons, there are no epistemic agents at
all. While this is more than enough to commit to free social deliberation,
Ostrom also reports that in cases of collective resource governance, groups
engaged in “cheap talk” perform significantly better than their independ-
ent counterparts (Ostrom 2005). That said, I do not argue here in favor of
any particular strand of deliberative democracy alone but consider talk,
votes, and prices to be the elementary, robust, but imperfect mechanisms
for harvesting collective intelligence, and I believe a viable system makes
use of all three in their diverse variants. I do not believe we should choose
one exclusively – I think this would make the system less reliable.
8. Roughly, Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem states that if (1) the agents are
sufficiently diverse that they do not get stuck at the same local optimum,
(2) the problem is complex, and thus no agents have the solution, and (3)
the agents can build on each others’ local optimums (the problematically
optimistic assumption), then the diverse group will outperform the group
of the best agents (Page 2008).
9. While insufficient in learning problems, some knowledge and character are
necessary because some agents must also pursue the best-up-to-now strat-
egy. In governance problems, this at least includes situated, scientific, civic,
150 Marko Luka Zubčić
and moral knowledge – reducing the relevant input in problems in complex
social systems a priori to exclusively scientific, or for that matter to situated
or moral, is unjustified and frankly strange.
10. Zubčić (2022) argues in detail how the protection of free diversity necessi-
tates the defense of freedom from poverty.

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1–19.
8 Institutional Cynicism
and Civic Virtue
Ian James Kidd

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those

who have not got it.
(George Bernard Shaw)

8.1 Introduction
Scholars are divided on the relationship between cynicism and political
life. Jeffrey Goldfarb spoke for many when he claimed, in The Cynical
Society, that public cynicism is “the single most present challenge fac-
ing American democracy today.” Cynicism, he worried, “dominates the
assumptions of our political and cultural life” and has become “con-
fused” with the ideals of “democratic deliberation and political wisdom.”
If Goldfarb is right, endemic public cynicism is destructive because it
“promotes acceptance of the existing order of things” (Goldfarb 1991: 2,
30). Worries about cynicism and democracy recur in the work of Patrick
Deneen. In Democratic Faith, he warns us not to be tempted by “the
retreat into easy optimism or the temptation to a kind of democratic
cynicism or despair,” each of which constitutes threat to democratic gov-
ernance (Deneen 2009: 12).
Other voices offer more encouraging views on cynicism and its relation
to democratic politics, often with a historical stance on forms of cyn-
icism. Historian Sharon Stanley argues that “cynicism inevitably con-
stitutes an ineradicable element of democracy” that can, with care, be
“managed and mobilized in ways that are perfectly hospitable to the con-
tinued, healthy functioning of democratic life” (Stanley 2012: 181ff). She
rightly distinguishes cynicism from other forms of disillusionment and
invites us to consider differing kinds of cynicism. The classical Cynics
used nature as the standard to attack corrupting social conventions –
the stance of Diogenes of Sinope, the “man in the tub” (Hard 2012). It is
different from the kinds of cynicism that emerge after the Enlightenment
(Shea 2010). Stanley uses this fact of historic pluralism to challenge a
“presumed connection between cynicism and political withdrawal”:

DOI: 10.4324/9781003311003-11
 Institutional Cynicism and Civic Virtue 153
It is virtually taken for granted among contemporary commentators,
inside and outside of academia, that cynicism corrodes and destroys
the civic dispositions necessary for a healthy democracy. Contrary to
all such readings, I argue that cynicism is an ineradicable and con-
stitutive component of democracy. Yet, this fact need not spell the
collapse of democracies worthy of our allegiance.
(Stanley 2012: 179)

So, on the one hand, we can sometimes put cynicism to work in demo-
cratic cultures. It may be part of a rational response to the morally crum-
pled reality of political life. On the other hand, as every scholar tells us,
there are many meanings and senses to the term cynicism. Some may
indeed contribute to processes that lead to the “collapse of democracy.”
Others, though, might help sustain a commitment to democratic govern-
ance. A cynic could, but need not, be an enemy of democracy. Such is
the optimistic spirit of Helen Small’s tellingly titled book, The Function
of Cynicism at the Present Time. She argues for a pluralist account: cer-
tain cynicisms have a “curative property” if they become “functional” in
serving more complex “aims” – aims that can separate functional cyni-
cism from the “more casualized and corrosive” kinds (Small 2020: 226).
One lesson of these accounts is that many things can get called cyni-
cism and affect democratic governance and public culture (Citrin 1974;
Eisinger 2000). In this chapter, I describe and endorse what I call institu-
tional cynicism and suggest it can feature within kinds of virtuous civic
stances in democratic societies. Put in rough detail, institutional cyni-
cism is a critical appreciation that an institution’s norms, practices, and
ethos tend to be corrupting – that is, liable to damage the moral character
of those working within the institution. As I experience the institution
as corrupting, I will be distrustful, skeptical, and critical of how it is
organized and tends to operate. After all, if it is corrupting, something
is deeply wrong with it. Other things might be wrong with it, too, but the
concept of institutional cynicism is not meant to capture everything that
can be wrong with an institution.
Institutional cynicism of this sort will not be an entirely happy dispo-
sition, but that should not stand against it. Appraisal of dispositions is a
matter of determining their necessity rather than their niceness: cynicism
might be bitter medicine, but one we need to take. I accept that other
forms of cynicism can be as destructive and as anti-democratic as critics
insist. But being cynical involves, among other things, being careful about
the cynical outlook one adopts. Any disposition, taken to an extreme,
will cause us problems. With cynicism, everything depends on the forms
it takes, its manifestations in interpersonal interactions and political life,
and its systematic effect on our overall civic conduct (Mazella 2007).
There are three compelling issues I do not engage in. First, if the insti-
tutional cynicism I describe is a virtue, is it a burdened virtue? These
154 Ian James Kidd
dispositions help navigate hostile environments while jeopardizing or
compromising their bearers’ flourishing (cf. Tessman 2005). Second, I do
not consider the idea that an institution may be served if they contain a
few exemplary institutional cynics. It may be that, though everyone needs
some cynicism, it is enough that a few of us have the virtue. A third issue
is the other virtues or dispositions that support institutional cynicism.
Candidates might include truthfulness and a kind of civic hope (Snow
2018; Williams 2002: 206f).
If institutional cynicism is a virtue, then it would be one of the civic
virtues. Like most modern writers, I define that term in an Aristotelian
sense (Curzer 2012; Vaccarezza and Croce 2021): (a) a civic virtue is a sta-
ble, robust disposition of thought, action, and feeling, which (b) enables
productive forms of political relationships and that is (c) animated by a
conception of the public good (see Dagger 1997; Edyvane 2013). Within
these general terms, there is scope for variety or disagreement: between
liberal and conservative theorists about which dispositions should count
as virtues and about the character of the political good (a rich discussion
of these issues is McPherson 2022). Such complexities also attend to the
neglected topic of civic or political vices (Button 2016).

8.2 Character and Corruption

My account of cynicism begins with a familiar conviction: many politi-
cal institutions are corrupting in the sense that engaging with or immer-
sion in them is an active source of moral damage (Card 1996; Tessman
2005). Specifically, corrupting institutions cause damage to our moral
character. Of course, there are other senses in which we might describe
institutions as corrupting, but the character-centered is what concerns
me. Critics often express the corrupting effects by using toxicological or
environmental metaphors – we easily talk of institution environments
being poisonous, polluted, or toxic. Such metaphors invite us to think and
talk about those environments as containing things that are harmful if
one is exposed to them for too long (Tirrell 2021).
The concept of corruption in the character-centered sense was once cen-
tral to moral and political philosophy in a way that it is no longer. Granted,
it has not gone away, but a different meaning of corruption has become
dominant (Philp 2015). Using a term with various senses is fine as long as
the meaning is clear. In this section, I explain the character-centered sense
of corruption and will start with its value. The first is its role in understand-
ing the etiology of individual-level vices and character failings. If we worry
about vice, then we should be interested in how we develop them – the ori-
gins and causes of our failings of character, or what José Medina calls their
“sociogenesis” (Medina 2012: 30). These aetiologies are complicated – we
explore psychological and developmental and interpersonal and structural
factors that are empirically complex (Dillon 2012; Kidd 2022).
 Institutional Cynicism and Civic Virtue 155
A second function of the concept of character corruption is to guide
ameliorative projects. If we worry about vice, we want to do something
about them, which might mean trying to reduce their incidence or sever-
ity or repairing the damage they cause. Quassim Cassam calls this “the
project of vice-reduction” (Cassam 2018: 186). Sometimes, there might
be nothing we can do about collective patterns of viciousness, but that
must be a conclusion we arrive at, not a pessimistic conviction we start
from (even if some of us are persuaded by more pessimistic, misanthropic
stances on human life – see Cooper 2018 and Kidd 2021a).
The third value of the concept of corruption is that it can help us think
about the moral and epistemic agency. However defined, our ability and
willingness to think, act, and feel well depends to a massive degree on
the quality of the social environment. Granted, this shouldn’t come to
eclipse individual agency: hyper-individualism is a problem just as much
as hyper-structuralism (Dillon 2012: 89-90f). Tracing the dialectics of
corruption is a way to seek something more sensible.
I gave fuller accounts of my character-focused history of corruption in
earlier work and will not rehearse all the details (see Kidd 2020a, 2021b,
2022). The core claim is the crucial role in the ongoing dynamics of indi-
vidual character development of corrupting social conditions. By cor-
rupting, I mean liable to cause moral damage in one or both of these
ways: (a) the conditions tend to facilitate the extirpation or erosion of
virtues and other excellences of character, and (b) the development and
exercise of vices and other failings of character. Character corruption
is a dynamic process – or a set of strategies – usually contemporaneous
with various counter-corrupting factors. One might be subjected to all
sorts of corrupting pressures and temptations. Still, one can also seek
ways of pushing back – for instance, affirming positive values, altering
one’s habits, seeking supportive or reparative interactions with virtuous
exemplars, or seeking different emplacements within the corrupting con-
ditions to shield oneself as much as possible from their damaging efforts.
Doubtless, other strategies can be identified or even imagined. If we are
sensitive to corrupting forces, we must develop the abilities that help us
do that work (this is one connection to the later discussion of cynicism).
Corruption analysts should also recognize that people are differen-
tially susceptible to corrupting forces. We have different anxieties, aims,
degrees of tolerance of moral tension, different structures of values,
and different kinds of responses to temptations or threats. Some people
seem unaffected by specific corrupting forces – unmoved by the allure of
wealth, say, or insensitive to certain forms of social pressure. Much of
this reflects profound differences in psychology and temperament.
We should also reckon with the fact that the range of corruptors –
the features of a social environment that have corrupting effects – are
diverse. This often makes identifying them tricky, but there is often a
consensus about the corruptors and their consequences. Corruptors may
156 Ian James Kidd
include norms, practices, operational expectations, incentive systems,
objectives, hierarchical structures, and institutional cultures (agonistic,
competitive, etc.). All these and more could facilitate the erosion of vir-
tue and the worsening of vice. Some corrupt our ideals. Some work to
entrench bad habits. Some acclimatize us to morally dubious compro-
mises. Some strain our values. Some distort the developmental trajectory
of our character.
Crucially for the later discussion of cynicism, corruptors can be acci-
dental and unwanted features of our institutions. After all, most institu-
tions are products of organic patterns of higgledy-piggledy development
with all the roughness. No one sat down and designed the social world,
even if some groups work hard to shape and reshape specific parts of it.
Unfortunately, other corruptors are intentionally built into institutions to
corrupt individuals in ways that render them exploitable. Consider cases
of politicians who alter institutions to encourage invidious behaviors –
weakening the standards of public life, disbanding watchdogs and sys-
tems of monitoring, and so on (see, e.g., Feldman and Eichenthal 2013).
Corrupted people often try to corrupt systems to their advantage and cor-
rupt others. For this reason, our criticism ought to be directed, in most
cases, to corrupting conditions and not to corrupt individuals. The excep-
tions include (a) people who are plausibly complicit in their corruption –
those who buy into corrupting pressures for the sake of their enhancement
(call these Faustian cases) – and (b) people who work hard to create more
corrupting conditions. But I leave these cases aside. I need to elaborate on
the corruption mechanisms before moving on to institutional cynicism.

8.3 Corrupting Conditions

Many of us experience political institutions as corrupting, and it is easy
to see how this could lead to a kind of cynicism. It needs some spelling
out, though. I am interested in how political institutions’ arrangements
and operations can corrupt the characters of those embedded in them.
When embedded in an institution, one is subjected to its values and goals;
these can be internalized or, at the least, influence our habits and dispo-
sitions. Our sense of identity – our tolerance for moral tension, our ide-
als, our standards of everyday moral and epistemic conduct – could all
be shaped by the internal realities of the institution. Over time, one can
become inured to making the uncomfortable compromises often integral
to institutional life. Therefore, being a part of the institution starts to
become corrupting – one is subjected to moral damage that might begin
to mark one’s character. In some cases, this awareness of potentially or
actually corrupting effects can motivate someone to stay away from the
institution – or to get out of it. Anecdotally, friends of mine have left
governmental institutions because, sadly, they felt themselves becoming
worse people – “It was doing bad things to me” was a common lament.
 Institutional Cynicism and Civic Virtue 157
This is a specific conception of corruption, and I argue it can connect
to a particular kind of cynicism. Other types of cynicism are available in
political theory and postmodernism (cf. Sloterdijk 1983), not all of which
relate to moral damage. At the same time, some political theorists do ges-
ture to character-based kinds of corruption. Susan Rose-Ackerman and
Bonnie Palifka, for instance, ask, “how the basic structure of the public
and private sectors produces or suppresses corruption” (Rose-Ackerman
and Palifka 2016: 37). One answer is that structures contain corruptors
that tend to damage and distort the moral character of those embedded
within the institutions.
Other political theorists are skeptical about institutional cultures being
morally corrupting. For instance, Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski
argue tenaciously against claims that the market is morally corrupting
(cf. Brennan and Jaworski 2015: Part 3). I want to note two points of their
discussion. First, we must provide evidence supporting the corrupting
effects of political institutions, drawing on history, sociology, ethnogra-
phy, and other disciplines (Chubb, Forstenzer, and Kidd 2021). Second,
Brennan and Jaworski propose that we distinguish the claims that struc-
tures cause people to have worse characters and that they reveal the lousy
character people had all along (Brennan and Jaworski 2015: 91f). I think
this is too limited: there are other ways corruptors can have harmful
effects on our moral character: other modes of corruption. I believe there
are at least five, indicating a more comprehensive set of options than
“causing” and “revealing.”

1 Acquisition – a corrupter leads to the acquisition of a new vice not

previously present in a person’s character.
2 Activation – a corrupter activates a dormant vice, one present in
someone’s character but not actively shaping their thoughts, actions,
and feelings.
3 Intensification – a corrupter increases the strength of a vice. A once
weak form of dogmatism becomes an intense kind of ultra-dogmatism.
4 Propagation – a corrupter increases the scope of vice and how it
affects a person’s thinking, action, and feeling. A once-localized
arrogance starts to spread, ever more widely, across more aspects of
one’s conduct.
5 Stabilization – a corrupter increases the stability of vice, the extent to
which it is resistant to disruption.

These modes of corruption refer to ways that a person gets corrupted.

With them in mind, we can also distinguish sets of sub-claims: a corrup-
tor may, for instance, facilitate a vice or a whole cluster of vice, or one
corruptor might activate a vice, and then other corruptors intensify and
stabilize it, and so on. In such cases, it will become hard to sustain any
clear distinction between causing and revealing certain vices.
158 Ian James Kidd
Here are some of the general kinds of corruptors that we might look for
in our institutional environments (see Kidd 2020a: §4.4):

a Absence of exemplars of virtue

b Derogation of exemplars of virtue
c Presence of exemplars of vice
d Valorization of exemplars of vice
e Rebranding of vices-as-virtues
f Rebranding of virtues-as-vices
g Increasing the exercise costs of virtue
h Decreasing the scope for the exercise of virtue
i Increasing the rewards of vice
j Decreasing the penalties for vice

Consider examples of features of British political culture that critics have

argued acted as corruptors. The first is certain cultures of secrecy. A cer-
tain amount of confidentiality is necessary for the running of a govern-
ment, if not the running of our relationships. The Blair premiership, into
its second and third terms, was increasingly accused of being secretive in
more problematic ways. One critic pointed to a “combination of a gen-
uine need for confidentiality, a siege mentality, and habitual caution.”
Collectively these created a culture of secrecy that “tended to reinforce
the walls of a closed world impervious both to diverse options and the
consequences of its own actions” (Rhoades 2011: 287).
Such cultures enabled Blair’s inner circle to conceal the considerations,
evidence, and reasoning that informed their decisions – and this included
their monumental decision to support the US-UK invasion of Iraq in the
Second Gulf War. Unfortunately, that culture of secrecy served to insu-
late Blair’s government from critical debate and rival perspectives. Why
would this be corrupting? Cultures of secrecy entrench the conditions
that feed individual-level closed-mindedness and dogmatism (Battaly
2018). Those epistemic vices are scaffolded by social environments
that structurally remove or marginalize alternative epistemic options.
Secrecy also lets people conceal their epistemic procedures – which ones
they used, how well they did them, what problems they ran into, and so
on. Outside agents do not reliably know which options were consulted,
what one thought of them, or how accurately or fairly we assessed them.
In these ways and others, cultures of secrecy are corrupting. Of course,
such cultures can be problematic for other reasons, too. They may con-
tribute to institutional opacity: the tendency of social institutions to
become resistant to understanding and epistemic appraisal (Carel and
Kidd 2022).
A second famous feature of the Blair premiership was its increasing
reliance on “spin,” the artful manipulation of political information to
present governments in a positive light. Governments dominated by spin
 Institutional Cynicism and Civic Virtue 159
often acquire an ethos of performative superficiality – where a sharp
distinction emerges between looking good and doing good. The prior-
ity is given to the appearance rather than the actual performance. For
Jill Johnson, Labour’s head of communications until January 1996, the
party’s reliance on spin doctors was feeding “a view that politics is and
should be run secretively from the centre” and was “slowly dripping poi-
son into the body politic” (in Foley and Foley 2000: 197). In May 1999,
Johnson nicely criticized New Labour’s alarming “fusion of policy with
spin”:

After two years, the outstanding feature of this government is that

its overwhelming desire to appease Middle England has led it to
conceive policies not so much to solve a problem as to conjure an
appearance. As image-making becomes progressively blurred with
policy development, politicians move from objective reality to a vir-
tual world of their creation.
(in Foley and Foley 2000: 197)

One legacy of this privileging is the phenomenon of bullshit, and “post-

truth” politics and the entrenchment into the political life of a vice
Quassim Cassam named epistemic insouciance (Cassam 2018: ch. 4).
Institutional ethoi of performative superficiality tend to corrupt in at
least two ways. First, privileging positive appearance over actual positive
performance will encourage us to assign less weight to procedural virtues.
These are dispositions necessary that enable us to perform repeatable
practices correctly. Examples include diligence, carefulness, meticulous-
ness, and thoroughness. Unexciting as they sound, procedural virtues are
vital to the everyday practical operations of life, including running big
political institutions like the civil service. Of course, exercising these pro-
cedural virtues requires us to resist the temptations to cut corners, rush,
skim over the fine print, and skip the other repetitive and tedious aspects
of life. But what drives us to exercise procedural virtues is a sense that it
does matter that we do well. Conscientiousness matters. This sense is apt
to be eroded by institutions whose ethos is one of performative superfici-
ality. Institutional life often involves tasks and activities that tend to be
repetitive, unglamorous, and unexciting – but utterly essential. A good
institution should encourage virtuously procedural conduct, requiring
an ethos of procedural conscientiousness.
Second, a person can internalize the attitudes and values of an ethos
of performative superficiality. They will start to refocus their energy
on effectively presenting as doing good rather than doing well. This can
encourage them to develop and exercise the vices of manipulation –
­dishonesty, deceit, and manipulativeness in various forms. I think this
happens for two reasons: one, the performatively superficial focus less
on actually doing well, so they will tend to start doing poorly, and – as a
160 Ian James Kidd
further consequence – they will need to begin concealing their deficiencies
and their cause. The manipulative person will therefore find themselves
starting to rely increasingly on patterns of manipulativeness to keep up
appearances. They will “spin,” lie, bullshit, deceive, divulge good times
to “bury bad news,” omit relevant context when giving news, constantly
move the goalposts to manufacture appearances of success, cunningly
use implicature, and so on. The Blair premiership was accused of this
(Barnet and Gaber 2001; Jeffries and Walker 2017: ch. 3). Against a thin
defense that all governments do this, two writers argue that “spin … did
not start in the Blair years, but it became more pronounced and widely
used at this time” until it “evolved a sense in its own right” (Jeffries and
Walker 2017: 41).
I am sure that cultures of secrecy and institutional ethoi of perform-
ative superficiality are corrupting in other ways. The cultures and ethos
could corrupt other vices, or the vices they encourage could, in turn,
facilitate the exercise and development of other vices in appalling vice-­
cascades. This would have to be determined by careful empirical study,
not a priori. We should also investigate how specific psychological pro-
files of political actors interact with these cultures and ethoi. I suspect the
dispositionally arrogant are more vulnerable to corruption by cultures of
secrecy and ethoi of performative superficiality. Arrogant people feel less
need to be accountable to others and more entitled to exempt themselves
from norms incumbent on members of social communities (see Roberts
and Woods 2007: 244f; Tanesini 2021: §5.2). An expectation that one will
conform to expected standards is rejected – proper accountability and
performative conscientiousness are for the little people.
I hope these examples are sufficient to indicate what the corruptors
built into political institutions can look like. This account of institutional
corruption should also resonate with many readers’ perceptions of the
harmful effects institutions can have on those who work within them.
Moreover, the account points to a further reason that corrupting politi-
cal institutions are bad: they damage public trust in those institutions. If
so, we are well on the way to some kind of cynicism.

8.4 Institutional Cynicism

Imagine someone who wants to be politically engaged but perceives
the relevant institutions as liable to corrupt their moral character. They
might suppose that their engagements will require them to cultivate par-
ticular new virtues or dispositions, ones apt to help them navigate an
environment full of potent corruptors. Some virtues regulate our experi-
ence and ways of engaging with our environments. These could be a ded-
icated set of virtues – Emily Sullivan and Mark Alfano identify classes
of virtues aimed at monitoring, adjusting, and restricting social-­epistemic
networks (Sullivan and Alfano 2020: §8.4). Or particular virtues could
 Institutional Cynicism and Civic Virtue 161
have structural monitoring among their functions if developed in the
right ways. José Medina argues that humility, curiosity, and open-­
mindedness can function to help members of oppressed groups cope in
hostile social environments (Medina 2012: 30–48). Or the virtues may
be collective virtues – ones possessed by collectives of people rather than
individual agents – which may include a form of virtuous solidarity (cf.
Battaly 2022; Byerly and Byerly 2016).
I suggest that a certain kind of cynicism should be among the virtues salient
to those engaged with corrupting political institutions. This sets me against
those who regard cynicism as antipolitical. Politicians often condemn cynical
attitudes and outlooks. Obama contrasted a “politics of hope” with a “pol-
itics of cynicism.” London Mayor Sadiq Khan once contrasted “optimism
and hard work” with “cynicism, lethargy, and fatalism.” The Democratic
politician, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, says “the biggest hurdle … our com-
munities have is cynicism.” Those on the political right make similar claims.
Sir Roger Scruton condemns kinds of cynicism – fostered, he says, by the
ruination of “old institutions” and traditional certainties – which he thinks
have left us “empowered, but without a destination” (Scruton 2019: 134f).
Of course, different kinds of cynicism are being invoked, and these
writers do not always explain what they mean by the term. I take it that
cynicism in its most general sense has two components: (a) a sense that
the professed motivations of a person or institution are different from
their operative ones – the ones directing their behavior – and (b) a convic-
tion that the operative ones, if identified, are likely to be morally inferior.
“Morally inferior” need not mean evil or invidious, just lesser in moral
quality. Think of the signs in hotel bathrooms that invite guests to reuse
their towels – the professed motivation is ecological sustainability, but
the operative motivation is to reduce laundry costs. Of course, wanting to
reduce costs is not a morally bad motivation, but it is lesser than environ-
mental concern. Indeed, many ecological ethicists and activists accused
the practice of “greenwashing” of feeding cynicism (Bowen 2014).
The conjunction of (a) and (b) generates the epistemic and affective
aspects characteristic of cynicism. These include policies of suspicious-
ness, distrust, and a striving to identify the “true” motivations behind
an action. This is at the core of cynicism, and its various kinds are built
upon it. It differs from the account of cynicism offered by Samantha Vice:

Cynicism is

a a stance of disengagement,
b characterized by distrust, contempt, skepticism (to differing degrees),
c adopted toward humans, their institutions, and values,
d adopted as a response to a belief that humans are motivated only by
self-interest, or
e more generally, that human beings are of little worth.
162 Ian James Kidd
We can question these components and their connection to one another.
The cynic need not disengage entirely from the world and, in many cases,
may be unable to, even if they want to. The cynic may be forced into com-
plex and perhaps awkward patterns of engagement and disengagement or
be compelled to maintain existing arrangements but in new and revised
ways – more watchful, less trusting, marked by new attitudes of vigilance
or alertness. Indeed, continuing one’s engagement with the institution
could help to keep cynical dispositions sharp and well-trained. Distrust,
contempt, and skepticism might also be contingent features of specific
ways of being cynical. I’m pretty cynical, but as far as I can tell am not
contemptuous of the people and institutions of which I am cynical (on
cynicism and contempt, cf. Bell 2013: §6.6). We should also resist building
into conceptions of cynicism contentious axiological claims about the
worth of human beings, or controversial anthropological claims.
We ought to distinguish three kinds of cynicism, determined by the
object of cynical attitudes and the sorts of behavior expressive of them.
First, agential cynicism is directed at individuals. We suspect or expect or
suppose them to operate with different and lesser operative motivations
and values than the ones they publicly profess (e.g., Citrin 1974). I may
be cynical about colleagues if they constantly talk about their commit-
ment to collegiality rather than shunt arduous duties onto the precari-
ously employed junior staff. Of course, cynical perceptions ought to be
well-supported by evidence, and we should also guard against the risk of
our perceptions and judgments being distorted by prejudices.
The second is institutional cynicism, directed at a specific political insti-
tution’s practices, norms, and values. This is familiar from everyday life:
many of us feel cynical toward the government, businesses, the police,
and so on. In most cases, our cynicism is directed toward those with
the power to shape an institution’s ethos and practical life – a university
Vice-Chancellor or executives of a Fortune 500 company. This is consist-
ent with a cynicism directed at the institution itself. Institutions have val-
ues or goals manifested in collective practices; these reliably bring about
specific results that serve the interests of some groups at the expense of
other attractions and groups (Fricker 2020). Institutional structures and
ethoi also survive radical personnel changes. Vice-Chancellors come and
go, but the university’s working features persist.
The third kind of cynicism is anthropological cynicism. It involves some
more or less systematic account of our essential nature or essence as
human beings. A conviction that we are essentially selfish creatures, “all
the way down,” that human nature precludes genuine altruism is a classic
sort of anthropological cynicism, of a kind often attributed (rightly or
wrongly) to Machiavelli and Hobbes (Agger et al. 1961). I’m skeptical
about anthropological cynicism: conceptions of human nature can be
projective rather than descriptive; the appeals to the sciences are often
questionable and mangled at worst. One attraction of anthropological
 Institutional Cynicism and Civic Virtue 163
cynicism is that it licenses the “bad faith” so well described by Jean-
Paul Sartre. It is more accurate to judge that human nature is deeply
“dappled,” shot through with streaks of selfishness, selflessness, and
complicated capacities for virtue and vice. Myopic fixation on one set of
aspects – darker, selfish, violent – is a failure to be avoided, not a clear-
sighted revelation of our true nature (Dupré 2001; Midgley 2002).
I’m not concerned with exploring agential or anthropological cynicism
in further detail. I will only mention that their relationships to institu-
tional cynicism – my focus in the rest of this chapter – are complicated.
Some cynics roll together agential and structural cynicism: specific agents
work hard to corrupt certain institutions, often producing unscrupulous
individuals. We probably cannot sharply distinguish agential and institu-
tional cynicism. Moreover, a deep sort of anthropological cynicism can
be the foundation for agential and institutional cynicism. If one supposes
that human beings are, by nature, essentially radically selfish, it makes
sense to presume that individuals and the institutions they create will
reflect that selfishness at some deep level. Such deep cynicism is attractive
but not my concern here.
I suggest that a certain kind of institutional cynicism can encourage
critical epistemic attitudes toward political institutions. I may direct cyn-
ical attitudes toward political institutions’ practices, arrangements, strat-
egies, and goals. When an institution declares it is doing A for the sake
of reason B, I wonder what its operative values are (Why do businesses
start to put up rainbows during Pride month? Why do big cosmetics
companies support breast cancer initiatives? Why are these universities
suddenly getting into food security?) Of course, many things can feed
institutional cynicism – commercial motivations, desires to enhance rep-
utation by playing into a trending issue, the conclusions of focus groups
attempts to attract new audiences and markets. The list includes many
factors from the broader literature on corporate and political corruption.
I want to connect institutional cynicism to the corrupting effects of
institutions in the final section.

8.5 Cynicism and Corruption

A key motivator for institutional cynicism is the recognition that an
institution is corrupting: its internal environment contains corruptors
apt to cause us moral damage. If so, one recognizes the institution likely
has many corrupted agents. Of course, people who are already, to some
degree, morally corrupt might also be attracted to those institutions
(Lord Acton’s remark that “power tends to corrupt” has been amended to
“power tends to attract the corruptible”). One is also likely to realize the
risk to oneself of engaging with the institution. “If you step into the fire,”
explained a friend who works in the national government, “you’re going
to get burned.” Institutional cynicism is sustained by experience and can
164 Ian James Kidd
be explained and justified. Cynics of this sort could easily describe spe-
cific corruptors and point out cases of severe moral damage done to peo-
ple (including themselves) while also elaborating on the mechanisms of
corruption. Indeed, those who work within institutions naturally grum-
ble about them, and doing so can serve essential epistemic-evaluative
functions (see Norlock 2018).
Here we should distinguish two problems with morally corrupting
institutions. The first is their tendencies to cause moral damage to those
embedded within them – and maybe also to those who must engage
with them in other ways. The crucial second point is that corrupting
­institutions – and the corrupted people they attract and create – will
erode public trust in the rules and standards of political life. The damage
to individual political actors is one harm; another is the broader damage
done to public confidence in the political system (Uslaner 2015). At this
point, critics of cynicism worry that adding cynicism into the mix wors-
ens things: the public sees corrupted politicians in a corrupting political
system, feels the first wave of alienation and distrust, then becomes cyni-
cal in ways that intensify all this.
I agree this destructive cynicism exists, but I also think there are pos-
itive kinds of cynicism. Institutional cynicism is a case in point, even if,
for sure, it can deteriorate into kinds of dogmatism. Cynicism should
be seen as a risky quality – a bitter pill that we must take only in careful
measures. Institutional cynicism can, if unregulated, become dogmatic
and jaundiced and entrap us within closed outlooks that feed fatalism, if
not despair. In other cases, cynicism can take self-serving forms, “a kind
of cunning complicity in the status quo” (Sennett 1992: 16). For these rea-
sons, institutional cynicism cannot be, by itself, a civic virtue. It can be
part of a broader civic stance if accompanied by other attitudes, values,
and commitments. These unaccompanied cynicisms are rightly criticized
by Arnett and Arneson (1999) and Kanter and Mirvis (1989). Speaking
chemically, cynicism is a volatile quality but with valuable properties if
mixed in proper measures with other components.
Institutional cynicism of the sort I have sketched differs in at least
three ways from the broader kind of cynicism described by Vice. To start
with, the institutional cynic is not confined to types of disengagement –
their practical life includes much more discerning kinds of disengage-
ment and engagement. In some cases, one might be unable to disengage
from an institution (quitting one’s job isn’t an option for everyone). A
cynic may remain engaged with certain aspects of their institution but
adroitly avoid other kinds of engagement – perhaps ones they suspect
would be profoundly corrupting. Or the cynic may decide to engage in
new ways with their institution: maybe a policy of acting in ways that
generate kinds of what José Medina calls epistemic friction – actions that
“disrupt” epistemic habits in ways that are “disruptive and reenergiz-
ing” (Medina 2012: 224). This sort of practice, of course, has venerable
 Institutional Cynicism and Civic Virtue 165
precedent in those provocative philosophical acts and rhetoric of the clas-
sical Cynics (Desmond 2014; Navia 1998). The “man in the tub” Diogenes
of Sinope attacked complacency and hypocrisy to try and “replac[e] false
values with those which would … enable human beings to fulfill their
true nature” (Hard 2012: ix).
A second difference is that, for my institutional cynic, the epistemic
and affective attitudes are aimed at the institution. Such attitudes can
include cautiousness, distrust, reticence, suspiciousness, watchful-
ness, and, doubtless for some, hate and contempt (cf. Eisinger 2000).
The object, though, is institutional norms, practices, and structures. I
distrust my university’s many claims to support equality and diversity
(many of its working standards and expectations say otherwise). I doubt
when oil and gas companies talk of their investment in green energy and
suspect they are greenwashing. But this does not automatically extend
to the individuals: that would be some further development of my cyni-
cal stance. Furthermore, institutional cynicism need not rely on claims
about human nature, about which one can be agnostic. Insisting that the
appraisal of collective human life must “go anthropological” is prob-
lematic. If we push down into our underlying natures, we risk occluding
institutional structures, which tend to serve the interests of those on the
winning side of those structures (cf. Kidd 2020b).
The third feature of institutional cynicism is that it is consistent with
what we might call philanthropic sentiment. Vice, recall, suggested that a
cynic thinks human beings are motivationally dominated by self-interest
and, also, of little worth:

The cynical stance prevents the cynic from interpreting people in

any way other than self-interested or corrupt, and seeing people like
this is to see them in ways unmoved by faith, hope, and charity […]
At least part of the harmfulness of cynicism is that the cynical atti-
tude is destructive of the goods constitutive of a flourishing human
life and undermines moral experience and progression. The conclu-
sion must be that we cannot value cynicism if we value morality and
meaningful life with others.
(Vice 2011: 178–179)

An institutional cynic, however, needn’t see people as ruled by self-­

interest. Or, rather, the cynic may accept that many, if not most people
are, some or most of the time, driven by various corrupted motivations.
But this is because their social environment has corrupted them. If one
removed those corrupting pressures, we might reveal a much richer
moral psychology. Human beings are of great moral worth, which is why
we should lament the moral damage done to them by corrupting environ-
ments. Indeed, because we are of value, normatively loaded talk of “cor-
ruption” or “moral damage” is intelligible to us. In his book Everybody
166 Ian James Kidd
Knows, William Chaloupka says that cynicism is a condition of “lost
belief” – of lost trust or confidence in the ideals and aspirations consti-
tutive of civic life (Chaloupka 1999: xiv). Cynicism may be the loss of a
belief, of course, or it might, instead, be something subtler – like the loss
of confidence in the hospitability of our social world to those ideals or a
loss of certain styles of believing (a cynic might continue to believe in the
American Dream or ideals of equality and liberty for all, but find that
belief is now strained or tested, rather than sanguine and secure, pushing
what Deneen (2009) calls their “democratic faith”).
Moreover, an institutional cynic should rue that entrenched corruptors
cause moral damage and are destructive of the goods of human life. That
explains why this kind of cynic wants to cause epistemic friction and try
to change things if and where they can. Certain cynics might submit to
fatalistic surrender, but that is not an automatic effect of institutional
cynicism. Helen Small sees cynicism as a basis for a “tactical” approach
to institutions (Small 2020: 154f).
At one point, Vice offers this worry:

We cannot value cynicism if we value humanity’s ongoing, small steps

towards progress. I have also argued that cynicism is inimical to other
goods – relationships, trust, a delight in others and the world.
(Vice 2011: 179)

An institutional cynic will reply that we can never make moral progress
without their cynicism about political institutions. We cannot create or
sustain human goods without awareness of how they are rendered fragile
by the corrupting realities of the world. The cynicism of the sort described
here reveals that fragility but does not revel in it, nor does it entail a pes-
simistic sense that we could ever do nothing about it. Cynicism reveals
uncomfortable realities but, in that sense, also exposes them as uncom-
fortable – thus, as something that one might want to change, if possible.
Institutional cynicism is not necessarily anti-democratic, even if it helps
erode particular untenable or naïve faith in democratic institutions. An
institutional cynic has a more critically lucid, skeptical, and savvy stance
which can help us better and more engaged citizens. My cynic does not
lack faith but has shaken off naïve belief and is thus more likely to have
a better sense of the status of the democratic institutions of their society
(and I leave aside the interesting question of how institutional cynicism
might function or be needed in other kinds of the political ­system – see
Steinmüller and Brandtstädter 2016).
I suggest that institutional cynicism should be seen as an essential
component of a civic stance. It serves crucial, if regrettable, functions
in a world whose institutions are full of corruptors. However, it must be
accompanied by attitudes, commitments, and values that help prevent it
from developing into the sort of caustic, corroding cynicism that worries
 Institutional Cynicism and Civic Virtue 167
critics. Describing that civic stance and identifying its other components
would be formidable. Still, we will only take up one if we accept that
certain kinds of cynicism can play valuable roles in political life. If some
commentators are correct, then the future of democratic societies will
depend on our ability to operationalize certain kinds of cynicism.

Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the editors for their invitation to contribute to the vol-
ume and for their generous and constructive comments. I also learned
much from discussions with Taylor Matthews and an audience at the
University of Bristol.

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9 Myside Bias in Individuals
and Institutions
Keith E. Stanovich

9.1 Introduction
Belief polarization has numerous diverse causes and can be approached
scientifically from many distinct levels of analysis. As I approach the
issue from the perspective of a cognitive psychologist, this chapter will
focus on myside bias, the primary psychological contributor to our soci-
ety’s failure to achieve belief convergence on numerous critical issues.
Myside bias occurs when people evaluate evidence, generate evidence,
and test hypotheses in a manner biased toward their own prior beliefs,
opinions, and attitudes.
Myside bias occurs in a wide variety of judgment domains. People
in all demographic groups exhibit it, and it is displayed even by expert
reasoners, the highly educated, and the highly intelligent. It has been
demonstrated in studies across a variety of disciplines, including cog-
nitive psychology (Edwards & Smith 1996; Toplak & Stanovich 2003),
social psychology (Ditto et al. 2019a), political science (Taber & Lodge
2006), behavioral economics (Babcock et al. 1995), legal studies (Kahan,
Hoffman, et al. 2012), cognitive neuroscience (Westen et al. 2006), and in
the informal reasoning literature (Kuhn & Modrek 2018). Myside bias
has been found to surface at every stage of information processing. That
is, studies have shown a tendency toward a biased pursuit of evidence,
biased evaluation of data, biased assimilation of evidence, biased mem-
ory of outcomes, and biased evidence generation (Bolsen & Palm 2020;
Clark et al. 2019; Ditto et al. 2019a; Epley & Gilovich 2016; Hart et al.
2009; Mercier & Sperber 2017).
That is the good news – we know a lot about myside bias. The bad
news is that it is one of the strangest cognitive biases, unlike the dozens
of others examined. For the first several decades of work in the heuristics
and biases tradition (Kahneman & Tversky 1973; Tversky & Kahneman
1974), from the 1970s to the 1990s, myside bias (often termed confirma-
tion bias, see Mercier 2017) was treated as merely another on a grow-
ing list of biases (anchoring bias, hindsight bias, availability bias, and
many others), and researchers assumed that it would act like other biases:

DOI: 10.4324/9781003311003-12
 Myside Bias in Individuals and Institutions 171
that it would be correlated with the same individual difference variables,
it would show the same degree of domain generality, and its status as
a non-normative response tendency would be equally secure. None of
these expectations have been realized. In this chapter, I will argue that
the strange properties of myside bias have implications for understanding
its role in creating belief polarization.

9.2 An Empirically Strange Bias

When Richard West and I began studying individual differences in cog-
nitive biases in the 1990s, one of the first consistent results from our early
studies was that the biases tended to correlate with each other (Sá et al.
1999; Stanovich & West 1997, 1998a, 1998b, 2000). The correlations were
usually relatively modest, but, then again, they derived from tasks meas-
ured with just a few items and hence of relatively low reliability. Another
consistent observation in our earliest research was that almost every cog-
nitive bias was correlated with intelligence as measured with various cog-
nitive ability indicators. Individual differences in most cognitive biases
were also predicted by several well-studied thinking dispositions, such as
actively open-minded thinking and the need for cognition.
These early indications that the tendency to override various cogni-
tive biases correlated with individual differences in cognitive ability and
thinking dispositions have been replicated in other research studies (see
Stanovich 2021 for citations). This finding has held for some of the most
well-studied biases in the Kahneman and Tversky tradition (Kahneman
2011; Tversky & Kahneman 1974): anchoring biases, framing biases,
hindsight bias, overconfidence bias, outcome bias, conjunction fallacies,
representativeness errors, the gambler’s fallacy, probability matching,
base-rate neglect, sample-size neglect, ratio bias, covariation detection
errors, pseudo-diagnostic effects, and many others.
There is no doubt that, based on prior work, the evident expectation is
that any new cognitive bias studied will show the same correlations with
individual difference variables. However, it turns out that myside bias
is not predictable from standard cognitive and behavioral functioning
measures. The degree of myside bias is not correlated with intelligence
(Klaczynski 1997; Klaczynski & Lavallee 2005; Klaczynski & Robinson
2000; MacPherson & Stanovich 2007; Perkins et al. 1991; Sanchez &
Dunning 2021; Stanovich & West 2007, 2008; Toplak & Stanovich 2003).
General intelligence’s failure to attenuate myside bias extends to varia-
bles highly related to intelligence, such as numeracy, scientific thinking,
reflectivity, and general knowledge (Drummond & Fischhoff 2019; Kahan
2013; Kahan, Peters, et al. 2012; Kahan et al. 2017; Van Boven et al. 2019).
Converging with these results is the literature in political science showing
that various indicators of cognitive sophistication, such as educational
level, knowledge level, and political awareness, do not attenuate partisan
172 Keith E. Stanovich
bias and can often increase it. For example, Joslyn and Haider-Markel
(2014) found that highly educated partisans disagreed more about policy-­
relevant facts than less educated partisans. Jones (2019) found that polit-
ical perceptions about policy-relevant conditions, such as the state of the
economy, were more polarized among the more informed and politically
aware partisans. Numerous measures of cognitive sophistication show
that cognitive elites display more polarization on various political issues
(Drummond & Fischhoff 2017; Ehret et al. 2017; Hamilton 2011; Henry &
Napier 2017; Kahan & Stanovich 2016; Kraft et al. 2015; Lupia et al. 2007;
Sarathchandra et al. 2018; Yudkin et al. 2019).
In summary, well-controlled laboratory studies of myside bias con-
verge with survey research and polling data showing that intelligence
and education do not inoculate against myside tendencies. As Ditto et al.
(2019b) note, “What if bias is not the sole province of the simplemind-
ed?….A growing body of research suggests that greater cognitive sophis-
tication and expertise often predicts greater levels of political bias, not
less….Cognitive sophistication may allow people to more skillfully argue
for their preferred conclusions, thus improving their ability to convince
­others – and themselves – that their beliefs are correct” (2019b: 312).
From a perspective on individual differences, myside bias displays other
curious tendencies. Other biases in the literature display correlations
with intelligence and thinking dispositions related to rational thinking,
such as actively open-minded thinking and the need for cognition (see
Stanovich 2021 for citations).
Despite these consistent findings involving almost every other cogni-
tive bias, myside bias has failed to correlate with relevant thinking dispo-
sitions in the same manner that it has failed to correlate with intelligence
(Clements & Munro 2021; Eichmeier & Stenhouse 2019; Guay & Johnston
2021; Kahan 2013; Kahan & Corbin 2016; Kahan et al. 2017; Macpherson &
Stanovich 2007; Stanovich & West 2007; Stenhouse et al. 2018; Toplak &
Stanovich 2003). Even personality dispositions that seem most directly
related to evading myside bias fail to attenuate it. For e­ xample, Simas
et al. (2020) suggested that empathy (or lack thereof) would be a piv-
otal mechanism in developing political polarization, partisan bias, and
ideological conflict. However, two studies found that the differences in
empathic concern did not predict the degree of partisan bias in evaluat-
ing a contentious public event. High empathic concern did not attenuate
the degree of affective polarization among partisans. Simas et al. (2020)
explain their findings by positing that empathy is biased toward one’s
ingroup and thus does not provide protection against myside bias.
A reasonably extensive literature has emerged on whether there are
ideological and partisan differences in myside bias. These results have
converged with the literature failing to find predictable differences in the
degree of myside bias. Ditto et al. (2019a) meta-analyzed forty-one exper-
imental studies of partisan differences in myside bias that involved over
 Myside Bias in Individuals and Institutions 173
12,000 subjects. After amalgamating all of these studies and comparing
an overall metric of myside bias, Ditto and colleagues concluded that
partisan bias in these studies was quite similar for liberals and conserva-
tives (see Sanchez & Dunning 2021; Washburn & Skitka 2018).
Another way myside bias is an outlier bias is that, in most cases, it
shows very little domain generality and appears very content-dependent.
Individuals who display high myside bias on one issue do not necessarily
show high myside bias on another unrelated issue (Tetlock 1986; Toner
et al. 2013; Toplak & Stanovich 2003). These results are unlike other
biases, such as framing effects, where other investigators and we obtain
reliabilities in the range of .60–.70 across a dozen or so different items
(Bruine de Bruin et al. 2007; Stanovich et al. 2016). In the literature, most
biases have a substantial degree of domain generality (Stanovich 2021)
but not myside bias.
Individual difference variables do not predict the degree of exhibited
myside bias, but one variable that does is the strength of the subject’s
opinion on that specific issue (Gugerty et al. 2021 Stanovich & West
2008), a finding that has been reported in many studies (Bolsen & Palm
2020; Druckman 2012; Edwards & Smith 1996; Houston & Fazio 1989;
Taber & Lodge 2006). In short, the level of myside bias displayed on a
particular issue in a specific paradigm is highly content-dependent.

