The epistemic promise of democracy and the myth of epistemic democracy

To citizens, democracy bears an epistemic promise: They expect that by taking collective decisions democratically, we can ensure that they are rational in the sense that we are less likely to regret them than decisions taken by other means. Democratic theorists have taken this promise seriously and tried to provide epistemic justifications of democracy, often drawing on Condorcet’s Jury Theorem (CJT). I argue that this strategy is flawed in three ways. First, political decisions are a matter of practical rather than theoretical reason. Second, even if aggregation does enhance the probability of decisions being rational or adequate, the mechanism is not transparent to most citizens and therefore no reason to endorse democracy. Third, arguments for democracy drawing on the CJT typically neglect the fact that modern democracy is representative and that representation is likely to result in specific aggregation problems. Even if the idea of epistemic democracy must therefore be viewed as a myth, we should try to understand when and how democracy can enable better decisions than other regimes. I argue that deliberative, not aggregative qualities of decision-making allow democracy to fulfil its epistemic promise. If we view democracy as the quest for justified, not "true” decisions, we can understand these as interactively constructed and not “discovered” by means of egalitarian discourses. Moreover, it becomes plausible for democratic practices to counteract specific aggregation problems associated with representation, such as the Ostrogorski paradox.