Abstract
This article presents two interlocking arguments for epistemic political egalitarianism. I argue, first, that coping with multidimensional social complexity requires the integration of expertise. This is the task of political parties as collective epistemic agents who transform abstract value judgments into sufficiently coherent and specific conceptions of justice for their society. Because parties thus severely lower the relevant threshold of comparison of political competence, citizens have reason to regard each other as epistemic equals. Drawing on the virulent “peer disagreement debate,” I then analyze the epistemic significance of political disagreement. I contend that citizens ought to pursue epistemic conciliation, an idea I contrast to the ideals of compromise and of consensus. Subsequently, I introduce insights from public choice theory and empirical findings which show that and why multi-party electoral competition coupled with equal rights to participation tends to produce conciliatory outcomes. We thus have reason to endorse political egalitarianism on epistemic grounds.
A defining feature of modern societies is their complexity. In the face of this social complexity, it seems hard to deny that some possess expert knowledge pertaining to the regulation of modern societies. Philosophers sometimes argue in favor of epistocracy on precisely these grounds. The primary aim of political procedures, they claim, is (or ought to be) to bring political competence to bear on their outcomes. And as J.S. Mill saw it, citizens aware of their intellectual inferiority ought to accept that the intellectually superior have a greater say in how the business of government is conducted. He states accordingly, “No one but a fool . . . feels offended by the acknowledgment that there are others whose opinion . . . is entitled to a greater amount of consideration than his.” 1 Hence, experts ought to rule.
A common strategy to resist the siren calls of the argument from complexity is to shift the discussion to moral grounds. 2 Instead of taking this moral route, I shall argue that political egalitarianism can be defended on epistemic grounds. While there surely are experts in certain domains, the political expertise necessary to cope with social complexity is a broader concept which requires expert knowledge across a broad range of domains and the ability to integrate this knowledge into a conception of a just society. Furthermore, I shall argue that political parties constitute collective epistemic agents who help citizens translate an assemblage of abstract value judgments into a sufficiently coherent and sufficiently specific conception of justice and thus help them cope with the complexity of the task of advancing the justice of their society. Eventually, this argument will lead me to defend a weak form of epistemic political egalitarianism. It is the thesis that citizens ought to regard the judgments informing their votes as equally reliable given the relevant threshold of comparison defined by their epistemic role in the decision procedures of modern democracies. In a subsequent step, I specify the relevant threshold of comparison as the reliability of abstract value judgments and the identification of political parties which most cohere with them. With respect to these judgments, citizens ought to regard each other as possessing equal epistemic authority. Their equal epistemic authority underwrites their claim to be given an equal say in determining the outcome of multi-party electoral competitions, not coincidentally the shape which elections take in modern democracies.
On top of this conclusion, I construe an additional defense of epistemic political egalitarianism which builds on the claim that the outcomes of egalitarian decision-making of the form just described tend to be the most rational given the background condition of persistent political disagreement. The conciliatory conception of democracy I advocate builds on the claim that the epistemic conciliation between the conflicting judgments of citizens regarding each other as equal epistemic authorities is the rational reaction to their disagreement. The conception thus replaces the ideals of consensus and of political compromise with the ideal of epistemic conciliation. Taking recourse to public choice theory and empirical findings, I demonstrate in detail that and why multi-party electoral competition tends towards conciliatory outcomes.
The precise conception of social complexity and political expertise as well as the role of parties as collective epistemic agents and the notion of epistemic conciliation need to be flashed out in detail, of course—a task I take up presently.
Coping with Multidimensional Complexity and the Need for Integration
Prima facie, high levels of complexity make it plausible to call on experts to decide contentious matters. One might think of complex problems in physics here where laymen ought to defer to the opinions of experts and usually do so happily. Hence, prima facie the complexity of governing our shared social world seems to grant plausibility to the claim that experts ought to rule. One challenge in a defense of egalitarian decision procedures, then, is to explain how this link can be disrupted.
I believe that a first step in this direction is to note that the complexity of physics and the complexity of the social world are of a different kind. The difference is easy to spot: the rules and decisions governing our social world often require us to address a comprehensive mix of complex empirical questions, which might or might not have to do with physics. In addition, taking a political stance on how our shared social world ought to be governed requires us to address a comprehensive mix of complex normative questions. In contrast to the problems of physics, the complexity of governing our social world is multidimensional in this sense. Furthermore, the task of deciding what needs to be decided in politics requires a vast array of empirical knowledge drawn from all disciplines of empirical research. 3 It is not enough that experts from various disciplines take rounds in deciding the common course of action; because public policy-making always affects various sectors of public policy, the task of governing requires procedures which integrate expertise from all areas.