9.3 Normative Complications

Myside bias is an outlier bias in another essential way. It is easy to show
that they lead to suboptimal decisions for most of the other biases in the
literature (anchoring biases, framing effects, base-rate neglect, and many
others). In contrast, despite all the damage that myside bias does to our
social and political discourse, it is shockingly challenging to show that,
for an individual, it is a thinking error.
In determining what to believe, myside bias operates by weighting
new evidence more highly when it is consistent with prior beliefs and less
highly when it contradicts a previous conviction. This tendency seems
wrong, but it is not. Many formal analyses and arguments in the phi-
losophy of science have shown that in most situations that resemble real
life, it is rational to use your prior belief to evaluate new evidence (Alloy
& Tabachnik 1984; Evans et al. 1993; Kornblith 1993). It is even rational
for scientists to do this in the research process (Koehler 1993; Tappin
et al. 2020). It is rational because people (and scientists) are not presented
with information of perfect reliability (Hahn & Harris 2014). The degree
of reliability is something that we must assess. A vital component of
that reliability involves estimating the credibility of the information or
new data source. For example, it is perfectly reasonable for a scientist
to use prior knowledge of a question to evaluate the credibility of new
data (Bovens & Hartmann 2003; Gentzkow & Shapiro 2006; Hahn &
174 Keith E. Stanovich
Harris 2014; Olsson 2013). Scientists do this all the time, and it is rational.
They use the discrepancy between the data they expect, given their prior
hypothesis, and the actual data observed to estimate the credibility of
the new data source (O’Connor & Weatherall 2018). The more significant
the discrepancy, the more surprising the evidence is, and the more a sci-
entist will question the source and thus reduce the weight given the new
evidence.
This cognitive strategy is sometimes called knowledge projection (see
Stanovich 1999, 2021), and what is intriguing is that it is rational for a
layperson to use it, too, if their prior belief represents actual knowledge
(an evidence-based prior) and not just an unsupported desire for some-
thing to be true. What turns this situation into one of inappropriate
myside bias is when a person uses not a belief that prior evidence leads
them to think is true but instead projects an initial belief the person
wants to be true despite inadequate evidence that it is correct by using
a conviction-based prior (see Stanovich 2021). The term conviction
conveys that these beliefs are often accompanied by emotional com-
mitment and ego preoccupation (Abelson 1988). They can sometimes
derive from protected values or partisan stances. The problematic
kinds of myside bias derive from people projecting convictions, rather
than evidence-based beliefs, onto new evidence they receive. That is
how we end up with a society that seemingly cannot agree on empiri-
cally demonstrable facts.
All arguments in favor of the normative appropriateness of mys-
ide bias given previously have concerned epistemic rationality only.
However, there is a further set of arguments in favor of myside bias
being instrumentally rational because of the social benefits of that kind
of thinking. The social benefits of myside reasoning have been explored
by many others (Clark & Winegard 2020; Clark et al. 2019; Greene 2013;
Haidt 2012: Kahan 2013, 2015; Kahan et al. 2017; Mercier & Sperber
2017; Sloman & Fernbach 2017; Tetlock 2002; Van Bavel & Pereira 2018)
and thus will not be pursued here other than to note that they comple-
ment the epistemic analysis in showing that it is difficult to ascertain,
on a net-net basis, that mysided processing is non-normative. Thus, for
all the reasons discussed in this section, myside bias is a different kind
of bias – and it requires a different kind of theoretical explanation than
traditional tasks in the heuristics and biases literature (Kahneman 2011;
Stanovich 2011).

9.4 A Theoretical Alternative: Memetics

In the literature, the default theoretical stance about myside bias tends
to see it as process driven. The findings discussed above indicate that
this default may require a reset. If it is indeed a process-based bias, those
processes seem to be unpredictable from the most well-studied individual
 Myside Bias in Individuals and Institutions 175
difference variables in psychology: intelligence and thinking dispositions
such as actively open-minded thinking and need for cognition. Instead,
opinion strength explains more variance in myside bias than psycholog-
ical process indicators. We need an alternative conceptualization where
myside bias is viewed as a content-based effect and not an individual
difference trait. Models that focus on the properties of acquired beliefs,
such as memetic theory (Blackmore 1999; Dennett 1995, 2017; Stanovich
2004, 2021), provide more suitable frameworks for studying myside bias.
The critical question becomes not “How do people acquire beliefs?” (the
tradition in social and cognitive psychology) but instead, “How do beliefs
acquire people?”
To avoid the most troublesome kind of myside bias (projecting
beliefs that are not evidence-based), we need to distance ourselves
from our convictions. It may help conceive our beliefs as memes with
their own interests. We treat beliefs as possessions (see Abelson 1986)
when we think that we have thought our way to these beliefs and that
the beliefs are serving us. What Dennett (2017) calls the meme’s eye
view leads us to question both assumptions (that we have thought our
way to our beliefs and that they are serving our personal goals). Memes
want to replicate whether they are beneficial for us or not, and they do
not care how they get into a host – whether they get in through con-
scious thought or are simply an unconscious fit to innate psychological
dispositions.
In short, acquiring essential beliefs (convictions) without reflection is
possible. There are many psychological examples where people acquire
declarative knowledge, behavioral proclivities, and decision-making
styles from innate propensities and (largely unconscious) social learning.
For example, Haidt (2012) invokes this model to explain moral beliefs
and behavior. The model is also applicable to the case of myside bias
(see Stanovich 2021). The convictions driving your myside bias are partly
caused by your biological makeup and partly by social learning from
parents, peers, and schools.
The convictions that determine your side when you think in a mys-
ided fashion often do not stem from rational thought. People will feel
less ownership of their beliefs when they realize they did not consciously
reason their way to them. When a belief is held less like a possession,
it is less likely to be projected to new evidence inappropriately. Recall
that the problematic kind of myside bias (see Stanovich 2021 for a fuller
discussion) is the kind that results when a person projects a conviction-­
based desired belief as a prior probability rather than a prior probabil-
ity that has resulted from the rational processing of previous evidence.
If we understand where convictions come from (our temperaments and
social experience), we might be able to develop a more depersonal-
ized stance toward our beliefs and thus avoid the problematic types of
­myside bias.
176 Keith E. Stanovich
9.5 The Peculiar Properties of Myside Bias Create
an Epistemic Crisis in Universities
The bias blind spot is a crucial meta-bias demonstrated in a paper by
Pronin, Lin, and Ross (2002). They found that people thought various
motivational biases were much more prevalent in others than themselves,
a much-replicated finding (Pronin 2007; Scopelliti et al. 2015). In two
studies, my research group (see West et al. 2012) showed that there is a
blind spot regarding most of the classic cognitive biases in the literature –
people think that most of these biases are more characteristic of oth-
ers than themselves. We found positive correlations between the blind
spots and cognitive sophistication – more cognitively skilled people were
more prone to the bias blind spot. However, this makes sense because
most cognitive biases in the heuristics and biases literature are negatively
correlated with cognitive ability – more intelligent people are less biased
(Stanovich 1999, 2011; Stanovich & West 1998a; Stanovich et al. 2016).
Therefore, it would make sense for intelligent people to say that they are
less biased than others – because they are!
However, one bias – myside bias – sets a trap for the cognitively sophis-
ticated. Regarding most biases, they are used to thinking that they are
less biased. However, myside thinking about your political beliefs repre-
sents an outlier bias where this is not true (Drummond & Fischhoff 2019;
Kahan, Peters, et al. 2012; Kahan et al. 2017; Sanchez & Dunning 2021;
Stanovich 2021; Stanovich & West 2008; Van Boven et al. 2019). This dis-
parity may lead to a particularly intense bias blind spot among cognitive
elites. Specifically, they may be prone to think that traits such as intelli-
gence (which they have) and experiences like education (which they also
have in abundance) provide them with very generalizable inoculations
against biased thinking.
If you are a person of high intelligence, have lots of education, and are
strongly committed to an ideological viewpoint, you will be especially
prone to think that you thought your way to your opinions. You will be
even less likely than the average person to know that you derived your
beliefs from the social groups around you. The beliefs comported with
your temperament and innate psychological propensities (see Haidt 2012;
Stanovich 2021). There is, in fact, a group of people who tick all of these
boxes: people who are highly intelligent, highly educated, and strongly
committed to an ideological viewpoint. That group happens to be the
group of social scientists who study politicized topics!
The university professoriate is overwhelmingly left/liberal. This demo-
graphic fact has been demonstrated in numerous studies (Abrams 2016;
Bikales & Goodman 2020; Ellis 2020; Horowitz et al. 2018; Jussim 2021;
Kaufmann 2020; Langbert 2018; Langbert & Stevens 2020; Lukianoff
& Haidt 2018; Peters et al. 2020). The trend is ubiquitous in the social
sciences (sociology, political science, and like), and it is particularly solid
 Myside Bias in Individuals and Institutions 177
in psychology, the source of many studies on politicized topics (Buss &
von Hippel 2018; Cardiff & Klein 2005; Ceci & Williams 2018; Clark &
Winegard 2020; Duarte et al. 2015). Ideological and partisan beliefs are
known to lead to the unwarranted projection of prior attitudes on the
evidence concerning a variety of issues, such as sexuality, morality, the
psychological effects of poverty, family structures, crime, childcare, pro-
ductivity, marriage, incentives, discipline techniques, educational prac-
tices, and many comparable subjects where distal political attitudes are
intertwined with people’s beliefs on specific issues.
It should be clear why scientific institutions with such an ideological
imbalance cannot produce accurate research on these topics. Science
overcomes the myside bias of individual scientists by immersing them in
a system of checks and balances – where other scientists with differing
biases are there to critique and correct. The bias of investigator A might
not be shared by investigator B, who will then look at A’s results with
a skeptical eye. Likewise, when investigator B presents a result, inves-
tigator A tends to be critical and look at it skeptically. However, what
can ruin this scientific error detection and cross-checking process should
be obvious. What ruins it is when all investigators share precisely the
same bias. Unfortunately, the field of psychology is in just this situation
concerning political ideology. The pool of investigators is politically
homogeneous. Thus, we cannot rest assured that our science has enough
variability to objectively approach politically charged topics like those
mentioned above.

9.6 Psychology’s Self-Correction Problem

The previously discussed Ditto et al. (2019a) findings highlight the dan-
ger of an academic elite thinking that they can investigate incendiary
political topics on which they have strong feelings without compromising
their research by myside bias. The Ditto et al. (2019a) findings show that
the ideology of the cognitive elite is no less prone to myside bias than the
political ideologies of the citizens that academics oppose. Nevertheless,
because of their cognitive ability and educational backgrounds, society’s
cognitive elites will think that their evidence processing is less driven by
myside bias than their fellow citizens.
As a result, we have ceased being a self-correcting science regarding
specific topics. For years, it has been known that various types of rac-
ism scales1 used in psychology do not measure the construct correctly
(Agadjanian et al. 2021; Carmines et al. 2011; Carney & Enos 2019; Reyna
2018; Wright et al. 2021; Zigerell 2015). Many of them literally build in
correlations between prejudice and conservative views. Early versions of
these scales included items on policy issues such as affirmative action,
crime prevention, busing to achieve school integration, or attitudes
178 Keith E. Stanovich
toward welfare reform and then scored any deviation from liberal ortho-
doxy as a racist response. Even endorsing the view that hard work leads
to success for many people in America will get a higher score on a “sym-
bolic racism” scale.
The social science monoculture repeatedly yields the same embarrass-
ing sequence time and again. We set out to study a negative trait concept
(prejudice, dogmatism, authoritarianism, intolerance, close-­m indedness –
the list is long). The traits studied are highly valenced – with one end of
the trait continuum being good and the other being bad. Then the scale
items are constructed like the racism scales discussed above – deliberately
building in conservative social policy to define the negative construct.
The scale is then used to associate conservatism with negative traits for a
decade. Hundreds of articles are produced. The New York Times articles
about the relevant research are written to show its liberal readers that
research psychologists (yes, science!) have confirmed the reader’s view
that liberals are indeed psychologically superior people – doing better on
all the tests that scientists have constructed to measure whether people are
open-minded, tolerant, and fair.
The flaws in these scales were pointed out as long ago as the 1980s
(Sniderman & Tetlock 1986). The decades-long failure to correct such
deficiencies in these ideologically slanted scales undermines public
confidence in psychology – as it should. Of course, there is indeed some
self-correction in social science. After about a decade (or maybe two), a
few researchers begin to probe whether there may have been theoretical
confusion in a particular trait concept. Subsequent research often shows
that the proposed trait was something different, or perhaps that the neg-
ative aspects can be found on either side of the ideological spectrum.2
For example, Conway et al. (2018) designed an authoritarianism scale
on which liberals score higher than conservatives. They simply took old
items that had disadvantaged conservatives and substituted content that
disadvantaged liberals. The old item “Our country will be great if we
honor the ways of our forefathers, do what the authorities tell us to do,
and get rid of the ‘rotten apples’ who are ruining everything” was changed
to “Our country will be great if we honor the ways of progressive think-
ing, do what the best liberal authorities tell us to do, and get rid of the
religious and conservative ‘rotten apples’ who are ruining everything.”
After the change, liberals scored higher on “authoritarianism” for the
same reason that made the old scales correlate with conservatism – the
content of the questionnaire targeted their views specifically.3
However, the fact that the scale eventually gets corrected, and the
psychological construct eventually gets clarified, should not be viewed
as necessarily flattering to psychology. Simply saying that corrections
are eventually made obscures that the errors are always made in one
direction (like at your local grocery, where things “ring up wrong” in
the overcharge direction much more often than the reverse). The initial
 Myside Bias in Individuals and Institutions 179
conclusion is that conservatives have higher levels of bad psychological
traits.
I had done this myself – in the 1990s, when, with colleagues, I con-
structed a questionnaire measuring actively open-minded thinking
(AOT). One essential processing style tapped by the AOT concept is the
subject’s willingness to revise beliefs based on evidence. Our early scales,
first constructed decades ago, had several items to tap this processing
style. However, my colleague Maggie Toplak and I discovered (Stanovich
& Toplak 2019) that there is no generic belief revision tendency. Belief
revision needs to be tapped with content because the specific belief deter-
mines how much people are willing to revise. In the mid-1990s, our items
were biased against religious (and conservative) subjects as initially writ-
ten. No doubt, if the correlations had come out in the other direction, we
would have been quicker to notice a problem, as those of us constructing
the items were all secularists.
Cherry-picking scale items to embarrass our enemies is a seemingly
irresistible tendency in psychology, as demonstrated during the recent
pandemic. As is now well known, the media leaped to label as a con-
spiracy theory the idea that the virus might have originated in a lab
in Wuhan because most mainstream media disliked the administration
associated with that idea. Of course, labeling an alternative hypothesis
as a conspiracy was deeply unscientific. There were still many viable
virus origination theories at the time in 2020 when the media started
their conspiracy mantra. In science, especially at the borderline of the
unknown, we do not label every hypothesis other than the one with the
highest Bayesian prior to be a conspiracy theory. In 2021, the media
was embarrassed by this earlier behavior because, as often happens in
science, the probability distribution across the viable theories shifted. It
was well-publicized that even fact-checkers had made the error of call-
ing everything but the primary hypothesis a conspiracy theory (Jilani
2021; Taibbi 2021; Tufekci 2021).
Perhaps such media bias should be expected in the present environment
but seeing fellow social science researchers doing the same thing was mor-
tifying. Several studies of Covid-19 misinformation and Covid-19 con-
spiracy theory beliefs had items in their scales that labeled belief in the
laboratory origin of the virus as a conspiracy theory.4 Before we knew any-
thing with confidence about the origins of the virus that caused Covid-19,
social scientists also jumped on the partisan bandwagon when they should
have been the first to point out that minority hypotheses should not be
labeled conspiracy theories at the beginning of an investigation.
For some years, studies of conspiracy beliefs have been plagued by
item selection bias. A few conspiracy theories are prevalent on the left;
others are on the right; many have no association with ideology.5 It is thus
trivially easy to select conspiracy theories disproportionally so that there
will be ideological correlations in one direction or the other. However,
180 Keith E. Stanovich
such correlations would not represent facts about people’s underlying
psychological structure. They would merely be sampling artifacts.
Kahan (2015) has shown that the heavy reliance of scientific knowl-
edge tests on items involving belief in climate change and evolutionary
origins has built correlations between liberalism and scientific knowl-
edge into such measures. Notably, his research has demonstrated that
removing belief in human-caused climate change and evolutionary
origin items from scientific knowledge scales reduces the correlation
between scientific knowledge and liberalism. Eliminating these items
also makes the remaining test more valid because responses on climate
and evolution items are expressive responses signaling group allegiance
rather than responses that reflect actual science knowledge (Kahan &
Stanovich 2016).
All studies of the “who is more knowledgeable” type in the political
domain are at risk of being compromised by such item selection effects.
Over the years, Democrats in the United States have called themselves
the “party of science” – and they are regarding climate science and belief
in the evolutionary origins of humans. Nevertheless, regarding topics like
the heritability of intelligence and sex differences, the Democrats sud-
denly become the “party of science denial” (Stanovich 2021). Whoever
controls the selection of items will find it irresistible not to bias the selec-
tion according to their notion of what knowledge is essential – choosing
items that fellow tribe members pass easily and that are opaque to their
political enemies and not seeing the possibility of someone else doing
exactly the opposite. It is distressingly easy to expose the ignorance of a
group we do not like if we control the selection of the items.

9.7 Academia’s Perverse Response to the Scientific Problem

of an Ideological Monoculture: Doubling Down
How has social science responded to the problems inherent in being an
institutionalized ideological monoculture? How has it sought to bolster
confidence in its scientific conclusions? Incredibly, the response has been
to double down on insisting that, when defining good thinking, only
they are the authorities. You must answer the questions posed by these
researchers correctly, but you must now also affirm that the creators of
the tests are the ultimate arbiters of what constitutes good thinking.
I am referring to the increasing popularity of so-called science trust
or “faith in science” scales (I am guilty of authoring one of these scales
myself!). On such questionnaires, the respondent is often asked whether
they trust universities, the media, or the results of scientific research on
pressing social issues. When the respondent answers that they do not
trust university research very much, their epistemic abilities are deemed
inferior. They are called science deniers, or people who do not “follow
the science.”
 Myside Bias in Individuals and Institutions 181
However, most of these “trust in experts” measures used in behavioral
science have methodological problems. The researchers employing them
view low-trust subjects as epistemically defective in their failure to rely
strongly on expert opinion when forming their beliefs. Investigators con-
sider more acceptance of information from experts such as these as bet-
ter. Indeed, maximum acceptance (answering “complete acceptance” on
the scale) is explicitly deemed optimal in the statistical analysis of such
measures.
How times have changed. In the 1960s and the 1970s, it was viewed as
progressive to display skepticism toward all claims of expertise. Making
people more skeptical toward government officials, journalists, and uni-
versities was viewed as progressive because, by doing so, we thought we
were moving toward a more accurate worldview. It was thought then that
truth was obscured by the self-serving interests of precisely the groups
listed on current “expert acceptance” questionnaires! Nevertheless, it is
viewed as an epistemological defect when conservatives currently evince
more skepticism on these scales. Actually, no one knows how much trust
in institutions is optimal, so these measures cannot possibly have valid
scoring protocols.
Related to these “trust in experts” scales are the “trust in science”
scales in the psychological literature (or their complement, so-called
anti-scientific attitude scales). I have constructed such a scale but now
consider that it is a conceptual error and, as a measure, will be prone to
misuse. When you ask a subject to respond to an item such as “science
is the best method of acquiring knowledge,” you might as well ask the
subject whether they have received higher education. The social benefit
of attending a university is learning that you are supposed to endorse
items like this. Every person with a BA knows it is a good thing to “follow
the science,” as we have often heard during the pandemic. The same BA
equips you to criticize your fellow citizens who do not know that “trust
the science” is a code word used by university-educated elites.
For these reasons, I have removed the anti-science attitudes subtest
from my lab’s omnibus measure of rational thinking, the Comprehensive
Assessment of Rational Thinking (Stanovich et al. 2016). It does not pro-
vide a clean and unbiased measurement of that construct. Suppose we
want to examine people’s attitudes toward scientific evidence. In that
case, we must take a domain-specific belief that a person has on a scien-
tific matter, present them with contradictory evidence, and see how they
assimilate that contradictory evidence (as some studies have done). You
cannot just ask people whether they “follow the science” on a question-
naire. That is the equivalent of constructing a test and giving half the
respondents the answer sheet. It would not be an independent finding
when those with the answer sheet do better. Such scales measure nothing
more than whether the respondent is a member of the tribe that designed
the test.
182 Keith E. Stanovich
My scale was far from the most misguided of this type. These question-
naires can get quite aggressive in what they require assent to if one is to
avoid the label “anti-science.” For example, one scale (Farias et al. 2013)
requires the subjects to affirm propositions such as “We can only ration-
ally believe in what is scientifically provable,” “Science tells us everything
there is to know about what reality consists of,” and “All the tasks human
beings face are soluble by science,” “Science is the most valuable part of
human culture.” The above is a quite an uncompromising set of beliefs to
have to endorse so as not to end up in the “low faith in science” group in
an experiment! One can be appropriately calibrated to scientific evidence
without enthusiastically affirming statements like these, which seem to
claim Promethean status for science.
In addition to this problem of overblown notions of what belief in sci-
ence entails, the social sciences employ definitions saturated with their
own myside bias. Consider a study (Feygina et al. 2010) that attempted to
link the conservative worldview with “the denial of environmental reali-
ties.” Subjects were presented with the following item: If things continue
their present course, we will soon experience a major environmental
catastrophe. If the subject did not agree with this statement, they were
scored as denying ecological realities. The term denial implies that what
is being denied is a descriptive fact. However, without a clear descrip-
tion of what “soon” means in this statement, what “major” means, or
what “catastrophe” means, the statement itself is not a fact – and so labe-
ling one set of respondents as science deniers based on an item like this
reflects little more than the ideological position of the study’s authors.
This tendency to conflate liberal responses with the correct answer
(or ethical response, fair response, scientific response, or open-minded
response) is particularly prevalent in social psychology and personality psy-
chology subareas. Studies often label any legitimate policy difference with
liberalism as an intellectual or personality defect (dogmatism or authori-
tarianism or racism or prejudice, or science denial). In one utterly typical
study (Azevedo & Jost 2021), the aggressive label “social dominance orien-
tation” is used to describe anyone who does not endorse both identity poli-
tics (emphasizing groups when thinking about justice) and the new meaning
of equity (equality of outcomes). A subject who does not support the item
“group equality should be our ideal” is scored in the direction of having a
social dominance orientation (wanting to maintain the dominant group in a
hierarchy). A conservative individual (or an old-style Democrat) who values
equality of opportunity and focuses on the individual will naturally score
higher in social dominance orientation than a left-wing advocate of group-
based identity politics who focuses on equality among groups.
The entire construct of social dominance represents a form of dou-
bling down on the bet that one’s beliefs are correct. The concept assumes
that the world should be interpreted through the lens of identity politics
and scores in the negative direction any response that strays from that
 Myside Bias in Individuals and Institutions 183
worldview. In contrast, if a subject denies that group performance is the
measure of fairness and thinks instead that fairness is a construct that
applies at the individual level, they will be said to have a social domi-
nance orientation – even though group outcomes are not even salient in
the subject’s framework. The subject’s fairness concepts are ignored, and
the experimenter’s framework is instead imposed upon them.
The study then defines “skepticism about science” with just two items.
The first, “We believe too often in science, and not enough in faith and
feelings,” builds into the scale a direct conflict between religious faith and
science that many subjects might not actually experience, thus inflating
correlations with religiosity. The second, “When it comes to fundamen-
tal questions, scientific facts don’t help very much,” is even more inter-
esting. If you think that the essential things in life are marriage, family,
raising children with good values, and being a good neighbor – and thus
answer that you agree on this item, you will get a higher score on this sci-
ence skepticism scale than a person who believes that the essential things
in life are climate change and green technology. Neither of these items
shows that conservative subjects are anti-science, but they ensure that
conservatism/religiosity will be correlated with the misleading construct
that names the scale: “science skepticism.”
Cognitive elites often use “fact-checking” to double down on their
insistence that adherence to the norms of the institutions that they con-
trol are the only arbiters of truth. If you do not accept the conclusions
of the fact-checkers, you are not “following the science.” Academic
researchers in the social sciences seem oblivious to an implication from
research on myside bias (Stanovich 2021) – that a primary source of bias
is the selection of items to fact-check in the first place. More problematic
than inaccuracies in the fact checks themselves is the automatic myside
bias that will trigger choosing one proposition over another for checking
amongst a population of thousands (Uscinski & Butler 2013).
Unfortunately, fact-checkers have become just another player in the
unhinged partisan cacophony of our politics. Progressive academics
populate many leading organizations in universities, others are run by,
and some are connected to Democratic donors in the United States. You
cannot expect such entities to win respect among the general population
when they have such ideological connections and do not fully instantiate
inclusive adversarial collaboration (see below).
Fact-checking is particularly prone to myside bias in the political
domain. The slipups that occur always seem to favor the ideological
proclivities of the liberal media outlets that sponsor the fact checks. As
previously noted, academic research groups immediately began includ-
ing items that classified belief in a lab origin for the Covid-19 virus as
a conspiracy belief in their studies. Scholars and commentators talk-
ing about the possibility of a lab origin were censored on social media
(Taibbi 2021). A New York Times reporter (a science reporter no less)
184 Keith E. Stanovich
said the lab origin hypothesis had “racist origins” (Jilani 2021). The idea
of a lab origin was labeled false and a “debunked” idea by fact-checking
websites (Taibbi 2021). However, in May 2021, the fact-checking website
Politifact issued a retraction to their September 2020 assessment that a
lab origin was a “pants on fire” claim. Likewise, fact-checking websites
quickly refuted the Trump administration’s claims that a vaccine would
be available in 2020 (Tierney 2021). Of course, we now know the vaccine
rollout was in December 2020.
Regarding many Covid-19 issues, these organizations had no busi-
ness treating ongoing scientific disputes (origins of the virus, the efficacy
of lockdowns) as if they were a matter of established “fact” they could
check. They were, as Tufekci (2021) phrased it in an essay, “checking
facts even if you can’t.” In an ongoing scientific dispute with a dominant
hypothesis warranting a 60% Bayesian prior, a minority hypothesis with
20% credence does not become a “conspiracy theory,” and those advo-
cating for it are not making a “pants on fire” claim. Unfortunately, this
was characteristic of fact-checking organizations and many social sci-
ence researchers studying the spread of misinformation throughout the
pandemic. They were too quick to double down by insisting that adher-
ence to their approach to these complex pandemic issues was a sign of
epistemic rationality.

9.8 Restoring Epistemic Legitimacy to the Social Sciences

I wrote a book on myside bias (Stanovich 2021) that discussed in detail
the difficulty each of us has in checking our tendencies to evaluate and
generate evidence in a manner that favors our pre-existing opinion. The
remedy for our society-wide epistemic crisis will not be any quick fix at
the individual level. The ultimate reform must be at the level of our insti-
tutions (Rauch 2021) – precisely the institutions (media and universities)
that have lost their status as neutral adjudicators of truth claims in recent
years. The answer cannot be to tell the populace to turn more strongly to
the same institutions that have been failing us. You cannot do that unless
you change the institutions themselves.
Academics pile up more and more studies of the psychological “defi-
ciencies” of the voters who do not support the Democrats or who voted
for Brexit. They pile up more conclusions on all the pressing issues of the
day (immigration, crime, inequality, race relations) using research teams
without any representation outside the left/liberal-progressive consen-
sus. We – universities, social science departments, my tribe – have sorted
by temperament, values, and culture into a monolithic intellectual edifice
that has long ceased to be a neutral adjudicator of fraught social issues.
We create tests to reward and celebrate the intellectual characteristics we
define ourselves by and skewer those we deplore. The broader population
no longer trusts us. Thus, in the last ten to twenty years, we have created
 Myside Bias in Individuals and Institutions 185
another layer of tests to find our critics guilty more elementally: they are
anti-science and do not “trust expertise.” How do you get a low score on
our new meta-tests? Answer: Say you do not trust us.
I have sat with university faculty and joked about how doctors think
they can regulate themselves, but we psychologists know that it is implausi-
ble that they will do it objectively. Nevertheless, we turn around and object
when there is disbelief in our self-regulating ability. We have an epistemic
crisis because cognitive elites have become so self-referential that they no
longer command the respect of the rest of the populace. We have been
cleansing disciplines of ideologically dissident voices for thirty years now
with relentless efficiency. We have attempted to define the beliefs of our
political enemies as pathologies. If you say that hard work will lead to
African Americans’ success, you will display “symbolic racism.” Belief in
the equality of opportunity for individuals combined with skepticism of
government-enforced equality of outcomes for groups becomes a “social
dominance orientation.” If you do not believe that “All the tasks human
beings face are soluble by science” or that science does not answer many of
the most important questions, you will be labeled anti-science or a science
skeptic. If you do not believe there will soon be a “climate catastrophe,”
you will be labeled a science denier.6 As a result, public trust in us is sink-
ing. It will not reverse, and it should not reverse – until we take measures
to ensure that we are triangulating social issues using various frameworks.

9.9 Adversarial Collaboration and the Ideological

Monoculture
Institutions, administrators, and faculty seem unconcerned about the
public’s plummeting trust in universities. Most outsiders, though, see
the monoculture as a bug. If academia wanted to fix the bug, it would
turn intensely to mechanisms such as adversarial collaboration, which
is well described on the website of the Adversarial Collaboration Project
of the University of Pennsylvania (see Clark & Tetlock 2022). Adversarial
collaboration seeks to broaden the frameworks within research groups
by encouraging disagreeing scholars to work together. Researchers from
opposing perspectives design methods that both sides agree to consti-
tute a fair test and jointly publish the results. Both sides participate in
interpreting the findings and conclusions based on pre-agreed criteria.
Adversarial collaborations prevent researchers from designing studies
likely to support a predetermined hypothesis and dismiss unexpected
results. Most importantly, findings based on adversarial collaborations
can be fairly presented to consumers of scientific information as proper
consensus conclusions and not outcomes determined by one side’s suc-
cess in shutting the other out.
There is a significant obstacle, however. It is not certain that, in the
future, universities will have enough conservative scholars to function in
186 Keith E. Stanovich
the needed adversarial collaborations. The diversity statements that candi-
dates for faculty positions must now write are a significant impediment to
increasing intellectual diversity in academia. A candidate will not advance
their chance of attaining a faculty position unless they affirm belief in the
tenets of progressive identity politics and pledge allegiance to its many terms
and concepts without getting too picky about their lack of operational defi-
nition (diversity, systemic racism, white privilege, inclusion, equity). Such
statements function like ideological loyalty oaths (Jussim 2019; McBrayer,
2022; Rozado 2019; Small 2021; Thompson 2019). You will not be hired if
you do not endorse the current shibboleths of identity politics. One wonders
whether, in the future, there will be enough intellectual diversity left in aca-
demia to make actual adversarial collaboration possible.

Notes
1. Contemporary scales go by a variety of names. The most common labels
are racial resentment, symbolic racism, and modern racism (Carmines
et al. 2011; Henry & Sears 2002).
2. Alternatively, the history of such scales starts out being unidimensionally
negative on one end (high authoritarianism is always worse). However,
the concept morphs into something resembling a cognitive style – where
extremes on either end look suboptimal, and the wisest response seems
somewhere in the middle. For example, authoritarianism morphs into
security concerns (Hibbing 2020) or a fixed versus fluid worldview
­(Hetherington & Weiler 2018).
3. Costello et al. (2021) present results on a more psychometrically sound left-
wing authoritarianism scale than that investigated by Conway – one with a
more thoroughly established construct validity.
4. See Gligorić et al. (2021) and Teovanović et al. (2021), but there are many
other examples.
5. If a scale includes a broad sampling of items, the correlation with ideology
should not be that large (Enders & Uscinski 2021; Oliver & Wood 2014;
Stanovich et al. 2016). The conspiracy belief subtest of our Comprehensive
Assessment of Rational Thinking (CART) sampled twenty-four different
conspiracy theories.
6. Singal (2018) parodied our field’s flaws when he posited the Jesse Singal
Authoritarianism scale consisting of three items cherry-picked to expose lib-
erals in the same way that the academic literature targets conservatives: “In
certain cases, it might be acceptable to curtail people’s constitutional rights
to stop them from spreading climate-change denialism”; “The government
needs to do a much more comprehensive job monitoring ­Christian-oriented
far-right terrorism”; “Some people want to act like the causes of racism are
complicated, but they aren’t”: “Racists are moral failures, and that’s that” –
a scale which would target liberals as the authoritarians.

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2915586631
10 Listening for Epistemic
Community
Hanna Kiri Gunn

10.1 Introduction
Of the various headline-worthy crises we presently face, the epistemic
crisis might be construed as a Cardinal Crisis interweaved through all
the rest. Under this banner, one can find a broad concern for how we have
lost, or are losing, the ability to collectively engage in meaningful and
productive deliberations on issues that affect us all. One more specific
potential loss is the very success of democratic decision-making. Such
success depends on the nature and quality of communication within
democratic societies. Quality communication, in turn, depends on both
the quality of speech and the quality of listening. And while much atten-
tion in social epistemology and philosophy of language has been paid
to the ways others may silence us, little attention has been given to our
duties to listen to one another.1
In this chapter, I argue that as members of an epistemic community,
we are obliged to develop listening competencies in ourselves and oth-
ers. One of the detriments of our current political climate is a failure to
meet these obligations. For instance, widespread polarization and the
phenomenon of “stupidification” lead to and exemplify listening failures.
I propose that the inability or unwillingness to listen undermines our
capacity to generate and maintain the kind of healthy epistemic com-
munity that we desire and is arguably required for the sustainability
of a democratic society. Our epistemic crisis, thus, is not just a crisis of
democracy but a skillful or competent epistemic community.
To cultivate a healthy epistemic community, we ought to recognize and
act on social obligations to foster the capacities needed for good listening.
A solution to the present epistemic crisis must incorporate some means
for promoting the skill of listening and the competencies that underlie
that skill. Crucially, therefore, the obligations to listen do not stem from
purely epistemic goods – that is, the values of effective belief formation
and deliberation – but rather from the distinctly social-epistemic values
of the epistemic agency and healthy epistemic community.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003311003-13
196 Hanna Kiri Gunn
To be clear, my goal here is not to specify, in detail, our obligations
around listening practices. Instead, the goal is to argue that we have such
duties and that future work in social epistemology ought to progress in try-
ing to spell these out. Further, as I highlight, many theorists working in
related areas – for example, those working on intellectual humility and cor-
responding virtues and politically oriented philosophers of education – are
already implicitly committed to the value of listening, especially within
the context of a democratic society.

10.2 Polarization, Stupidification, and Epistemic Exclusion

The epistemological crisis has been interpreted as a crisis of epistemic
and communicative dimensions with significant consequences on liberal
democratic political systems. One undertheorized area, however, remains
that of the normative aspects of listening and its role in maintaining
healthy epistemic communities. This first section aims to motivate the
idea that listening failures are essential to the epistemological crisis. The
intuitive idea is that a range of polarization effects2 indicate that there
are widespread epistemic and communicative failures that we can under-
stand, in part, as failures of listening competencies. A crucial part of this
failure is an inability to overcome animosity in the face of disagreement.
Animosity, as it appears, clogs up ears just as well as it does empathy.
As an attempt at generalization, polarization is about doxastic changes
in individuals or groups that occur either over time intervals or because
of an intervention, many of which are taken to be (though need not be)
unjustified changes in belief. Polarization effects take a range of potential
subjects, including but not limited to the views of an individual, a group’s
views across time, and the belief set of significant collectives like the
political ideology of political parties. Polarization research has become
especially salient for those interested in making sense of the epistemolog-
ical crisis as it intersects with political partisanship.
One reason for this, as I understand the connection, involves the
correlation between polarization effects and partisan antipathy.3 The
substance of this antagonism is notably both doxastic and affective.
Doxastically, the kind of partisan antipathy regularly portrayed in the
context of polarization research results in group-think, unwarranted def-
erence to the beliefs of one’s partisan allies, and the downright dismissal
of what is believed by one’s partisan peers. As an affective phenomenon,
partisan antipathy can be seen in survey results in the United States,
indicating that, over the past three decades, in particular, there has been
a sharp rise in perceptions of partisan rivals as evil, immoral, and even
unsuitable for marrying one’s children.4
Polarized partisans, in short, do not seem to desire much to do with
one another. This phenomenon is problematic at least because this
 Listening for Epistemic Community 197
fracturing of an ideologically divided but still-united democratic com-
munity causes individuals to opt out of political and social activities.5
More robust than this, the ingroup dynamics that seem to co-occur with
pervasive polarization involve excluding outgroup members as people
whose opinions and beliefs are allowed to influence one’s own. A fur-
ther effect that appears to occur (at least in part) due to polarization is
stupidification that devalues knowledge and, by extension, those who
possess it.
Lisa Heldke (2006) introduces and defines this process of “stupidifi-
cation.” To stupidify a body of knowledge is to take it to lack several
kinds of value, including practical, aesthetic, and moral significance.
Stupidification also results in stupid knowing: a stupid knower knows
about stupidified things. Heldke’s target is the stupidification of the knowl-
edge of rural people by big-city dwelling metrocentrists. As she explains,
the knowledge rural people have “aren’t the sorts of things anyone would
want to know, let alone anything anyone would need to know, or would be
enriched by knowing” (2006, 152, emphasis in original). Stupid knowing
is different from ignorance: it is not because someone lacks the belief that
they are a stupid knower. Instead, having that knowledge makes one a
stupid knower.
This ability to cast others as irrational and stupid because of what they
know is an extraordinarily successful method of ostracization. Heldke’s
definition of stupidification describes a process by which epistemic con-
trol is exercised over others. A change in the perceived value of some
knowledge system can make it permissible to ignore, or even spurn, those
who believe it. Significantly, a consequence of this process of devaluing
knowledge is that it warrants, both epistemically and morally, ignoring
and discounting those ideas from serious consideration. For a demo-
cratic community, this is antithetical to a fundamental commitment to
the equality of ideas, culture, and practice.
The critical point, for our purposes, is that part of the harm of stu-
pidification and polarization effects is that they encourage us to become
resistant to worldviews that might provide opportunities for reflection
and improvement. As Heldke nicely illustrates, a vital feature of the stu-
pid knowing designation is that a stupid knower cannot be a “sophis-
ticated” knower (2006, 161). For this reason, stupidification warrants
ignoring them – refusing to listen to them – in our deliberations and
conversations, treating what they know not as valuable but, at best, as
a curiosity.
Now, stupidification and polarization are not the same things, they
do not need to coincide, and neither would appear to necessitate the
other’s existence. It is also implausible that all kinds of political disa-
greement entail stupidification. However, in our actual case, there are
reasons to think that polarization is causing us to see one another as
198 Hanna Kiri Gunn
stupid knowers due to the entrenchment of partisan attitudes about the
political “other.”
The relationship between stupidification and polarization that is of
interest here concerns this “othering” effect that we can call “epistemic
estrangement.” By epistemic estrangement, I refer to a process where
individuals within the same epistemic community gradually become
alienated from other community members due to failing to value, respect,
and understand one another’s beliefs. These may be attitudes about par-
ticular policies, what constitutes the good life, or differing perspectives
about risks and threats faced by the community. Epistemic estrangement
can occur because of polarization effects, such as spread or ideological
polarization, and it may occur because of stupidification.
The motivation for calling this consequence “epistemic estrangement”
is that it highlights the social-epistemic implications for the community.
One of the significant barriers facing public discourse in democratic
societies is not merely that people disagree about matters of importance.
Indeed, this is very often a political or epistemic community’s virtue.
It is, instead, how disagreement manifests in the community and how
it enables or disables creative political decision-making. What appears
to be taking place as a side effect of a range of polarization effects is an
affective shift in the perception of those we are meant to treat as polit-
ical equals. Stupidification predicts such an outcome. If one is a stupid
knower, one is morally and epistemically deficient.
It is hard not to see stupidification as almost a boiler-plate political
strategy in 2022. I have written previously about what I call the “incredu-
lous reaction,” a mixture of surprise and concern at other people for fail-
ing to adhere to epistemic norms like trusting perceptual evidence, for
example, from photographs about crowd sizes (Gunn 2021a). Sometimes
other people’s epistemic choices or commitments strike us as so mis-
guided that they must be wilful, thus the desire to punish those who seem
to flout good epistemic conduct. What I have called the “norm of exclu-
sion” validates the incredulous reaction: this norm warrants excluding
the testimony of those who one takes to be irrational.
But this is problematic if we treat it as indefeasible – if we take epis-
temic principles that aim at truth to trump all other values that seek
different epistemic goods. The risk of a norm that recommends not
listening to those one takes to be irrational is that it can establish a
default attitude of exclusion from epistemic – and thus, political – life
for people we assume to be unreasonable. Research into polarization
and partisan divisions reveals that many partisans believe their dif-
ferently partisan peers are not trustworthy, reliable, or rational oth-
ers – they are evil and wildly misguided about the facts. Such a norm
rejects treating others with the respect and tolerance that democratic
commitment entails: our default setting ought to be treating others as
reasonable equals.
 Listening for Epistemic Community 199
10.3 Epistemic Community, Epistemic Agency,
and Listening
What norms should guide citizens of democratic societies amid what
many consider an “epistemic crisis”? And how should we conceive of the
crisis? We have come to refer to a cluster of epistemic and communicative
ailments as a crisis by analogy to the climate crisis. (It is striking how
rich climate metaphors and analogies have been for contemporary social
epistemologists.) Our epistemic environment, by analogy, is in a state of
emergency – our “canaries in the coal mine” range from outlandish the-
ories about space lasers igniting wildfires (Branson-Potts et al. 2021) to
butterfly sanctuaries serving as sites for human smuggling (BBC 2022).
However, the framing of the crisis part of “climate crisis” has shifted:
we increasingly hear more about climate “tipping points” and spiraling,
as-yet-uncontrollable “domino effects” that would put an abrupt end to
our attempts to get the upper hand and stabilize climate systems.
These are distinct views: one proposes we are in the midst of an ongo-
ing emergency, and the other suggests that the ongoing crisis is a dire
warm-up before we hit a point of no return. We must consider that the
epistemological crisis may merely pose a “tipping point.” We may be
nearing the edge of a cultural cliff in our epistemic environment from
which we cannot climb back up. Put less metaphorically, without inter-
ventions that can meaningfully push back against the ways that we are
actively trained to be partisans incapable of meaningful, respectful, and
edifying public discourse, we may lose out on the goods that healthy
public discourse promises altogether. How many generations of failing
to cultivate the dispositions, competencies, and attitudes that support a
healthy epistemic community does it take until the prospect of a healthy
epistemic community is all but gone?
What are the analogous tipping-point risks we arguably face, then?
From the perspective of someone who typically thinks in the social epis-
temology space about issues of epistemic agency as understood above,
the entrenchment of the range of “polarization” harms is a particularly
salient tipping-point risk.
If we are in such an epistemic crisis, either an ongoing emergency or
facing some epistemic tipping point(s), what should we do to either halt or
prevent it? Many authors writing on the epistemic crisis have focused on
our doxastic practices: how are people forming beliefs? Are they reading
the viral stories or merely sharing them online? Do people know how to
verify a source, to engage in lateral reading? Listening has simply not had
as much theoretical attention as a part-solution to the epistemic crisis as
protecting speech has. It is, of course, imperative to safeguard speech. But
speech without an audience is empty – it lacks the force to move anyone or
thing. Moreover, an audience who perceives you as a stupid knower is at
least as helpful as not having one and potentially much more dangerous.
200 Hanna Kiri Gunn
Speech without an audience fails in another way that overlaps with
speaking to an audience who takes you as a stupid knower. Alongside
a lack of uptake for what has been said, the speaker fails to get any of
the other goods from taking the floor: being understood, being shown
respect by being attended to, being included in an ongoing conversation
where others have been allowed their say or the promise of an informa-
tive discussion with a sincere interlocutor. Our epistemic agency is deeply
intertwined with listening: one’s capacity and willingness to listen well
to others and others’ willingness and capacity to listen to oneself. To
have the ability to speak to one’s opinions, values, or knowledge without
being heard is not to be included in epistemic life. To talk without being
listened to in a democratic society is to be sequestered and ineffectual.
Indeed, it is not to be treated as an equal.
It is much easier to understand the value of listening if we conceive of
it through the lens of social-epistemic goods and within the context of
an epistemic community. An underappreciated social-epistemic value is
that of the health of the epistemic community itself. We should under-
stand this in terms of the epistemic agency of the community’s members.
The role of listening, then, is critical for the health of the epistemic com-
munity, given its significance for the epistemic agency of its members.
In the next section, I argue that much analytic epistemic theorizing is
implicitly committed to this model of understanding epistemic commu-
nities and listening duties. Still, explicit and intentional theorizing com-
mitted to the value of the health of the epistemic community is needed.
Let me now say more about what I mean by “epistemic community”
and “social-epistemic agency.” I understand the epistemic environment
as a complex system constituted by, at a minimum, a combination of
actual people (their attitudes, dispositions, skills), social networks, and
technology. An epistemic community is a group of people embedded in
an epistemic environment and united at the level of joint commitment to
some fundamental epistemic values or aims (Gunn 2020).
All political societies are also, in a foundational sense, epistemic ones
but not the reverse. The epistemic character of a political society is evi-
dent in liberal democratic systems where democratic processes revolve
around testimony, persuasion, and collective deliberation, each of which
is a kind of social-epistemic practice. The health of the epistemic com-
munity can be seen as a part of the common good of political society. By
attending to and promoting the health of the epistemic community, we
meet what I propose is an obligation that promotes a common interest in
both epistemic and political well-being.
At the risk of asserting a controversial premise, being a community
member is not a static role: communities only exist because their members
maintain them. The particular character of a community, its sustaina-
bility, and its resistance to radical change or welcoming of it depend on
the nature of that specific community. Or so I assume for this discussion.
 Listening for Epistemic Community 201
Epistemic communities, then, are groups of people brought together
owing to a “joint commitment” in Margaret Gilbert’s sense (Gilbert 2013;
Gunn 2020).6 The function of joint commitment is that it ratchets up the
normative stakes by making us accountable to other agents who share the
responsibility. If we want not to be bound by it, we must ask to be released
or violate our commitment. When we think about epistemic communities,
we think about groups of people who jointly commit epistemically.
Epistemic communities enable or disable the epistemic agency of their
members. They do this because epistemic agency, as I understand it, is
a competency developed through training by and with other people and
letting one participate in epistemic life more-or-less well. Put differently,
the epistemic agency is a relational skill or a relational ability. It is rela-
tional in two ways. First, it is causally relational in that competencies
have to be acquired – one needs to learn from others how to do things
like responsibly form beliefs, do research, and effectively teach others.
Second, it is constitutively relational because our ability to bring about
changes in the epistemic environment depends on other people too. For
example, whether or not people are willing to learn from me in a class-
room determines whether I can occupy the epistemic role of a teacher.
In general, to be an epistemic agent is to be the kind of creature that
can bring about epistemic changes in their epistemic environment, which
requires being able to make epistemic changes in oneself and others.7
Epistemic agency, or the ability to meaningfully participate in epis-
temic life, is (like other sorts of agency) good for human beings. Listening
is an essential part of epistemic agency. We are often able to bring about
epistemic changes by being listened to. It is through listening to others
that we can improve our worldview, to subject our beliefs and convictions
to reasonable challenges. It is essential, then, that individuals can be lis-
tened to by competent others and have the same ability to support the
other members of their epistemic community.
An epistemic crisis threatens the epistemic environment by affect-
ing any constitutive parts: via social networks, via new technology, via
undermining attempts to exercise epistemic agency or develop some
competency it requires. It is probably reasonably clear, then, why threats
to epistemic agency register as threats to what, simply by analogy, we
can call “political agency.” If one cannot exercise epistemic agency, say,
by having their say about whether the government should build a bridge,
they are excluded from the political project too.

10.4 Civility Approaches to Public Discourse

and Obligations to Listen
In this way of thinking about epistemic communities, one of the oppor-
tunities in times of epistemic crisis is that it reveals that joint commit-
ments crop up functionally in practice, whether in theory or not. When
202 Hanna Kiri Gunn
we are considering solutions for the epistemic situation, this framing of
epistemic communities as collectives grounded in joint commitments
helps to keep in focus the (social-) fact that we are responsible, individ-
ually and collectively (as the distribution of social power allows), for the
current and future character of the epistemic community.
There are many takes on the causes of the epistemic crisis. A common
but arguably naive one is that the internet is responsible for the current
state of polarization effects at the individual and collective levels. However,
consider the following passage – which will be contextualized below – com-
menting on the perceived state of public discourse in the United States,

First, the claim is made that our political and social discourse is
highly polarized, uncivil, and unproductive. Second, our political
and social leaders are more interested in following public opinion
than imagining bold, new solutions to old problems. Third, our
communal life is increasingly fragmented into increasingly smaller
and more highly politicized units. Fourth, a breakdown in public
mores, tolerance, and self-restraint is lamented, and a blurring of the
boundaries between private and public discourse is felt to influence
dramatically and negatively every aspect of our public culture.

This diagnosis of the state of public discourse is almost two decades old.
It comes from Judith Rodin and Stephen P. Steinberg’s (2003) introduc-
tory chapter, “Incivility and Public Discourse,” of their edited book,
Public Discourse in America. Despite the proliferation of arguments that
the internet – and social media in particular – have brought about the
epistemic crisis, this quote comes from a pre-social media age. Indeed,
2003 was the year both 4chan and The Pirate Bay first went live, the year
that Second Life was released, and the year the iTunes store opened.
The moral of this is not to propose that the internet and social media have
no impact on the present state of public discourse or our epistemic lives.
Instead, the goal is to contextualize the current situation in a slightly longer
history. This history helps us understand how public discourse came to be the
way it is and develop a sense of recurrent problems. Given that many of the
contributors to Rodin and Steinberg’s (2003) book are reflecting on research
from the 1990s, we can assert with some confidence that these barriers to
public discourse have been blocking the path for at least three decades – with
the internet arriving at a time to exaggerate and make them worse.
Recent theorizing about public discourse has continued to share the
framing of civility and incivility. However, there has been a sharp rise
in treating the problem as an issue of epistemic responsibility. More
specifically, often a case of the virtues and vices of epistemic agents or
the dispositions of epistemic agents. As illustrated below, many exist-
ing theories diagnosing epistemically harmful propensities like intellec-
tual arrogance and positive accounts of virtues like intellectual humility
 Listening for Epistemic Community 203
entail normative claims about listening skills. Despite this, and while
many may mention listening and its centrality to epistemic life, there are
as of yet few accounts of listening in its own right, a point that has not
gone unnoticed by others also calling for further theoretical attention to
listening for social justice (e.g., Beausoleil 2021).
One influential view in the intellectual humility literature is offered by
Whitcomb et al. (2017). They propose that intellectual humility involves
developing a particular dispositional profile to properly understand one’s
epistemic strengths and weaknesses. Whitcomb et al. are engaged in an
interdisciplinary research project involving psychological and philo-
sophical analysis of intellectual humility. They, therefore, include predic-
tions about what possessing the virtue of intellectual humility will entail.
And prediction eleven is that the intellectually humble have an increased
“propensity to consider alternative ideas, to listen to the views of others,
and to spend more time trying to understand someone with whom he
disagrees” (2017, 13). Balancing some notion of intellectual deference and
intellectual arrogance is present in most accounts of intellectual humil-
ity. Whitcomb et al. are committed, then, to the idea that becoming intel-
lectually humble is valuable and that one of its consequences is to modify
our ability to listen to one another.
Intellectual humility is proposed to be a virtue for managing intellec-
tual confidence by Ian James Kidd (2016). Humility “requires a variety
of practices of confidence calibration,” Kidd writes, and these include
“listening, objecting, querying” as processes of learning how to manage
one’s confidence (2016, 397). Confidence calibration is required for both
managing under- and overconfidence. One of the outcomes of this is that
the humble person is “willing to argue with and listen to others” because
they recognize that doing so maintains a virtuous degree of confidence
and affords others the respect that comes from contributing to others’
intellectual life (2016, 401).
Alessandra Tanesini (2016) explicitly proposes that audiences have
responsibilities toward speakers lest they display the vice of “haughti-
ness.” In particular, “the haughty tend not to listen to objections or not
to take them as seriously as they deserve to be taken” (2016, 81). Michael
P. Lynch (2018) argues that “epistemic arrogance” is the attitude of think-
ing that one has nothing to learn from others. Lynch’s motivating exam-
ples for this account of epistemic arrogance include the Obnoxious Uncle
(who refuses to listen to others on topics he takes himself to be an expert
on), the Dogmatic Listener (who is not listening but merely waiting to
speak), and the Mansplainer (who may learn from listening to others but
is incapable of seeing this as a result of listening to them). Tanesini and
Lynch are both committed to the idea that our dispositions to listen are
a significant part of one’s epistemic agency and that it is incumbent on us
to develop such tendencies toward, for example, humility and away from
arrogance.
204 Hanna Kiri Gunn
In Know-It-All Society (2019), Lynch writes: “Democracies need their
citizens to have convictions, for an apathetic electorate is not an elector-
ate at all. Yet democracies also need their citizens to listen to one anoth-
er’s convictions, to engage in political give-and-take” (14). This quote
highlights an important issue that has not yet been discussed directly: lis-
tening duties should not be misunderstood as duties to believe or support
what is heard. For example, the harm of the polarization-stupidification
dynamic is not that there is a failure to “come together” in the sense of
everyone “agreeing that p is true.” The harm, instead, is that in failing to
listen to someone else, we undermine their epistemic agency by preemp-
tively and unjustifiably refusing to let their testimony have any bearing
on our point of view. This, of course, can damage one’s epistemic agency
by failing to allow for the improvement of one’s set of beliefs.
Up to this point, I have defended the claim that we have listening
duties. Still, by the end of the remaining discussion, I will also have made
some gestures toward how we might need to do so to support a healthy
epistemic community. I will argue that, while we can productively make
sense of duties to listen to others to bring about particular moral ends like
respect and epistemic ends like understanding, we ought to focus first on
what duties there are to develop and maintain listening competence as a
proper part of one’s epistemic agency. There is, I think, a reasonable pro-
posal that for the collective health of the epistemic community, we need
to invest in the joint project of edifying epistemic agency for individuals
and that such a project requires thinking seriously about how to cultivate
the kind of listening competence that would resist harms like intellectual
arrogance, intellectual deference, and, of course, the stupidification of
others.
To do so, I begin the next section by discussing a potential objection
that listening to others in moments of polarizing epistemic crisis risks
merely ingraining polarization and its consequences.

10.5 A Virtue of Reciprocity Requires Investing

in Listening Obligations
In Sustaining Democracy: What We Owe to the Other Side (2021), Robert
B. Talisse presents the “democrat’s dilemma.” The democrat’s dilemma
arises because citizens of democracies face two requirements: first, to pur-
sue justice and, second, to acknowledge one another as political equals.
These requirements conflict when we do not perceive other members of
our political society as equals because of their objectionable views. The
democrat’s dilemma is that it can seem like treating other community
members as equals fails to pursue justice (because of their objectionable
opinions that the government could make into policy). Still, we under-
mine the second requirement by failing to treat them as political equals
(and thus giving their views a hearing).
 Listening for Epistemic Community 205
The positive proposal that Talisse offers includes a discussion of three
virtues of democratic citizenship: public-mindedness, reciprocity, and
transparency (2021, 30–33). The virtue of reciprocity entails that we owe
one another “the disposition to formulate one’s political views in a way
that reflects a willingness not merely to allow others to speak but to give
them a hearing. We manifest the virtue of reciprocity when the views and
concerns of others contribute to our own thinking” (2021, 32, emphasis
added).
Talisse argues that we do need to be able to remain open to our
views being improved by others, thus resisting epistemic arrogance or
dogmatism, but that does not require abandoning conviction in one’s
beliefs, thus giving over to intellectual deference. The aim of giving
others a hearing is to do one’s due diligence in forming, updating, and
modifying one’s views. He argues, then, that there are distinct harms
from failing to listen appropriately in an epistemic crisis constituted
by polarization effects: listening poorly, listening too much, and lis-
tening too much to specific others – including our political allies –
exacerbate polarization effects. Thus, he argues, we ought to resist
arguments that we must “love our political enemies” to resist polari-
zation effects.8
It strikes me as fair to be skeptical about proposals that we merely
need to put aside our differences, come together, and talk it out until
we see one another as equals and can return to a more civil political
culture. In part, this is because such desires are nostalgic and thus
crave a past that did not exist – placing the current moment in a long
history of research into public discourse helps to reveal this. More to
the point, though, listening duties need not be about responsibilities to
engage in attending to each other (and that risks “overdoing” democ-
racy (Talisse 2019)).
Listening duties can also be about how we listen when we do. Further,
once we conceive of listening as one competence of epistemic agency, lis-
tening duties may aim at edifying this competence. We need to consider
what skills underlie the virtue of reciprocity and what competencies indi-
viduals need to have mastery of to become open-minded, intellectually
humble, and responsibly selective listeners.
My main contention is this. To “deliver the goods” via the virtue of
reciprocity, we must already have developed into the hearing epistemic
agents that the virtue demands. Competence with listening in circum-
stances of disagreement, perhaps inimical conflict, requires work. Being
able to deliver on the virtue of citizenship presupposes that one is a par-
ticular kind of epistemic agent, but this requires active investment in
developing one’s epistemic competencies. In order to get reciprocity, we
need to invest in the development of epistemic agency – in particular, in
ways that encourage listening that treats others as epistemic and polit-
ical peers.
206 Hanna Kiri Gunn
10.6 Investing in Listening for the Epistemic Community:
Education and Skill Development
I have proposed that flourishing epistemic communities support the
development, maintenance, and exercise of the epistemic agency of
their members. Epistemic crises can threaten epistemic agency in vari-
ous ways, depending on the situation’s causes. I have committed to the
idea that we should take the health of our epistemic community to be an
essential epistemic good (which also has tremendous instrumental value)
and, in the political domain, to be a part of the common good. The role
of listening duties I have proposed is that they are essential to enabling
epistemic agency and a healthy epistemic community.
I agree with Aristotle’s general framework of good listening developed
by Suzanne Rice (2011). According to Rice’s analysis, Aristotle would
not have taken there to be essential listening virtues. Instead, what is
required to listen virtuously will depend on the specific instance of lis-
tening – listening in teaching is vitally different from listening in politics
and listening to a baby’s cry. Hence, the proposal that we should first
consider what it takes to be a competent listener and what our obliga-
tions may be, collectively, for developing this competence in ourselves
and others. To some extent, and given the practical end that such col-
lective listening obligations seek to support, it strikes one that empirical
research into listening skills may be a crucial descriptive constraint on
normative accounts of listening. Still, we must work out such theoretical
questions in the longer run.
But whatever the correct account of listening ends up being, the criti-
cal point, for our purposes, is that reflection on our obligations to listen
points to our epistemic interdependence, and our broader obligations to
promote the bases for a healthy epistemic community. While it is often
not the central focus of much philosophical theorizing, we can find this
line of thinking in the work of various influential epistemologists, femi-
nist philosophers, philosophers of education, and educational theorists.
W. K. Clifford, for instance, argues that our duty to believe following
the epistemic norms is crucial for the cross-generational health of the
epistemic community. Metaphorically, he describes our epistemic prac-
tices as, “an heirloom which every succeeding generation inherits as a
precious deposit and a sacred trust to be handed on to the next one, not
unchanged but enlarged and purified…An awful privilege, and an awful
responsibility, that we should help to create the world in which posterity
will live” (1999, 74). The title of this section is adapted from a similar
claim made by Lorraine Code (1987) in a chapter on epistemic commu-
nity, that to be a participant in a society is to be at the same time a “con-
server and modifier of practices” and that “Practices can be created and
preserved only by their practitioners; they are neither self-generating nor
self-sustaining” (193).
 Listening for Epistemic Community 207
Of course, promoting good epistemic practices and community is not
just a matter of following personal obligations to listen or reason well.
There are also collective obligations to ensure that our primary epistemic
institutions – our educational system, for instance – properly support a
healthy epistemic community. Thus, for political pedagogical theorists
like Paulo-Freire and bell hooks, there is no clear division between our
epistemic lives more generally and our political lives. Concerning the
development of the competencies that underlie political life, educational
practice is critical. Further, both hooks and Freire directly confront
issues of political marginalization and thus aim to present alternative
models of education that aim to create a genuinely democratic social
structure in the classroom.
In an exchange about creating community in classrooms, bell hooks
and philosopher Ron Scapp converge on the idea that teachers and stu-
dents are all “subjects in history” who cannot drop their identities off at
the door. hooks argues that “[Teachers] must intervene to alter the exist-
ing pedagogical structure and to teach students how to listen, how to hear
one another” (1994, 150, emphasis in original). Scapp develops this idea
by proposing that it “doesn’t mean to listen uncritically or that class can
be open so that anything someone else says is taken as true, but it means
taking seriously what someone says” (ibid).
The connection between pedagogy and political culture is central to
much of John Dewey’s writing on education. Of particular importance for
this discussion is that Dewey presented a theory of listening, distinguish-
ing between “straight-line” or “one-way” listening and “transactional
listening-in-conversation” (Waks 2011). We can grasp the difference by
contrasting the kind of listening required in a lecture where a professor
expects students to merely transcribe the professor’s thoughts on a topic
and a dialogue-based seminar where students and teachers collectively
work to understand the issue together.
As Waks explains, Dewey took transactional listening to enable
“cooperative friendship” that itself “generates both the means and the
end of democracy as a form of social life” (2011, 198). Thus, listening
practices for Dewey feed directly not only into our skills for engaging in
dialogue but also affect the ways that we relate, morally, to one another.
Similar notions are present in the educational theory of J. F. Herbart, a
contemporary of Dewey. Andrea English (2011) argues that educating for
critical listening was an essential role for teachers in Herbart’s theory. In
modeling critical listening practices, teachers can help students cultivate
what Herbart called an “inner censor,” an intellectually humbling moral
disposition.
I have suggested that quality listening supports the health of an epis-
temic community. What might this look like? We might find one such
example in the Nordic models of early childhood education. In the early
1990s, all Nordic countries committed to including a democratic structure
208 Hanna Kiri Gunn
in early childhood education that emphasizes the role of the child as an
active participant in democratic processes at school (Broström 2019).
This model of early childhood education is committed to the idea of the
“child’s perspective” that entails perceiving children as contributors to
their democratic society.9,10
The Nordic models employ the concept of “Bildung,” which denotes
active learning intended to develop moral and epistemic character,
including the ability to listen and argue with others in a co-determining
fashion. Co-determination in this context means that children are treated
as having a voice that will be included in shared decision-making and
that they ought to extend the same right to others (children or teachers).
Early childhood educators working within these models are encour-
aged to perceive children as competent participants who bring their
values and opinions to school. Part of the educator’s responsibility is to
allow the children to explore societal issues from their own perspectives,
supporting their exploration in such a way that it develops their acqui-
sition of both knowledge and norms. As Broström (2019) explains, the
democratic-based curriculum requires preschool teachers to “listen to
children and challenge them to reflect and express their thoughts and
actions and take the initiative themselves.” With such an approach,
teachers can model skillful listening and work to establish a norm of lis-
tening inside and outside the classroom.
The core ideas about the connection between the skills developed
in educational settings and their consequences on political culture are
correct. Our political community is not separable but depends on our
broader epistemic community. The current epistemic crisis, often framed
as a political problem, is more fundamentally a crisis of the epistemic
community. A healthy epistemic community requires the promotion
of epistemic agency. Epistemic agency, in turn, requires the ability to
speak and that others listen. Polarization and stupidification often lead
to epistemic marginalization, refusals to listen, and thus the frustration
of epistemic agency. If we want to promote the health of the epistemic
community, we need to understand more fully what our obligations to
listen are. But we also cannot ignore the practices and institutions that
foster the competencies necessary for listening well and that we, as mem-
bers of the epistemic community, must design and support to secure
­stability for the democratic structure.

Notes
1. I have in mind work on illocutionary silencing (Langton 1993) alongside
rival theories for this phenomenon, including, for example, perlocutionary
frustration (Bird 2002) and discursive injustice (Kukla 2014). Relatedly, a
broad range of work analyzes the impact of prejudices in our epistemic
and communicative lives that focus on speakers. These include, for exam-
ple, how prejudice can cause systematic failures to perceive speakers’
 Listening for Epistemic Community 209
­credibility accurately (Fricker 2007) and how prejudice can cause frequent
failures of misinterpretation and bring about self-censorship in speakers
(Dotson 2011; Medina 2012).
2. See Gunn (2021b) for a discussion of polarization, including the disam-
biguation of filter bubbles and echo chambers. Many other measurable
effects are also recognized as polarization effects in the broader social
science literature. Bramson et al. (2016), for example, explain nine kinds.
These include, for example, “spread,” which refers to the range of attitudes
in a population on a specific topic. To say that a population is polarized
in the sense of spread implies a considerable distance between the most
extreme attitudes at the “poles” within the group.
3. See Pew Research Center (2022).
4. McBrayer (2021) provides an extended discussion on group conformity
biases and post-truth political culture, including research on partisan
antipathy.
5. See Talisse (2019) for an extended analysis of how the partisan political
culture in the United States undermines “civic friendship.”
6. A joint commitment involves all parties personally committing to some
action (“I will do x”) and committing to others to undertake that action
together (“I will do x with you”).
7. These two metaphysical commitments for epistemic agency make this a
version of the relational theories of autonomy (see Mackenzie & Stoljar
2000, 7–8).
8. See his discussion in Chapter 3, “The Polarization Dynamic,” and §3.1 on
rejecting the idea we must love our political enemies.
9. In Denmark, for example, early childhood education policies require that
preschool children have “co-determination, joint responsibility, under-
standing, and experience with democracy. Furthermore, preschool should
contribute to developing children’s autonomy and abilities to participate in
binding social communities” (Broström 2019).
10. To provide a non-Nordic example, one German preschool has taken on
an explicitly deliberative-democratic model in their school that exempli-
fies many of the commitments of the Nordic model. Dolli Einstein Haus
characterizes itself as a “democracy nursery” the children at this center co-­
created a constitution specifying their rights at the center, and all decisions
about naps and meal times are decided through deliberative, democratic
means (Oltermann 2017). This strategy directly targets the children’s abil-
ity to listen and be listened to, developing in them an expectation that this
is how collective decisions are made.

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Part III

Democratic Realism
11 Sensemaking, Empathy,
and Democracy
Quassim Cassam

11.1 The Great Paradox

In Strangers in Their Own Land, the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild
introduces readers to a man called Mike Schaff, who exemplifies what she
describes as the Great Paradox.1 Schaff was a victim of a vast environ-
mental disaster in Louisiana, the appearance of a sinkhole that stretched
over thirty-seven acres and devoured everything in its wake. A lightly
regulated drilling company was to blame. Still, Schaff “hailed govern-
ment deregulation of all sorts, as well as drastic cuts in government
spending – including that for environmental protection” (2018: 5). This
is the essence of the Great Paradox: “great pollution and great resistance
to regulating polluters” (2018: 21). How could victims of environmental
pollution not favor ecological protection? How can the poor oppose more
government help for the poor? How can a state that was “one of the most
vulnerable to volatile weather be a center of climate denial” (2018: 23)?
Hochschild spent years in Louisiana, listening to people like Schaff and
empathizing with them in search of answers.
From Hochschild’s liberal standpoint, and presumably that of many
of her readers, the Great Paradox is also a great surprise. Her project is,
therefore, an exercise in what others have called sensemaking, “the making
of sense” (Weick 1995: 4).2 We find efforts at sensemaking “whenever the
current state of the world is perceived to be different from the expected state
of the world” (Weick, Sutcliffe & Obstfeld 2005: 414). Schaff’s is one such
world. One would expect victims of environmental disasters resulting from
weak environmental regulation to favor stronger regulation. This is not what
Hochschild found. How is this to be explained? What would a satisfactory
explanation look like? Is it necessary to empathize with people like Schaff
to understand them? These are among the questions to be addressed below.
Many of Hochschild’s subjects voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 US
presidential election. Liberals, surprised by his victory, tried to explain it
and work out what it meant. This was another exercise in sensemaking.
In these cases, there is an event E, and the objective is to make sense of E
after the event. Sensemaking is retrospective.3 It is not about predicting

DOI: 10.4324/9781003311003-15
216 Quassim Cassam
the future but understanding the past. It is not confined to making sense
of events, as making sense of an event like Trump’s win requires one to
make sense of the attitudes that led many who would not benefit econom-
ically from a Trump presidency to vote for him. Because sensemaking is
a response to a surprise, and what is surprising to one person might not
be surprising to another, there may be different views about when sense-
making is called for. Conservatives who expected Trump to win and peo-
ple like Schaff to vote for him saw no need for sensemaking. Completely
different events and different attitudes elicit their sensemaking.
Hochschild sees empathy as the key to sensemaking. Explaining the
Great Paradox requires understanding “how life feels to people on the
right – that is, the emotion that underlies politics” (2018: xi). To under-
stand people on the right, she had to imagine herself in their shoes, that is,
to empathize. To “know others from the inside, to see reality through their
eyes,” it is necessary to “cross the empathy wall” (2018: 5). The ultimate
objective was not just to better understand her subjects but to see if it was
possible to “make common cause on some issues” (2018: xiii). Empathy,
as Hochschild understands it, is an antidote to polarization. Empathetic
understanding of other people is also seen as vital for democracy.4
However, there are many different accounts of empathy.5 On one view, it
is “the activity of imaginatively adopting another person’s perspective in
a way that somehow engages the emotions of the one doing the imagina-
tive work” (Bailey 2022: 52). Others represent it as a bloodless exercise in
reading the mind of another. The former is sometimes called “emotional
empathy,” while the latter is described as “cognitive empathy.”6
It is open to question whether emotional empathy is necessary for sen-
semaking. On the face of it, it is possible to understand why Hochschild’s
subjects see the world as they do without imaginatively adopting their
perspective in Bailey’s sense. For example, Marxists may regard the Great
Paradox as illustrating the power of ideology or as a compelling illustra-
tion of the phenomenon of false consciousness, a mode of consciousness
that misrepresents socio-economic reality while also being determined by
that reality.7 This socio-structural explanation of the Great Paradox does
not require emotional empathy with people like Mike Schaff. Indeed, for
all her talk of empathy, it is not obvious that Hochschild’s insights result
from emotional empathy with her subjects.8
What explains the appeal of the idea that empathy is required for sen-
semaking and the key to a healthy democracy? Aside from the hope that
emotional empathy might be an antidote to polarization, there is also the
suggestion that the objective of sensemaking is personal understanding and
that personal understanding requires empathy. On this view, sensemak-
ing involves understanding people in a distinctive manner. Specifically,
it involves relating to other people as individuals and engaging with their
subjectivity. Because socio-structural responses to the Great Paradox
fail to do this, they do not deliver personal understanding or Verstehen,
 Sensemaking, Empathy, and Democracy 217
as it is sometimes called, of individuals like Schaff. However, it is unclear
that a particular form of empathetic personal understanding is required
to resolve the Great Paradox. The fact that some victims of pollution
are against greater regulation of polluters reflects their ideology, but we
do not need empathy to understand their ideologies or the emotions to
which they give rise. We have their words and deeds to go on.
The discussion below will proceed as follow: Section 11.2 will argue
that emotional empathy has little to contribute to sensemaking in the
political domain. Others have written about the barriers to emotional
empathy in general, but the political realm is one in which these barri-
ers are especially challenging to overcome. It is easy to exaggerate the
role of empathy in listening exercises such as Hochschild’s. On the face
of it, it is possible to listen to someone without empathizing with them.
Section 11.3 will criticize arguments for the view that empathy is vital
for democracy. Section 11.4 will discuss the relative merits of empathy
and socio-structural approaches to political understanding. A case will
be made for downplaying the role of empathy and avoiding empathy fet-
ishism. There are problems with the notion of false consciousness, but it
remains illuminating when explaining the Great Paradox.

11.2 Sensemaking and Empathy

We can understand the notion of empathy in many different ways. It will
be understood here as made up of two components identified by Olivia
Bailey. First, empathizing is a form of imaginative perspective-taking: it
“necessarily involves using one’s imagination to ‘transport’ oneself, such
that one considers the other’s situation as though one were occupying the
other’s position. So, for instance, when we try to imagine how things are
for a recent widower empathetically, we might imagine having just lost a
spouse or other loved one” (2022: 52). The second feature of empathy is
that it is emotionally charged imaginative perspective-taking:

In certain critical respects, the emotional experience of the one who

empathizes closely resembles the emotional experience of the target of
empathy. An admittedly metaphorical but apt way of thinking about
how the emotions are implicated in empathy is to conceive of the empa-
thizer as encountering their imaginative recreation of the other’s situation
through the same emotional lens as the target of empathy. The widower
apprehends his loss through the lens of grief. We as the widower’s empa-
thizers also allow our thoughts to be directed in ways characteristic of
grief. The isomorphism between this empathetic experience and the
original grief of the widower strongly recommends the conclusion that
when we empathize, we do not merely imagine feeling some emotion.
Instead, we do not merely imagine that we are feeling some emotion.
(Bailey 2022: 53)
218 Quassim Cassam
The two components of empathy are separable. Emotionally charged
perspective-taking is emotional empathy. Affectless perspective-taking
is cognitive empathy.9 It is quite possible to imagine being in the shoes of
a recently bereaved widower and understand the grief that that position
entails without experiencing the same type of emotion as the widower. In
these cases, the widower’s emotion is intelligible but not mirrored by the
empathizer.
Emotionally charged perspective-taking is essential in many personal
relationships, including relationships with close friends and family.
Empathizing with a person is a way of engaging with them emotion-
ally. This is much easier to achieve with people with whom one has a
close personal relationship than with casual acquaintances or total
strangers. Emotional empathy is psychologically demanding, and there
are psychological limits to the number of people with whom a person
can empathize.10 Empathizing with someone means engaging with their
subjectivity. In the widower’s case, one engages with the subjectivity of
a unique individual rather than with recently bereaved widowers in gen-
eral. As Gregory Currie puts it, “we think of empathy as an intimate,
feeling-based understanding of another’s inner life” (2011: 82). A person
without such an understanding of anyone else’s inner life is seriously
impoverished. A person who has, or even claims to have, a feeling-­
based understanding of the inner lives of scores of people is a freak or a
charlatan.
What is the role of emotional empathy in political sensemaking? When
the current state of political reality is different from its expected state,
for example, when someone like Trump is elected President, there is sen-
semaking to be done. Thus, one might ask how so many white working-­
class voters could come out in favor of such an unlikely candidate. This
is a question for political science, sociology, and other disciplines but
the accounts that these disciplines offer are impersonal. They are not,
and cannot be, based on emotionally charged perspective-taking or a
feeling-based understanding of the inner lives of millions. It is tempt-
ing to think this difficulty can be circumvented by a selective emotional
engagement with representative citizens whose perspectives can be gen-
eralized. This is a way to think about Hochschild’s investigation. She
formed relationships, even friendships, with individuals in Louisiana
who exemplified the Great Paradox. By getting into these individuals’
heads, she extracted valuable insights about what would otherwise be
an extremely puzzling phenomenon. On reflection, however, it is unclear
that she needed emotional empathy; she could have arrived at the same
conclusions without empathy for her interlocutors.
One of her interlocutors spoke of her aversion to regulation and learn-
ing to live without it. She wanted clean air and water, but “sometimes
you had to do without what you wanted. You couldn’t have both the oil
industry and clean lakes, she thought, and if you had to choose, you had
 Sensemaking, Empathy, and Democracy 219
to choose oil” (2018: 177). You had to choose oil for economic and polit-
ical reasons. Regulation was seen as being at odds with capitalism and
the American Dream, and several of Hochschild’s subjects were explicit
in their commitment to both. One told her that she was “so for capitalism
and free enterprise” and that the “environmentalists want to stop the
American Dream to protect the endangered toad” (2018: 122). Regulation
puts power in the hands of the federal government, but “the federal gov-
ernment was taking money from the workers and giving it to the idle. It
was taking from people of good character and giving to people of bad
character” (2018: 144). It has no business regulating people’s lives, espe-
cially if climate change, to which environmental regulation is supposed
to be a response, is a “bunch of hooey” (2018: 48).
It is difficult to imagine a more self-consciously ideological explanation
of the Great Paradox. Hochschild’s subjects are victims of pollution who
are resistant to regulating polluters because doing so would conflict with
their ideological commitments. The latter are matters of principle; they
see pollution as a price worth paying for capitalism and the American
Dream. In other words, Hochschild’s subjects value keeping the govern-
ment out of their affairs more than they value clean air and water. When
ideologically committed victims of pollution oppose greater regulation
of polluters, they are simply being ideologically consistent.
Furthermore, there is no need for empathy to grasp their ideological
commitments and values, and their implications for environmental reg-
ulation. It is enough to listen to what they say about their reasons and
motives. No imaginative adoption of their perspective is required. One
simply needs to take them at their word, as Hochschild does.
Many questions remain unanswered. One might wonder why
Hochschild’s subjects are so hostile to the federal government and why
their values are as they are. When they talk about the federal govern-
ment giving money to people of bad character, who do they have in mind?
What is the role of race in their thinking about these matters? People’s
reasons for their political beliefs and preferences may be rationalizations
rather than their actual motives. Empathizing with them will not reveal
whether they are rationalizing or speaking in code when they object to
welfare payments going to people of bad character.11 If one is mystified
by another person’s political beliefs and tries to make sense of them by
empathy, one is unlikely to succeed. Fully empathizing with someone else
means envisaging oneself in their situation with their beliefs and other
psychological characteristics rather than one’s own. Thus, the fact that
one is mystified by their beliefs might make it impossible for one fully to
empathize with them. Tasked with empathizing with a racist or someone
else with alien values, one may have no idea how to begin.12
However, this is not the end of the story. Hochschild is not merely con-
cerned with her subjects’ political beliefs but with “how life feels to people
on the right” (2018: xi). Perhaps the point at which empathy comes into its
220 Quassim Cassam
own concerning the Great Paradox is the point at which, to understand
her subjects, she needs to understand their emotions. She sees herself as
trying to understand “the hopes, fear, pride, shame, resentment, and
anxiety” (2018: 135) in the lives of those she talked with. Their emotions
include resentment about the liberal perception of people like them as
backward, racist, sexist, homophobic, and overweight. This is one factor
that makes them feel like strangers in their own land. Another source of
resentment is the feeling of being held back while immigrants, black peo-
ple, and refugees cut in line ahead of them with the federal government’s
help. Without emotional empathy, how can their emotions make sense to
an outsider?
In Bailey’s example, empathizing with the widower’s grief by imagin-
ing the loss of a loved one presents no great challenge for anyone capable
of experiencing the normal range of human emotions. The imagined loss
of a loved one, like the actual loss of a loved one, “may be felt as a tight-
ness in the throat or hollowness in the stomach” (2022: 53). This isomor-
phism between the empathetic experience and the grief of the widower is
the basis of the notion that when we empathize, we do not merely imagine
that we are feeling some emotion but experience it. Empathizing with
Hochschild’s subjects is a different matter. One might be incapable of
viewing help for minorities through the lens of resentment if one can only
see such support in a positive light. Someone repelled by racism cannot
experience resentment about federal government help for people of bad
character if they suspect that “person of bad character” is a covert racial
epithet. Isomorphism between the putative empathetic experience and
the original resentment of Hochschild’s subjects might be unattainable
because of a fundamental difference in political outlook and values. The
difficulty is that the emotions in these cases are political emotions and
that empathizing with someone else’s political emotions requires what
might be called political empathy rather than plain human sympathy.13
Unlike the widower’s grief, political emotions are ones whose source is
ideological and take as their object abstract matters of political princi-
ple, such as the relative merits of capitalism and regulation. Empathizing
with such emotions requires the imaginative adoption of the political
perspective that underpins them, but such political empathy may prove
impossible for those who find the perspective in question wrong-headed
and repellent.14
For example, a committed environmentalist might be able to under-
stand, in the abstract, why someone who is in love with free market cap-
italism would resent government regulation of the environment. Still, it
would be unsurprising that the environmentalist cannot feel any such
emotion. Their emotional experience cannot resemble that of the per-
son who resents environmentalists because they are killing the American
Dream to save the toad. However, the environmentalist’s lack of empa-
thy for Hochschild’s subjects need not prevent them from understanding
 Sensemaking, Empathy, and Democracy 221
the latter’s perspective on regulation. Since their perspective flows from
their ideological commitments, how they feel about environmental regu-
lation and the federal government is not a mystery. It is not empathy but
dialogue that reveals the political outlook of Hochschild’s subjects and
removes any sense that their opposition to environmental legislation is
paradoxical. It is possible to make sense of them without feeling what
they feel, even if some form of cognitive empathy is required.15
Knowing how someone feels about something by inference from their
politics is different from knowing how they feel by feeling what they feel.
Environmentalists may lack an intimate, feeling-based understanding
of the inner lives of Hochschild’s subjects. In this sense, they lack an
essential form of personal understanding of these subjects, but no such
understanding is required for political sensemaking. Unsurprisingly, the
latter requires political rather than personal understanding. There is
more about the distinction between political and personal understanding
in Section 11.4, but one obvious reason for not making political under-
standing depend on personal understanding is that it is only possible to
have a unique understanding of, or emotional empathy with, people one
knows personally and knows well. The number of such people is tiny
when compared to the number of people of whom one seeks, and perhaps
achieves, political understanding. This makes it unlikely that personal
understanding is the key to political understanding.
On the final page of her book, Hochschild speaks of the need to find
new ways to “get acquainted across our differences” (2018: 266).16 She
recommends, among other things, high school domestic exchange pro-
grams for which “students could prepare by learning active listening and
epistemology” (2018: 266) as well as history and civics. This reference to
active listening reveals more about Hochschild’s methodology than talk
of empathy. Active listening is attentive, compassionate, unhurried, non-
judgmental, and unaggressive. Active listeners use respectful questioning
and non-verbal cues to demonstrate their interest in what the speaker
is saying. They do not interrupt and they verify their understanding
through paraphrasing the speaker’s message.
This is a fair summary of how Hochschild proceeds. Her emphasis on
the “deep story” of her interlocutors is particularly compelling. Their
deep story focuses on relationships between social groups in America.
Like any conscientious active listener, Hochschild reconstructs her sub-
jects’ deep stories and tests them “to see if they thought it fit their expe-
riences” (2018: 135). They did. According to one of her subjects, she had
succeeded in reading his mind. Active listening is sometimes described as
empathetic, but this sense of “empathy” has little to do with emotionally
charged perspective-taking. Political sensemaking requires one to be a
good active listener but does not require the imaginative adoption of the
speaker’s perspective. When it comes to active listening and sensemak-
ing, we should resist the temptation to exaggerate the role of empathy.
222 Quassim Cassam
11.3 Empathy and Democracy
Why would anyone think that empathy is vital for democracy? Two argu-
ments in favor of this view are the argument from democratic legitimacy
and the argument from polarization. Jason Stanley proposes a version of
the first argument in How Propaganda Works.17 It is based on Du Bois’s
account of the political system of the American South during the period
after the Civil War.18 According to Du Bois, as Stanley reads him, the
South’s laws lacked democratic legitimacy for two reasons. The obvious
one is that Blacks were not allowed to participate in the making of laws
that applied to them. A less apparent reason is that “those who created
the laws did not have empathy for some of those subject to them, namely,
their Black fellow citizens” (2015: 101). This meant that “the laws were
crafted in such a way that did not reflect respect for the viewpoints of
Black citizens” (2015: 101). Lacking respect, the laws also lacked demo-
cratic legitimacy.
Stanley understands empathy as cognitive empathy, the capacity to
imagine oneself “as someone in the situation of the other” (2015: 102).
This mental capacity “underlies the capacity to give the perspectives of
our fellow citizens equal weight” (ibid.). By implication, it is a precon-
dition of democratic legitimacy. A democratic culture is “one in which
everyone has a say in the policies and laws that apply to them” (2015: 16).
It is also one in which, when proposing a policy, policymakers “imagine
being someone subject to that policy” (2015: 102). The “someone” in this
formulation implies an impartial stance. This is different from Bailey’s
conception of empathy since it does not involve imagining oneself in the
shoes of a specific other and is not a piece of emotionally charged per-
spective-taking. Nevertheless, it is empathy as Stanley understands it.
Stanley’s argument fails. Democratic legitimacy requires that policy-
makers appreciate the impact of their policies on their fellow citizens,
especially their negative impact on specific groups of citizens. It also
requires that policymakers are not indifferent to such effects and prop-
erly consider them in formulating their proposals. However, as Stanley
notes, “to gain an appreciation of the fact that others would be negatively
affected by a policy I support, I do not need to be able to occupy their
perspective, even in an impartial manner” (2015: 103).19 For example, a
childless minister might be incapable of imagining being someone with
a child, but this does not prevent them from appreciating the impact on
low-income families with children of a policy to reduce levels of child
support.
Much depends on what counts as “appreciating” the fact that others
would be negatively impacted by a policy one supports. It might seem
that without empathy, the childless minister can only have an intellectual
appreciation of what his policy means for people with children rather
than a “real” appreciation. The minister might understand that some
 Sensemaking, Empathy, and Democracy 223
people will end up worse off because of his policies but also be indiffer-
ent. Empathizing with those affected makes it harder not to care. Indeed,
there is the view that empathy is “itself a way of caring” (Bailey 2022: 51).
Furthermore, the form of empathy that is most likely to make vivid the
impact of a policy to cut child support is not the relatively bloodless and
impartial empathy that Stanley describes but full-blown emotional empa-
thy that enables the minister to feel the economic pain of those affected
by his policies.
The picture of a government minister who is indifferent to the impact
of his policies on sections of the population is not attractive, and it is not
implausible that policies that display such indifference lack democratic
legitimacy. However, the necessary remedy is not empathy. Even if empa-
thizing with affected groups is not feasible, as it might not be, it is rea-
sonable to expect lawmakers to show compassion for people affected by
their decisions and to be willing to listen to them. As Bloom points out,
compassion and empathy are not the same things. Compassion is “simply
caring for people, wanting them to thrive” (2018: 50). It is “more diffuse
than empathy” (2018: 40) and does require one to mirror anyone else’s
feelings: “it is weird to talk about having empathy for the millions of vic-
tims of malaria, say, but perfectly normal to say that you are concerned
about them or feel compassion for them” (2018: 40–41). Compassion,
rather than empathy, is the antidote to indifference.
Listening matters because, in a democracy, people who will be affected
by a law or policy deserve a hearing. This was Du Bois’s point about the
South. As he puts it: “it is pitiable that frantic efforts must be made at crit-
ical times to get lawmakers in some States even to listen to the respectful
presentation of the black man’s side of a current controversy” (1994: 89).
The listening that is at issue here is active. Active listeners engage with the
arguments presented to them. They take them, and the people who put
forward these arguments, seriously rather than dismissively. However, as
argued above, active listening does not require empathy. The active lis-
tener tries to make sense of opposing points of view, especially when they
are surprised by them. They are, in this sense, engaged in sensemaking.
It is compassionate sensemaking on the part of policymakers rather than
empathy that is needed for democratic legitimacy.
The argument from polarization has a different take on the link
between democracy and empathy. The idea is that excessive polarization
threatens democracy and that the antidote is empathy. The notion that
polarization is a threat to democracy is a familiar one. In polarized socie-
ties, neither side in political disputes sees their political opponents’ views
as legitimate. Political adversaries “often regard each other as immoral,
stupid, lazy, and even threats to each other’s way of life” (Hannon 2020:
597). As people become more polarized, they become more antagonistic
and less willing to compromise. Eventually, democratic institutions such
as elections and an independent judiciary are threatened as the process
224 Quassim Cassam
accelerates. Polarization in the US-led Donald Trump’s supporters to use
force to attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 Presidential election.
In the United Kingdom, bitter arguments about Brexit led some sections
of the British press to employ the Nazi tactic of representing uncompliant
judges as the enemy within. This sort of behavior is no basis for a healthy
democracy.
In response to this concern, Hannon outlines a version of deliberative
democracy that is “partly grounded in empathetic understanding” (2020:
592). Deliberative democrats take the exchange of reasons for preferring
specific outcomes or believing certain facts to be central to decision-­
making. The exchange of reasons is only possible if people understand
each other, and the relevant form of understanding is what Hannon calls
“empathetic understanding” (2020: 597). This requires a willingness to
listen to other people, including one’s political adversaries. More than
this, “it requires the ability to ‘take up’ another person’s perspective. We
must be able to see the other person’s point of view” (2020: 598). We must
be able to “reenact or imitate the thought processes of others” (2020:
598). Only if we do that are we likely to find common ground with our fel-
low citizens and a basis for compromise. That is why democracies should
“encourage citizens to understand others empathetically” (2020: 602).
Democracies that fail to do this risk falling apart under the pressure of
polarization.
This argument suffers from some of the same defects as those put for-
ward by Stanley and Hochschild. One theme that unifies these arguments
is the transition from calls for people to listen to their political adversar-
ies to calls for people to empathize with their adversaries. It is possible to
listen without empathizing, and empathy is in many cases neither neces-
sary nor possible. As noted above, it is difficult to empathize with people
whose views are repellent, but this does not mean that it is not possible to
understand their views. Understanding does not have to be empathetic.
For example, many people who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021
believed that the 2020 election had been stolen and had a story about how
the so-called steal had happened. It is perfectly straightforward to listen
to these views and understand them without empathizing with them, or
the people whose views they are. Empathizing with the rioters requires a
sympathetic identification that many would find impossible and unnec-
essary. Sympathetic identification with a recently bereaved widower is
one thing. Sympathetic identification with the Capitol rioters is another.
Its emphasis on the need for mutual understanding, and the role of
empathy in securing such understanding, raises another question about
the argument from polarization: how far is political polarization the
result of a lack of understanding? Liberals in America understood the
motives and beliefs of the Capitol rioters only too well. There was no lack
of understanding to be remedied by empathy. The problem was that there
were deep and irreconcilable differences between the two sides. As Amos
 Sensemaking, Empathy, and Democracy 225
Oz observes concerning the Israeli/Palestinian dispute, “some conflicts
are real” and “much worse than a misunderstanding” (2012: 8). Even if it
were possible for the Capitol rioters to use their imagination to take up
the perspective of their liberal critics, it is wishful thinking to suppose
that this would have made them more likely to arrive at a compromise
with them. In the same way, liberals who empathize with rioters enough
to see their point of view may feel more rather than less hostile to them
due to this exercise. Empathic understanding could end up exacerbating
polarization.20
It might seem that the position at which we have arrived is an uncom-
fortable one. On the one hand, polarization has been represented as a
threat to democracy. On the other hand, many democracies are becoming
more polarized. How, in that case, is democracy in these countries pos-
sible? How is democracy in America possible? Three responses suggest
themselves. The first is to question the idea that polarization is incom-
patible with democracy. The second is to accept this idea but argue that
the degree of polarization in America has not yet reached a critical level
and is still compatible with democracy. The third would be to question
the assumption that countries like America are democracies. Thus, one
might agree with Stanley that America is a democracy in name only and
that the language of democracy is used to mask a thoroughly undemo-
cratic reality.21 The extent of polarization is not the only basis for this
view. A democratic culture is one in which all citizens have an equal say
in the policies and laws that apply to them. It would be difficult to argue
that this is true in a country like America, where voter suppression is rife,
and a person’s wealth determines access to political power. These are
problems to which empathy is not the solution.

11.4 Political Understanding

In his General Psychopathology, Karl Jaspers distinguishes between
explanation and understanding. By explanation, he means causal expla-
nation: “We find by repeated experience that a number of phenomena
are regularly linked together, and on this basis we explain causally”
(1997: 301). Based on the observation of events, experiments, and the col-
lection of examples, “we attempt to formulate rules. At a higher level, we
establish laws, and in physics and chemistry, we have to a certain extent
reached the ideal, which is the expression of causal laws in mathemat-
ical equations” (1997: 302). Understanding is different since it pertains
to what Jaspers calls “meaningful psychic connections” (1997: 301). In
this context, “psychic” means “psychological.” Understanding is per-
sonal. When we attempt to understand another person, we immerse our-
selves in their psychology and try to “understand genetically by empathy
how one psychic event emerges from another” (1997: 301). For example,
we understand by empathy, rather than by experiment, that “attacked
226 Quassim Cassam
people become angry and spring to the defense, cheated persons grow
suspicious” (1997: 302).
Jaspers subscribes to a form of what Christoph Hoerl calls epistemic
particularism about understanding.22 This is the view that understanding
“is achieved (if it is achieved) directly upon confrontation with a particu-
lar case” (Hoerl 2013: 108). Understanding “is not achieved by bringing
certain facts under general laws established through repeated observa-
tion” (2013: 108). The role of understanding is to make something “visible
to our experience” (Jaspers 1997: 312). It can only play this role “because
it deals specifically with connections between elements of a person’s con-
scious life” (2013: 109). It is possible to immerse oneself in another per-
son’s psychic situation because “there is something it is like to be in that
situation” (2013: 109). Thus, understanding is particularist, it is directed
at the mental life of another person, and it engages with the subjectivity
of the other by empathy rather than through the application of general
laws.
Given the distinction between explanation and understanding, one way
to approach the Great Paradox is to look for an explanation. This is the
approach of theorists who view the paradox through the lens of false con-
sciousness, a mode of consciousness that misrepresents socio-economic
reality while also being determined by that reality. In capitalist societies,
the socio-economic reality that this form of consciousness misrepresents
includes the reality that the socio-economic status quo serves the political
and economic interests of the ruling class but not the working class. For
the latter to acquiesce in such a system, they need to misperceive their
interests and identify with capitalism and free enterprise.23 Their identifi-
cation with capitalism is manifested by, for example, their pro-capitalist
ideology. This ideology masks key features of the socio-economic reality
by which it is “determined.”
Whether or not Hochschild’s subjects are “working class,” there is little
doubt that many people in Louisiana, including some who spoke to her,
do not do well economically or socially. According to her data, Louisiana
ranked forty-ninth out of fifty states in human development and last in
overall health. Only eight out of ten Louisianans have graduated from
high school, and only 7 percent have graduate or professional degrees.24
Yet many of these people describe themselves as “so for capitalism and
free enterprise.” From a false consciousness perspective, this is a classic
case of the disenfranchised and marginalized being blind to their inter-
ests. Their blindness is not a mystery since it is explained by a gener-
alization about highly unequal societies: what keeps them on an even
keel is their ability to induce large numbers of socially and economically
disadvantaged people to believe that the status quo works for them. The
basis of this generalization is not empathy but a historical observation.
Paraphrasing Jaspers rather than Marx, we find by repeated experience
that gross inequality and working-class loyalty to the system often go
 Sensemaking, Empathy, and Democracy 227
together. Those who have the least to gain from the established order are
among its most enthusiastic defenders. This explains the Great Paradox
in general terms by referring to the law about how unequal societies work.
Hochschild objects to this explanation because it lacks a complete
understanding of the role of emotion in politics:

Many liberal analysts …. have tended to focus on economic self-­

interest. It was a focus on this that led me …. to carry the Great
Paradox like a suitcase on my journey through Louisiana. Why, I’d
repeatedly asked myself, with so many problems, was there so much
disdain for federal money to alleviate them? These were questions
that spoke heavily to economic self-interest. And while economic
self-interest is never entirely absent, what I discovered was the pro-
found importance of emotional self-interest – a giddy release from
the feeling of being a stranger in one’s own land.
(2018: 228)

False consciousness explanations suppose that people who do not act in

accordance with their own economic interests must be misperceiving
them. However, someone can see clearly that taxes to fund higher welfare
payments would be economically beneficial to them personally and still
be against this policy because they hate big government or resent welfare
payments going to the idle and undeserving.25 Such a person does not
fail to grasp their economic interests. It is just that other things matter to
them more. To understand what those other things are and why they mat-
ter to them, we need to understand their emotions and engage with their
subjectivity as individuals rather than resort to a generalization about
unequal societies. Political understanding, an understanding of people’s
political choices, is ultimately a form of personal understanding. On this
account, the challenge is to understand the Great Paradox and explain
it. To understand it, we need to understand individual people, where the
relevant notion of understanding is the one described by Jaspers.
There is something right about this, but it calls for the false conscious-
ness approach to the Great Paradox to be modified rather than aban-
doned. It is undoubtedly a mistake to suppose that people who do not
benefit economically from capitalism are always unaware of this fact or
blind to their economic interests. However, most are not as clear-eyed
as Hochschild’s ideologically driven subjects, who understand that they
must choose between oil interests and clean lakes or between having
more money and having low taxes for the rich. As for those who are clear-
eyed about these matters, it is not enough to point out that they have
strong feelings about the size of the government or taxes. The question is:
why do they feel the way they do? Why is their loyalty to the oil industry
stronger than their desire for clean lakes or their hatred of the govern-
ment stronger than their commitment to their financial well-being? These
228 Quassim Cassam
emotions and preferences express their ideology, but the obvious ques-
tion is: why do they have such an ideology?
One would not be asking these questions if their political emotions and
preferences made perfect sense. These questions are pressing precisely to
the extent that, from an “objective” standpoint, the marginalized ought
not to care more about the interests of large corporations than about
the gradual destruction of the physical environment in which they and
their children will be living. By implication, this way of putting things
distinguishes a person’s real interests from their actual preferences or
emotions. Large corporations have a real interest in minimal regula-
tion, but Hochschild’s subjects do not. Their real interest lies elsewhere.
This is not merely an issue of economic self-interest but of overall well-­
being. Whatever their feelings, it is, in fact, worse for people to be living
in a highly polluted but unregulated environment than in a regulated but
unpolluted environment. If they fail to see this, the most plausible expla-
nation is one in terms of their false consciousness. Similarly, if false con-
sciousness has a socio-structural explanation, so does the Great Paradox.
Liberal critics will almost certainly object to talking about people’s
“real” interests, as distinct from their preferences.26 Some may feel that
there is no “objective” standpoint from which we can distinguish real
interests from actual preferences, but this is a mistake. The issues are far
too complex to be satisfactorily dealt with here. Still, one way to allow
actual preferences and real interests to come apart is to insist that there
is such a thing as the human good or a good life for a human being and
that a person’s real interests are at least partly a reflection of the human
good.27 Living in an environment that is not dreadfully polluted is part of
a good life for a human being. Whether they realize it or not, Hochschild’s
subjects have a genuine interest in living in such an environment. They
are victims of false consciousness if they fail to realize it and care more
about protecting oil interests. Their consciousness is not false because
they misrepresent socio-economic reality but because their priorities are
skewed relative to a plausible vision of the human good.
It is striking how little empathy reveals about these fundamental mat-
ters. Empathizing with Hochschild’s subjects, or understanding them in
Jaspers’ sense, will reveal their priorities but not that their priorities are
skewed. Confrontation with a particular case might reveal a specific indi-
vidual’s worldview and the sources of that worldview in their life story.
Still, it will not connect their worldview with that of others in the same
situation. It will not explain how their view comes to be shared by many
people in the same social position or the role of socio-structural factors in
manufacturing consent to pollution or inequality. The particularist ori-
entation of understanding is attractive on a human level but too narrowly
focused to be a practical exercise in sensemaking on a macro level. As
noted above, the number of people in whose mental life one can immerse
oneself is far lower than the number whose views and preferences need
 Sensemaking, Empathy, and Democracy 229
to be understood. These considerations all point to the need for a more
general or generalist approach to the Paradox. In Jaspers’ terminology,
they point to the need for an explanation.
The thesis that the best explanation is one in terms of false conscious-
ness has not been defended here. It has only been put forward as a poten-
tially satisfactory explanatory approach to sensemaking. Whether it is
actually a satisfactory approach cannot be settled here. However, the
shape of the approach is more important for present purposes than its
details. In contrast with epistemic particularism, with its emphasis on
empathy and confrontation with particular cases, the false conscious-
ness approach to the Great Paradox is based on observation rather
than empathy. It is generalist rather than particularist in its orientation.
Rather than focusing on individuals, it focuses on groups or classes of
people, defined by reference to their social location. These are the basic
units of explanation, and the mode of explanation is functional or causal.
When people in the same situation have the same perverse preferences,
the perversity of their priorities is explained by reference to their function
of maintaining the status quo.
A response to this line of thinking would be to say that there is no
need to choose between empathy and understanding or between false
consciousness and emotional empathy as tools for dissolving the Great
Paradox. Why can’t empathizers do their thing while social scientists
analyze the paradox in terms of general laws? The short answer is that
there is nothing wrong with the two approaches running in parallel,
but there is a deeper issue about the nature of political understanding.
Hochschild offers a new model of political understanding, which says
that the best way to make sense of the coexistence of significant pollu-
tion and great resistance to regulating polluters is to empathize with the
emotions of people like Mike Schaff. The attractions of this approach are
apparent, but so, now, are its limitations. The political, as distinct from
personal, understanding that it delivers is relatively shallow. We should
not fetishize empathy when making sense of people’s political prefer-
ences. Individual psychology is no substitute for social science.

Notes
1. Hochschild (2018).
2. On sensemaking as a response to a surprise, see Louis (1980).
3. The retrospective nature of sensemaking is emphasized in Weick, Sutcliffe
and Obstfeld (2005).
4. See Hannon (2020).
5. Coplan lists no fewer than seven mental processes, or states described as
empathy. See Coplan (2011): 4.
6. See Bloom (2018: 17) for more on the distinction between cognitive and
emotional empathy.
7. See Marx and Engels (1970) and Meyerson (1991) for a valuable account of
the Marxist theory of false consciousness.
230 Quassim Cassam
8. I leave it open whether Hochschild’s project or socio-structural explana-
tions of the Great Paradox require cognitive empathy. Henceforth, unless
otherwise indicated, by “empathy,” I mean emotional empathy. Thanks to
Hana Samaržija for urging me to be more explicit about this.
9. “In claiming that empathy (in my sense) involves both emotion and per-
spective-taking, I do not mean to deny that some forms of perspective-­
taking are affectless” (Bailey 2022: 52, n. 6).
10. See Hannon (2020: 604).
11. Could “people of bad character” be a coded racial epithet, like “welfare
recipient”? There is more about such epithets in Gilens (1996).
12. One could try to “bracket” one’s own beliefs and attitudes, as Hannon rec-
ommends (2020: 598), but some attitudes are impossible to bracket without
undermining one’s identity. As Bailey notes (2022: 52), there is a difference
between imagining being in someone else’s position with one’s character,
history, and physical features intact and imagining being in their shoes
with their character, history, and physical characteristics. I cannot imagine
being in the shoes of a virulent racist with his character and values. Imag-
ining being in his position with my character and values is unlikely to cast
much light on the racist’s inner life. In this case, it seems that empathy is
either impossible or useless.
13. As Martha Nussbaum notes, “all societies are full of emotions” (2013: 1).
While some of these emotions have little to do with political principles or
public culture, “others are different: they take as their object the nation, the
nation’s goals, its institutions and leaders, its geography, and one’s fellow
citizens as fellow inhabitants of a common public space” (2013: 2). These
are examples of political emotions.
14 As Sharon Krause points out, “there is nothing in perspective-taking, con-
strued as a purely intellectual act, that effectively moves us to think beyond
the limits of our personal convictions” (1998: 162). The same goes for emo-
tionally charged perspective-taking.
15. See below on whether even cognitive empathy is required.
16. This is her response to a magazine article by Frank Rich in which he writes
that for all Hochschild’s “fond acceptance of her new Louisiana pals, and
for all her generosity in viewing them as virtually untainted by racism, it’s
not clear what such noble efforts yielded beyond a book, many happy mem-
ories of cultural tourism, and confirmation that nothing will change any
time soon. Her Louisianans will keep voting for candidates who will sab-
otage their health and their children’s education; they will not be deterred
by an empathic Berkeley visitor, let alone Democratic politicians” (Rich
2017). Rich is right.
17. Stanley (2015, chapter 3).
18. Du Bois (1994).
19. Stanley credits Sharon Krause with this insight. See Krause (1998: 162–
165). Another consideration is that it might not be possible “to imagina-
tively place oneself in the situation of others who have had dramatically
different life experiences” (Stanley 2015: 103). See Paul (2015).
20. As Hannon concedes. See Hannon (2020: 599).
21. Stanley (2015: 13).
22. Hoerl (2013).
23. This is one of Meyerson’s two dimensions of false consciousness. She
describes “twin states of mind” as involving false consciousness: “first, the
rationalizations of members of the ruling class, their inaccurate conception
 Sensemaking, Empathy, and Democracy 231
of their motives, and, second, the blindness of the workers to their inter-
ests, their identification with the capitalist system …. It is the rulers who
benefit from both mistakes” (1991: 8).
24. Hochschild (2018: 9).
25. Naturally, such people do not think of themselves as undeserving. It is only
other people who are freeloaders.
26. According to Isaiah Berlin, “it is one thing to say that I know what is good
for X, while he himself does not; and even to ignore his wishes for its – and
his – sake; and a very different one to say that he has eo ipso chosen it”
(1969: 133). From a false consciousness perspective, there is no question of
Hochschild’s subjects somehow choosing stricter environmental regulation,
despite their protestations to the contrary. The critical point, which Berlin
does not deny, is that people do not always know what is good for them.
27. Inspired by Aristotle, Philippa Foot remarks that “the idea of the human
good is deeply problematic” but that “for all the diversities of human life, it
is possible to give some quite general account of human necessities, that is, of
what is quite generally needed for human good” (Foot 2001: 43). These human
necessities include clean air and clean water but, whatever Hochschild’s sub-
jects might think, not unregulated oil production. The idea of basing an
account of false consciousness on an Aristotle-inspired account of the human
good deserves more detailed consideration than it can be given here.

References
Bailey, O. (2022), ‘Empathy and the Value of Humane Understanding,’ Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research, 104: 50–65.
Berlin, I. (1969), Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Bloom, P. (2018), Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (London:
Vintage).
Coplan, A. (2011), ‘Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects,’ in
A. Coplan & P. Goldie (eds.) Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological
Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 3–18.
Currie, G. (2011), ‘Empathy for Objects,’ in A. Coplan & P. Goldie (eds.) Empathy:
Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University
Press): 82–95.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1994), The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover).
Foot, P. (2001), Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
Gilens, M. (1996), ‘“Race Coding” and White Opposition to Welfare,’ American
Political Science Review 90 (3): 593–604.
Hannon, M. (2020), ‘Empathetic Understanding and Deliberative Democracy,’
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 101: 591–611.
Hochschild, A. R. (2018), Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on
the American Right (New York: The New Press).
Hoerl, C. (2013), ‘Jaspers on Explaining and Understanding in Psychiatry,’
in G. Stanghellini & T. Fuchs (eds.) One Century of Karl Jaspers’ General
Psychopathology (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 107–120.
Jaspers, K. (1997), General Psychopathology, volume 1, trans. J. Hoenig &
M. Hamilton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).
232 Quassim Cassam
Krause, S. (1998), Civic Passions: Moral Sentiment and Democratic Deliberation
(Princeton: Princeton University Press).
Louis, M. R. (1980), ‘Surprise and Sense Making: What Newcomers Experience
in Entering Unfamiliar Organizational Settings,’ Administrative Science
Quarterly, 25: 226–251.
Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1970), The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur (London:
Lawrence & Wishart).
Meyerson, D. (1991), False Consciousness (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
Nussbaum, M. (2013), Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Oz, A. (2012), How to Cure a Fanatic (London: Vintage Books).
Paul, L. A. (2015), Transformative Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Rich, F. (2017), ‘No Sympathy for the Hillbilly,’ New York Magazine (March 19,
2017).
Stanley, J. (2015), How Propaganda Works (Princeton: Princeton University
Press).
Weick, K. E. (1995), Sensemaking in Organizations (London: Sage Publications).
Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M. & Obstfeld, D. (2005), ‘Organizing and the Process
of Sensemaking,’ Organization Science, 16: 409–421.
12 Political Skepticism, Bias,
and Epistemic Colonization
Michael P. Lynch

12.1 Political Skepticism

Anyone interested in politics has, at one time or another, despaired at
the lack of progress that we seem to make toward a more just, equitable,
or peaceful society. Such despair, and the cynicism that accompanies it,
most frequently arises from observing recurrent obstacles to progress
such as racism, religious violence, or the inherent selfishness and greed of
human beings – hindrances that recur so often they can make the polit-
ical task seem downright Sisyphean. A central assumption behind the
idea that political progress is possible is that we know where we should
be heading. From a comprehensive perspective, that is not too hard – we
head toward the horizon of justice. The hard part is knowing the details
of the way. That, it seems, is very difficult indeed. So difficult that some
think we should acknowledge it is impossible. That is, we are incapable
of knowing what is true in politics. Call this view political skepticism.
The threat that political skepticism poses is not to the possibility of
truth in politics but its utility as a political concept.1 As I will be using the
term here, skepticism about X – whether X is the external world, or other
minds, morality, or politics – is the view that, to some degree or other, we
are incapable of knowing about X – the truth about it eludes our grasp.
That is distinct from the view that there are no political truths to know.
To those with an ear tuned to the practical, that may sound like a distinc-
tion without a difference, but it is not. To cite just one: the idea that there
are no political truths has the consequence that there are also no political
falsehoods, and hence no such thing as political mistakes. On the other
hand, the political skeptic believes we are constantly making political
mistakes – making poor or unjustified political judgments. That is a view
that has been used to motivate a variety of political standpoints. But it
can also motivate the rejection of the significance of political knowledge
and appeals to it in democratic theory and practice. As such, no inquiry
into the epistemology of democracy can ignore it.
Before we start, however, let me say what I mean by political knowl-
edge. Sometimes political scientists talk about political knowledge as

DOI: 10.4324/9781003311003-16
234 Michael P. Lynch
knowledge of how a political system works or its elements. For instance,
how many branches of government there are or who the president is
(Somin 2013).2 There is nothing wrong with labeling this kind of knowl-
edge as political knowledge, but judgments like that are not what pri-
marily concerns us here. We are interested in those judgments that figure
in public political discourse and constitute such discourse. Moreover, as
everyone knows, the range of such judgments is extensive. As Orwell once
lamented, “There is no such thing as keeping out of politics … all issues
are political issues.”3 And Orwell’s sentiment is certainly in keeping with
our times when everything from COVID to climate change is politicized.
To accommodate his point while avoiding any foolhardy attempt to
give a conceptual analysis of something so slippery, I will assume that
political knowledge is knowledge involving judgments with political
meaning. A judgment has such meaning when it carries distinctive polit-
ical associations for a community in a context.4 These will include the
actions it is thought to engender (voting, protesting, and liking), the con-
victions and values it is thought to express, and whose side is perceived
as “winning” if the judgment is widely accepted. Thus, whether one’s
knowledge counts as political depends on the context and community
one is in. What is apolitical knowledge in one context (knowledge of vac-
cines, for example) can suddenly become political when the context shifts
or the issues change. If so, then skepticism about political knowledge
concerns whether we can know which of the judgments that have politi-
cal meaning for us are true.
In what follows, I will review several lines of skeptical argument
directed against the possibility of political knowledge so understood,
aiming to show that one of them – concerning the reality of a concep-
tual corruption often called epistemic colonization – is far more plausible
than the others. I conclude by offering some thoughts on how this skepti-
cal threat, while profound, should motivate us not toward quietism but a
more vigorous and inclusive democratic politics.

12.2 Skepticism from Disagreement

The ancient academic skeptic Carneades, visiting Rome to appeal on
behalf of the Athenians, spent his time lecturing – one day in favor of
virtue, the next against it – and endeavoring to demonstrate that there
were always good arguments on either side of any consequential ques-
tion. Unsurprisingly, this did not go down well with the Roman authori-
ties. Cato the Younger is said to have granted the Athenian requests just
to get Carneades and his dangerous rhetoric out of town and out of range
of tender Roman ears (Laursen and Paganni 2015: 7).
The story reminds us of two essential facts about skepticism. It is irri-
tating to political partisans, and it usually begins from the observation
that evidence does not definitively settle specific questions. If the former
 Political Skepticism, Bias, and Epistemic Colonization 235
fact lends skepticism to some of its appeal, the latter reminds us of the
oldest argument in its support. Crudely put. Wherever there is perva-
sive disagreement in judgment, we should conclude that we do not know
which judgments are true and which are not.5
Curiously, the same premise has been used throughout history to
support a very different conclusion: that judgments about morality are
only relatively true or false. The relativist, unlike the skeptic, thinks we
can know, but only what is relative to our perspective. That is appealing
in the same manner that Mom’s assurance that her children’s picture is
appealing – but it is not precisely transparent what it means. On the other
hand, the skeptic offers straightforward counsel: admit that you do not
know.
Yet the clarity here only goes so far, with the ancient skeptics divided
into two schools. The Academics, of which Carneades was a chief rep-
resentative, held that skeptical arguments demonstrated we merely do
not know anything. Followers of Pyrrho gave even more radical counsel
than the Academics: we should not just refrain from saying we know. We
should refrain from believing – even believing the proposition that we do
not know anything. On this latter view, the point of skepticism was to
free yourself from commitment – to allow yourself to be carried along on
the gentle seas of appearance. The sentiment was that without dogmatic
commitment, one would be happier.
Whether one can genuinely be happier while believing in nothing is
an intriguing question. However, we need not settle that to address the
argument from disagreement as it might apply to politics. The first prem-
ise would seem true: that there is widespread and seemingly intractable
political disagreement. Indeed, some (notably Schmitt 2007/1932) have
asserted this is almost accurate. In their view, part of what makes a judg-
ment political is that it is the subject of a certain kind of “us vs. them”
conflict. No dissent, no politics. In any event, the first premise is plausi-
ble, even if inadequate by itself to raise skeptical doubts. Unsurprisingly,
advocates of these sorts of arguments (whether about politics or some-
thing else) typically rest substantial weight not only on how widespread
political disagreements are but also on the kind of disagreements in play.
This claim brings us to the second premise – that we cannot “step out-
side” our political judgments and check to see which are true. How we
regard this will depend in part on how it is defended. And it needs defense
because it isn’t obviously true.
One kind of defense would appeal to general concerns about how
humans acquire knowledge. Perhaps, as George Berkeley thought, we
can never know what judgments are true because we can never check and
see without making another judgment – and that one, too, would need
to be checked for truth. Or perhaps, as we will examine in greater detail
in a moment, we can appeal to general facts about humans’ penchant for
bias. But if we are defending the second premise with general facts about
236 Michael P. Lynch
how bad at comprehending stuff human beings are, then those facts will
presumably undermine not just political knowledge but all knowledge.
We will have an argument on our hands that will be more destructive
than we might have wanted.
Nevertheless – and even if they pale at accepting a general skepticism
about all knowledge – proponents of this argument face a further prob-
lem. Historical, scientific, and economic judgments can all become politi-
cal in a reasonably intuitive sense. As the pandemic has taught us, almost
any judgment, even causal judgments about the physical world, such as
that mask-wearing lowers the chance of infection, can become the subject
of political debate and so take on political meaning in a sense defined
above. Furthermore, that presents the supporter of the argument with
a dilemma: since it seems that almost any judgment can have political
meaning in some context or other, either we accept a general and deeply
implausible skepticism according to which we cannot know whether
almost any proposition is true (including whether the earth is flat or cli-
mate change is real), or our knowledge of their truth is relative to a con-
text (sometimes we know them, sometimes we do not), or we must restrict
our skepticism to normative political judgments.
Of these, I suggest the last is the most plausible, but it remains unclear
how that restriction would go. Our general political views are entangled
with one another – with normative political judgments being supported
by, and in return, supporting non-normative political judgments, it will
not always be clear how we could be skeptical about one kind of judg-
ment without being skeptical about the other. Second, and more impor-
tantly, we have yet to be given a reason to think that normative political
judgments are inherently unknowable. They would be if, for example, we
held, with political emotivism, that such judgments are not truth-apt in
the first place. But that is not the view we are considering, as we noted at
the outset. Moreover, the mere fact that it is difficult to be objective, neu-
tral, or serene about normative political judgments does not mean that it
is impossible to know whether any of them are true. Hence, the general
argument from disagreement so far canvassed is not effective at motivat-
ing a particular skepticism about political knowledge.
However, appeals to a disagreement can motivate a more limited, if
also more unsettling, political skepticism. It is possible to see irreconcil-
able political disagreement undermining not all possible political knowl-
edge a priori, but as an empirical fact that undermines our access to a
particular kind of political knowledge concerning the state’s legitimacy.6
This kind of skepticism has been attributed to Nietzsche by Shaw (2007).
Such an attribution can sound surprising. Nietzsche, after all, is often
identified with relativism, not skepticism – as rejecting the idea of objec-
tive political truth as opposed to arguing that we cannot know what it
is. But Shaw reads Nietzsche as arguing for a different approach. As she
puts it, “Nietzsche’s most distinctive argument for political skepticism…
 Political Skepticism, Bias, and Epistemic Colonization 237
rests on the claim that even if we can assume that there are knowable
normative truths, secular societies will have a tremendous problem in
making those truths effective in political life” (Ibid. 9).
The political effectiveness Shaw has in mind concerns the role such
truths can play in building consensus. The idea is this: modern secular
states require normative consensus in order to be, or at least appear to be,
legitimate. Such consensus requires, at the very least, agreement on cer-
tain general principles concerning the governance of society and its fun-
damental values. In a democracy, these might concern principles about
voting, representation, and the extent of state power. Shaw’s Nietzsche is
willing to grant that some people may be in a place to know these princi-
ples. Still, most people are not equipped to do so, and appeals to reason
will not effectively settle a pervasive disagreement about them. A consen-
sus of that sort has typically only been achieved by appeal to myth – to
religion. However, that path is cut off by the secular state. As a result, in
the absence of socially dominant myths or religious authority, the secular
state is unlikely to achieve the consensus over grounding political truths
that it needs to legitimize its exercise of power. The best it can do is to
utilize its power to coerce people into accepting its coercion as justified.
The Nietzschean skeptical argument is both weaker and more robust
than the other arguments we just canvassed, invoking disagreement. It
is weaker in the sense that it rests on at least three assumptions beyond
the scope of skepticism itself: (1) that the chief usefulness of normative
political judgments lies in its role in consensus-building; (2) that state
legitimacy rests on such consensus; and (3) that religion is a stable mech-
anism for building it. Of these, the second seems plausible; the third –
given the long history of religious strife – much less so. The first we will
have the occasion to examine below. Regardless, the core skeptical argu-
ment here is also more potent in a distinct sense and can be considered
separate from the above points. Unlike the previous versions, that core
argument is not against the possibility of political knowledge but against
whether enough people will ever have it to make such knowledge useful. It
is, we might say, a defense of a lived political skepticism – and thus, were
it combined with an unambiguous defense of its central skeptical hypoth-
esis, would present a formidable challenge to the utility of the very idea
concepts like truth and knowledge in politics.

12.3 Liberalism and Who Knows Better

Before we move on and discuss a revised and updated Nietzschean
approach to the problem, I want to pause and deflect a possible misun-
derstanding. So far, I have been representing skepticism about political
knowledge in a way that may give the impression that it is a purely abstract
philosophical problem with little real-world application. Nevertheless,
political theorists have employed political skepticism to motivate all
238 Michael P. Lynch
sorts of political positions, sometimes with significant (if often unfor-
tunate) real-world consequences. I will briefly highlight three examples.
Perhaps the most notorious use of skepticism goes back to Montaigne,
who famously used Pyrrhonist arguments to shed doubt on dogmatic
religious and political movements in 16th century France. At the same
time, it was being torn apart by both plague and civil war. Montaigne
was so struck by these arguments that he dropped out of politics alto-
gether, resigning from his political post and counseling that dogmatic
“zeal works wonders when it strengthens our tendency to hatred… but it
never makes one fly toward goodness”7: 495). Montaigne seemed to draw
the political lesson that we should be less engaged and less committed
politically, as such commitments are precisely what motivates political
violence. Skepticism here is used to justify political quietism.
As we noted above, the Pyrrhonist arguments are entirely general,
which Montaigne was keen to emphasize. But a more focused political
skepticism was wielded during the 20th century by thinkers with a very
different political agenda – one which sees liberty as the central political
value. For example, we find Friedrich Hayek defending individualism by
arguing that:

The basic fact is that it is impossible for any man to survey more than
a limited field, to be aware of the urgency of more than a limited
number of needs. …This is the fundamental fact on which the whole
philosophy of individualism is based. It does not assume, as is often
asserted, that man is egoistic, selfish, or ought to be. It merely starts
from the indisputable fact that the limits of our powers of imagina-
tion make it impossible to include in our scale of values more than
a sector of the needs of the whole society…. This recognition of the
individual as the ultimate judge of his ends, the judgment that, as
far as possible, his views ought to govern his actions, comprises the
essence of the individualist position.
(Hayek 1944/2007: 102)

Hayek’s “basic fact” supporting individualism is a central skeptical tenet.

Roughly put, human life is so complicated and individuals so different
that humans cannot make reasonable judgments about what people very
different from themselves need and want. As a result, Hayek wants to
conclude that attempts to centrally plan economies around views about
what is in “everyone’s interests” are bound to fail. Such plans presuppose
planners know what other people want and need.
Ironically, where Hayek uses a form of political skepticism to moti-
vate individualism and views opposed to central planning, others have
used skepticism to motivate the rule of experts. Economist Bryan
Caplan’s argument that voters in a democracy are systematically irra-
tional, for example, can be taken that way (Caplan 2007). Where Hayek
 Political Skepticism, Bias, and Epistemic Colonization 239
sometimes seems to assume that human beings are at least experts on
what is in their self-interest, Caplan claims that human beings are
terrible reasoners and are subject to frequent “rational irrationality.”
When the outcomes of holding a false or unjustified judgment are not
obvious, people may be prone to hold the judgment despite the evi-
dence because doing so may have identity-confirming or other psycho-
logical benefits. Caplan’s argument is concentrated on economics: he is
concerned with showing that people embrace “irrational” views, which
most mainstream economists reject. This sentiment is what he means
by saying that voters in a democracy make terrible decisions. They
make terrible economic decisions that often run against their long-
term self-interest. A tempting conclusion – perhaps Caplan’s, perhaps
not – is that, at least when it comes to economic matters, we should
often favor government by expertise over democratically arrived deci-
sions. Roughly and crudely put, his view is that economists know best
about economics.
I do not accept either of these arguments. Both invoke skeptical prem-
ises but try to restrict the skeptical impact – Hayek by assuming that
people can at least know their own interests and Caplan by assuming that
experts can be free of the biases that bind ordinary people. However, my
point here is not to assess either view but to use them to signal the critical
role that skepticism can play in motivating actual political policy – even
dreadful policy. Yet looking at both arguments together raises an obvi-
ous concern. What if everyone – both ordinary voters and experts – were
flawed and biased in their politically relevant reasoning? Moreover, what
if this failure was not confined to purely normative political judgments
but extended to any judgment with political meaning, whether normative
or not? If so, then Shaw’s Nietzschean argument sketched above would
seem to gain a grip: even if there could be some political knowledge, dis-
agreement about who knows what might be so pervasive that such knowl-
edge, even when possessed, would be useless.

12.4 The Argument from Bias

What I will call the argument from bias begins with the following two
thoughts: (a) humans are naturally biased when making politically mean-
ingful judgments, and (b) they are terrible at spotting bias in themselves.
There is a vast and ever-growing body of research that would seem to
suggest that both thoughts are true. Many psychologists today agree,
for example, that our cognitive infrastructure is divided between con-
sidered, reflective reasoning and intuitive, automatic thinking. Given
that we encounter a superabundance of sensory information moment-to-
moment basis and that reflective reasoning processes are laborious, we
could not get on with our lives if our brains did not quickly process most
of the information with which we are regularly confronted.8 Thus, our
240 Michael P. Lynch
brains regularly take “shortcuts” in service of the aim of fast and efficient
processing.9
Yet what is efficient is not always true. In the context of social catego-
rizing, the fact that we regularly take cognitive shortcuts when forming
judgments about people means we overemphasize outgroup differences
and ingroup similarities. But it also means that racist, sexist, or other-
wise discriminatory associations that have permeated the more extensive
social context can distort how we conceive of the categories themselves.
To take a concrete example, consider Payne’s (2001) studies, in which sub-
jects identified guns faster and misidentified tools as guns more often
when primed with non-white faces than when primed with white faces.
The widely accepted explanation for this result is that the subjects were
more likely to associate blackness with danger than they were to associ-
ate whiteness with danger.
Moreover, a wealth of other research corroborates these and similar
points. None of it is a surprise. We are flawed, biased reasoners made of
very crooked timber indeed. However, evidence suggests that we are unre-
liable at telling the difference between judgments formed by reason and
those based on bias.10 In particular, many people exhibit what is known
as a “bias blind spot,” an inability to recognize when biases inform their
judgments. Thus, as Pronin and Schmidt (2013) discuss, people are prone
to deny that their political or other ideological judgments are formed due
to partisan or ideological alignment, insisting that their judgments were
reached instead based on sound reasoning.
The existence of bias blind spots should also come as no surprise, as
we have been aware for quite some time of the Dunning-Kruger effect,
whereby people tend to both generally overestimate their abilities and
rate their capabilities as higher than those of their peers. Assuming this
tendency carries over to the problem of bias detection. Not only is it the
case that we regularly overestimate our ability to detect when our think-
ing is biased but also, the worse we are at detecting this, the better we
think we are. Suffice it to say: the problem of pervasive bias is one we
cannot ignore.
It also seems relevant to whether democracies can expect enough of
their citizens, expert or otherwise, to have political knowledge to counter
the Nietzschean worry. One reason to think so is straightforward: we
expect our political judgments to be biased. Indeed, a bias toward one’s
partisan community seems almost inevitable. No one witnessing today’s
polarized age of misinformation would think such bias is not rampant
and dangerous to political knowledge.
This fact seems an obvious motivation for political skepticism.11 The
argument might go like this: if I know the politically consequential prop-
osition that p, then I must be able to rule out the possibility that my
judgment that p is the result of bias. Nevertheless, I cannot rule that out
precisely because I may be suffering from a biased blind spot. So, I do
 Political Skepticism, Bias, and Epistemic Colonization 241
not know whether any politically meaningful proposition is true. We do
not know what we think we know when it comes to what is politically
meaningful to us.12
The argument from bias has some plausibility, partly because it
employs a skeptical possibility that seems all too real, unlike appeals to
evil demons or brains-in-vats. However, it fails because, like those other,
more famous philosophical arguments, it tries to deduce a universal con-
clusion a priori. This fact sets it up for failure. First, one might take excep-
tion to it by rejecting the premises. One can reject the first premise, for
example, on the externalist grounds that one can know without having
to rule out possibilities that you do not. One can sometimes know that p
without having any thoughts about how you formed your judgment that
p. And one might question the second premise by noting that we often
CAN identify our biases in individual cases – and likewise, we can some-
times rule out the possibility that we are biased in a way that undermines
knowledge. The empirical evidence we cited above is consistent with the
fact that we do not always suffer from blind spots, and sometimes we can
tell when we are not.
An even more basic problem with the argument is its assumption that
bias consistently undermines knowledge. As Kelly and McGrath have
recently noted, that is not always clear. To cite their example: the fact
that it is in a person of color’s self-interest to judge that persons of color
should not be targets of discrimination should hardly count against her
being said to know that people of color should not be discriminated
against (Kelly and McGrath 2022: 31). Bias does not always undermine
knowledge and may sometimes aid acquisition. As Rini has pointed
out, being partisan and biased in one’s data acquisition toward reliable
sources can increase one’s knowledge in an environment saturated with
fake news and misinformation by preventing your judgments from being
falsely undermined (Rini 2017).
So, while bias often undermines knowledge, it is not an omnipotent
evil demon. It is not a cultural and sociological reason why some indi-
viduals suffer from it in some contexts more than others. Insofar as it
ignores these reasons, the argument from bias is not just unpersuasive,
and it seems naïve. I now turn to considerations concerning bias that can
motivate a more realistic skepticism about our political judgments.

12.5 The Argument from Epistemic Colonization

Thus far, we have observed it is surprisingly difficult for the political
skeptic to mount arguments that are both extensive enough to target a
variety of political judgments yet not so general as to support a global
skepticism. I now want to turn to a third argument that would seem bet-
ter suited to achieve that balance. It also concerns a kind of bias – but a
kind of systemic bias.
242 Michael P. Lynch
Systemic bias is usually understood as occurring whenever a system
or institution consistently produces outcomes that favor one group or
set of individuals over others. These products can include beliefs and
judgments. Thus, a legal system is systemically biased when it gener-
ates legal judgments that favor whites over black and brown people. A
financial system is when it consistently produces financial judgments that
do the same. It is well-known that liberal democracies and their institu-
tions are rife with systemic bias – what we might call institutional bias.
Institutional bias is best seen as corruption – a rot that eats away at insti-
tutions and produces unjust outcomes. It is not all that difficult to spot,
but it is challenging to stop – because those who benefit from those sys-
tems (whites) tend to be those in power.
But there is another kind of systemic bias that lies farther below the
surface and is accordingly more challenging to even expose. This kind
of bias operates not at the level of institutional systems but in concep-
tual systems. It comes in different forms, but since it involves or is the
result of kinds of systemic bias, and bias of that sort is a kind of cor-
ruption, I will call it epistemic corruption. A conceptual system is epis-
temically corrupt when its concepts are consistently used to produce
unjustified and false judgments on some range of subjects that favor one
group of people over another.13 So understood, epistemic corruption is
an element in other forms of systemic corruption since it works at the
level of how people think, and how people think affects how they act.
The corruption of institutional bias is at least partly a result of epis-
temic corruption.
Until recently, analytic philosophers have not been focused on the
problem of systemic bias in our conceptual frameworks or the power
dynamics involved in epistemic practices generally. The intellectual
traditions most focused on the problem have been feminist, queer,
and decolonial theory. What this literature has repeatedly shown us
that, as with other forms of systemic corruption and bias, there are
several different cultural mechanisms at work that help to explain how
and why we may suffer from epistemic corruption. Here, I will focus
on just one, which I will call, following Franz Fanon and philosophers
Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Walter Mignolo, and Lewis Gordon, epis-
temic colonization.14
Epistemic colonialization occurs when one group, through systems
of education, literary norms, and legal power, comes to impose a par-
ticular set of concepts and norms of rationality on another group.
Over the last five hundred years, the literal imposition of what Fanon
called “Greco-Latin” or Eurocentric standards and concepts on other
cultures has had that effect. However, the impact extends to the col-
onizers as well, since assumptions about what philosophies, politi-
cal ideas, and histories are essential to understand – and which can
be ignored – impact not just what the colonized believe but what the
 Political Skepticism, Bias, and Epistemic Colonization 243
colonizers themselves take for granted. Moreover, as Gordon notes, the
point extends even further:

Fanon observed in Black Skin, White Masks that this kind of colo-
nization is radical because it enchained what people think and how
they think. We could say the same thing about norms and normative
thought – namely, our understanding of what it means to be good, to
do things right, and to make the world such that is, upon reflection,
the best we could and ought to achieve.
(Gordon 2021: 34)

Gordon’s point is that epistemic colonization constrains what we think is

morally and politically possible. As another white man once said to me
about racism when, many years ago, I was teaching in Mississippi, “that
is just how it is.” He meant that racism was an inevitable product of how
humans think and could not change. This lack of hope is the political
outcome of epistemic colonization, affecting, as Fanon well knew, the
colonizer and the colonized.
Epistemic colonization does not just impose concepts. Like coloniza-
tion generally, it also takes resources from the colonized, in this case con-
ceptual resources. It can prevent people from having the conceptual tools
necessary to recognize or understand their experiences. This phenome-
non was familiar to philosophers of the race from Anna Julia Cooper to
Du Bois and Fanon and has been discussed widely under the label of “the
epistemology of ignorance”; more recently, it has been called “hermeneu-
tical injustice” by Fricker.15 This conduct results in epistemic corruption
because lacking concepts like “sexual harassment” or even “institutional
bias” can not only lead people to believe that there is no sexism or racism
in contexts where there is, but also lead to the result that Gordon empha-
sizes above: a limiting of the political imagination and hope. You cannot
imagine how things could get better if you don’t understand how bad
they are in the first place.
Epistemic corruption, in whatever form it takes, can motivate a kind of
political skepticism. If we cannot rule out that our present political judg-
ments are the result, or even just partly the result, of epistemic corrup-
tion, we may doubt whether they are fully justified – and hence whether
they qualify as knowledge.
We should take this kind of political skepticism seriously. It is, after
all, based on a simple thought: human judgments are always shaped by
the concepts those judgments employ. And our concepts are often shaped
by processes some of which are beyond our control. As Wittgenstein
emphasized, no one makes their concepts – we inherit them from the
community in which we live and the political ideologies that normatively
govern our actions and thoughts. Moreover, the history of humanity, and
the history of colonization, strongly suggest that epistemic corruption
244 Michael P. Lynch
happens to the oppressed and the oppressors alike. It would be astonish-
ing if our political concepts were not at least partly corrupted.
Yet while I consider epistemic corruption as a reason to take political
skepticism seriously, I do not think that the kind of skepticism it moti-
vates is unhealthy. Nor is it particularly friendly to any of the three kinds
of skeptical politics I canvassed above: Montaigne’s quietism, Hayek’s
liberation individualism, or Cohen’s epistemic autocracy. Nor, as I will
argue, should it cause us to give up on the goal of democratic consensus
or the ideal of truth in democracy. Indeed, I think it should cause us to
take that idea seriously.
Let us start by examining the kind of skepticism that the problem of
epistemic corruption would seem to motivate, what that kind of skepti-
cism might be used to justify, and what it cannot justify. The first thing
to observe is that epistemic corruption comes in degrees. It is not an
all-or-nothing matter; thus, the skeptical challenge it presents is neither.
The degree to which forces like racial ignorance or colonization corrupt
our concepts will vary from time and place and individual. Moreover,
in almost every case, it is implausible that an individual’s concepts are
so corrupted that every judgment someone makes about politics will be
false or unjustified. Just as judicial corruption due to institutional bias
can nonetheless leave many legal judgments untouched, so too with
many political judgments that might result from a corrupted conceptual
system.
So the kind of skepticism motivated by the problem of epistemic cor-
ruption is a mediated one, according to which we must acknowledge that
many of our political judgments – including perhaps our Lockean intu-
itions about the property and Rawlsian intuitions about justice – may
be less justified than we thought. Further, it may even warrant a slightly
stronger conclusion, namely, that our political judgments may always be,
at best, only partially justified.
Seen from the perspective of real-politic, this is an unsurprising result.
After all, as anyone engaged in actual political decision-making knows,
politics always requires making high-stakes decisions in limited infor-
mation states. We never know enough to be anywhere close to certainty
on most of our everyday political decisions because, for example, we lack
insight into candidates’ true motivations, we cannot predict all the con-
sequences of our policies, and we do not know what other states actors
might do in the future, and so on. So, the fact that on top of all the other
reasons, we must add the probability that we are victims of epistemic
corruption should not cause us to be more skeptical in total about our
political judgments but be skeptical in a different way. It tells us that we
must be more skeptical of our ways of thinking.
Being skeptical about our own patterns of thought can be a good thing
from the point of view of political knowledge. That is because awareness
of epistemic corruption should encourage those who benefit from it to
 Political Skepticism, Bias, and Epistemic Colonization 245
adopt a more intellectually humble attitude toward politics. To be intel-
lectually humble, in a sense I intend here, is to (i) own one’s intellectual
limitations16 and (ii) be willing to learn from other people’s testimony
and experience – to be willing to revise one’s judgments and attitudes
considering evidence supplied by others. Thus, intellectual humility is
both a self-regarding and an other-regarding attitude. It concerns seeing
oneself as a limited cognitive being, capable of being affected by bias
and epistemic corruption. Still, it also means being motivated to listen to
others – that is, to think that one alone cannot know it all.
As Fanon might have said, white people have a hard time being intellec-
tually humble around black people (Fanon 1952). Humility, not to men-
tion reason, as Fanon reminded us, takes flight whenever blacks enter the
room. However, that is precisely why it is essential from the standpoint
of democratic political action. As Gordon notes, what epistemic coloni-
zation teaches us about democracy is that one must act “based on what
one cannot know and despite what one thinks one is” (Gordon 2021: 55).
Awareness of epistemic corruption can be liberatory precisely because
it can help encourage more democratic attitudes.17 From this point of
view, it would be a mistake to think that such awareness should cause us
instead to investigate politics or dig in on Hayekian individualism. That
would seriously miss the point. The point of revealing the corruption of
any form – legal, financial, or epistemic – is liberatory, to blow the whis-
tle and alert us to harms and injustices. Shrugging one’s shoulders and
slinking off to the “arms of learned virgins” (as Montaigne famously put
it) or accepting a kind of individualism that exemplifies the very essence
of colonizing thinking (as Hayek essentially does) is just entirely at odds
with the spirit of decolonizing, the spirit of uncorrupting our political
thinking. Nor does the problem of epistemic corruption add any comfort
to those like Caplan. They wish to point out that ordinary individual
voters are frequently massively wrong at coming to the correct answer
(even where the “correct answer” means, as it indeed does not always,
“what is in their best economic interest”). That may be so, but the prob-
lem of epistemic corruption provides little comfort for the position that
we should give more power to elite decision-makers. That is because epis-
temic corruption, where it happens, corrupts both the ordinary and the
elite alike. Where a mechanism for such corruption like colonization is at
work, all of us can fall into adopting expectations, norms, and concepts
that put, for instance, white men in a better position than black or brown
women or men.
What epistemic corruption does suggest is that Nietzschean worry is a
serious one – that deep political disagreement is unlikely to be resolved
by appeal to individual reason alone. Such disagreement tends to concern
issues of power between groups: between whites, for example, and people
of color. By limiting our imagination, epistemic corruption due to coloni-
zation makes it harder to reach justified resolutions to disagreements via
246 Michael P. Lynch
the rational consensus of the individuals involved. Of course, “harder”
is not “impossible,” but it means that if we want to combat epistemic
corruption, focusing just on the individual epistemic agent is a mistake.
We need more democratic social-epistemic practices and institutions –
practices that correct for, and not just replicate, the effects of epistemic
corruption.
I do not assert that constructing and promoting such practices will
bring us consensus in the face of disagreement. Rorty, following Dewey,
hoped that a commitment to democratic ideals like solidarity might play
that role (Rorty 1989). However, the politics of this century are repeating
the lesson of the last one: namely, that consensus – or more pointedly, the
consensus amongst the privileged – is often best achieved by appeals to
fascist and nationalist myths of racial superiority. In the face of fascism
and fake news, appeals to truth often fail in building consensus.
Crucially, however, the utility of political truths does not lie solely in
their use in consensus-building. What we should take away from the rise
of disinformation and global fascism is that the pursuit of truth in poli-
tics is best seen not as a guarantee of consensus but as a protective bulwark
against anti-democratic forces, and it is for that purpose that combatting
epistemic colonization via the construction of better social-epistemic
practices is crucial. How to do this, of course, is a delicate further ques-
tion. I conjecture that it would involve developing, first, more inclusive
practices. As Landemore has persuasively argued, “inclusive deliber-
ation, that is deliberation involving all the members of a given group,
has greater epistemic properties than less-inclusive deliberation, involv-
ing only a few members of a group” (Landemore 2013: 90ff). Second, to
develop better practices, we need to embody attitudes like intellectual
humility as regulative ideas within them. A social practice embodies an
attitude as a regulative ideal just when the activities constitutive of that
practice are guided by the idea that participants ought to adopt that atti-
tude (Lynch 2019).
Developing these ideas is a task beyond the scope of our discussion.
However, the practices I have in mind are those crucial for the expansion
of public epistemic trust and include those embedded in historical and
scientific inquiry (archival techniques, experimental replication, peer
review); journalistic standards (using more than one source); dialogue
techniques (having empathy, giving everyone a chance to speak, listen-
ing); and legal investigation (appealing to reliable evidential techniques,
examining the motivation of witnesses). An overlooked but obvious fact
is that these sorts of practices exist because we recognize that our epis-
temic assessments are often flawed (Allen and Lynch 2022). Biases are
hard to spot – that is why they are biases, and appeal to informational
checks and balances is a way to compensate for that fact (Lynch 2019). In
following practices like these, we strive to play by rules meant to correct
our fallibility, compensate for our biases, and implicitly encourage us to
 Political Skepticism, Bias, and Epistemic Colonization 247
take a more reflective view. By giving and asking for reasons that emerge
from such practices, we sustain and participate in the democratic space
of reasons itself – a space that remains open to dialogue even when we
are not.
I began this chapter by noting that political skepticism does not chal-
lenge the existence of political truth so much as its relevance – simply
because if we cannot know the truth, we are, as Rorty might have said,
“aiming at a target we cannot hit” (Rorty 2021). I urge a different conclu-
sion: far from undermining the relevance of political truth, awareness of
the mechanisms of epistemic corruption should encourage us to adopt a
more mitigated, engaged skepticism toward ourselves and our practices.
This modestly skeptical and intellectually humble attitude is predicated
on taking truth more rather than less seriously. What epistemic corrup-
tion teaches us is a lesson that, like most important lessons in life, we
need to learn again and again. Politics is an uncertain business, and if
we want to figure out our best collective path forward, we need to build
social-epistemic institutions and practices that can help us correct our all
too human flaws. The struggle against the forces of epistemic coloniza-
tion is the struggle for democracy.18

Notes
1. In many of his works across his long career, Rorty (1979, 2021) argued that
truth was either too metaphysically vague or too barren a concept to use
as a political ideal. In this sense, he could be considered sympathetic to the
political skeptic. However, as I see it, Rorty’s ultimate view is not skepti-
cism about our capacity to know political truths but the concept of truth
(in or out of politics) itself. Since I have taken up Rorty’s arguments else-
where (Lynch 2004, 2012), I will set them aside here.
2. This usage has some of its roots in Zaller’s The Nature and Origins of Mass
Opinion (Zaller 1992).
3. Orwell (2009: 282).
4. Political meaning, so defined, is a species of what Lessig (1995) and
Haslanger (2014) call social meaning.
5. As I have noted elsewhere (Lynch 2004), we can employ comparable argu-
ments concerning disagreement to motivate relativism about various kinds
of truths. However, here, I will concentrate on skepticism.
6. Another approach, often associated with Berlin (1958) (Two Concepts of
Liberty), centers on the thought that specific political values are incom-
mensurable – unable to be evaluated along the exact dimension of evalua-
tion. If, for instance, there is no way to settle the classic debate of whether
liberty or equality is paramount, one might believe this leads to general
political skepticism. Nevertheless, while the debate about whether this
form of value pluralism persists, there is no consensus that it leads to skep-
ticism rather than relativism about political values.
7. Montaigne (2003).
8. See Kahneman (2011).
9. See Kahneman (2011, especially 2011: 105).
10. Kornblith (2012).
248 Michael P. Lynch
11. As we have already noted, Caplan (2007) arguably employs a similar argu-
ment: see Kornblith (2012) and Saul (2013) for explicit discussions of the
epistemic impact of bias. The present argument draws on Allen and Lynch
(2022).
12. One might complain that the argument establishes too much – like the
argument from disagreement, it may seem to undermine all knowledge,
not just political knowledge. See Allen and Lynch (2022) for discussion. In
any event, there are plenty of other reasons to reject the argument.
13. Kidd (2019) has recently and usefully appealed to the idea of epistemic
corruption to help analyze the effects of oppression and education. Kidd’s
focus, however, is on a kind of corruption that inhibits the development of
intellectual virtues and encourages intellectual vices in individuals.
14. Maldonado-Torres (2008), Mignolo and Walsh (2018), and Gordon (2021).
15. See, for example, Sullivan and Tuana (2007) and Fricker (2007). Medina’s
summary is an excellent overview of the connection between these works
of literature (Medina 2017).
16. See Whitcomb et al. (2015) and M. Lynch (2019).
17. Here I am influenced by Heather Battaly’s important paper on this topic
(Battaly 2020).
18. For help with this paper, I thank the editors, a reviewer, Teresa Allen,
Nimra Asif, Eric Berg, and Lewis Gordon.

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Skepticism and Public Discourse.” In Reason, Bias and Inquiry, by Nathan
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Lynch. London: Routledge.
———. 1958. Two Concepts of Liberty. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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13 Economic Inequalities and
Epistemic Democracy
Ivan Cerovac

13.1 Introduction
Most contemporary political epistemologists appreciate and endorse
democracy as a collective decision-making procedure with legitimacy-­
generating potential. While some hail it for its procedural qualities and
internalizing the values of freedom and equality, others focus on its
instrumental qualities and the epistemic significance of political out-
comes it produces, and some incorporate both approaches. Most of
these strategies address democracy as an idealized procedure within an
equally idealized social environment. However, democratic processes
occur in real societies subject to many extraneous and non-ideal social
and economic conditions. Economic inequalities frequently negatively
affect the qualities that had initially made democracy so appealing. This
chapter aims to demonstrate how substantial social and economic dis-
parities reduce democracy’s legitimacy-generating potential and analyze
what can be done to preserve it.
The chapter proceeds as follows. In Section 13.2, I briefly address the
qualities a decision-making procedure must fulfill to be able to generate
legitimate political decisions. Writing from the standpoint of an epis-
temic democrat, I indicate that these qualities can be both moral (aim-
ing for equality in the decision-making process) and epistemic (aiming
for the quality of outcomes, or at least for the procedural quality of the
deliberative process). I end the first part by underlining a severe concern:
significant inequalities in income, wealth, and capital ownership often
spill over from the economic and social spheres to the political arena.
The considerable effect these inequalities have on decision-making might
diminish democratic procedures’ moral and epistemic qualities, impair-
ing their ability to produce legitimate political decisions. Section 13.3.
summarizes various spillover mechanisms and approaches wealthier
citizens can use to acquire more-than-equal political influence. These
might include both actions used to obtain disproportionate impact in
the decision-­making process and conduct that constrains the scope of
the decisions that democratic governments can produce. Section 13.4.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003311003-17
 Economic Inequalities and Epistemic Democracy 251
discusses how we can evaluate economic inequalities’ impact on demo-
cratic legitimacy. I analyze two distinctly epistemic approaches, liberal
epistemic and egalitarian epistemic positions, and provide arguments
for endorsing the latter. Finally, in Section 13.5. I sketch two approaches
epistemic egalitarianism can assume to remedy the spillover problem.
First, we can try to regulate (or even disable) the mechanisms that allow
affluent citizens to translate economic and social power into political
influence. Second, we can leave the spillover mechanisms unregulated
and instead try to diminish existing social and economic inequalities.

13.2 Epistemic Democracy and the Informal

Political Sphere
Epistemic approaches to political legitimacy assume various forms and
endorse democratic and non-democratic political systems.1 The common
ground is represented by these approaches’ epistemic standards when
evaluating various decision-making procedures. As we can utilize differ-
ent instrumental and purely procedural epistemic norms, and as meeting
the epistemic standard can be the sole requirement or just one of the
many requirements a decision-making process must fulfill, I shall sim-
plify the debate by focusing on the standard account of epistemic democ-
racy. This account builds upon Rawls’ liberal principle of legitimacy
and argues that a decision-making procedure must be acceptable to all
reasonable (or qualified) citizens to have legitimacy-generating potential
(Rawls 1993, 137).2 Since the unequal distribution of political influence
introduces the invidious comparisons objection (Estlund 2008, 36–37),
decision-­making must allocate political power equally while simulta-
neously organizing the decision-making process in an epistemically
optimal way: one compatible with an equal allocation of political influ-
ence. Numerous contemporary authors writing in this tradition perceive
democracy as a decision-making procedure with legitimacy-generating
potential. It distributes political power equally among all (qualified) cit-
izens, meeting the moral criterion (Cohen 1989, Beitz 1990, Rawls 1993,
Christiano 2008). It also ostensibly outperforms other fair decision-­
making procedures in placating the epistemic standard. Namely, it
exceeds other suitable practices in producing decisions of substantial
epistemic quality (Estlund 2008, see also Marti 2006, Landemore 2013,
Goodin and Spiekermann 2018, Cerovac 2020) and in fostering delibera-
tion and epistemic virtues (Peter 2011, 2021).
Epistemic democracy thus provides two essential criteria by which we
can evaluate decision-making procedures: a moral and an epistemic crite-
rion (Estlund 1997).3 However, decision-making procedures occur in the
real world, and their ability to placate the two criteria can be significantly
affected by the economic and social circumstances in which decision-­
making ensues. While some procedures might meet the two criteria under
252 Ivan Cerovac
ideal conditions and within strictly controlled environments, their ability
to treat citizens as equals and secure the decent quality of deliberation
and the quality of resulting political outputs might be jeopardized when
applied to realistic circumstances. To better understand this phenom-
enon, we must introduce the distinction between the formal and infor-
mal political spheres (Estlund 2008, 189, see Walzer 1983, Stacey 2010,
Radnitz 2011). The former includes elections, parliamentary debates,
voting in the parliament, decision-making in the executive bodies of
the government, as well as many other processes conducted under strict
rules and regulations. The latter incorporates political speeches (typi-
cally held outside formal institutions), propaganda, public debates and
writing to the media, lobbying, citizen rallies and protests, and activi-
ties such as producing and distributing visual or literary artworks that
spread political messages. Strict egalitarian norms such as the appeal for
equal political influence in the decision-making process typically apply
within the formal political sphere (for instance, the one-person, one-vote
principle4). Despite substantial difficulties, we can apply these norms
within the formal political sphere. The decision-making process in this
sphere can mirror the ideal democratic procedure that meets both the
moral and the epistemic criterion. However, trying to implement strict
egalitarian norms requiring the equality of political influence5 in the
informal political sphere comprises many difficulties. Namely, the free
exercise of civic liberal rights, including personal and economic liberties,
can result in citizens having profoundly unequal political influence in
the informal political sphere. Insisting on the equality of political impact
in the informal political sphere would thus entail a systematic denial of
some rights and liberties. Such a claim might give rise to the infamous
leveling-down objection (Christiano 2008) when citizens end up with an
equal but lower level of well-being than they would have had the inequal-
ity been preserved.6
Contemporary discussions thus differentiate between formalist
approaches, where the equality of political influence is preserved only in the
formal political sphere, and substantivist or egalitarian approaches, where
the plea for equal political power applies to the formal and the informal
political sphere. Note again that the debate is not about the distribution
of resources in general but the distribution of capabilities for exercising
political influence. Substantivist approaches do not necessarily object
to general inequalities in the economic or social sphere. They locate the
problem in the spillover of inequalities from economic and social spheres
into the informal political sphere and subsequently from the informal into
the formal political sphere (Walzer 1983, see also Sunstein 1994, Robeyns
2019). Substantivist approaches rest on the spillover thesis – their argu-
ments make sense only if there are good reasons to believe that consid-
erable inequalities in income and wealth can cause disparities in political
influence, which undermine the moral value of democratic procedures.
 Economic Inequalities and Epistemic Democracy 253
Additionally, epistemic substantivists endeavor to demonstrate that vast
inequality in the economic and social spheres might also undermine dem-
ocratic procedures’ epistemic value, either by reducing the epistemic value
of the deliberative process itself or by decreasing the quality of political
decisions produced using democratic systems.7 The following section of
the chapter discusses and analyzes various mechanisms the rich can use
to translate financial power into political power.

13.3 Spillover Mechanisms

Political influence can manifest itself in various spheres of life and at
different stages of the collective decision-making process. Many authors
have analyzed and written extensively on these mechanisms (Beitz 1990,
Rosenstone and Hansen 1996, Knight and Johnson 1997, Lijphart 1997,
Christiano 2010, Campante 2011, Christiano 2012, Machin 2013). First,
before the decision-making process even begins in its traditional form,
citizens can use financial power to fund campaigns influencing public
opinion. Second, money can support political campaigns and activi-
ties shaping voting behavior during the electoral process. Such conduct
might affect the elections’ outcome and motivate politicians and political
parties to embrace values and policies that will help them draw addi-
tional funding. Third, financial power can also affect the feasibility of
some democratically chosen aims by making them counterproductive
and obsolete and practically vetoing some proposals. Since there are con-
siderable inequalities in the distribution of income, wealth, and owner-
ship of productive assets, the concern is that, by using these mechanisms,
financial imbalances might and often do cause considerable inequalities
of political influence in the informal political sphere.

13.3.1 Influencing the Public Opinion

Civic opinions and preferences regarding most political issues are typ-
ically formed and modified far before the formal deliberative decision-­
making process takes place. Apart from inputs within their intimate
sphere (e.g., family and friends), citizens receive and are called to evaluate
much information coming from the informal political sphere, including
mainstream media and social networks, citizen rallies, public debates,
promotional materials, and even works of art. These inputs typically
affect which political issues people consider relevant and thus determine
what citizens think about and their attitudes and preferences regarding
those issues. For example, the effects of mainstream media (TV and news-
papers) on civic political opinions have been extensively studied (Entman
1989, Livingstone and Lunt 1994, Jacobs and Shapiro 2000). Although
these effects have substantively decreased in the past thirty years, main-
stream media still represents an essential source of information for many
254 Ivan Cerovac
citizens (Gurevitch, Coleman, and Blumler 2009). Social networks pro-
foundly influence civic opinions (Bond et al. 2012, Marichal 2016), con-
tributing to the spread of false news (Klein and Wueller 2017), ideological
segregation (Flaxman et al. 2016), and epistemic and political polariza-
tion (Kubin and von Sikorski 2021). Despite the hope that they might level
the playfield, they too have proven to be susceptible to financial power,
from paid advertising to bots and fake accounts. As affluent citizens can
invest disproportionate amounts of money in promoting their political
views, they can exercise political influence to a far greater extent than the
average citizen. This influence can “change the ideological climate and
what is perceived as sound evidence” (Robeyns 2019, 256). Citizens can
use their money to fund research groups and think tanks that produce
arguments supporting the funders’ economic, social, and political views.
These arguments can later be interpreted as sound evidence and dissemi-
nated using mainstream media, social networks, or even privately funded
non-­governmental organizations engaged in public advocacy.8 Financial
power can thus influence public opinion even before some political issues
have appeared on the agenda. It can significantly affect which topics will
be discussed publicly and become the object of collective decision-making.
The spillover from the economic to the political sphere is not always
intentional. Of course, money is sometimes used to advocate for a par-
ticular law or policy and sometimes to support a more general political
aim or even a political ideology. However, it seems that financial power
can turn into political influence even when one lacks the intention to do
so. For example, the owner of a publishing house can decide to publish
only novels where the protagonists exhibit some personal and social vir-
tues (for instance, independence and self-reliance, or selflessness and care
for others). These novels might carry political messages or affect how
people think about politics, even if the author or the publisher did not
conceive them as politically relevant works. Although the reasons for the
publisher’s decision might have been purely personal or aesthetic, having
the power to decide which novels will be published gives one dispropor-
tionate political influence. However (as discussed later in the chapter),
sometimes equalizing political influence entails actions that so severely
affect civic fundamental rights and liberties that no well-intended lib-
eral (or even egalitarian) thinker would consider such actions justified
(Estlund 2008). For now, it suffices to say that, even before something
becomes a public issue and even before it is put on the political agenda,
inequalities in income and wealth enable some citizens to have a dispro-
portionate influence on others.

13.3.2 Funding Political Campaigns

The focus now turns from influencing public opinion in general (where
the political struggle need not be yet mirrored in the formal political
 Economic Inequalities and Epistemic Democracy 255
process) to impacting the results of a collective decision-making process
once the relevant issues have been put on the agenda. Campaign contri-
butions are probably the most direct example of the influence transfer
from the economic to the informal political sphere. Of course, contri-
butions do not directly influence the electoral process – votes are what
win elections. However, political campaigns consist of various actions
that aim to influence civic voting behavior, and none of these actions are
cheap or easy to perform. Running for office and acquiring civic support
(as well as the support of fellow party members and other politicians)
requires the means to present and explain one’s views (along with reasons
and arguments supporting those views) to others. In large communities,
such a task can only be completed by using paid advertisements, organ-
izing public rallies, appearing in the media, and employing public rela-
tions experts. Vast economic inequalities imply that these means are not
equally available to all citizens.9 Those having more income and wealth
will, other things equal, “have access to better means for conveying their
political message to the public than poor candidates” (Cerovac 2020, 215).
Of course, most contributions politicians receive for their campaigns are
donated by other citizens. However, wealthier citizens can contribute
more, thus exercising more significant political influence in the informal
political sphere. Consequently, politicians will be motivated to shape the
political aims and the public policies they are advocating to meet better
the preferences of those who can donate significantly more (Campante
2011).10 Since the affluent are not a homogeneous group, the preferences
the politicians try to meet need not be similar (and can be, and often are,
conflicting and incompatible). This fact does not seem to alleviate the
original problem, as political influence in the informal political sphere
remains unequally distributed.
Is unequal political influence concerning campaign contributions gen-
uinely a significant threat to political equality? Christiano (2012, see also
Robeyns 2019) explains why the affluent have more significant capabili-
ties to donate money to political campaigns. Due to the decreasing mar-
ginal utility of money, rich people are left with far more money than the
poor when they meet their basic needs. Donating money to political cam-
paigns thus does not represent a relevant loss of utility. This explanation
is supported by empirical evidence indicating that most people who con-
tribute to political campaigns are “concentrated at the upper echelons of
the distribution of income” (Christiano 2012, 245, see also Ansolabehere,
de Figueiredo, and Snyder 2003). Besides, recent research suggests that
representative bodies tend to systematically neglect the perspectives and
interests of the citizens ranked in the lowest two-thirds of the income
scale (Bartels 2016). Gilens and Page present similar (or even more wor-
risome) results. They argue that economic elites “have substantial inde-
pendent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and
mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence”
256 Ivan Cerovac
(Gilens and Page 2014, 564). This spillover from the economic to the
political sphere is seldom unintentional. Citizens can fund political cam-
paigns because they believe that this action will contribute to the realiza-
tion of their political aims and values.11 Even those who might have some
non-political motives (for instance, helping a good friend who happens
to be a candidate) understand that their actions represent the exercise of
political influence in the informal political sphere. On the one hand, since
campaign contributions represent a straightforward and clear exercise of
political impact, many countries regulate them. On the other hand, since
donating money to political campaigns is often understood as exercising
the freedom of speech, regulation tends to balance these two values: the
equality of political influence and freedom of speech. I raise some doubts
regarding this approach later in the chapter.

13.3.3 Imposing Structural Constraints

Finally, citizens with disproportionate financial power can exert sub-
stantial influence on political decisions without exercising unequal polit-
ical impact in the decision-making process. Namely, excessively affluent
citizens (and especially those owning productive assets, as well as those
controlling financial capital) can influence the feasibility conditions by
exercising their property rights in a way that makes some political aims
complex to achieve (Christiano 2010, 201). In other words, citizens con-
trolling capital can sometimes “subordinate decisions and actions of the
state” to their own financial decisions (Cohen 1989, 28). For example,
suppose the democratic government aims to increase the minimum wage
to reduce inequalities and improve the well-being of the worst-off citi-
zens. In that case, owners of firms respond by laying off workers, thereby
reducing the well-being of the worst-off. The government’s minimum
wage policy thus becomes self-defeating. Similarly, the government’s
approach to introducing more progressive taxes to fund healthcare or
education can be met with capitalists’ decisions not to invest as much as
before (since they expect their gains will be taxed away), and this might,
in turn, reduce economic growth and decrease the funds that the govern-
ment can spend on healthcare or education.12
Wealthy citizens’ ability to render policies they disagree with self-­
defeating can significantly limit the scope of the democratic government’s
mandate. Citizens can exercise this political influence directly in the form
of a threat or a warning. For example, in a recent annual report, Meta,
the company owning both Facebook and Instagram, indicated that it
is considering shutting down its services in Europe if it cannot keep
transferring user data back to the United States. The warning came as
a response to the legal opinion issued by the European Court of Justice,
following which the current practices do not adequately protect the pri-
vacy of European citizens.13 In many cases, however, political influence
 Economic Inequalities and Epistemic Democracy 257
is exercised indirectly. The government expects capital owners to act in a
certain way (one that will make the policy self-defeating) and is thus moti-
vated not to implement policies that might result in capitalists exercising
their property rights. As with campaign contributions, democratic states
are again facing a dilemma. They must choose between the free exercise
of property rights, on the one hand, and political equality in the informal
political sphere, on the other hand. Some insights into this debate are
presented in the remainder of the chapter. For now, it suffices to say that
the unequal distribution of wealth and ownership over productive assets
can generate inequalities in influence over collective decisions.

13.4 How Do Political Inequalities Endanger

Democratic Legitimacy?
This section aims to indicate how each spillover mechanism reduces the
moral and the epistemic value of democracy, thus endangering its legit-
imacy-generating potential. The task is to demonstrate that democracy,
characterized by substantial economic inequalities that spill over to the
political sphere, fails to be a decision-making procedure that meets the
liberal principle of legitimacy, that is, a process that can be endorsed by
all reasonable (or qualified) citizens as free and equal (Rawls 1993).
Traditionally, epistemic arguments against wealth-induced inequali-
ties in political influence can go along two (often intertwined) lines. First,
considerable disparities in political power can reduce the intrinsic (pro-
cedural) quality of political deliberation. Discussion and the exchange
of reasons and arguments help us not only make correct, efficient, and
just political decisions but also learn from deliberation and other peo-
ple’s views.14 In such well-ordered deliberation, “no power except for
the forceless force of the better argument” is exercised (Habermas 1990,
185). However, suppose one’s political influence in collective deliberation
depends partly on one’s income and wealth (as it often does, consider-
ing that money helps convey a political message using media campaigns,
public relations experts, and rallies). In that case, decision-making pro-
cedures fall short of the deliberative ideal. Additionally, since money for
political campaigns typically comes from contributors, it will urge elected
representatives to vote for laws and policies that advance donors’ inter-
ests, not for political decisions supported by the best reasons (Beitz 1990).
Second, inequalities in political influence can simultaneously impair the
instrumental epistemic value of democratic deliberation. When a small
group of wealthy citizens can disproportionately influence public opin-
ion, affect the decision-making process, or put structural constraints on
democratic decisions, we can expect that politics will be shaped to dis-
proportionately address perspectives and promote the interests of this
small group. Recall Bartels’ (2016) thesis that votes in the US Senate
show little to no responsiveness to the perspectives and interests of the
258 Ivan Cerovac
citizens ranked in the lowest two-thirds of the income scale. This fact
suggests that the government’s policies will likely miss the interests of the
majority and the common good.
Suppose inequalities in income and wealth tend to spill over from
the economic to the informal political sphere (as described earlier in
the chapter) and thus produce disparities in the distribution of political
influence. In that case, one might be tempted to conclude that, since all
citizens should have an equal political impact, the system enabling these
spillovers fails to meet the liberal principle of legitimacy. However, it
seems that the principle (at least as Rawls intended it15) does not directly
call for equality in the decision-making process. It simply calls for equal-
ity in an earlier stage, when all reasonable citizens are free and equal to
deliberate on the decision-making procedure they can all endorse. This
procedure does not have to be egalitarian – if all reasonable citizens can
support some non-egalitarian decision-making procedure (for exam-
ple, one that epistemically outperforms other procedures16), we can say
that such a procedure meets the liberal principle of legitimacy (Estlund
2008). However, this implies that we must publicly justify all deviations
from equality, and all reasonable citizens must be able to see why (and
how) such variations improve the procedure’s epistemic qualities. Can
inequalities in the informal political sphere (caused by the spillover of
political influence from the economic to the political sphere) be justified
in such a way?
David Estlund (2000) gives a persuasive epistemic argument con-
ditionally supporting inequalities in the informal political sphere. He
characterizes this take as a liberal epistemic position and differentiates
it from a libertarian position since the rationale for disparities in the
informal political sphere is not moral (i.e., grounded in property rights)
but epistemic. Estlund makes a clear distinction between political input
and political influence. The latter is a zero-sum game, where an increase
in one person’s political influence implies that another person’s political
influence is reduced. The former is an approximate non-zero-sum game,
where we can increase one person’s political input without reducing some
other person’s input. If, for example, civic political input is measured in
letters written to their political representatives, and one starts to write
two additional letters every year, one’s political input will increase, but
that will not reduce the number of letters sent by other citizens.17 Estlund’s
central presumption is that more political input generally increases
the procedure’s epistemic quality. While democracy and coin-flipping
distribute political influence equally among all citizens, we hold that
democracy epistemically outperforms coin-flipping because it gives citi-
zens more significant political input. Therefore, we should increase civic
political intake to improve the decision-making procedure’s epistemic
qualities. Of course, since inequalities in political input produce epis-
temically harmful inequalities in political influence, we must balance the
 Economic Inequalities and Epistemic Democracy 259
two, keeping the total level of political input as high as possible and the
distribution of political power as egalitarian as possible. However, how
can we do that?
Estlund follows Rawls’ difference principle (Rawls 1999, 65–68) and
applies it to the informal political sphere, arguing that allowing some ine-
qualities in political input leads to a greater level of total political intake.
The state then must regulate imbalances in political input using progres-
sive taxation to reduce disparities in political influence and increase the
political intake of the worst-off. In practice, this means that the state
should allow campaign contributions (although they introduce inequal-
ities in the informal political sphere) but should tax them and use the
acquired funds to increase the political input of citizens who do not (and
cannot) donate money for political campaigns. Estlund believes this will
increase the total level of political input and improve the political intake
of the worst-off while simultaneously keeping the inequalities in political
influence within acceptable boundaries.
There are reasons to doubt whether such regulation will improve the
epistemic quality of political outputs. First, while the message space
of politics (where political views can be broadcasted and displayed) is
ample and leaves enough room for new inputs, individuals have limited
cognitive space to process these messages. Christiano calls this phenom-
enon socially induced cognitive scarcity (Christiano 2010, 248). Since cit-
izens cannot be realistically expected to use more than one hour a day
to consider public and political issues, the total level of political input is
somewhat limited. Of course, political candidates can spend donations
to hire better public relations experts, fight for prime time during tel-
evision broadcasts, or outbid paid advertising spaces on social media.
However, in the end, this turns out to be a fight for political influence.
In other words, after a certain point, an increase in one’s political input
might be epistemically meaningless unless accompanied by a rise in one’s
political influence. The worry is that, since an agent’s cognitive space
is limited, it can be dominated by those with disproportionate political
impact. Second, there are doubts about whether we can apply the differ-
ence principle to the distribution of political influence. Some argue that
it might be appropriate when the distribution of income and wealth is in
question as the endorsed inequality might have motivational effects and
thus increase the total amount of resources being redistributed. However,
the same does not apply in the informal political sphere. We can achieve
the increase in the total amount of political input without introducing
political inequalities since the resources invested in producing politi-
cal input (for instance, money to fund political campaigns) comes from
the motivational effect of disparities in the economy, not the political
sphere (Cerovac 2020). Finally, liberals might argue that the epistemic
difference principle fails to meet the principle of reciprocity. Namely,
the difference principle is not introduced to regulate political liberties,
260 Ivan Cerovac
and the equal fundamental liberties principle, as well as the fair equality
of opportunity principle, has lexical priority over the difference princi-
ple. By allowing inequalities in political influence, the liberal epistemic
position fails to protect the fair value of political liberties (Rawls 1999).
A more egalitarian approach (the egalitarian epistemic position) builds
upon Estlund’s claim that increases in political input are epistemically
rewarding but does not resort to justifying inequalities in political influ-
ence to increase the total level of political input. Unlike strict egalitari-
anism, this position is not concerned solely with political power equality
but with the quality of political decisions. However, unlike Estlund’s
view, it holds that we can benefit from increased levels of political input
without having to introduce epistemically detrimental effects of unequal
distribution of political influence. To achieve this aim, the egalitarian
epistemic position cannot simply restrict or forbid campaign contribu-
tions and other instances where economic power spills over to the infor-
mal political sphere. While this would be an egalitarian move, it would
disregard the epistemic importance of civic political input. To meet high
epistemic standards, the egalitarian epistemic position must increase
civic political intake while equally distributing political influence. This
provision requires giving the state a prominent role in securing that all
citizens share a sufficiently high level of roughly equal political input.

13.5 Egalitarian Epistemic Position

and the Role of the State
The spillover of inequalities from the economic sphere to the informal
political sphere raises legitimacy concerns because inegalitarian systems
cannot meet the liberal principle of legitimacy, that is, they cannot be
endorsed by all reasonable (qualified) citizens. Additionally, since higher
levels of civic political input improve decision-making procedures’ epis-
temic qualities, not all policies that distribute political influence equally
among all citizens can be reasonably endorsed. Coin-flipping, queen for
a day,18 and aggregative democracy give all citizens an equal chance to
influence the final decision. However, we reject these procedures because
they fail to properly harness and utilize civic epistemic contributions.
Therefore, the solution is not to equalize civic political influence at the
cost of significant reductions in political input. Although imposing sub-
stantial restrictions or forbidding many activities in the informal political
sphere might balance civic political power, this would have devastating
effects on the procedure’s epistemic value. The state must divulge forms
of regulation that simultaneously give all citizens an equal level of politi-
cal influence and keep their political input relatively high.19
Two broad approaches can be used to tackle the spillover problem.
First, we can focus on stopping the spillover process and implementing
regulations to insulate the political sphere from the harmful effects of
 Economic Inequalities and Epistemic Democracy 261
background inequalities. For example, we can introduce laws prohibit-
ing the use of private wealth in political campaigns or raise public funds
that will finance political campaigns. This approach allows vast inequal-
ities in income and wealth and targets wealthy citizens’ mechanisms to
translate their economic power into political influence. Second, we can
focus on reducing the disparities in income and wealth, particularly in
control over productive assets. For example, we can argue for a more
egalitarian distribution in the economic sphere, insisting on more pro-
gressive taxation or even advocating for economic alternatives to capi-
talism, such as property-owning democracy or liberal socialism. Unlike
the former approach, this one is not concerned with the spillover process.
If we remove considerable inequalities in income and wealth, there will
be nothing to spill over from one sphere to the other. Both approaches
have some advantages and disadvantages, and I briefly evaluate them in
the rest of the chapter.

13.5.1 Procedural Reform

The first approach attempts to tackle the spillover problem from the
standpoint of non-ideal theory. Some procedural proposals addressed
here are already implemented in the national legislation of many coun-
tries, and the central issue becomes not what procedural elements should
be introduced but to which extent they should be applied. Charles Beitz
categorizes these procedural elements as “ceilings” and “floors” (Beitz
1990, 193–194). “Ceilings” represent limits set on private donations to
political campaigns. Since campaign contributions are often regarded as
an exercise of the freedom of speech (and sometimes the freedom of asso-
ciation), most countries allow private donations. However, many specify
the maximal amount that can be legally donated (Gulzar, Rueda, and
Ruiz 2021). “Floors” include state subsidies for political activities.
In most cases, party subsidies are when the state funds political parties
and their activities. However, some philosophers (Ackerman and Ayres
2004) have suggested that funds should go directly to citizens in the form
of vouchers that can be spent to (anonymously) support a candidate or a
political organization. While the first model tries to reduce inequalities
in political influence by limiting wealthy civic political input, the second
model is more focused on increasing the political intake of each citizen
and does not address the problems related to inequalities in political
influence.20
Since the egalitarian epistemic approach aspires to abolish inequalities
in political influence while promoting high levels of civic political input, it
must combine “ceilings” and “floors” to achieve its aims. However, while
similar strategies are already used in many countries worldwide, the
egalitarian epistemic approach would have to put “ceilings” extremely
low while simultaneously rising the “floors” to reasonably high levels.
262 Ivan Cerovac
This approach implies that the state should subsidize vouchers of consid-
erable monetary value (for instance, Ackerman suggests that each adult
citizen should receive a coupon of 50 “Patriot dollars”) and, at the same
time, severely limit private donations. Ideally, the space between the two
thresholds would be minimal or non-existent, implying that all citizens
have equal political influence and political input.
We can raise several objections against this proposal, and I consider
only the two most significant. First, the egalitarian epistemic approach
severely limits the freedom of expression, practically blocking any private
donations apart from those made through vouchers. Citizens’ freedom of
expression manifests itself in many forms and using personal funds to
support one of the candidates or political parties seems like a straight-
forward form of political expression (Anderson 2000). However, many
freedoms must be regulated to be meaningfully utilized and enjoyed.
Citizens value the freedom of speech in collective deliberation because
it enables all participants to specify their interests and perspectives, thus
enabling them to participate as free and equal in the decision-making
process (Dworkin 200021). Additionally, some restrictions on the freedom
of speech are required to keep collective deliberation sufficiently inclu-
sive and insulate it from the harmful effects of money, thus protecting its
epistemic value (Bennett 2020). The very reasons we value the freedom
of speech in collective deliberation raise the justification of some restric-
tions regarding its use. This fact does not call for the censorship of any
political view, as the intention is not to strip political influence from some
individuals or groups but to distribute political power equally among all
citizens. Second, the egalitarian epistemic approach might seem to be
vulnerable to a form of leveling-down objection (Estlund 2008). If we
prioritize equality of political influence, we might end up endorsing
egalitarian models of distribution that support deficient levels of polit-
ical input, so low that the citizens will be worse off than in some other,
non-egalitarian model of distribution. While this can be a valid concern
in the economic sphere, we can (and should) use state support to keep
the levels of political input sufficiently high (Cerovac 2020, Blau 2021).
Since inequalities in the informal political sphere are not the only (and
probably not even the primary) source of civic motivation to be more pro-
ductive in the economic sphere, we can avoid the leveling-down objection
by using public funds to ensure high levels of civic input, while simulta-
neously keeping the economy competitive by allowing inequalities in the
economic sphere.
The procedural reform proposal and the former two objections raised
against it focus on campaign contributions as the central (and maybe
only) source of inequalities in the informal political sphere. However,
this interpretation lacks and neglects numerous disparities in the infor-
mal political sphere caused by other spillover mechanisms. Even if we
introduce vouchers for funding political campaigns and impose severe
 Economic Inequalities and Epistemic Democracy 263
restrictions on private campaign contributions, many inequalities will
remain unaddressed. Citizens possessing publishing and media houses,
citizens donating money to think tanks and non-governmental organ-
izations, and those owning giant firms, factories, and other productive
assets will still have disproportionate political influence. Introducing
procedural reforms regulating political campaigns and decision-making
might not be enough to eradicate inequalities in the informal political
sphere.

13.5.2 Social Structure Reform

Campaign contributions are just one of many mechanisms prosperous
citizens can use to spill their economic power into the political sphere.
Owning media outlets and publishing houses on the one hand and
productive capital on the other can significantly increase one’s politi-
cal influence. While contemporary discussions typically address some
extreme cases (for example, billionaires who own social networks such
as Facebook or Twitter, newspapers such as The New York Times or The
Washington Post, or giant firms such as Walmart, Amazon, or Apple),
we must consider that simply owning a small publishing house, a local
newspaper, or a small hotel that employs twenty people gives you dispro-
portionate political influence in the informal political sphere. Implying
that the state should constantly supervise how citizens utilize their prop-
erty, intervening whenever there is an instance of spillover, seems a haz-
ardous, illiberal suggestion that opens the door to a range of slippery
slope arguments (Estlund 2008, 187–189). Additionally, even if we want
more state control, some doubt remains that the state will ever be able to
stop the spillover between the two spheres (Robeyns 2019, 256).
An alternative approach (one addressing the problem from the stand-
point of ideal theory) recedes from procedural reforms that aim to stop the
spillover and instead focus on reforms changing the economic and social
structure. The main thought is that, since there will be no significant ine-
qualities in income and wealth, the state will not have to block or regulate
spillover mechanisms. This approach is endorsed by John Rawls, who, just
like Robeyns, doubts the state’s ability to block spillover mechanisms. He
indicates that “welfare-state capitalism rejects the fair value of political
liberties” and “permits enormous inequalities in the ownership of real
property (productive assets and natural resources) so that the control of
the economy and much of political life rests in few hands” (Rawls 2001,
137–138, emphasis added). He argues for a property-owning democracy
or liberal socialisms, systems characterized by a broad dispersal of (both
human and non-human) capital, where every citizen controls roughly
equal amounts of money. While this approach seems to offer a more com-
prehensive solution, it might be targeted by Estlund’s leveling-down objec-
tion. Namely, unlike the “ceilings” and “floors” system discussed earlier,
264 Ivan Cerovac
this approach entails substantial reforms in the economic and social
structure, making somewhat justified the worry that the total level of
political input might be reduced.

13.6 Conclusion
Considering the harmful effect inequalities in the informal political
sphere have on the moral and the epistemic qualities of democratic pro-
cedures (and consequently on their legitimacy-generating potential),
there is a strong need for reforms that can remedy political inequalities.
However, the shortcomings of both approaches indicate no simple solu-
tion. While the two approaches represent substantively different projects
for reducing political inequalities, applying other methods, and even hav-
ing quite different goals, their drawbacks suggest that combining efficient
elements from both might help temporarily alleviate the problem and
render it less severe.

Notes
1. For a comprehensive overview of different epistemic approaches to polit-
ical legitimacy, see Peter (2011) and Cerovac (2020). Also, for an excellent
overview of theories discussing the epistemic qualities of democracy (rather
than its legitimacy-generating potential), see Prijić-Samaržija (2018).
2. We can find similar requirements in many other contemporary authors as
well. For example, Joshua Cohen argues for a “social order in which the
justification of the terms of association proceeds through a public agree-
ment among equal citizens” (Cohen 1989, 30).
3. Numerous authors without a desire to be categorized as epistemic demo-
crats endorse similar criteria. For example, Thomas Christiano writes that
a political system should be designed to “make collective decisions that
aim for the common good and justice [non-procedural, epistemic criterion]
in a way that treats all citizens as free and equal participants [procedural,
moral criterion]” (Christiano 2012, 241; see also Cerovac 2020, 53–61).
4. It is a phrase typically accredited to British trade unionist George Howell,
who used it in the 1880s.
5. Of course, the egalitarian call is not for equal political influence but equal
opportunity for exercising political impact. It is up to citizens to decide
whether to use their capability to influence the decision-making process.
For more information, see Estlund (2000, 128).
6. The leveling-down objection undermines strict egalitarianism by negating
one of its critical arguments with the claim that we should eliminate equal-
ity if it implies reducing the well-being of those better-off to the level of the
worst-off. It invites us to imagine two alternative states: S1 and S2. In S1,
everyone is equally well-off, while in S2, everyone is better off than in S1,
but some are better-off than others. Strict egalitarians would have to favor
S1 and argue for policies that equalize citizens’ well-being, even if that
indicates reducing everyone’s well-being, including the well-being of the
worst-off. When applied to political epistemology, this objection implies
that strict egalitarians would have to insist on equal levels of citizens’ polit-
ical input, even if that entails substantively reducing each citizen’s level of
 Economic Inequalities and Epistemic Democracy 265
political input and negating some essential rights and liberties. For more
information about the leveling-down objection, see Parfit (2002) and Chris-
tiano (2008), and for its application in political epistemology, see Estlund
(2000).
7. An extensive debate on the epistemic value of collective deliberation sig-
nificantly surpasses the scope of this chapter. We can find arguments in
favor of this value in Landermore (2013 and 2021) and Talisse (2021), as
well as in a few chapters within the Democratic Optimism section of this
volume. Additionally, collective deliberation in controlled and inclusive
environments can help alleviate the harmful effects of epistemic injustice
(Samaržija and Cerovac, 2021). For arguments questioning or rejecting this
value, see Ahlstrom-Vij (2012) and Brennan (2016), as well as Chapter 2
of this book within this volume’s Democratic Pessimism section. However,
although the article assumes that public deliberation has some epistemic
value, we can effortlessly adapt most arguments to demonstrate the detri-
mental effect of economic and social inequalities on the epistemic import
of aggregative procedures. Using money to influence public opinions, fund
political campaigns, and impose structural constraints harms aggregative
and deliberative democratic processes.
8. We can find a comprehensive account of how private funds can affect and
even dictate academic research (for example, in economics or political sci-
ence) in Biglaiser (2002) and Stedman Jones (2012).
9. Joshua Cohen, for example, argues that “economic resources provide a
material basis for organized political action.” Poor groups thus face pro-
found organizational and political disabilities. See Cohen (1989, 29).
10. Politicians, of course, believe that campaign contributions are only one
of the means that helps win elections. Ultimately, their political messages
must appeal to the citizens, not only those who can contribute most to
politicians’ campaigns. However, they must also consider shaping their
political messages to draw the most votes and attract as much funding as
possible. Campaign contributions thus lead to “an endogenous wealth bias
in the political process since the decisive agent whose preferences will pre-
vail in equilibrium will be wealthier than the median” (Campante 2011,
646–647).
11. There might be numerous motivations for donating money to support a
particular political candidate or a political party. However, the main rea-
son seems to be that donors agree with the aims and values (or concrete
policies) the candidate or the party is advocating (Magleby, Goodliffe, and
Olsen 2018).
12. Another notable example focuses on situations where the government aims
to reduce pollution by limiting the emissions of greenhouse gases. This
decision can be met with industries’ decision to move the production pro-
cess to another country, thus increasing unemployment and foiling some
other aims the democratic government wanted to achieve. These well-
known examples, as well as a few others, can be found in Cohen (1989),
Christiano (2010), and Robeyns (2019).
13. For additional information, see Schechner and Glazer (2020) and Shead
(2022).
14. The inequality of political influence does not always have to affect collec-
tive deliberation negatively. For example, Mill argues for his plural voting
proposal because (among other things) he holds it will prevent class legis-
lation and thus motivate different groups to deliberate within the Parlia-
ment (Mill 1977; see also Cerovac 2022). However, Mill also argues against
pledges and campaign promises, as well as for (limited) public funding of
266 Ivan Cerovac
political campaigns, because he is aware that money-driven political cam-
paigns can seriously impair the quality of deliberation. For other accounts
that emphasize the educative effects of democratic deliberation, see, for
example, Peter (2011).
15. Rawls’ liberal principle of legitimacy simply requires that all citizens, as
free and equal, can “endorse the society’s fundamental political arrange-
ments” (Wenar 2021).
16. Imagine flipping a perfect or semi-perfect coin (or having a group of experts
or a wise AI), which tends to produce correct political decisions far more
often than any other decision-making procedure. Additionally, suppose
that the coin can do so publicly, that is, all reasonable citizens can agree
that it outperforms all other procedures. A procedure in which all political
decisions are made by such a coin (or a group of experts, or wise AI) would
be able to meet the liberal principle of legitimacy. However, most (or all)
citizens would have no political influence whatsoever (Cerovac 2020).
17. Of course, increasing one’s political input does not necessarily increase
one’s political influence. If my political input increases and the input of all
other citizens remains the same, my political influence will be increased,
and other citizens’ political influence will be reduced. However, if my polit-
ical input increases, but this increase is accompanied by a proportionate
rise in other citizens’ political input, my political influence will remain the
same. Finally, I can simultaneously increase my political input and reduce
my political impact, provided that other citizens’ political input increases
disproportionately (i.e., to a greater extent than mine).
18. Queen for a day is another procedure Estlund (2008) introduced to demon-
strate that procedural fairness is not the only relevant feature of decision-­
making procedures. Every (adult) citizen can be randomly selected for one
day to make all the pertinent political decisions. Estlund intends to show
that a decision-making procedure can give all citizens an equal chance to
influence the final decision (since every citizen has an equal opportunity
to be randomly selected as a ruler) and still be epistemically lacking. A
similar argument could be made for aggregative democracy: although all
citizens have an equal chance to influence the final decision, their political
input is reduced just to their votes, and thus the procedure fails to utilize
civic contributions properly.
19. This view, particularly its sufficientarian aspects focused on keeping the
level of political input reasonably high, is recently defended by Adrian Blau
(2021).
20. However, the aspiration is that the substantial increase in (lower and mid-
dle class) civic political input produces epistemic benefits and will improve
the representation of civic interests in the political process. For additional
information, including doubts about whether this is the case, see Pevnick
(2016).
21. John Rawls endorses a somewhat similar position when he argues that all
citizens should have a “fair opportunity to take part in and to influence
the political process” (Rawls 1999, 224). For an excellent analysis of this
position and a new perspective on the conflict between freedom of speech
and equality of political influence, see Dawood (2013).

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14 What Political Enemies Are for
Robert B. Talisse

14.1 Introduction
This chapter explores a moral conflict at the heart of democratic citizen-
ship. It is the conflict between pursuing justice and treating one’s political
opponents with the kind of respect that is appropriate among citizens.
When the stakes are high in a political decision, we are bound to per-
ceive our opponents as not merely on the other side of the issue but on
the unjust side. Accordingly, treating our foes as fellow citizens feels like
a capitulation to injustice. Why not forgo the niceties of citizenship and
treat opponents as mere obstacles to justice? Why not play democracy to
win?
Standard accounts in democratic theory ground the requirement to
respect opponents in the equal standing of all citizens. The idea is that,
except for those who embrace ideas that are unambiguously beyond the
pale, citizens are owed recognition, even when we regard them as mis-
taken about justice. While I do not repudiate this view, it strikes me as
insufficient. The duty to recognize the equal standing of one’s fellow cit-
izens is a pro tanto requirement. The question is why one should uphold
civic relations with opponents when doing so appears to impede the pur-
suit of justice.
The dynamics of polarization supply a compelling reason why we
must uphold civic relations with at least some of our political enemies.
Specifically, I claim that we must sustain democracy with our enemies to
maintain democratic ties with our allies properly. Although that will be
my account of what our political enemies are for, it will become clear that
the argument is not crudely instrumental. I will argue that we have moral
reasons for sustaining democracy with our enemies.
I proceed as follows. In Section 14.2, I spell out the moral conflict
sketched above, what I will call the democrat’s dilemma. I will show that
the difficulty arises from our sincere effort to meet our civic duties; the
issue is inherent to citizenship. In Section 14.3, I present an account of
polarization’s threat to democracy. After disambiguating two polariza-
tion phenomena, I will show how polarization destabilizes our alliances.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003311003-18
 What Political Enemies Are for 271
This illustration provides the basis for my response to the democrat’s
dilemma. However, having a moral reason to sustain democratic relations
with political enemies does not mean it is effortlessly done. Section 14.4
discusses difficulties with respecting those whose politics one despises.

14.2 The Democrat’s Dilemma

Let us begin with a commonplace: Democracy is many things. It is a form
of government, a kind of constitution, a system of institutions, a deci-
sion procedure, a series of activities, and more. At a more profound level,
though, democracy is the ideal of self-government among equals. The
familiar institutions of democracy – free elections, majority rule, public
offices open to all, and the like – reflect the pursuit of a self-governing
society of equals. In a democracy, the people are not mere subjects of
the government. They are equitable participants in government. They are
citizens.
Democracy thus is a dignifying proposal. The claim is that a decent,
stable, and relatively just society is possible without royals, overlords,
and bosses. Democracy contends that people can govern themselves.
So understood, democracy responds to a moral problem. Government
in any form exercises power over those it governs. In a democracy, this
power is shared equally among the citizens. However, one upshot of
their equality is that citizens are likely to disagree over how their gov-
ernment should deploy political power. When democracy enacts policy,
some citizens will be forced to comply with opposing decisions. Thus, the
moral problem is: how can one be subjected to political power without
subordination?
Democracy answers that even when citizens find themselves on the los-
ing side of a vote, they retain their equal status because they remain par-
ticipants. In the wake of political defeat, they need not withdraw, resign,
or go quietly. They are entitled to continue rebuking, campaigning, and
organizing on behalf of their favored ideas and against the standing pol-
icies. Accordingly, even when subjected to decisions they oppose, they
remain citizens rather than subordinates, each with an equal say and
the social standing to contest prevailing choices and policies. The dem-
ocratic government thus deploys power over citizens without rendering
them mere objects; therein lies democracy’s legitimacy.
Democracy’s reconciliation of exercises of power with the equal stand-
ing of those subjected to it entails that citizenship is a moral office. It
involves processes by which citizens collectively direct their government
to exert power over themselves, even though they disagree on how that
power should be deployed. As exercising power among equals is a mor-
ally solemn enterprise, citizenship is an ethically weighty office.
Unsurprisingly, citizenship comes with responsibilities, many of which
are not strictly legal. Although only citizens could perform the criminal
272 Robert B. Talisse
acts of treason or sedition, there also are ways citizens can behave that
render them morally blameworthy, reckless, admirable, or decent. For
example, it is commonly thought that voting is typically praiseworthy,
while not casting a vote is blameworthy. We take a similar stance toward
being informed citizens; we believe citizens should follow the news and
responsibly form political opinions. Ignoring politics altogether is a mild
dereliction, while deliberately consuming blatantly unreliable political
information and forming political opinions irresponsibly are considered
blameworthy, perhaps seriously so. We hence have a concept of civic duty.
I cannot here present a complete account of our civic duties.1 However,
what has been said suggests that citizenship involves at least two moral
requirements. First, as citizens are members of a self-governing commu-
nity, they must bear responsibility for their political order. This require-
ment implies that they must deploy their share of political power in ways
that reflect their best understanding of what justice requires. Citizens
who vote unreflectively or only based on a crude assessment of their nar-
row interests are reproachable. In taking responsibility for their political
order, citizens are called upon to consider the public good and not merely
their interests. In short, citizens are under a moral duty to use their share
of political power to pursue justice.
A second requirement is that citizens are also members of a commu-
nity of political equals. Thus, when acting as citizens, they must acknowl-
edge that their fellow citizens are their political equals – lateral partners
in self-government, each entitled to an equal political say. In this way, cit-
izens are responsible for one another. This tie means that, when it comes
to politics, they owe one another a certain kind of regard, what we might
call civic respect.
On many accounts, civic respect requires citizens to consult with one
another, try to understand each other’s perspectives, and maybe even rea-
son together, even when they vehemently disagree. Sometimes civic respect
is also cast as a collection of moral and intellectual character traits, such
as open-mindedness, humility, curiosity, and generosity. Important ques-
tions loom. However, I need not attempt to define the precise contours of
civic respect here. It is sufficient to note that specific modes of political
engagement are unfitting among democratic citizens precisely because
they express a fundamental disregard for political equality. Current disa-
greements over practices like de-platforming and canceling demonstrate
broad endorsement of the claim that we generally do owe one another
civic respect; the debates concern the limits of that requirement.
The point of civic respect is tethered to the conception of democratic
legitimacy with which this section began. In a democracy, the government
must never brutely impose political power on citizens; it must be directed
by processes in which each citizen gets an equal say. Accordingly, demo-
cratic citizens who find themselves on the losing end of a vote must have
been afforded a chance to appeal to their peers. Moreover, even after the
 What Political Enemies Are for 273
votes are counted, those on the losing side remain entitled to challenge,
question, critique, and protest the prevailing result. They are not reduced
to mere subjects that must quietly comply with the dominant view, as
their fellow citizens are bound to permit them to object and hear their
objections.
The democrat’s dilemma arises because these two requirements can
clash. In instances of disagreement over political questions that strike us
as normatively weighty, we are bound to see our political opponents as
not merely wrong about the issue but in the wrong. We are prone to see
them as not simply incorrect about what justice requires but as on the
side of injustice. We must take it that if they prevail, our society will move
further from justice.
Accordingly, democratic citizenship invokes an oddly conflicted moral
posture. When the political stakes are high, treating our opponents as
political equals feels like a concession to them and a corresponding
betrayal of justice. In expressing civic respect, we fall short of the require-
ment to pursue justice. Moreover, pursuing justice seems to recommend
that we seek to shut down the opposition, break civil relations with them,
and treat them as mere obstacles rather than democratic partners.
That is not all. We can strain our political alliances by expressing civic
respect for our opponents. Insisting that those on the other side are our
political equals entitled to an equal say – and perhaps also a hearing –
typically sounds to our allies like a betrayal, a confession that our ally-
ship is at best half-hearted. However, one must join a chorus to have a
compelling democratic voice. When expressing civic regard dilutes the
potency of our political coalitions, it counteracts our responsibility to
pursue justice.
Amid this clash, a citizen can plausibly ask why she should bother
expressing civic respect for her political enemies. She could affirm that,
in general, she is required to show civic respect to fellow citizens, but she
could add that in specific cases, showing civic respect detracts from the
pursuit of justice. Noting that she is also under the requirement to take
responsibility for her political order, she wonders why her commitment
to respect her fellow citizens who have demonstrated poor and possi-
bly corrupt political judgment should trump justice. Why shouldn’t she
simply suspend democratic relations with her enemies, disregard their
perspective, and do whatever she can to secure a political outcome con-
sistent with justice?
That is the democrat’s dilemma. Before moving on, a few clarifica-
tory points are in order. First, the difficulty emerges within the office of
democratic citizenship. It is not the product of a democratic deficit on
the part of the citizen. Instead, it arises from striving to live up to what
democracy demands. Second, the dilemma concerns conflicting moral
requirements of citizenship. The citizens in the grip of the conflict do not
deny that they are subject to two ethical requirements; instead, they seek
274 Robert B. Talisse
a reason why civic respect ought to be upheld at the expense of pursuing
justice. Accordingly, the dilemma does not address cases where citizens
advocate for more radical departures from democratic norms. Our envi-
sioned citizen is not proposing that her political enemies ought to be dis-
enfranchised or prosecuted; instead, she is pointing to a moral reason
internal to the office of citizenship for breaking off civil relations with
them. Third, the dilemma does not assume that citizens must demon-
strate civic respect no matter what. The difficulty does not regard persons
who may hold the status of democratic citizenship but who nonetheless
espouse grossly anti-democratic doctrines. The question of what stance
an authentically democratic citizen should take toward democratically
divested citizens is essential, but it differs from the issue at hand. The
democrat’s dilemma rests on the observation that political disagreements
among democratic citizens are often disagreements about what justice
requires; it embeds the premise that political opinions are incompatible
with justice, which responsible democratic citizens may espouse.
One might seek to dispel the democrat’s dilemma by arguing that in
a democracy, the pursuit of justice requires one to uphold civic respect.
This maneuver invokes the thought that the justice of a political decision
is partly a function of the fairness of the process by which it was made.
The argument continues that upholding civic respect is required for pro-
cedurally just collective decisions. The democratic pursuit of justice is
thus constrained by the requirement to respect the equality of one’s fel-
low citizens. The dilemma dissolves.
Although I am sympathetic to this general line of argument, I see it as
insufficiently attentive to the perspective of the democratic citizen. The
democrat’s dilemma is not an abstract exercise in reconciling two conflict-
ing directives. It is a conflict from the standpoint of the engaged demo-
cratic citizen. It is worth trying to address the citizens who find themselves
in the grip of the dilemma rather than dismissing them out of hand.
Here things stand: the democrat’s dilemma shows that democratic cit-
izenship is morally conflicted. We are directed to acknowledge as our
equal democratic partners those we cannot help but see as agents of
injustice. Under political circumstances where the stakes are high and
urgent, there is a moral case for suspending democratic relations with our
foes. Under such conditions, why not abandon civic respect and pursue
justice? Why attempt to sustain democratic relations with political ene-
mies? The dynamics of political polarization supply a compelling moral
reason why we must uphold civic respect.

14.3 The Polarization Dynamic

Polarization looms large in prevalent diagnoses of political dysfunction.
Ezra Klein calls it the “master story” of what’s “awry” in American
democracy (2020, xix). However, those who lament polarization rarely
 What Political Enemies Are for 275
offer a precise account of what polarization is. If polarization is our
“master story,” we need details.
First, we must distinguish two phenomena: political polarization and
belief polarization.
When people lament polarization, they usually talk about political
polarization. Political polarization is a metric of the ideological distance
between opposed political groups. When it is pronounced, the common
ground dissolves. Stalemate, deadlock, and frustration result.
Although the idea of political polarization is familiar, “ideological dis-
tance” remains vague. It is helpful to distinguish three ways of construing
it. We can regard them as distinct sites where ideological fissures emerge.
One construal looks at the official doctrines of the opposing groups. In
the case of political parties, we look to platforms: Two parties are polit-
ically polarized to the degree that their political agendas are opposed
or, in some other sense, incompatible. Refer to this species of political
polarization as party polarization.
Party polarization is endemic in a democracy. Indeed, it can be polit-
ically healthy, as it makes citizens’ electoral options salient. However,
when it becomes excessive, party polarization can impede government
functions.
A second construal looks at party leaders and officials. It gauges
the extent of unanimity within the party. Opposed groups are highly
polarized when their respective constituents include few moderates
or bridge-builders. As it focuses on leaders and officials, call this elite
polarization.
Elite polarization involves the shunning of moderates. It typically is
accompanied by the attitude that cooperation with the other side consti-
tutes disloyalty. When elite polarization is pronounced, parties valorize
purity. A vernacular for ridiculing moderates develops.2 With moderates
sidelined, the hardliners take control. The result is a deadlock accompa-
nied by cross-partisan animosity among elites.
A third understanding of ideological distance examines the attitudes
prevalent among ordinary citizens who identify with a party.3 Widespread
polarization occurs when rank-and-file citizens embrace intensely nega-
tive attitudes and dispositions toward those perceived to be politically
dissimilar from themselves. As it centers on the attitudes citizens take
toward perceived opponents, widespread polarization does not need to
track actual policy disputes (Levendusky and Malhorta 2016). Instead,
citizens are polarized in this sense simply by virtue of the animosity they
harbor for perceived rivals.
The data are striking. Widespread polarization has escalated sig-
nificantly in the United States over the past four decades, even though
divides among citizens over policies have either remained stable or eased
(Iyengar and Krupenkin 2018; Mason 2018b). Importantly, citizens not
only report dislike for affiliates of the opposing party but also see them as
276 Robert B. Talisse
untrustworthy, unpatriotic, unintelligent, and dangerous. Furthermore,
this animosity is directed at fellow citizens, not only the opposing side’s
candidates, officials, and spokespersons (Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes 2012).
Moreover, animosity is generalized. Citizens do not only dislike per-
ceived rivals’ politics; they also find their nonpolitical behavior disagree-
able. The clothes they wear, the vehicles they drive, the food they eat,
their modes of entertainment, and more all become triggers of contempt
(McConnell et al. 2017; Hetherington and Weiler, 2018).4 Widespread
polarization expands partisanship into a “mega-identity” or lifestyle
(Mason 2018a, 14).
Even though widespread polarization has escalated in the absence of
commensurate policy divisions, citizens believe that their political dif-
ferences are significant and intensifying (Bougher 2017).5 They attribute
sharply opposing – and radical – views to rivals. These projections are
generally inaccurate (Ahler 2014; Ahler and Sood 2018).
Heightened levels of popular polarization help explain the pervasiveness
of elite and party polarization.6 Elite polarization is incentivized when
citizens intensely dislike those outside their political tribe. After all, poli-
ticians and party leaders seek to win elections, and they do this by extract-
ing political behavior from their base (Lee 2016). Animosity, distrust, and
contempt are motivationally potent (Iyengar and Krupenkin 2018, 215).
Accordingly, when party-affiliated citizens manifest intense animosity
toward the other side, candidates and party leaders do well to amplify
hostility toward their opposition. This, in turn, rewards parties that
adopt platforms that punctuate opposition to the rival party’s agenda.
Widespread polarization makes for easy campaigning: demonize the
opposition, valorize intransigence, and stoke animosity. This feeds back
to citizens, fueling adverse effects toward partisan rivals. The three sites
of political polarization thus reinforce each other.
These circumstances are familiar. Our next question is why widespread
polarization is so popular. To understand this, we need to look at belief
polarization.
Belief polarization is a doxastic shift that occurs within like-minded
groups.7 Iterated interactions among like-minded people result in each
person adopting a more extreme formulation of their shared view. When
we surround ourselves only with others who reinforce our ideas, we tend
not only to become more confident in their correctness; we also adopt
more exaggerated formulations of them. Interaction with like-minded
others transforms us into more extreme versions of ourselves.
This shift involves an alteration in our grasp of the basis of our beliefs.
We come to overestimate the weight of supporting evidence. We also
become more dogmatic, unreceptive to counterevidence, and resistant to
correction. We more readily dismiss detractors as benighted. We become
less inclined to listen to them and more prone to interrupt when speaking
(Sunstein 2009, 44; Westfall et al. 2015).
 What Political Enemies Are for 277
Typically, our like-minded associates are similarly situated. Group
members hence fuel one another’s escalation. As they adopt the shift
toward extremity, they become more disposed to act in concert.
Moreover, as the shift escalates confidence, they grow more inclined to
engage together in risky behavior (Stoner 1968). All the while, their views
of outsiders grow more intensely negative.
Extremification is only part of the phenomenon. As groups embrace
extremity, members begin to withhold information and hide preferences
that deviate from perceived group expectations (Sunstein 2019, 84).
Accordingly, groups also tend to become more alike in ways beyond their
initial like-mindedness (Hogg 2001). They also become more invested in
being alike. Our more extreme selves are also more conformist.
This homogenization is unsurprising. Belief polarization intensifies
adverse attitudes regarding outsiders, leading groups to fixate on the bor-
ders between insiders and outsiders. They adopt increasingly exacting
standards for authentic membership. As qualifications for good-standing
membership intensify, the group develops means for detecting poseurs.
Standards for authenticity thus come to encompass behaviors and atti-
tudes that extend beyond the group’s defining ideas. Compliance with
these broader expectations becomes a way of expressing one’s member-
ship in the group. Accordingly, belief polarized groups tend to be highly
susceptible to the Black Sheep Effect – their negative attitudes toward
perceived apostates are more intense than those they take toward out-
right foes (Marques et al. 1988).
Further, as groups become more conformist, they also become more
reliant on centralized standard-setters to establish the markers of authen-
tic membership. Belief polarization hence renders groups more hier-
archical and less internally democratic. Thus, as conformity pressures
intensify, even slight deviations from the group’s expectations amplify
into serious infractions. Belief polarized groups are prone to factional-
ize; they, therefore, tend to shrink into smaller cohorts of hardliners.
Thus far, we have seen that belief polarization involves two shifts: dox-
astic extremification and group homogenization. That is the core of the
phenomenon. Nevertheless, our picture remains incomplete. We need to
look at how belief polarization works.
Belief polarization is pervasive.8 It has been studied for more than six
decades and found within groups of all kinds. It is robust across differ-
ences of nationality, race, gender, religion, economic status, and level of
education.9 This prompts the question of how belief polarization works.
Two intuitive views suggest themselves, an informational and a com-
parison account. The former holds that belief polarization results from
the informational filters in like-minded groups. The latter contends that
it occurs because group members strive to be seen by peers as authen-
tic; they amplify their commitment to being slightly above the perceived
mean. As the members are recalibrating simultaneously, the group itself
278 Robert B. Talisse
shifts toward extremity. We cannot examine these accounts here.10 Suffice
it to say that neither can be the whole story. Neither information exchange
(Myers et al. 1980) nor ingroup comparison (Baron et al. 1996) is neces-
sary to initiate belief polarization.
A better account holds that belief polarization is driven by group-­
affiliated corroboration of one’s views. We shift toward extremity when
we feel that a group we identify with embraces a belief or attitude that we
espouse. We need not hear new evidence, nor need we compare ourselves
to other group members. Instead, realizing that one’s view is popular
among one’s identity group is sufficient.
The corroboration view treats belief polarization as centrally a mat-
ter of group affinity. However, it recognizes that exchanging information
and performing social comparisons are often ways of situating oneself
within a group; hence, the corroboration view need not deny that the
other accounts capture ways of initiating belief polarization. The cor-
roborationist holds that the mechanism driving the phenomenon has to
do with the positive effect that results from affirmation from one’s self-­
ascribed identity group.
This explains why extremity shifts are more severe when group mem-
bership is primed (Abrams et al. 1990) and less pronounced among
like-minded subjects who do not regard themselves as sharing a group
identity (Le 2007). The view holds that corroboration from our peers
makes us feel good about our beliefs, and this feeling of affirmation in
our self-ascribed identity leads us to shift toward extremity (Hogg 2001).
Thus, belief polarization is not only a phenomenon of extremification
and homogenization but also a process by which group identity is made
salient and centered.
Notably, the relevant corroboration can come by way of highly indirect
channels. For example, presenting a liberal subject with a chart showing
that liberals widely oppose genetically modified food can prompt belief
polarization; similarly, exposure to a poll showing that conservatives
strongly favor a particular military action can produce an extremity shift
in a conservative already favorably disposed to that action (Baron et al.
1996, 558). Moreover, the environmental prompts need not be verbal,
overt, or literal; they can be merely implicit signals to group members
that some belief is prevalent among them. Hats, pins, campaign signs,
logos, gestures, songs, and the like are potential initiators of belief polar-
ization for those who share that identity (Baron et al. 1996, 559).
Note a connection between belief polarization and partisan sorting
(Bishop 2009). As the United States has grown more diverse in various
respects, citizens’ local spaces have become more politically homogene-
ous (Chen and Rodden 2013; Tam Cho et al. 2013). Schools, workplaces,
occupations, congregations, and neighborhoods are sorted accord-
ing to partisan allegiance (Iyengar and Westwood 2015; Mason 2015).
Consequently, our daily routines tend to place us in social interaction
 What Political Enemies Are for 279
only with those who share our political identity. Even when these interac-
tions are not about politics, our partisan identities have grown so central
to our overall sense of ourselves that our political commitments are cor-
roborated. Sorted social spaces expose us to belief polarization, which
encourages further sorting.
With these details in place, we can see that the problem of polarization
lies in the interaction of belief and political polarization. These two phe-
nomena work together to exacerbate divisions, reward divisiveness, and
erode our capacity for responsible democratic citizenship.
To see how this works, recall that as we extremify, we also come to
adopt increasingly hostile stances toward those perceived to be different.
As we shift, their views look disfigured and irrational. Those who hold
such views strike us as ignorant, naïve, and malign. We see them as a
radicalized monolith, unified around the most extreme versions of the
views that oppose our own and unworthy of civic respect. As a result, we
are more thoroughly embedded within our camp, reinforcing tendencies
to regard outsiders as untrustworthy, unpatriotic, unintelligent, threat-
ening, and treacherous (Pew Research Center 2019).
Ironically, as we regard our opponents in these ways, we come to fit the
description we ascribe to them: we grow more intensely insular, distrust-
ful, close-minded, and tribal. Once belief polarization has escalated,
even amicable interactions with our political opponents tend to further
our extremity (Bougher 2017; Bail et al. 2018); attempts to “reach across
the aisle” backfire (Nyhan and Reifler 2010). Often, they are subject to
the same forces. A tragically self-fulfilling projection results: each side
shifts toward their opposition’s most unflattering caricature.
Thus, the polarization dynamic. Belief polarization escalates wide-
spread polarization, leading us to regard our political rivals as threats
to neutralize. Civic respect begins to look Pollyannaish, if not positively
complicit. Allies hive together. This tendency initiates further belief
polarization, which produces more popular polarization. As was noted
earlier, the deepening of widespread polarization activates party and
elite polarization. Officeholders are released from electoral pressures to
deliver tangible results – they can win reelection simply by stoking their
base’s contempt for the opposing side (Puglisi and Snyder 2011; Sood and
Iyengar 2016). This fuels further popular and belief polarization.
And on it goes: we embrace exaggerated conceptions of our differences;
we over-ascribe extreme ideas and vices to opponents; we attribute to
them an implausible degree of internal unanimity; and we lose the ability
to track the reasons they offer for their ideas. Eventually, we see them
as divested from democratic citizenship and unworthy of civic respect.
Politicians strategize accordingly, which fuels further belief polarization.
However, that is not all. Ultimately the polarization dynamic con-
stricts our sense of the range of permissible political disagreement among
democratic citizens. It leads us to see political opponents as irredeemably
280 Robert B. Talisse
beyond the pale. It fosters the profoundly anti-democratic stance that
democracy is possible only among those who agree about politics.
Now for the crucial upshot. The idea that democracy is possible only
among those who agree about politics is not only anti-democratic; it is also
unsustainable. To see why, recall that belief polarization involves both
extremification and homogenization. As coalitions grow more uniform,
they become increasingly resolute in enforcing conformity. Thus, belief
polarization causes groups to become less tolerant of dissension within
their ranks and more prone to expel deviating members. Consequently,
belief polarization also erodes our ability to navigate disputes among
our allies. The endeavor to sustain democratic relations only among our
political allies is doomed: belief polarized coalitions splinter and shrink.
When we think of toxic political divides, we fix on disputes among
liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. We thereby
overlook that there are significant political disputes within partisan
coalitions. Consider the nascent rifts between religious and libertari-
an-leaning Republicans over abortion or between liberal and progressive
Democrats over criminal justice. These, too, are disputes over justice;
there is no reason to think that, once engaged, they would not be volatile.
A progressive prison abolitionist may vote for the same candidates as a
liberal criminal justice reformer, but each must see the other as advocat-
ing for injustice.
Return to the democrat’s dilemma. We were envisioning citizens who
take their democratic responsibilities seriously. They want to use their
share of political power to advance justice, and they recognize the gen-
eral duty to show their fellow citizens civic respect. However, there are
political circumstances where expressing civic respect for their oppo-
nents counteracts their advocacy for justice. They wonder why they
should bother engaging with their foes at all. Why not simply disregard
them and work with allies to secure justice?
The polarization dynamic supplies a compelling reply. When we dis-
miss our enemies and break off civic interactions with them, the phe-
nomenon of belief polarization does not simply dissolve. Instead, it turns
inward, toxifying our relations with our political allies by escalating
conformity pressures and dismantling our capacity to navigate disagree-
ments with them. This shift, in turn, causes our coalitions to splinter and
shrink, rendering them less politically efficacious. Hence, the response
to the citizen caught in the democrat’s dilemma is that when we break
off democratic relations with our enemies, we endanger our capacity to
sustain democratic ties with our allies. Yet we must cultivate and main-
tain solid political coalitions to pursue justice effectively. Thus, we need
to support democratic relations with our political enemies if we are to
seek justice.
The argument may seem objectionably instrumental. It claims that
unless we uphold civic respect for our enemies, we will lose the capacity
 What Political Enemies Are for 281
to maintain the kinds of political relationships necessary for pursuing
justice. This suggests that expressing civic respect for our enemies is
crudely strategic. That is hardly respect at all.
Although I concede that the argument is instrumental, I deny it is objec-
tionably so. First, upholding democratic relations with political enemies
is itself moral: we have a moral reason to maintain the social conditions
under which our efforts to secure justice could succeed. Second, recall
that the argument is addressed to citizens who already are disposed to
regard their political opponents as democratically divested or otherwise
undeserving of civic respect. I endorse a relatively straightforward moral
view according to which citizens as such are owed civic respect simply
by virtue of the fact that political decisions almost always involve the
exercise of coercive power among equals. The audience I aim to address
at present is likely to find that kind of argument unmoving. Accordingly,
the argument I have proposed casts engagements with political enemies
as occasions for building and maintaining stronger alliances. Note also
that the argument calls for expressing civic respect for one’s foes; it does
not say that one must simply proceed as if one respected them. Given the
damage to democracy that the polarization dynamic has already caused,
the crudely strategic reason for upholding civic respect might be the best
we could do. I would say, then, that the argument has a proleptic flavor: it
gives citizens a moral reason to proceed as if their political enemies were
deserving of respect; the hope is that by proceeding that way, citizens will
eventually develop authentic civic respect for their enemies.

14.4 Managing Belief Polarization

Thus far, I have argued that the polarization dynamic provides a com-
pelling moral case for upholding democratic relations with political ene-
mies, even when we regard them as on the side of injustice. In calling the
argument “compelling,” I am assessing its philosophical quality, not its
practical force. Upholding democratic relations with our political ene-
mies is difficult, even under the best political circumstances. Moreover,
present political circumstances are far from ideal.
Specifically, the argument above may be compelling for citizens con-
fronting the democrat’s dilemma, wondering why they should not sus-
pend democratic relations with their enemies. However, many citizens
in contemporary democracies are well past this point. They are already
in the grip of the polarization dynamic; they have already written off
their enemies as undeserving of civic respect. It will not do, then, simply
to recommend that citizens attempt to engage with foes as if the polar-
ization dynamic were not already in effect. As noted above, some data
show that this strategy backfires (Bail et al. 2018). After all, there is a
difference between what one must do to prevent an outcome and what one
must do to reverse it. What can be done if the way forward does not lie in
282 Robert B. Talisse
introducing more peace, love, and understanding into political interac-
tions with our foes?
The first thing to observe is that belief polarization is a byproduct of
active democratic citizenship; the polarization dynamic emerges from
the normal functioning of democracy. It thus cannot be fixed or elimi-
nated but only managed. Secondly, we must acknowledge our vulnera-
bility to belief polarization. We need to recognize that, to some degree,
our political thinking and relations with our fellow citizens are shaped by
those dynamics. This method is not a “both sides” maneuver but rather
a reasonable inference from well-established results. When we think of
polarization and extremity, we quickly see it in our opponents. However,
the idea that we are not vulnerable to the same forces is naïve.
So, recognizing that the problem lies within us is the first step.
Nevertheless, what must we do? Recall that as we shift toward extremity,
our views look more obviously correct; thus, our conception of the scope
of reasonable disagreement shrinks. Accordingly, one way we operation-
alize the realization that our political thinking is very likely impacted
by polarization is to create occasions for reminding ourselves that our
political thinking is not beyond reasonable criticism.
To be clear, this does not require us to adopt the stance of the Millian
fallibilist, who holds that beliefs are never quite the entire truth and
are perpetually in danger of becoming dead dogma. Instead, it calls
for the more modest stance that we are epistemically improvable. This
is consistent with the thinking that our political beliefs are correct as
they are. It involves only the recognition that our articulation, appre-
ciation, and grasp of them could be deepened, sharpened, and refined.
Acknowledging the possibility of reasonable criticism does not require
divestment from our commitments but only recognizing that we could
do better by them by exposing ourselves to occasions where we could
improve our command of them.
Managing belief polarization starts with self-criticism among allies.
Under more modest belief polarization conditions, we could intro-
duce robust “Devil’s Advocate” norms into our alliances. These norms
encourage allies to subject our shared commitments to reasonable crit-
icism. However, we cannot again attempt to manage belief polarization
by proceeding as we would if it had not already heavily taken effect. The
worry is that in especially active political coalitions, conformity pressures
have escalated to such a degree that Devil’s Advocacy leads only to the
ostracism of the internal critic. The task is to introduce mechanisms of
self-criticism without escalating conformity pressures among our allies.
Given existing levels of belief polarization, the prospects seem bleak.
The task of managing belief polarization thus begins neither with our
cross-partisan relations nor our alliances. What then? My suggestion is
counterintuitive: We need solitude if we seek to manage belief polarization.
Recall earlier points about partisan sorting and the corroboration view of
 What Political Enemies Are for 283
belief polarization. We are surrounded by partisan prompts and overt and
implicit calls to our allegiance. Partisan rifts are omnipresent, as are sites
for signaling allyship. In addition, you may be familiar with arguments
claiming that social media echo chambers distort our politics. On the cor-
roboration view of belief polarization, partisan sorting turns our physical
environments into echo chambers; they encourage the same distortions.
The idea, then, is that we must occasionally withdraw if neither our
allies nor our opponents can function as reasonable critics of our politi-
cal ideas. In another work, I argued that citizens must engage in coopera-
tive activities where political affiliation is simply beside the point (Talisse
2019). The idea here is different. Managing belief polarization calls for
us to occasionally engage in politics alone, away from the pressures of
allies and foes. It is not that we must withdraw from politics; instead,
we need to engage in a kind of solitary political reflection. Typically, we
figure out where we stand politically by looking to our allies. Polarization
management requires that we sometimes engage in political reflection in
a detached context from the polarization dynamic. I am calling not to
withdraw from politics but for occasional civic solitude.
The problem is that our social worlds are already colonized by partisan-
ship. Consequently, civic solitude calls for distance. Citizens need space
to grapple with political ideas that are not prepackaged in the political
fissures of the moment. Accordingly, managing belief polarization involves
expanding our political imagination by reflecting in ways that remind us
that the spectrum of opinion available to democratic citizens is broader
and more profound than what figures into the day’s politics. By encoun-
tering a more expansive palate of political ideas, democratic citizens can
more accurately position their commitments and rivalries; they more reli-
ably distinguish between the unavoidable disputes among citizens and
unbridgeable gaps between democratic ideals and those of anti-democracy.
The details of civic solitude cannot be spelled out here. If we are sub-
merged in the polarization dynamic, we must extricate ourselves from the
morass. This will involve exposing oneself to political ideas alien to the
prevailing categories and debates, ideas that are not immediately trans-
latable into the idiom of the moment’s politics. Perhaps this is achieved
by reading ancient political theory, immersing oneself in the politics of a
foreign democracy, or studying the political art of 19th century America.
It does not matter much, so long as the process is undertaken in a way
that permits the material to remain detached from the day’s politics.
We are accustomed to thinking that democracy is about action. A
Google search of the phrase “this is what democracy looks like” instantly
returns thousands of images of masses gathered in public space to express
a shared political message. To be clear, this is what democracy looks
like. Citizens must be active participants in self-government. However,
citizens must also be reflective. We have seen that prominent modes of
democratic action activate forces that unravel our capacities for political
284 Robert B. Talisse
reflection. Without those capacities, our political action might feel even
more urgent and necessary, but it is also more likely to be directed by
distortions that ultimately contribute to democratic dysfunctions.

Notes
1. For further details, see Talisse (2021, Ch 1).
2. In the United States, the terms “RINO” (“Republican in name only”) and
“neoliberal” (a professed liberal who nonetheless serves corporate inter-
ests) serve this purpose.
3. This phenomenon is frequently called affective polarization, but this term
is not ideal in the present context for reasons that will become clear below.
See Iyengar et al. (2019) for a review.
4. It may come as no surprise, then, that in the United States, widespread dis-
approval of inter-partisan marriage is now more pronounced than disap-
proval of inter-faith and inter-racial marriage (Iyengar and Westwood 2015,
691). This animosity is good because co-partisanship is the most reliable
predictor of long-term relationship success among those paired on online
dating platforms (Huber and Malhotra 2017; Iyengar and Konitzer 2017).
5. See the “perception gap” data presented in Beyond Conflict (2020) and
More in Common: https://perceptiongap.us/.
6. Alternatively, at least the public expressions associated with these forms of
polarization perform that function. The parties and party members in the
United States are not as divided over political policies.
7. The phenomenon is generally called “group polarization.” In the present
context, this more common name is misleading. I am distinguishing polit-
ical and belief polarization, both of which have to do with groups. Also, I
should note that I am using the word “doxastic” broadly.
8. Hence, Lamm and Myers (1978, 146), “Seldom in the history of social psy-
chology has a nonobvious phenomenon been so firmly grounded in data
from various cultures and dependent measures.”
9. The appendix in Sunstein (2009) summarizes the most important findings.
10. For more detail, see Talisse (2021, Ch 3).

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Affect.” Advances in Political Psychology 39: 201–218.
Iyengar, Shanto, Yphtach Lelkes, Matthew Levendusky, Neil Malhotra, and Sean
J. Westwood. 2019. “The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization
in the United States.” Annual Review of Political Science 22: 129–146.
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A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization.” Public Opinion Quarterly 76:
405–431.
Iyengar, Shanto, and Sean J. Westwood. 2015. “Fear and Loathing across Party
Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization.” American Journal of Political
Science 59: 690–707.
Klein, Ezra. 2020. Why We Are Polarized. New York: Avid Reader Press.
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286 Robert B. Talisse
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Perspectives on Psychological Science 10: 145–58.
15 Top-Down and Bottom-Up
Solutions to the Problem
of Political Ignorance
Ilya Somin

15.1 Introduction
There is broad, though not universal, agreement that widespread voter
ignorance and irrational evaluations of evidence are significant threats to
democracy. The rise of authoritarian-leaning right-wing populist move-
ments in the United States and many European countries has accentu-
ated the significance of this menace, as has the role of public ignorance
during the Covid-19 pandemic and in fostering the common yet incorrect
belief that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Donald Trump.
The problem is not a new one, however. Nor is it confined to one coun-
try, the supporters of one or a few specific politicians, or one side of the
political spectrum. While there is increasing awareness of the danger,
there is deep disagreement over strategies for mitigating it. “Top-down”
approaches, such as epistocracy and lodging more authority in the hands
of experts, seek to alleviate ignorance by consolidating more political
power in the hands of the more knowledgeable segments of the popula-
tion. Another version of this approach would give expert officials more
power to control the flow of information to the public, thereby limiting
the influence of “misinformation,” particularly that spread on the inter-
net and social media.
By contrast, “bottom-up” approaches seek to either raise the politi-
cal competence of the public or empower ordinary people in ways that
give them better incentives to make reasonable decisions than ballot-box
voting does. Examples of bottom-up strategies include increasing voter
knowledge through education, various sortition proposals, paying voters
to increase their understanding of politics, and shifting decisions to insti-
tutional frameworks where citizens can “vote with their feet.”
This chapter surveys and critiques a range of both top-down and
bottom-up approaches. In the process, I build on my previous work
assessing feasible strategies for addressing the problem of political igno-
rance. I tentatively conclude that top-down strategies have severe flaws
and are likely to make things worse rather than better. While we should
not categorically reject them, there is a solid basis for skepticism about

DOI: 10.4324/9781003311003-19
288 Ilya Somin
their desirability. Bottom-up strategies have significant limitations of
their own. But they have greater upside potential. Expanding foot vot-
ing opportunities is more promising than any other currently available
option. Paying voters to increase their knowledge also deserves more sig-
nificant consideration than it has received.
Section 15.2 briefly surveys the problem of political ignorance, which
includes low political knowledge levels and highly biased assessments of
the information voters do learn. Both issues primarily stem from ulti-
mately rational individual voter behavior that can result in detrimental
collective outcomes. Section 15.3 outlines and critiques several top-down
approaches to addressing political ignorance, including epistocracy, the
delegation of power to experts insulated from political pressure, and gov-
ernment control of information flows.
These strategies each have unique defects. But they also have sys-
tematic ones that are likely inherent in any top-down approach. Those
include flawed incentives of decision-makers, limitations on their knowl-
edge, and how public ignorance inhibits effective monitoring of the very
officials empowered to make up for it. We should not altogether reject
top-down strategies. But their severe limitations are cause for wariness.
Section 15.4 considers bottom-up strategies, including using education
to increase political knowledge, sortition mechanisms, paying voters to
increase their knowledge, and shifting decisions to frameworks where
people can “vote with their feet” and thereby have more substantial
incentives to seek relevant information than ballot-box voters do. None
of these strategies are perfect, and some have flaws similar to those that
bedevil top-down strategies. But, overall, they are more promising, espe-
cially in the case of expanding opportunities for foot voting. Paying vot-
ers to increase their knowledge is also a potentially promising approach
that deserves more significant consideration.

15.2 The Problem of Political Ignorance

Political ignorance is a two-level problem.1 Most of the voting public is
rationally ignorant – knowing little or nothing about the issues, parties,
and candidates at stake in elections. In addition, most voters have little
incentive to evaluate the information they learn objectively. They instead
assess those facts in a highly biased way, overvaluing those that reinforce
their preexisting views and undervaluing or even ignoring the rest.
Voters have strong incentives to be “rationally ignorant” because there
is so little chance that their votes will make a difference to the outcome.
In an American presidential election, the odds that a given vote will
make a decisive difference to the result is approximately 1 in 60 million,
or even less.2 In a situation where there is little or no benefit to acquir-
ing additional knowledge, it is often perfectly rational for individuals to
remain largely ignorant about the issues at hand.3 Survey data show that
 Top-Down and Bottom-Up Solutions to Political Ignorance 289
voters often lack even rudimentary knowledge about the candidates and
policies at issue in any given election.4
They also have little incentive to analyze whatever information they
learn logically and unbiasedly. On the contrary, voters have incentives to
fall prey to what economist Bryan Caplan calls “rational irrationality”:
when there are few or no negative consequences to error, it is rational to
make little or no effort to control one’s biases.5 Thus, citizens routinely
overvalue evidence supporting their preexisting views while downplaying
or ignoring anything that cuts the other way.6 These tendencies toward
biased evaluations of information are significant and widespread among
voters on both sides of the political spectrum.7
Many of the most attentive citizens tend to be highly biased “political
fans.”8 They follow politics closely for much the same reasons as sports
fans follow their favorite teams: not to get at the truth, but to enjoy the
camaraderie of their fellow fans, the process of cheering on their pre-
ferred political “team,” and – in many cases – detesting opposing “teams”
(opposing parties and their supporters). There is nothing necessarily
wrong with being a political or sports fan. But fan behavior is often at
odds with truth-seeking. People who follow politics primarily to enhance
their fan experience cannot objectively evaluate political information.
Rational ignorance and rational irrationality affect the decisions of
altruistic voters and those who are narrowly self-interested. Even a citizen
strongly motivated to help others has little incentive to devote more than a
small amount of effort to acquiring political knowledge and reining their
biases. Whether voters’ purposes are self-interested or not, the odds that
seeking out new knowledge and curbing biases will pay off are extremely
low. This low likelihood makes it rational for both egoists and altruists
to severely limit the time and effort devoted to acquiring and analyzing
political information and to make little effort to curb their biases.9
Rational ignorance does not necessarily require careful, calculated
decision-making. In many cases, it involves merely the application
of crude rules of thumb or an intuitive sense that there is little bene-
fit to seeking out additional knowledge. Thus, the prediction of rational
behavior in this sphere is not dependent on the assumption that voters
are hyper-logical or capable of making complex calculations about odds.
Indeed, such a detailed calculation may often actually be irrational,
requiring more time and effort than can be justified, given the likely
benefit.10
Decades of survey data indicate that voter knowledge levels are low
and have undergone little or no increase, despite rising educational
attainment and the development of the internet and other modern
technology that makes information easier to access.11 The majority of
the public often does not know basic information, such as which party
controls Congress, what significant policies have been enacted in recent
years, or which elected officials are responsible for which issues.12
290 Ilya Somin
Just before the 2014 US federal election, in which the primary stake
was control of Congress, only 38% of voters knew which party controlled
the House of Representatives, and a similar percentage knew which
controlled the Senate.13 Another 2014 survey found that only 36% of
Americans can even name the three branches of the federal government:
the executive, the legislative, and the judicial.14 Despite growing fiscal
problems, most of the public also has little understanding of how the
federal government spends its money – vastly underestimating the per-
centage of the budget that goes to major entitlement programs (among
the largest categories of federal spending) while massively overestimating
that allocated to foreign aid (which is only about 1% of the budget).15
Survey data indicate that there is similar ignorance in other democ-
racies. It is not a problem unique to the United States. On the contrary,
it exists in a wide range of democratic political systems in Europe and
elsewhere.16
Some scholars have argued that voter ignorance is not as profound a
problem as it seems because voters can use “information shortcuts” to
make up for their knowledge deficits.17 Others contend that, even if indi-
vidual voters make poor decisions, the effects of their errors cancel each
other out through a “miracle of aggregation,” resulting in the electorate
making well-informed decisions.18
I have criticized shortcut theories and “miracle of aggregation” argu-
ments in some detail in previous work.19 Here, I assume, for present
purposes, that these mechanisms do not come close to fully solving the
problems of rational ignorance and irrationality. Thus, we must try other
methods.
It is, however, vital to emphasize that the enormous size, scope, and
complexity of modern government both exacerbate the initial problem of
political ignorance and weakens the effectiveness of any efforts to “solve”
it.20 In most modern democracies, government spending accounts for
one-third or more of GDP, and the state regulates almost every signif-
icant human activity, at least to some substantial degree.21 This reality
ensures that even a substantial increase in voter knowledge might not be
enough to enable the electorate to monitor more than a small fraction
of government activity effectively. It also creates many opportunities for
elites and interest groups to exploit the system.

15.3 Top-Down Approaches

The most obvious potential solution to the problem of political igno-
rance is to find some way to concentrate power in the hands of the (at
least relatively) more knowledgeable. I call such strategies “top-down”
approaches to the problem.
The most straightforward top-down approach is limiting the fran-
chise to a more knowledgeable population segment or giving the latter
 Top-Down and Bottom-Up Solutions to Political Ignorance 291
extra votes. Instead of democracy, we could have “epistocracy” – the
“rule of the knowers” or at least move in an epistocratic direction.22 A
more far-reaching extension of that approach would be to concentrate
more authority in the hands of experts, at least relatively insulated from
the democratic political process. Such officials could be technocrats,
­scientists, or others with (supposedly) superior insight into public policy
issues.
Finally, it may also be possible to give experts greater control over
information flow – especially misinformation – to the general public.
Under this approach, the voters would still have ultimate control over
the selection of public officials and thereby still wield decisive influence
over policy. Nevertheless, that influence would be guided and improved
by curbing misinformation.
I consider each of these three ideas, in turn. Despite their differences,
they have some common limitations. The most significant is that all three
create dangerous opportunities for the government to exploit the mech-
anism in question to promote its own partisan and ideological interests
while suppressing opposition. Second, all three are likely to be less effec-
tive at coping with rational irrationality and bias in evaluating informa-
tion than with simple ignorance.

15.3.1 Epistocracy23
The basic idea of epistocracy is far from new. As far back as the origins
of democracy in ancient Greece, the franchise was limited to adult male
citizens of the “hoplite” (military) class because it was thought they had
superior knowledge and insight.24 In the nineteenth century, John Stuart
Mill advocated giving more educated citizens extra votes for the same
reasons.25
Modern democracies already pursue epistocratic strategies for limit-
ing the franchise in some respects. In the United States, we exclude over
20% of our population from the franchise because we think they are igno-
rant and have poor judgment: children.26 Strikingly, very few of us feel
much guilt for this massive exclusion of a large part of our population
from political power. Even the idea of letting some children vote if they
can prove they are more knowledgeable than the average adult is consid-
ered radical and dangerous.27
Similarly, the United States does not allow legal immigrants to become
citizens and obtain the right to vote unless they can pass a civics test
that most native-born Americans would likely fail if they had to take
without studying.28 Many US states also exclude convicted felons and the
mentally ill from the franchise out of concern over their competence and
judgment (or lack thereof).
More recently, political philosopher Jason Brennan has revised and
extended the case for epistocracy in his influential 2016 book, Against
292 Ilya Somin
Democracy.29 He proposes various strategies for limiting the franchise to
more knowledgeable segments of the public while still ensuring that the
electorate is large and representative.30 For example, we could limit vot-
ing rights to those who pass a political knowledge test, similar to that
already imposed on immigrants who want to become naturalized citizens.
While Brennan’s ideas may seem radical and off-putting, they can also
be described as just modest extensions of the status quo. The exclusion
of children, immigrants who cannot pass a citizenship test, felons, and
the mentally ill already covers 25% or more of the population. If that is
acceptable, why not eliminate the least knowledgeable 10% of the cur-
rent electorate or the least knowledgeable 20%? Many of them might be
no more competent voters than the groups we already exclude because
of their supposed ignorance and poor judgment. If an adult native-born
American is as bad a voter as the average child – or the average immigrant
who cannot pass the citizenship test – it is hard to argue that they deserve
to have the vote any more than members of these other groups do.
Nonetheless, it is unlikely that epistocracy can overcome the problem
of political ignorance or even be a significant tool in mitigating it. The
idea has three serious shortcomings. First, it is difficult to believe that
real-world governments can be trusted to objectively identify the more
knowledgeable segments of the electorate and exclude the rest. For obvi-
ous reasons, they will be tempted to bias the system in favor of the sup-
porters of their party or ideology.31 On top of that, there is a long history
of using exclusions from the franchise to bar voters based on race, ethnic-
ity, gender, and other similar invidious bases.
Even if the government can purge itself of such long-standing preju-
dices or prevent them from influencing the rules for determining who
qualifies as a sufficiently knowledgeable voter, the incentive for partisan
and ideological bias will remain. That problem is a structural constraint
inherent to government, not merely a consequence of biases specific to a
particular time and place.
We could perhaps overcome the issue by delegating the task of
­developing voter qualification criteria to a committee of non-partisan
experts on political knowledge. But that merely kicks the process back to
the problem of figuring out how to select those experts. A group with the
power to determine qualifications for the electorate – and therefore the
indirect ability to control the composition of future governments – is an
obvious target for “capture” by parties, interest groups, and others.
This latter problem also weakens the case for “enlightened preference”
voting, a form of epistocracy under which everyone still gets to participate
equally. The government then weights their votes based on calculations
about what their preferences would have been if they had higher levels of
political knowledge.32 As with more conventional approaches to epistoc-
racy, the government would still have to have a test for determining what
qualifies as political knowledge. In addition, it would also have to select
 Top-Down and Bottom-Up Solutions to Political Ignorance 293
a formula for converting the “raw” preferences of low-­information voters
to their “enlightened” version. Both steps in this process are rife with
opportunities for capture and bias.
Brennan is aware of these difficulties and has proposed ways of miti-
gating them, such as leaving the selection of qualifications to the public
rather than a government agency.33 But I am skeptical that the public
can carry out this function effectively or that any other currently known
institutional arrangement can do it.34
A second limitation of epistocracy is that it would, at best, solve only
one part of the political ignorance problem: low voter knowledge levels.
If it works as intended, the system will ensure that the electorate is vastly
more knowledgeable than what we presently have. That would be a genu-
ine improvement over the status quo. Nevertheless, it would not address
the problem of biased evaluation of information. An electorate that is
well-informed but still in the throes of “rational irrationality” might
make terrible decisions. Depending on how the epistocratic electorate
is chosen, the problem of bias might even be worse than before because
people who follow politics closely – and thereby have higher levels of
factual political knowledge – are disproportionately likely to be biased
“political fans.”35
Perhaps epistocratic selection can choose voters based not only on
their superior knowledge but also on their relative lack of bias in evalu-
ating what they know. But that would make epistocracy even more chal-
lenging to implement and create even more opportunities for partisan
and other manipulation of the selection process.
Finally, it is not clear that even the best possible epistocratic selec-
tion process will lead to an electorate capable of effectively monitoring
modern government’s full range of functions. The knowledge burden
required to do so is significant enough that even an electorate far more
knowledgeable and far less biased than what we currently have would
still not be sufficient.
It is not my view that epistocracy should be wholly rejected. There are
epistocratic elements in the status quo, and there is a plausible case for
extending those elements at the margin. Regional or local governments
should perhaps undertake experiments in more thoroughgoing epistoc-
racy, especially in areas where partisan, racial, and ethnic conflicts are
not too great, thereby reducing possible sources of bias. Nevertheless,
barring some breakthrough in institutional design, it is unlikely that
epistocracy can do more than marginally mitigate the problem of politi-
cal ignorance.

15.3.2 The Rule of Experts

If epistocracy is impractical or insufficient, why not go further in the same
direction and transfer control over more policy areas to small groups
294 Ilya Somin
of experts insulated from political pressure? Unlike epistocratic voters,
there are well-established criteria for identifying experts in specific fields.
For example, there are established and more or less widely recognized
credentials for doctors, scientists, economists, defense policy specialists,
and the like.
As with epistocracy, status quo policy already incorporates the rule
of experts in some respects. For example, most democracies delegate
monetary policy to an independent central bank, such as the US Federal
Reserve Board.36 During the coronavirus pandemic, many policy deci-
sions were at least in part delegated to specialized public health agencies,
such as the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in hopes that these
experts could curb the spread of the virus by “following the science.”
Experts, of course, also often wield discretionary authority in other areas
of public policy, ranging from food and drug regulation to environmen-
tal protection.
Some scholars and public policy analysts argue for greatly expand-
ing the delegation of power to experts. Notable examples include Cass
Sunstein and former US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.37 Why
not expand the Federal Reserve model to other areas of policy?
Despite its potential appeal, the rule of experts is a seriously flawed
antidote to political ignorance. The most obvious danger is that experts
will serve their interests or those of well-organized interest groups rather
than the general public. Once insulated from the democratic process,
experts will have little incentive to help the people from whose control
they have been deliberately protected. There is, of course, a long history
of small elite groups ruling in their interests.
On the other hand, if expert bodies remain subject to external pressure,
they can readily become politicized. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the
CDC adopted measures such as a nationwide eviction moratorium and
Title 42 “public health” expulsions of migrants that had little scientific
basis but were advocated by powerful constituencies within the Trump
and later the Biden administration.38 As a result, immense harm was
inflicted on innocent people – most notably some 1.7 million vulnerable
migrants cruelly denied opportunities to seek asylum – with little or no
public health gain.39
Experts also suffer from knowledge and bias problems reminiscent of
ordinary voters. As economist F. A. Hayek famously argued, it might
be impossible for them to determine the actual preferences of the people
they wish to serve because they cannot know how much any given indi-
vidual values a particular activity.40 A health expert probably knows
more than I do about the risks of drinking or smoking. Nevertheless,
only I know how much enjoyment I derive from having a beer or smok-
ing a cigarette. For that reason, the expert cannot readily tell whether
trying to limit a given person’s alcohol intake will improve their welfare
or not.41
 Top-Down and Bottom-Up Solutions to Political Ignorance 295
This was a ubiquitous problem during the Covid-19 pandemic, when
public health experts ordered sweeping “lockdowns” to contain the virus
while trying to exempt “essential” activities, without considering that
many people assigned widely divergent values to the activities in ques-
tion. For much of the population, the lost opportunities might well have
outweighed the marginal benefit of reducing potential exposure to the
virus.42 The experts especially failed to consider the enormous costs of
pandemic migration restrictions, including the stifling of future innova-
tion that could improve health outcomes in the long run.43
In addition to limitations on their knowledge, experts also suffer from
ideological and partisan bias in evaluating the information they know.
Like ordinary voters, political elites are highly biased in evaluating polit-
ical information; even in Denmark, a nation noted for having a relatively
responsible and non-polarized elite, political leaders show severe moti-
vated reasoning similar to that of ordinary “political fans.”44 Experts
tasked with designing paternalistic policies also demonstrate a variety of
biases similar to those of ordinary citizens.45 While they have a greater
incentive to learn relevant information than ordinary voters do – because
of the greater likelihood of decisiveness – they still have little incentive
to carefully and objectively weigh costs and benefits instead of validating
their preexisting biases and views. After all, most of the costs of their
decisions are borne by the general public rather than by the experts
themselves.
These considerations do not prove that delegation of power to politi-
cally insulated experts is never justified. In some situations, the available
alternatives may be even worse. For example, letting an insulated cen-
tral bank set monetary policy may be a lesser evil than giving incumbent
politicians control over the money supply, enabling them to debase the
currency when doing so might help their reelection prospects.
Delegation to experts may be helpful in cases where a clearly defined
task requires specialized expertise and there is broad consensus about
the associated costs and benefits that cut across ideological lines. In such
situations, perverse incentives are reduced, and there is less possibility of
ideological or partisan bias. Most major public policy issues, however,
are not like that. Moreover, the more matters are delegated to experts,
the greater the difficulties of monitoring the latter and avoiding biased
and self-serving policies.

15.3.3 Controlling the Flow of Misinformation

In recent years, some experts have argued that the ready availability of
misinformation, facilitated by the internet and modern social media, has
led many to believe “fake news,” conspiracy theories, and other dubious
material on political issues.46 If so, the solution is to restrict the flow of mis-
information, thereby preventing voters’ judgment from being influenced.
296 Ilya Somin
Some advocates propose relatively modest measures, limited to curtail-
ing extreme disinformation about election arrangements.47 Others would
go much further. For example, French President Emmanuel Macron has
proposed banning websites that spread “fake news” during elections.48
If voters lack the knowledge and discernment to sift through and reject
misinformation on their own, perhaps we can improve their judgment by
restricting access to dubious and dangerous information sources. Unlike
epistocracy and the rule of experts, this strategy does not seek to displace
the electorate from its role as the ultimate decision-maker in a democ-
racy. But it would impose elite control over the information available to
the voters.
The main objections to this approach are too well-known to require
extensive elaboration. The most obvious is that incumbent governments
cannot be trusted to even-handedly target “misinformation” instead of
selectively suppressing information sources that undercut the official
line and support their opponents. This danger is especially significant
in a deeply polarized political system like the United States and some
European nations. Democrats would have good reason to distrust the
objectivity of a Republican administration in determining what qualifies
as “misinformation” or “fake news.” Republicans would, likewise, have
good reason to distrust a Democratic one.
Plans to suppress misinformation also suffer from the mistaken
assumption that the problem is mainly a product of the new information
environment created by the internet and social media, which facilitate
“cheap speech” by unscrupulous manipulators, unconstrained by tradi-
tional media gatekeepers.49 Thus, it is argued that all we need to do to
curtail misinformation seriously is a crackdown on its spread through
these new pathways.
In reality, it is far from clear that misinformation from new forms of
media is significantly worse than that from the old or that political igno-
rance and irrationality are worse now than in the past.50 Political knowl-
edge levels have been stably low for decades.51 While today’s political
environment features plenty of irrational, widely believed misinforma-
tion, it is hard to show that it is worse than in the past. The ignorance
and bias that contributed to the rise of fascism and communism in the
early twentieth century were at least as bad as anything that exists today,
and the distortions on which these ideologies were based were spread
through what we would today consider “legacy” media: primarily news-
papers and radio.
Even today, new media are probably less significant sources of misin-
formation than traditional ones, such as broadcast media. More people
follow news on broadcast media and conventional news websites than
on social media.52 On the right, networks such as Fox News are far more
significant purveyors of misinformation than anything on social media.
Left-wing misinformation also has many alternative channels.
 Top-Down and Bottom-Up Solutions to Political Ignorance 297
Ultimately, the main problem is not the supply of misinformation on
specific media but the demand for it by political fans who crave valida-
tion for their preexisting biases rather than search for the truth.53 If that
demand remains high, it will be met by purveyors of misinformation
and exploited by unscrupulous politicians and activists. It is no surprise
that right-wing misinformation – such as claims that Democrats stole
the 2020 election from Donald Trump – appeals primarily to committed
right-wingers, while left-wing political misinformation has the opposite
valence.54 The root of the problem is the rational irrationality of voters,
which makes many of them avid and gullible consumers of political clap-
trap, not the availability of misinformation.
In theory, we can imagine a government that comprehensively suppresses
the flow of misinformation across all media. Then, even the most gullible
voters would not fall prey to it because they would never get the chance
to see it. But such a quasi-totalitarian state would have every incentive
to suppress all opposition and fill the websites and airwaves with its own
misinformation. Near-comprehensive government control of electronic
and broadcast media has yielded awful results in countries like Russia and
China. We should not assume it would be much better in the West.
Even if government regulation could significantly reduce the flow of
“misinformation,” defined in some objective sense, it would still not solve
the problem of political ignorance. Rationally ignorant voters would
remain unaware of most areas of government policy and thus remain
unable to monitor it effectively. Moreover, they would still be highly
biased in evaluating the information they learn, even if it was not inher-
ently misleading. Some of the biggest and most egregious deceptions
might be banished from the political scene. But more prosaic forms of
ignorance and bias would remain.

15.4 Bottom-Up Strategies

In contrast with top-down proposals for alleviating political ignorance,
bottom-up approaches seek to address the problem in ways that empower
ordinary people rather than limiting their influence. Some straightfor-
wardly seek to increase voters’ knowledge. Others seek to restructure
decision-making institutions to incentivize ordinary citizens to make
better-informed choices. Like top-down approaches, bottom-up strate-
gies have a variety of shortcomings and constraints. But some are none-
theless promising. Empowering people to “vote with their feet” is likely
to have the most significant potential.

15.4.1 Increasing Knowledge through Education

The seemingly most straightforward bottom-up strategy for increasing
voter knowledge is to rely on education. If voters are ignorant about
298 Ilya Somin
politics and government, why not just teach them? The need to create
competent voters is a long-standing traditional rationale for public educa-
tion. In theory, it should be possible to require citizens to become knowl-
edgeable voters as a condition of graduating from high school. Students
will only get a diploma if they demonstrate their knowledge of the struc-
ture of the political system, key areas of government policy, basic eco-
nomics, and any other information that may be essential to becoming a
good voter.55 From Thomas Jefferson’s day to the present, reformers have
often argued that we can alleviate public ignorance through education.56
Jefferson famously wrote that “the remedy” for voter ignorance is “to
inform their discretion by education.”57
But using education to conquer voter ignorance is a much more dif-
ficult proposition than optimists assume. Strikingly, voter knowledge
levels have mainly remained stagnant – and low – over the last fifty to
sixty years, even as education levels have significantly risen.58 Today, the
average American adult has several years more formal education than in
the early 1960s. But that has done little to increase voter knowledge.
Perhaps things would be different if only schools adopted better cur-
ricula. A school system focused on increasing political knowledge could
surely make significant progress. But real-world politicians and school
officials have little incentive to structure public education in this way.
Having been elected by a largely ignorant electorate, they have little
incentive to prioritize increasing that knowledge. Increases might even
threaten their grip on power!
Worse, the actual incentives of education officials are not merely to
neglect political knowledge but to use public schools to indoctrinate stu-
dents in the preferred ideology of the party in power or the majority of
the community. Indoctrination was one of the main reasons governments
established public education in the United States and Europe in the first
place.59
And such tendencies persist today. In the United States, both conserva-
tive “red” states and liberal “blue” states seek to develop school curricula
that promote their respective ideologies.60 Current battles over “critical
race theory” in American schools are the latest iteration of a long history
of ideological conflict over school curricula.61 With both left and right
seeking to capture schools to promote their ideologies rather than create
a balanced curriculum that increases citizen knowledge in some neutral
sense, there is little chance that public schools will overcome the problem
of political ignorance anytime soon.
In theory, voters could carefully monitor school curricula and reward
political leaders who adopt education policies that increase political
knowledge while minimizing indoctrination. But if voters were that
knowledgeable about education policy, it would mean there was not much
of a problem of political ignorance to begin with. The very existence of
widespread voter ignorance is an obstacle to its alleviation.62
 Top-Down and Bottom-Up Solutions to Political Ignorance 299
Even if schools could be more effectively structured to increase polit-
ical knowledge, it is not clear they could get students to learn enough to
effectively monitor the many functions of modern government. That may
require more instruction than any school system realistically has time
for, at least if other educational goals are also pursued. Moreover, even if
students, upon graduation, are fully knowledgeable about the significant
policy issues of the day, their knowledge is likely to become dated as new
problems emerge over time. Hopefully, an 18-year-old high school grad-
uate will be a voter for many decades to come. During that time, new
issues will undoubtedly arise. Unless voters are required to report for
regular continuing political education – or reeducation – their knowledge
will likely atrophy over the years.63
Some evidence suggests that political knowledge can be increased
if governments adopt school choice policies, under which – instead of
being assigned to a public school based on geography – parents are given
vouchers that enable them to send their children to any public or private
school of their choice.64 Such reforms are worth pursuing. Nevertheless,
it is doubtful they will lead to more than modest increases in political
knowledge.65
Even if education can significantly increase voter knowledge, there
remains the problem of how to alleviate biased evaluation of political
information. In theory, schools can pursue that objective as well. But it
is likely to be even more difficult than increasing merely factual knowl-
edge. Among other things, any such “de-biasing” education is itself
susceptible to being biased due to capture by ideological factions and
interest groups.

15.4.2 Paying Voters to Become Better Informed

The core problem of political ignorance arises from voters’ incentives to
be rationally ignorant. There is too little payoff to learning about politi-
cal issues for the individual voter. If that is the problem, why not change
voter incentives by paying them to learn? Economist Bryan Caplan, best
known for his work on “rational irrationality,” has proposed the estab-
lishment of a “Voter Achievement Test,” under which any citizen who
wants to can take a test of fundamental political and economic knowl-
edge and get a monetary payment based on their performance.66 The
higher the score, the higher the pay. This simple approach to addressing
political ignorance deserves serious consideration.
No one need be required to take the test. Moreover, unlike in the case
of epistocracy, nobody need lose their right to vote if they refuse to take
the test or perform poorly on it. The promise of payment could nonethe-
less incentivize large numbers of people to increase their political knowl-
edge. If payments of $100 or even $1000 for high scores lead to creating a
vastly more knowledgeable electorate, it would be a bargain!
300 Ilya Somin
In addition, the test could be updated as new issues arise or additional
policy-relevant information emerges. Unlike material learned in school
years ago, the test content need never become outdated. Voters who have
taken the test previously could be offered the opportunity to retake it
every few years, earning more money. In this way, they can be incentiv-
ized to keep their knowledge of public policy up to date.
The most obvious flaw in this strategy is the question of whether the
government can be trusted to objectively determine what should be on
the test and what the “right” answers are. It is easy to imagine how the
test can be biased in favor of a particular political party or ideology.67
The dangers are similar to those that arise with epistocracy.68 But the
risk is somewhat lessened because the test would not be used to exclude
people from the franchise.
Even if we cannot trust the state to develop an objective “Voter
Achievement Test,” perhaps private philanthropists or educational
organizations might do so. We might reduce the danger of bias by having
an ideologically diverse group of experts design and revise the test.
At least for now, I am skeptical that either the private or public sector
can design a test-and-payment system that is likely to be both effective
and widely accepted. Nevertheless, this bottom-up strategy for increas-
ing voter knowledge deserves more significant consideration. At the very
least, it is worth attempting as a small-scale experiment. Experimental
evidence indicates that small payments for correct answers lead survey
participants to give more accurate responses on tests of political knowl-
edge – an increase of 11% if participants have no opportunity to study
and 24% if they have a day to prepare.69 Larger payments combined with
more study time might lead to far better results.
Of all the strategies considered here, “paying for performance” is the
one to which experts have given the slightest consideration.70 At the very
least, we should devote more sustained analysis to it.
That said, like the other options considered so far, it is more likely to be
effective in combating pure ignorance than alleviating bias in evaluating
information. In principle, a test can also be designed to improve perfor-
mance on the latter front. But it would be a much more complicated task
and even more susceptible to biases of its own.
Similarly, we can augment the test to include an assessment of reason-
ing skills, aside from those needed to combat bias. For example, test-tak-
ers could be incentivized to learn economics, political theory, and other
bodies of knowledge that could help them better assess the factual infor-
mation they learn about specific policies and government structure. But
selecting such background knowledge and determining what counts as
a correct answer in this context would likely create even more oppor-
tunities for bias and manipulation than the selection of merely factual
information.
 Top-Down and Bottom-Up Solutions to Political Ignorance 301
15.4.3 Sortition
Some political theorists and others have argued that we can use “sor-
tition” to overcome the problem of political ignorance while simulta-
neously empowering ordinary voters in a way that does not cede vast
power to elites.71 Sortition transfers decision-making authority over vari-
ous issues to small groups of randomly selected citizens. It thereby over-
comes the problem of rational ignorance by creating decision-making
bodies with a smaller number of voters. Each vote matters more; thus,
voters have more incentive to learn about the issues and assess opposing
arguments without bias..
In addition, the participants could spend far more time evaluating
issues than voters typically do in conventional elections. Because the par-
ticipants are randomly selected, the resulting group can be representative
of the whole population. Potentially, sortition might combine represent-
ative popular participation in government with a higher level of political
knowledge than is likely under conventional democracy.
Some sortition proposals would use randomly selected groups to
decide on specific policy issues, such as education or environmental pro-
tection, or engage in oversight of government officials.72 More ambitious
versions would replace the entire electorate with an “enfranchisement
lottery,” under which only a small randomly selected group would get to
vote in national elections. That group would then have the opportunity
and incentive to discuss the issues in depth.73 Another option is to have a
house of the legislature chosen by sortition, perhaps combined with one
selected by traditional elections.74
Unfortunately, sortition is not nearly as good a solution to the problem
of political ignorance as it might initially seem.75 Unless the participants
study for a very long time, they are unlikely to become knowledgeable
about more than a small fraction of the many issues the modern state
addresses.
We might alleviate this problem by having each body selected by sorti-
tion address only a narrow range of issues. But then there would be severe
problems of coordination between them. Moreover, groups addressing
a specific policy area might neglect significant trade-offs between that
issue and others. For example, a group highly knowledgeable about edu-
cation policy might still not know enough to assess the trade-off between
devoting X amount of additional resources to public schools instead of
devoting the same funds to law enforcement or environmental protection.
Another way to make the participants better informed is to have them
serve for long periods, perhaps even years at a time. But in that scenario,
the participants would gradually become a kind of professional govern-
ing class and would no longer be just randomly selected, ordinary people.
The problem of elite domination that sortition is intended to solve would
return in a new form.
302 Ilya Somin
Juries in the civil and criminal justice systems often have difficulty
understanding the points at issue in cases with broad policy implications
or complex scientific evidence.76 These problems are likely even more
severe if we use jury-like sortition mechanisms to address a much more
comprehensive range of policy issues. Among the difficulties likely to be
encountered are the challenges of coordinating sortition-selected bodies
that address different problems. Such coordination will become problem-
atic if there are discrete juries or “mini-publics” addressing each issue. If
we instead have one or a few bodies address many problems at once, that
would dramatically increasing participants’ knowledge burden.77
Sortition systems are also vulnerable to manipulation in a variety of
ways. The government could skew the selection procedure to ensure more
of its supporters get selected. If, as in most proposals, the participants are
expected to hear presentations about policy issues and engage in delib-
eration about them, there are many ways to bias the choice of presenters
and the selection and framing of issues. A biased sortition process might
well exacerbate the dangers of voter ignorance and irrationality rather
than diminish them.
Even without such biases, sortition systems will face difficult trade-
offs between representativeness and minimizing incentives for rational
ignorance. If the group selected is small, rational ignorance is unlikely
to be a problem, since each vote will have a high chance of decisiveness.
But a small, randomly selected group can easily be unrepresentative. For
example, a group of twenty people randomly selected from a population
equally divided between Republicans and Democrats will have a 60% or
larger majority for one party more than 50% of the time. The likelihood
that some parts of the population will be significantly underrepresented
increases if more than two groups have to be accounted for – for example,
if there are more than two political parties or if we seek representative-
ness based on race, gender, ethnicity, religion, and other characteristics,
in addition to political partisanship.
Sortition may be a valuable tool for enabling popular participation in
discrete decisions requiring evaluation of a narrow set of facts. The classic
example is a jury trial to determine a specific defendant’s criminal or civil
liability. By contrast, sortition is much more dubious when addressing
complex, multifaceted issues.78 In those situations, the juror-deliberators
are likely to face poor incentives, be too small a group to be representa-
tive, or have difficulty becoming informed unless they essentially become
full-time policymakers – in which case they would no longer be randomly
selected “ordinary” citizens at all.

15.4.4 Foot Voting

Perhaps the most effective bottom-up strategy for empowering people to
make better-informed political decisions is to increase their opportunities
 Top-Down and Bottom-Up Solutions to Political Ignorance 303
to “vote with their feet.” People can vote with their feet in federal systems
by choosing what regional or local government to live under, through
international migration, and in the private sector.
Both foot voting under federalism and foot voting through interna-
tional migration are mechanisms by which individuals and families can
exercise political choice – deciding what government policies they wish
to live under. Many private-sector decisions have a similar function,
particularly where private organizations provide services traditionally
associated with local or regional governments, as in the case of private
planned communities or private school choice.79
When it comes to the problem of ignorance, all three types of foot vot-
ing have enormous advantages over ballot-box voting. Whereas ballot-­
box voters have incentives to be rationally ignorant due to the very low
probability of any one vote making a difference, foot voters have strong
incentives to seek out relevant information because their decisions are
highly likely to matter.
If you are like most people, you probably devote much more time and
effort to deciding what television or smartphone to buy than to choosing
who to vote for in any election. That is not because the television is more
important than who governs the country, but because the TV decision is
highly likely to have a decisive effect. The TV you choose will probably
end up in your house, and you will have the chance to use it. By contrast,
if you turn on the TV and have the misfortune of seeing the president
of the United States or some other powerful politician on screen, your
chances of determining who holds that office and what policies they pur-
sue are infinitesimally small.
Basic economic theory and extensive empirical evidence indicate that
foot voters seek out more and better information than ballot-box vot-
ers.80 They also have better incentives to evaluate the information they
learn objectively.81 When a decision is highly likely to make a difference,
people have stronger incentives to curb potential biases than if the odds
of decisiveness are very low. These points even apply to foot voters in
highly challenging situations, such as migrants fleeing authoritarian
regimes that limit the flow of information or African-Americans decid-
ing whether to leave the oppressive Jim Crow-era American South.82
Foot voting can effectively address both the problem of ignorance and
bias in evaluating information. In that respect, it is more promising than
any other strategy.
Some argue that foot voting is not a truly “political” choice because it is
often motivated by “economic” or personal considerations, such as seek-
ing job opportunities. But the same is true of much ballot-box voting.83
The economic considerations that influence foot voting are often heavily
influenced by government policy, such as housing and labor market regu-
lation. In addition, many migrants move because of even more unambig-
uously “political” factors, such as the extent of personal liberty allowed
304 Ilya Somin
by the government and the incidence of state-sponsored discrimination
against their racial, ethnic, or religious group.84 International migrants
tend to move to nations with greater freedom on various dimensions.85
Much can be done to expand opportunities for all three types of foot
voting, most notably breaking down barriers to international migration
and reducing restrictions on internal mobility within federal systems,
such as exclusionary zoning, which blocks the construction of new hous-
ing in response to demand.86 Within the US and other federal systems, we
can expand foot voting opportunities by decentralizing and limiting the
powers of government, thereby leaving more room for local and regional
variation in policy, and creating more opportunities for people to vote
with their feet on a wide range of issues.87
It is likely impossible to subject every issue to foot voting. Some prob-
lems are so large-scale that they can only be addressed by a central gov-
ernment or, as in the case of global climate change, by international
agreements and institutions. Nevertheless, there are ways to create far
greater decentralization and foot voting opportunities than exist at
present.88
Relative to other strategies for alleviating the problem of political igno-
rance, foot voting has the virtue of massively improving incentives for
informed decision-making without empowering a small group of elites
at the expense of the general public and without creating opportunities
for incumbent government officials to skew the system in their favor. As
we have seen, both flaws bedevil other, more conventional strategies for
alleviating voter ignorance.
There are a variety of objections to expanded foot voting, such as
claims that it might lead to a “race to the bottom,” arguments that it will
not benefit unpopular racial and ethnic minorities, and – most obvious
of all – concerns that moving costs are too high for it to be effective, par-
ticularly for the poor. I have responded to each of these concerns in detail
in previous work.89
Here, I will merely note that moving costs are balanced by the enor-
mous gains many foot voters stand to achieve from going to places where
better government policies and institutions can help them to become
more productive and thereby earn vastly higher incomes than are pos-
sible in their original homes.90 Within the United States, reducing exclu-
sionary zoning alone – aside from other barriers to mobility – could
enable millions of people to move to areas where they could significantly
increase their income – expanding US GDP by as much as 30% or more.91
Economists estimate that eliminating barriers to international migration
could lead to a doubling of world GDP.92
And the biggest gains of this sort are likely to be realized by the poor
and otherwise disadvantaged.93 This prospect can incentivize them to
overcome moving cost barriers by borrowing against their future incomes,
and other means – and also incentivize others to help finance these moves.
 Top-Down and Bottom-Up Solutions to Political Ignorance 305
Far from promoting inequality, as some fear, expanded foot voting
opportunities are a significant boon to the poor, disadvantaged, and
oppressed.94
While fully exploiting the benefits of foot voting would require radical
policy changes, especially regarding restrictions on international migra-
tion, even comparatively modest incremental reforms could enable signif-
icant progress. Partially breaking down barriers to internal mobility and
partially decentralizing government policy would still expand the foot
voting options available to millions of people. The same goes for incre-
mentally reducing obstacles to international migration. If, for example,
the United States were to increase its annual intake of immigrants by a
mere 10% compared to pre-Covid-19 pandemic levels, that would provide
an enormously valuable foot voting opportunity to some 100,000 people
each year.95
In addition to practical concerns about the effectiveness of foot vot-
ing, there are also long-standing arguments that existing governments
have a right to exclude would-be migrants based on analogies between
the rights of governments and those of homeowners and private clubs.96
Alternatively, exclusion can be justified by claims that particular racial
or ethnic groups are the rightful owners of a given territory and therefore
have the right to exclude others.97 I have responded to such claims I detail
in my book, Free to Move.98
There are also concerns that expanded foot voting might exacerbate
various problems, such as increasing ethnic conflict, overburdening wel-
fare states, increasing crime and terrorism, and spreading contagious
diseases. These issues cannot be examined in detail here, though I have
also addressed them in previous work.99
Here, I do not attempt to make anything approaching a comprehensive
case for expanding foot voting. I merely highlight its potential value as a
strategy for addressing the problem of political ignorance, and especially
its advantages over other proposals for alleviating that danger.

15.5 Conclusion
Voter ignorance is a severe flaw of democracy that is extremely difficult to
overcome. A variety of strategies have been proposed to address it. To
facilitate analysis, I have divided them into “top-down” and “bottom-up”
approaches. We should not dismiss top-down processes out of hand. In some
situations, they may be helpful or even unavoidable. But they have several
common flaws.
Bottom-up strategies have significant limitations of their own. Neverthe-
less, some are highly promising. The ones with the most significant potential
are paying voters to increase their knowledge – an approach that deserves
much more critical consideration than it has received – and expanding oppor-
tunities for foot voting.
306 Ilya Somin
Notes
1. This summary of the problem of political ignorance is partly adapted from
Ilya Somin, Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom
(New York: Oxford University Press, rev. ed. 2022), ch. 1.
2. For different estimates of the likelihood of decisiveness, see Ilya Somin,
Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2nd ed. 2016), 75–76.
3. For a more detailed discussion of the logic of rational ignorance, see
Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance, 75–91; cf. Ilya Somin, “Is Politi-
cal Ignorance Rational?” in Routledge Handbook of Political Epistemology,
eds. Michael Hannon and Jeroen de Ritter (London: Routledge, 2021). The
idea of rational political ignorance was first developed by Anthony Downs,
An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1957),
ch. 13.
4. This section builds on my book Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why
Smaller Government Is Smarter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2nd
ed. 2016), which analyzes rational ignorance and its consequences in detail
(see esp. chs. 1–4). I addressed a variety of criticisms of the arguments
advanced in that book in Ilya Somin, “The Ongoing Debate Over Political
Ignorance: Reply to My Critics,” Critical Review 27 (2015): 380–414.
5. See Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance, ch. 3; Bryan Caplan, The
Myth of the Rational Voter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2007), ch. 5; and Bryan Caplan, “Rational Ignorance vs. Rational Irration-
ality,” Kyklos 53 (2001): 3–21.
6. For a review of the evidence, see Somin, Democracy and Political Igno-
rance, 92–97.
7. For recent overviews of the evidence indicating widespread bias among
voters on both left and right, see Brian Guay and Christopher D. Johnson,
“Ideological Asymmetries and the Determinants of Politically Motivated
Reasoning,” American Journal of Political Science (forthcoming); Peter H.
Ditto et al., “At Least Bias Is Bipartisan: A Meta-Analytic Comparison of
Partisan Bias in Liberals and Conservatives,” Perspectives on Psychological
Science 14 (2019): 273–291; cf. Robin McKenna, “Asymmetrical Irration-
ality: Are Only Other People Stupid?” in Routledge Handbook of P ­ olitical
Epistemology, eds. Michael Hannon and Jeroen de Ritter (London:
Routledge, 2021); Keith E. Stanovich, “The Irrational Attempt to Impute
Irrationality to One’s Political Opponents,” in Routledge Handbook of
Political Epistemology, eds. Michael Hannon and Jeroen de Ritter (London:
Routledge, 2021).
8. I introduced this analogy in Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance,
93–94.
9. For a more detailed discussion, see ibid., 78.
10. For a more detailed discussion of why rational ignorance does not require
careful calculation and is consistent with the use of crude heuristics, see
Ilya Somin, “Rational Ignorance,” in Routledge International Handbook
of Ignorance Studies, eds. Matthias Gross and Linsey J. McGoey (London:
Routledge, 2015); and Brad R. Taylor, “The Psychological Foundations of
Rational Ignorance: Biased Heuristics and Decision Costs,” University of
Queensland, unpublished paper, Aug. 31, 2019, available at https://papers.
ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3443280.
11. For recent overviews of the evidence, see, e.g., Somin, Democracy and
Political Ignorance, ch. 1; Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Christopher Achen and Larry
 Top-Down and Bottom-Up Solutions to Political Ignorance 307
Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive
Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Rick Shen-
kman, Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth about the American Voter
(New York: Basic Books, 2008).
12. For numerous examples, see Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance, ch. 1.
13. Ibid., 1.
14. Ibid., 20.
15. Ibid., 18.
16. See, e.g., Ipsos-MORI, Perils of Perception: A Fourteen-Country Study
(Ipsos-MORI, 2014) (detailing similar ignorance in many leading democ-
racies); Ipsos-MORI, Perils of Perception 2018 (Ipsos-MORI, 2018) (same);
Bobby Duffy, The Perils of Perception: Why We Are Wrong about Nearly
Everything (London: Atlantic Books, 2018), chs. 4–9.
17. See, e.g., Morris Fiorina, Retrospective Voting in American Presidential
Elections (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981); V. O. Key, The
Responsible Electorate (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966),
60–61; Arthur Lupia and Matthew McCubbins, The Democratic Dilemma:
Can Citizens Learn What They Need to Know? (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
18. See, e.g., Donald Wittman, The Myth of Democratic Failure (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995); Hélène Landemore, Democratic Rea-
son: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); James Stimson, “A Macro The-
ory of Information Flow,” in Information and Democratic Processes, eds.
John Ferejohn and James Kuklinski (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1990); Bernard Grofman and Julie Withers, “Information-Pooling Mod-
els of Electoral Politics,” in Information, Participation and Choice, ed.
­Bernard Grofman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); James
Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the
Few (New York: Doubleday, 2004), ch. 12.
19. See Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance, ch. 4.
20. For a more detailed elaboration of this point, see ibid., 160–63.
21. Ibid.
22. The term has been popularized in recent political theory by Jason Bren-
nan, Against Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).
See also Jason Brennan, “The Right to a Competent Electorate,” Philo-
sophical Quarterly 61 (October 2011): 700–24; Jason Brennan, “In Defense
of Epistocracy: Enlightened Preference Voting,” in Routledge Handbook
of ­ Political Epistemology, eds. Michael Hannon and Jeroen de Ritter
(London: Routledge, 2021); Jason Brennan and Christopher Freiman,
“Why Paternalists Must Endorse Epistocracy,” Journal of Ethics and Social
­Philosophy 21 (2022): 329–53.
23. This critical evaluation of epistocracy draws on my earlier piece on the
subject. See Ilya Somin, “The Promise and Peril of Epistocracy,” Inquiry
16 (2019): 27–34 (symposium on Brennan, Against Democracy).
24. I discuss this aspect of the limited franchise of Athenian democracy in Somin,
“Democracy and Political Knowledge in Ancient Athens,” Ethics 119 (2009):
585–90. See also Josiah Ober, Knowledge and Democracy: Innovation and
Learning in Classical Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
25. John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (Indianap-
olis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958 [1861]), 140–42.
26. See US Census Bureau, “Quick Facts,” July 1, 2018, available at https://
www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045218 (estimating that
22.6% of the US population consists of persons under the age of 18).
308 Ilya Somin
27. I have tentatively proposed this myself. See, e.g., Ilya Somin, “Should
We Let 16-Year-Olds Vote?” Volokh Conspiracy, Washington Post,
Sept. 19, 2014, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-
conspiracy/wp/2014/09/19/should-we-let-16-year-olds-vote/?utm_term=.
ea9529c2c42a.
28. A 2018 study found that only 36% of Americans could pass the citizen-
ship test required for legal immigrants to become citizens: Woodrow Wil-
son Foundation Survey, Oct. 2018, available at https://woodrow.org/news/
national-survey-finds-just-1-in-3-americans-would-pass-citizenship-test/.
29. Brennan, Against Democracy.
30. Ibid., ch. 8.
31. For a more detailed discussion of this problem, see Somin, “Promise and
Peril,” 30–31.
32. Brennan, “In Defense of Epistocracy.” This can be done by comparing
the views of the voters in question with those of people with similar back-
ground characteristics (e.g., income, race, gender, and so on) but with
higher levels of political knowledge.
33. Brennan, Against Democracy, ch. 8.
34. For a more extended critique of Brennan’s proposals, see Somin’s “Promise
and Peril,” 31–33.
35. For citations to relevant evidence, see Somin, Democracy and Political Igno-
rance, 94–100; see also Diana Mutz, Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative Versus
Participatory Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 29–41.
36. See Paul Tucker, Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Bank-
ing and the Regulatory State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).
37. See, e.g., Stephen Breyer, Breaking the Vicious Circle: Toward Effective Risk
Regulation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), ch. 3; Cass R.
Sunstein, Risk, and Reason: Safety, Law and the Environment (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002).
38. See Ilya Somin, “Nondelegation Limits on COVID Emergency Powers:
Lessons from the Eviction Moratorium and Title 42 Cases,” NYU Journal
of Law and Liberty 15 (2022): 658–98.
39. Ibid.
40. F. A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review
4 (1945): 519–30.
41. This and other similar limitations of expert knowledge are outlined in
Mario Rizzo and Glen Whitman, Escaping Paternalism: Rationality,
Behavioral Economics, and Public Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2020), ch. 7.
42. This is especially likely in light of growing evidence that harsh lockdowns
did little to reduce Covid-19 mortality. See, e.g., Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung,
and Steve H. Hanke, “A Literature Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effects
of Lockdowns on COVID-19 Mortality,” Studies in Applied Economics
No. 200, Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health,
and the Study of Business Enterprise, Jan. 2022, available at https://sites.
krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-
of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf; Virat Agarwal
et al., “The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Policy Responses on
Excess Mortality,” National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2021,
available at https://www.nber.org/papers/w28930.
43. See Somin, Free to Move, pp. 155–60.
44. See Martin Baekgaard et al., “The Role of Evidence in Politics: Motivated
Reasoning and Persuasion among Politicians,” British Journal of Political
Science 49 (2017): 1117–40.
 Top-Down and Bottom-Up Solutions to Political Ignorance 309
45. For an overview, see Rizzo and Whitman, Escaping Paternalism, ch. 9,
esp. 330–47.
46. See, e.g., Richard L. Hasen, Cheap Speech (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2021); Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum, Many People Are
Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy; James Ball,
Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World (New York: Biteback, 2018);
Cailyn O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age:
How False Beliefs Spread (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).
47. See, e.g., Hasen, Cheap Speech.
48. See Yasmeen Serhan, “Macron’s War on Fake News,” The Atlantic, Jan. 6, 2018.
49. For a recent statement of this view, see Hasen, Cheap Speech.
50. For an overview of reasons why that may not be the case, see Ilya Somin,
“Are Public Ignorance and Misinformation Getting Worse?,” Reason,
Feb. 15, 2022, available at https://reason.com/volokh/2022/02/15/are-public-
ignorance-and-misinformation-getting-worse/; Matthew Yglesias, “The
‘Misinformation Problem’ Seems like Misinformation,” Slow Boring, Feb. 15,
2022, available at https://www.slowboring.com/p/misinformation-myth?s=r.
51. See Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance, ch. 1.
52. See Ilya Somin, “The Case against Imposing Common Carrier Restric-
tions on Social Media Sites,” Reason, July 8, 2021, available at https://
reason.com/volokh/2021/07/08/the-case-against-imposing-common-carri-
er-restrictions-on-social-media-sites/ (going over the data); Pew Research
Center, “More Than Eight-in-Ten Americans Get Their News from Dig-
ital Devices,” Jan. 12, 2021, available at https://www.pewresearch.org/
fact-tank/2021/01/12/more-than-eight-in-ten-americans-get-news-from-
digital-devices/ (data showing that many more Americans follow television
or media organization website news than do so on social media).
53. See discussion in Part I; see also Ilya Somin, “The Demand for Political Mis-
information Is a Bigger Danger Than the Supply,” Reason, Apr. 15, 2022,
available at https://reason.com/volokh/2022/04/15/the-demand-for-politi-
cal-misinformation-is-a-bigger-danger-than-the-supply/.
54. Ibid.
55. Different theories of political participation imply additional knowledge
prerequisites. See Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance, ch. 2; Jamie
Terence Kelly, Framing Democracy: A Behavioral Approach to Democratic
Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), ch. 4.
56. See, e.g., Ben Berger, Attention Deficit Democracy: The Paradox of Civic
Engagement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 153–57.
57. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to William C. Jarvis, Sept. 28, 1820,” in The
Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 15, eds. Andrew Lipscomb and Albert
Bergh (Washington, DC, 1904), 278.
58. Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance, 198–200.
59. See, e.g., Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1976); E. G. West, Education and the State, 3rd ed. (Indianap-
olis: Liberty Press, 1994), 84–107; and John R. Lott Jr., “An Explanation for
Public Provision of Schooling: The Importance of Indoctrination,” Jour-
nal of Law and Economics 33 (1990): 199–231.
60. For some recent examples, Ilya Somin, “Public Education as Public
Indoctrination,” Reason, Jan. 12, 2020, available at https://reason.com/
volokh/2020/01/12/public-education-as-public-indoctrination/.
61. See, e.g., Laura Meckler and Hannah Natanson, “New Critical Race The-
ory Laws Have Teachers Scared, Confused and Self-Censoring,” Wash-
ington Post, Feb. 14, 2022, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/
education/2022/02/14/critical-race-theory-teachers-fear-laws/.
310 Ilya Somin
62. I make this point, 202-0, in Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance,
202–03.
63. Ibid., 203–04.
64. Ibid., 202–03.
65. Ibid (explaining the reasons why).
66. Bryan Caplan, “A Cheap, Inoffensive Way to Make Democracy Work
Better,” Econlog, Oct. 9, 2013, available https://www.econlib.org/
archives/2013/10/a_cheap_inoffen.html.
67. I emphasize this limitation in evaluating the “pay for performance”
approach in Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance, 219–21.
68. See the discussion earlier in this chapter.
69. Arthur Lupia and Markus Prior, “Money, Time and Political Knowledge:
Distinguishing Quick Recall and Political Learning Skills,” American
Political Science Review 52 (2008), 169–83; for additional discussion, see
Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance, 219–20.
70. For rare exceptions, none of which are close to being comprehensive, see,
e.g., Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance, 219–21; Caplan, “A Cheap,
Inoffensive Way to Make Democracy Work Better”; and Arthur Lupia,
Uninformed: Why People Know So Little about Politics and What We Can
Do about It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 174–75.
71. See, e.g., Claudio López-Guerra, Democracy, and Disenfranchisement: The
Morality of Electoral Exclusions (Oxford University Press, 2014); Clau-
dio Lopez-Guerra, “The Enfranchisement Lottery,” Philosophy, Politics,
and Economics (Oct. 2010); Helene Landemore, Open Democracy: Rein-
venting Democracy for the 21st Century (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2020); Helene Landemore, “Deliberation, Cognitive Diversity, and
Inclusiveness: An argument for the Random Selection of Representa-
tives,” Synthese 190 (2013): 1209–31; Ethan Leib, Deliberative Democracy in
America: A Proposal for a Popular Branch of Government (University Park:
Penn State Press, 2004); Alexander Guerrero, “The Epistemic Case for
Non-Electoral Forms of Democracy,” in Routledge Handbook of Political
Epistemology, eds. Michael Hannon and Jeroen de Ritter (London: Rout-
ledge, 2021); Alexander Guerrero, The Lottocratic Alternative, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2021).
72. See, e.g., Landemore, Open Democracy (promoting a wide-ranging version
of this approach); Samuel Bagg, “Sortition as Anti-Corruption: Popular
Oversight against Elite Capture,” American Journal of Political Science
(forthcoming).
73. See, e.g., Claudio López-Guerra, Democracy and Disenfranchisement;
Lopez-Guerra, “Enfranchisement Lottery.”
74. See, e.g., Arash Abizadeh, “Representation, Bicameralism, Political Equality,
and Sortition: Reconstituting the Second Chamber as a Randomly Selected
Assembly,” Perspectives on Politics 19 (2021): 791–806.
75. This section builds on criticisms of sortition in Somin, Democracy and
Political Ignorance, 208–11.
76. To summarize some relevant evidence, see Ilya Somin, “Jury Ignorance
and Political Ignorance,” William and Mary Law Review 55 (2014): 1167–93,
1179–87.
77. This problem is highlighted in Ilya Somin, “Deliberative Democracy and
Political Ignorance,” Critical Review 22 (2010): 253–79, 271–72. I focused
on proposals for local, small-scale deliberative democracy. But the same
considerations apply with equal force to sortition.
78. For a more detailed discussion, see Somin’s “Jury Ignorance and Political
Ignorance.”
 Top-Down and Bottom-Up Solutions to Political Ignorance 311
79. See Somin, Free to Move, ch. 4.
80. For extensive reviews, see ibid., ch. 1, and Somin, Democracy and Political
Ignorance, ch. 5.
81. See evidence discussed in works cited in the previous note.
82. Ibid.
83. For a more detailed discussion of this objection, see Somin, Free to Move,
39–42.
84. Ibid, 39–42, 69–70.
85. Ibid., 69–70.
86. For overviews of such barriers and what can be done to address them, see
ibid., chs. 2–3.
87. Ibid., chs. 2 and 7.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid., chs. 2 and 3.
90. For details, see ibid.
91. Ibid., 52–53.
92. Ibid., 71–74.
93. Ibid., 52–53 and studies cited therein.
94. For additional analysis of this point, see ibid., 53–57, 77–80.
95. Ibid., 202.
96. Both analogies are advanced in Christopher Heath Wellman, “Freedom of
Movement and the Right to Enter and Exit,” in Migration in Political Theory:
The Ethics of Movement and Membership, eds. Sarah Fine and Leah Ypi (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 83, 87; see also Christopher Heath Well-
man, “Immigration and Freedom of Association,” Ethics 119 (2008): 109–41.
97. See, e.g., Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books,
1983), ch. 2; Michael Walzer, “Exclusion, Injustice, and the Democratic
State,” Dissent 40 (1993): 55–64; David Miller, “Immigration: The Case
for Limits,” in Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics, eds. Andrew
Cohen and Christopher Heath Wellman (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); David
Miller, Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 60–68.
98. Somin, Free to Move, ch. 5.
99. Ibid., ch. 6.

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Index
Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refers notes.
Aberdein, A. 61
academia 180–184; corporate world
and 17; diversity in 17, 186
Achen, C. 28
acquisition: data 241; knowledge 3, 4,
208, 241; modes of corruption 157
activation modes of corruption 157
active listeners/listening 10, 221, 223
actively open-minded thinking (AOT)
171–172, 175, 179
adversarial collaboration 9, 183,
185–186
affective polarization 105–107, 110n53,
118–119, 129, 172, 284n3
Against Democracy (Brennan) 291–292
agential cynicism 162
Ahlstrom-Vij, K. 39, 59
Alfano, M. 138, 160
alliances 270, 273, 281, 282
alternative facts 34, 38, 47
Alternative for Germany (AfD) 63
American Dream 126, 166, 219–220
analytic epistemology 2–3, 75, 76–79,
84
anchoring biases 170, 171, 173
Anderson, E. 18, 136, 144
anger 118; moral disapproval and 119;
partisan bias 98; political 118; and
resentment 117–118, 123, 126, 128,
130n5; see also political resentment
antagonistic narrative strategies 103
anthropological cynicism 162–163
AOT see actively open-minded
thinking
Appiah, K. A. 28
applied philosophy 53
Arendt, H. 52, 96, 108n26
argument 25, 202, 257; from bias 239–
241; consensus 41; from epistemic
colonization 241–247; in philosophy
of science 173; from polarization
222, 223, 224; populism and
populist 61; Pyrrhonist 238; race to
the bottom 304; rhetorical forms of
55, 64; skeptical 234–235, 236, 237
Aristotle 5, 17, 206, 231n27
Arneson, P. 164
Arnett, R. C. 164
Arnold, J. R. 109n41
assumptions: about communication
97; behavioral 25–30; of proof 18–25
attitudes 99, 216; associative 38;
belief polarization 277; beliefs
and 230n12; concurring agents
42; conservative political 37;
convictions and 52; cynical 161–163;
democratic 245; detrimental 36;
epistemic 77, 163; false 77; negative
277; political 177; self-protective
insistence 76; of Tea Party
supporters 122; test hypotheses
59; toward scientific evidence 181;
values and 159
authentic people 55, 62, 64
authoritarianism 178, 182, 186n3,
186n6
Bailey, O. 217, 220, 222, 230n12
Baldwin, J. 130n16
Bartels, L. M. 28, 36, 38, 257
Battaly, H. 3
Becker, J. 109n43
behavioral assumptions 25–30
Beitz, C. 261

belief polarization 276–277, 278,
279–284
Berkeley, G. 235
Berlin, I. 231n26, 247n6
best-up-to-now strategy 137, 140–142,
149n9
better informed voters 299–300
biases: argument from 239–241;
cognitive 2, 5, 30, 53, 56–59;
confirmation 60, 64; empirically
strange 171–173; heuristics and 52,
56–59; institutional 242–243; outlier
9; partisan 98, 173, 295; sortition
302; systemic 242; see also specific
types
Biden, J. 106
Biden administration 294
bigotry 118
Bildung 208
Black Sheep Effect 277
Blair premiership 158, 160
Blau, A. 266n19
Bloom, P. 223
bootstrapped corroboration 42–43
bottom-up strategies 287–288;
foot voting 302–305; increasing
knowledge through education
297–299; paying voters to become
better informed 299–300; sortition
301–302
Bramson, A. 209n2
Brennan, J. 68, 157, 293; Against
Democracy 291–292
Brexit 121, 135, 184, 224
Breyer, S. 294
Brostrom, S. 208
Brown, G. 130n4
burdened virtue 153
Cadwalladr, C. 99–100, 108n34
Cambridge Analytica 109n37
Cameron, D. 126, 127
campaign contributions 255–257,
259–263, 265n10
Caplan, B. 238–239, 245, 289, 299
Cassam, Q. 61, 67, 155; Vices of the
Mind: From the Intellectual to the
Political 3
Cato the Younger 234
ceilings as procedural elements
261
certainty 33, 36, 95, 104
Chaloupka, W.: Everybody Knows
165–166
Index 317
character: affective 128; corruption
and 154–157; epistemic 61, 75,
136–137, 140, 143, 149n4, 200, 202,
208; ethical and epistemic 45, 47;
moral 118, 153, 157, 160; person of
bad 219–220; of populism 62; social
79; traits 3, 4
Chavez, H. 51, 55
Christiano, T. 255, 264n3
civic duty 272
civic political informedness 39–40
civic political sophistication 36–39
civic respect 272–274, 279–281
civic virtue 154
classical cognitive biases 56–59
Clifford, W. K. 206
Clinton, H. 100, 119, 130n9
Code, L. 206
co-determination 208, 209n9
cognition: cultural identity-protective
116; need for 171–172, 175; social
dimension of 76–79
cognitive biases 2, 5, 30, 53, 56–59
cognitive diversity 20
cognitive empathy 222
cognitive miserliness 56–67
Cohen, J. 52, 54, 62, 264n2, 265n9
collaboration see adversarial
collaboration
collective deliberation 200, 257, 262,
265n7, 265n14
collective governance 146
collective virtues 161
common knowledge effect 40–41
competence requirement 35–40
complex evaluative spaces (CES) 142,
143
Comprehensive Assessment of
Rational Thinking (CART) 181,
186n5
Condorcet, N. 7, 32, 35–46
Condorcet’s Jury Theorem (CJT) 32–
48, 149n6; competence requirement
35–40; independence requirement
40–44; sincerity requirement 44–46
conspiracy beliefs 179, 183, 186n5
constitutive epistemic suboptimality
143–144
Converse, P. 36–38
Conway, L. G. 178
Cooper, A. J. 243
core epistemic functions 144–146,
148
correspondence theories 96, 108n23
318 Index
corroboration 278; bootstrapped
42–43
corrupting/corruption 153; and
character 154–156; conditions
156–160; and cynicism 163–167
corruptors 155–156; kinds of 158
Costello, T. H. 186n3
COVID/Covid-19 93, 104, 179,
183–184, 234, 294–295, 305
Cramer, K. 117
critical thinking 70–85; analytic
epistemology 76–79; culture of
ignorance 72–74; and epistemic
authorities 79–82; epistemic
circumstances 72–74; and
intellectual autonomy 74–76;
postmodern epistemology 76–79;
social dimension of cognition
76–79; trusting experts as 82–83
criticism of deliberation 149n7
Croatian youth 45
culture of ignorance 72–74, 85n2
cultures of secrecy 158, 160
Cummings, D. 109n35
cumulative culture 138, 149n3
Currie, G. 218
The Cynical Society (Goldfarb) 152
cynicism 152; agential 162;
anthropological 162–163; and
corruption 163–167; curative
property of 153; institutional 153,
154, 160–163; kinds of 162; politics
of 161
D’Agostino, F. 142
Dahl, R. 93, 94, 107n14
decision-making 22–23; agent as
heuristic 19; collective 22, 32,
35, 253; deliberative and 148;
democratic 18, 46, 146; inclusive 17;
political 48; procedures 251, 258,
266n16, 266n18; process 250, 251,
253, 262
deep cynicism 163; see also cynicism
De La Torre, L. 62
deliberative democracy 41, 107n11
Delli Carpini, M. X. 34, 37, 39, 99
demand responsibility 99
democracy: defined 136;
disinformation and 91–94; empathy
and 222–225; epistemology of 1–6;
nursery 209n10
Democracy Report 2022 90
democratic backsliding 51, 90, 106
democratic culture 153, 222, 225
democratic deliberation 9, 51, 52,
60–61, 65, 67, 257, 266n14
Democratic Faith (Deneen) 152
Democrats 28, 92, 102, 106, 180, 280,
296–297
Deneen, P.: Democratic Faith 152
Dennett, D. C. 175
de Ridder, J. 52; Handbook of Political
Epistemology 5
Descartes, R. 76
destructive cynicism 164
Dewey, J. 74, 207
Diogenes of Sinope 152, 165
disagreements 103–106; skepticism
from 234–237
discovery reliability 140, 141, 143
disinformation 90–107; defined
97–99; democracy and 91–94;
disagreements 103–106;
undemocratic 94–97; voter
influence 99–103
Ditto, P. H. 172, 173, 177
diversity theorem 17–30; assumptions
of proof 18–25; behavioral
assumptions 25–30
Diversity Trumps Ability (DTA) 144
Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem 21,
30n12, 149n8
dogmatism 58–59, 67, 75, 96, 158, 164
doing good 159
doing well 159
doubling down 180–184
Du Bois, W. E. B 222–223, 243
Dunning-Kruger effect 240
early childhood education 207–208,
209n9
Eatwell, R. 130n15
Ebbw Vale 120, 121
echo chambers 33, 34–35, 41–44, 47,
85n2, 209n2, 283
education: early childhood 207–208,
209n9; increasing knowledge
through 297–299
egalitarian approach 252, 260–262,
264n5
egalitarian democracy 107n11
egalitarian epistemic position
260–264
egalitarianism 77, 80, 251, 260, 264n6
electoral autocracy 94
electoral democracy 93–94, 97,
99, 106
 Index 319
electoral ignorance 12, 36, 287–290, epistocracy 291–293
297–299, 302, 304 epistocrats 135
elite polarization 275, 276 establishment 55, 62, 117–119, 299
emotional empathy 10, 216–218, Estlund, D. 258, 260, 266n18
220–221, 223, 229 etiology 154
emotionally charged perspective- European Union (EU) 32, 120–122,
taking 218, 221–222, 230n14 147
empathy: cognitive 216, 221–222; EU vs. Disinfo 102
democracy and 222–225; empathy Everybody Knows (Chaloupka)
10, 216–218, 220–221, 223, 229; 165–166
political 220; sensemaking and 216, expert acceptance scales 181
217–221 expert rule 5, 6, 12, 36, 85n3, 148
empirically strange bias 171–173 explanation and understanding 225
empty signifiers 62 extremification 277, 278, 280
English, A. 207 extremity shifts 278
enlightened preference 292
enlightened understanding 93–94, 106 Facebook 90, 100, 102, 109n37, 256,
Environmental Protection Agency 120 263
epistemically corrupt 242 fact-checkers 179, 183
epistemic arrogance 203, 205 fact-checking 183, 184
epistemic authorities 7, 8, 12, 73–77, fact polarisation 104–105
79–82, 83–84 factual beliefs 104
epistemic autonomy 75–77, 82–84 “faith in science” scales 180
epistemic bubbles 33–34, 41–44, 47, Fakas, J. 93, 94; Post-Truth,
85n2 Fake News and Democracy 92
epistemic capture 146–148 fake news 295, 296
epistemic circumstances 72–74 fallibilism 108n22
epistemic colonization 242–243; Fallis, D. 97, 98
argument from 241–247 false narrative 98, 108n31
epistemic community 195–208; Fanon, F. 242, 243
civility approaches to public floors as procedural elements 261
discourse 201; education and skill Foot, P. 231n27
development 206–208; epistemic foot voting 288, 302–305
agency 199–201; epistemic formalist approaches 252
exclusion 196–198; listening framing biases 171
199–201, 206–208; listening Freire, P. 207
obligations 204–205; obligations Fricker, M. 141; Epistemic Injustice:
to listen 204; polarization 196–198; Power and the Ethics of Knowing 4
stupidification 196–198; virtue of Friedman, J. 148n1
reciprocity 204–205 The Function of Cynicism at the
epistemic corruption 242–247 Present Time (Small) 153
epistemic crisis 176–177, 195, 199, 202, funding political campaigns 254–256
204–205, 208
epistemic democracy: and informal Galston, W. 63
political sphere 251–253 Gaus, G. 142
epistemic estrangement 198 General Psychopathology (Jaspers)
epistemic friction 164, 166 225–226
Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Gigone, D. 41
Ethics of Knowing (Fricker) 4 Gilbert, M. 201
epistemic insouciance 58, 159 Gilens, M. 147, 255
epistemic powers of democracy 136, glorious victories 57
141, 143–146 Gluck, J. 56, 65
epistemic reliability 136, 137–143 GMO foods 22
epistemology see specific types Goldfarb, J.: The Cynical Society 152
320 Index
Goldman, A. I. 4
Goodin, R. E. 40
Goodwin, M. J. 130n15
Gordon, L. 242, 243
Gove, M. 61
government strategy 127
Great Paradox 215–217, 218, 226–227,
229
group polarization 284n7
Gunn, H. K. 209n2
Gunther, R. 109n42
Haider-Markel, D. P. 172
Haidt, J. 175
halo effect 63
Handbook of Political Epistemology
(de Ridder and Hannon) 5
Hannon, M. 52, 224, 230n12;
Handbook of Political Epistemology
5 160–163, 165
Hastie, R. 41
Haus, D. E. 209n10
Hayek, F. 238–239, 244, 294
Hayekian individualism 245
Heldke, L. 197
Herbart, J. F. 207
heuristics 56–59
hindsight bias 171
Hochschild, A. R. 120–124, 126, 128,
216–217, 221, 230n16; Strangers in
Their Own Land 215
homogenization 277–278, 280
Hong, L. 17–25, 30n6–7
Hong-Page theorem 18–19, 22–24, 29,
47, 140
hooks, bell 207
Howell, G. 264n4
How Propaganda Works
(Stanley) 222
ideological belief system 37
ideological distance 275
ideological monoculture 185–186;
scientific problem of 180–184
illiberal democracy 94, 120
illocutionary silencing 208n1
increasing disagreements 103
independence requirement:
Condorcet’s Jury Theorem (CJT)
40–44; hypothetical affairs 34;
obstacle to 35
independent dependence 84
individually epistemically vicious 136,
138, 140
individual understanding 216
Individual Virtue Approach
(IVA) 135–148; epistemic
capture and 146–148; epistemic
powers of democracy 143–146;
epistemic reliability 137–143;
institutional epistemology 137–143;
representative electoral
democracy (RED) 143–146;
theorists 149n2
informal political sphere and
epistemic democracy 251–253
Information Disorder: The Essential
Glossary (Wardle) 97
information technology 90
informed citizens 1, 272
inner censor 207
institutional bias 242–243
institutional cynicism 153, 154,
institutional epistemology (IE) 135,
137–143
institutional ethoi 159, 160
intellectual autonomy 74–76
intellectual humility 75, 196, 203
intensification modes of corruption
157
Internet Research Agency 100
inter-partisan marriage 284n4
issue a mandate 99
Ivaldi, G. 130n2
Jaspers, K. 228–229; General
Psychopathology 225–226
Jaworski, P. 157
Jones, P. E. 172
Joslyn, M. R. 172
Jury Theorem 144
Kahan, D. M. 28, 104, 105, 130n12,
180
Kahneman, D. 56, 57
Kant, I. 76
Kanter, D. L. 164
Kavanagh, J. 103, 104, 109n46
Keane, J. 95, 96, 108n23
Keeter, S. 34, 37, 39, 99
Kelly, T. 241
Kidd, I. J. 3, 203, 248n13
Klein, E. 274
Know-It-All Society (Lynch) 204
knowledge resistant 105
Krause, S. 230n14, 230n19
Kuklinsky, J. H. 37, 39
 Index 321
Landemore, H. 18, 104 motivated reasoning 28–29, 105,
learning problems 139–143, 149n9 110n52, 122, 130n12, 295
Leave campaign 109n35 MS-13 27–28
leave supporters 117, 122, 130n11 Mueller, R. 100
Leave voters 121, 124, 125 Muslim: discrimination against 63;
left-leaning individuals 123 refugees/migrants 54, 57, 61, 63;
Le Pen, M. 55 ruler 57
Levy, N. 138 myside bias 56, 59–60, 170–186;
liberal democracy 93 academia 180–184; adversarial
liberal epistemic position 258 collaboration 185–186; doubling
liberalism 237–239 down 180–184; empirically strange
Lin, D. Y. 176 bias 171–173; epistemic crisis in
listening 199–201; active 10, 221; universities 176–177; ideological
competencies 10, 195; failures 196; monoculture 185–186; memetics
obligations 204–205 174–175; normative complications
Locke, J. 76 173–174; properties 176–177;
Lodge, M. 38 psychology’s self-correction
looking good 159 problem 177–180; restoring
Lynch, M. P. 203; Know-It-All Society epistemic legitimacy to social
204 sciences 184–185; scientific problem
of ideological monoculture 180–
Macron, E. 91, 92, 94, 107n10, 184; theoretical alternative 174–175
296 Myside bias (Stanovich) 59
Maduro, N. 65
Maldonado-Torres, N. 242 Nelson 44
manipulation 66, 98, 100, 158, 302 neologism 94
Marlin, R. 98–99 New Diversity Theory 136, 142
Mason, L. 115 New York Times 106, 178, 183
McBrayer, J. P. 209n4 Nguyen, C. 34, 41
McGrath, S. 241 Nietzsche, F. 236–237
media bias 179 Nietzschean approach 237
Medina, J. 154, 161, 164 nonaccidental feature of
memetics 174–175 disinformation 97; see also
Mercer, R. 109n37 disinformation
Mercier, H. 58 non-Nordic 209n10
meta-narratives 102 normative complications 173–174
Meyerson, D. 230n23 normative diversity 141, 149n4
Mignolo, W. 242 Northern League 116, 117
Mill, J. S. 36, 52, 141, 265n14, 291 Nussbaum, M. 230n13
miracle of aggregation 290
Mirvis, P. H. 164 objectivism 108n27
miserliness: cognitive 56–67; social objectivity of values 108n27
epistemic 67–68 Ocasio-Cortez, A. 161
miserly processing 58 Orban, V. 51, 68, 94
misinformation: controlling the Orwell, G. 234
flow of 295–297; see also ostracization 197
information Ostrom, E. 138
misleading information 97, 98 our-side bias 59–60, 62, 68
models of democracy 144; see also outcome bias 171
democracy outlier bias 173, 176
Montaigne, M. de. 238, 244 outlook 95, 115–119, 121, 123, 127, 129,
moral damage 154, 155, 156, 157, 153, 161, 164, 220, 221
163–166 overconfidence bias 171
morally inferior 161 Oxford English Dictionary 91
322 Index
Page, B. I. 147, 255
Page, S. 17–25, 30n6–7, 30n12
Palifka, B. 157
participatory democracy 107n11
Payne, B. K. 240
Pennycook, G. 105
personal understanding 216
Peyton, B. 37, 39
philosophy: analytic 5, 52;
applied 53; critical thinking 74;
engaged 68; political 48n1, 52;
professors 71
Plato 5, 52, 76
political belief system 37
political campaigns: funding of
254–256
political disagreements 104
political enemies 270–284; democrat’s
dilemma 271–274; managing belief
polarization 281–284; polarization
dynamic 270, 274–281
political epistemology 5, 52–53
political equality 93
political ignorance 287–305; problem
of 288–290; top-down approaches
290–297
political inequalities 257–260
political influence 55, 92, 250–263,
264n5, 265n14, 266n17
politically motivated reasoning 28,
105
political polarization 7, 10, 44, 172,
224, 254, 275
political resentment 115–130; cruel
hopes 125–128; good hopes
128–130; magic hopes 125–128;
paradox of 120–122; polarization
116–120; queue jumping 123–125;
wilful hopes 125–128
political skepticism 233–234,
247n6
politics 225–229; of cynicism 161; of
hope 161
popular government 92, 93, 94
popular sovereignty 26, 29, 54, 62
populism 51–68, 115, 120, 129, 130n2,
131n18; cognitive miserliness 56–67;
populist threat to democracy
54–56; social epistemic miserliness
67–68
postmodern epistemology 76–79
Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy
(Farkas and Schou) 92
preemptive evidencing 43
Problem-Solving a Tournament
Thesis (PT) 137
procedural reform 261–263
Pronin, E. 176, 240
propagation modes of corruption 157;
see also corrupting/corruption
psychology’s self-correction problem
177–180
Public Discourse in America
(Steinberg) 202
public opinion: influencing 253–254
racism 118, 127, 177–178, 243; symbolic
185, 186; systemic 147
radicalization 52, 61, 67, 68
Rand, D. G. 105
Rapacioli, P. 109n43
“rapefugees” 63
rational irrationality 289, 293
rationally ignorant/ce 63, 288–289,
290, 301–302
Rawls, J. 52, 251, 259, 263, 266n15,
266n21
reasonable criticism 282
reconquest of Spain 57
reform see procedural reform
refugees, Muslim 54, 57, 61, 63
remain supporters 130n11
representative democracy 32, 48n2;
see also democracy
representative electoral democracy
(RED) 136, 143–146, 147
Republicans 280
restoring epistemic legitimacy to
social sciences 184–185
Rice, S. 206
Rich, F. 230n16
Rich, M. D. 103, 104, 109n46
Rini, R. 241
Rittel, H. 139
Rodin, J. 202
Rorty, R. 247, 247n1
Rose-Ackerman, S. 157
Rosenfeld, S. 108n18
Ross, L. 176
rule of experts 293–295
Russia, role in 2016 American election
100
Samaržija, S. P. 58
Sartre, J.-P. 163
Scapp, R. 207
Schaff, M. 215–216, 229
Schmidt, K. 240

Schou, J. 93, 94; Post-Truth, Fake
News and Democracy 92
Schwartz, S. H. 131n21
science skepticism 183
science trust 180
Scruton, R. 161
self-correction problem 177–180
sensemaking 215; empathy and
217–221
sexism 118, 127, 243
sexual harassment 243
Shaw, T. 236–237
Simas, E. N. 172
Simple Governance Thesis (SG) 137
simple reliability 138, 140, 141, 146
sincerity requirement 44–46
Singal, J. 186n6
skepticism: from disagreement 234–
237; political 233–234; science 183
Small, H. 166; The Function of
Cynicism at the Present Time 153
social dimension 75; of cognition
76–79
social dominance 182–183
social-epistemic agency 200
social epistemic miserliness 67–68
social epistemology 4, 70
social identity theory 116, 124, 125
social structure reform 263–264
Somin, I. 68
Soros, G. 51
sortition 301–302
Sosa, E. 3
Sperber, D. 58
Spiekermann, K. 40
spillover mechanisms 253–257
Sputnik 103
stabilization modes of corruption 157;
see also corrupting/corruption
Stanley, J. 230n19; How Propaganda
Works 222
Stanley, S. 152
Stanovich, K. 56, 58, 59
Steinberg, S. P.: Public Discourse in
America 202
stereotyping 59–60, 68, 128
Strangers in Their Own Land
(Hochschild) 215
strategies in learning governance
149n5
structural constraints 256–257
stupidification 195, 197
subsidiarity 147, 148
substantivist approaches 252
Index 323
Sullivan, E. 160
Sunstein, C. R. 44
Swedish Democrats 102
Swedish Populist Party 102
Swire-Thompson 44
symbolic racism 185, 186; see also
racism
systemic bias 241–242
systemic racism 147; see also racism
Taber, C. S. 38
Tajfel, H. 116
Talisse, R. B. 68, 205, 209n5;
Sustaining Democracy: What We
Owe to the Other Side 204
tame problems 137–138
Tanesini, A. 3, 203
Tappin, B. M. 105, 110n54
targeted political messaging 109n37
Tea Party 116, 120–125
Tesich, S. 107n5
theoretical alternative 174–175
threat of populism 54–56; see also
populism
Toplak, M. 179
Trump, D. 28, 32, 51, 54, 91, 92, 101,
107n37, 119, 135, 215–216, 218, 224,
287, 297
Trump administration 294
“trust in experts” measures 181
trusting experts 82–83
truth 85n1; and certainty 95; decay
103; as an objective property 96
truth-sensitivity 85n1
Tufekci, Z. 184
Turner, J. C. 116
Tversky, A. 57
undemocratic disinformation 94–97;
see also disinformation
understanding and explanation 225
unresponsive government 48n1
US Centers for Disease Control
(CDC) 294
US Federal Reserve Board 294
values: beliefs and 38; customs and
120; epistemic and 3, 72, 76, 85n1;
ethical and moral 103; liberal 129;
progressive and conservative 46;
political 6, 36, 48n2; voters 26
Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem)
107n1, 107n15
Vice, S. 161, 164, 165, 166
324 Index
vice epistemology 3, 4, 53 Webster 44
Vices of the Mind: From the West, R. 171
Intellectual to the Political Whitcomb, D. 203
(Cassam) 3 wicked problems 139, 142, 143
virtue epistemology 3, 4, 53, 70, 85n1 widespread polarization 275, 276
Virtues of the Mind (Zagzebski) 3 Wittgenstein 42, 243
voter irrationality 289, 297, 302 Wolff, J. 52–53, 68
Vuković, V. 45
xenophobia 118, 127
Wagnsson, C. 103
Waks, L. J. 207 Zagzebski, L. 80; Virtues of the
Wardle, C. 108n28; Information Mind 3
Disorder: The Essential Glossary 97 Zaller, J. R. 38
Washington Post 91 Zemmour, E. 57
Webber, M. 139 Zubčić, M.-L. 150n10