As the above paragraph asserts the existence of empirical and normative expertise, one clarification regarding the possibility of normative expertise seems to be in order. As some philosophers, most notably John Rawls, have argued, “We do not, in actual practice, hand over the determination of right and wrong to any other agency whatsoever.” 4 There are others, however, who find it “very difficult to deny [that] some (relatively few) people know [the relevant] normative standards better than others.” 5 We find similar stand-offs in the history of philosophy, such as between Millean and Rousseauian conceptions of the epistemic authority of citizens. Whereas Rousseau argues that if the relevant social conditions are met, “the common good is everywhere fully evident and requires only good sense to be perceived,” 6 John Stuart Mill claims that the educated are more likely to engage with matters of public concern and to thus exercise and develop their sense of justice. Hence, conveniently for Mill’s elitist project, empirical expertise, or the superior intellects’ ability to acquire it, and normative expertise in the sense of having a better developed sense of justice are positively correlated. 7 One way of spelling out normative expertise in the Millean sense is the claim that some fare better than others at the task of integrating normative demands drawn from a wide range of moral considerations into a sufficiently comprehensive conception of justice fit for modern society. If we suppose that this kind of normative expertise might exist in society, the argument for epistemic political egalitarianism, which I develop in subsequent sections, is pertinent. To advance an epistemic argument for the equal epistemic authority of citizens does in no way contradict the idea that there might also be a moral argument against granting some members of society the status of moral experts, of course. If we are already convinced that with respect to abstract value judgments, citizens ought to be treated as possessing equal epistemic authority, so much the better for the argument I advance in this article.
Its multidimensionality and the need for integration are important facts about the complexity characterizing the task of governing modern societies when it comes to the argument for democratic institutions and egalitarian decision procedures. Correspondingly, we ought not to conceive political expertise as analogous to the competence of scientist or experts in a specific domain. Political expertise is a much broader concept than scientific expertise. Crucially, in complex modern societies, political expertise is no longer an attribute of individuals who occupy a special role in the decision process but of collective epistemic agents. Focusing on political parties, I shall lay out shortly how they aptly deal with multidimensional complexity and the task of integrating expert knowledge in various domains. I shall also explain how these institutions link to egalitarian decision-making.
The Fundamental Importance of Political Parties for Modern Democracy
Generally speaking, political parties have received and still largely receive a stepmotherly treatment from the side of political philosophy. Furthermore, even when philosophers have discussed parties more prominently, the latter were usually presented in an unfavorable light. 8 Hence, to the extent that they are discussed at all, political parties have a notoriously bad reputation in political philosophy. With few exceptions, the emphasis has been on parties as representatives of private interests which stand opposed to the common interest of the community. As parts pitted against the whole, political parties often appeared under the heading of “factions.” Thus defines Thomas Madison a faction as “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” 9 In his view, parties (or factions) are the necessary evil of politics that we can only hope to neutralize by means of institutional design but which we can never eradicate completely. 10 One alternative to viewing political parties as factions of private interests pinned against the common interest of all is to conceive them more akin to Edmund famous definition as “a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest upon some particular principle in which they all agreed.” 11 In this view, citizens can disagree about their conception of the common good and the vision of a just society. It is the role of parties to organize and channel this conflict of opinion. The aim of this section is to replace the negative picture of political parties which continues to populate the mainstream of political philosophy with a vision of democracy which sees them as legitimate institutions forming an integral and indeed fundamental part of democracy. 12
Unlike most philosophers, political scientists on the other hand have long recognized the importance of political parties for modern representative democracies. In fact, they have done so from the days when political science first emerged as an academic discipline. Subsequently, they have a long tradition of thoroughly analyzing their role in the democratic process. The fact that since the end of the Second World War, an approximate 11,500 academic publications have appeared on the subject in Western Europe alone bears witness to this. 13 As Nancy Rosenblum aptly puts it in her important contribution on the subject, “If parties are the orphans of political philosophy, they are the darlings of political science.” 14
And rightly so! The analysis of both government and parliament, each one of them core democratic institutions of the democratic system of government, and their relationship is overshadowed by the fundamental importance of political parties as “both of these institutions, like nearly every other aspect of political life, are dominated by political parties.” 15 Among the manifold results of this engagement with political parties is the insight that they perform many important functions such as the mobilization of the electorate, the recruitment of political personnel, and the articulation and aggregation of interests. 16 In addition, they fulfill a crucial role in the process of representation as “the political party is the primary vehicle ensuring that citizen preferences are reflected in government policy.” 17 Furthermore, they are important with respect to a basic element of democracy, namely, the accountability of decision makers to the electorate. After all, it is “political parties [who] have to rule and take responsibility for their decision.” 18 Some political scientists even maintain, “the only way collective responsibility has ever existed, and can exist given our institutions, is through the agency of the political party.” 19
Political Parties as Collective Epistemic Agents and Carriers of Political Expertise
With regard to the argument I am advancing in support of egalitarian decision procedures, additional functions of political parties enter the limelight. Political parties help citizens to cope with the multidimensional complexity of the task of advancing the justice of modern societies. They do so by reducing the complexity along the normative and the epistemic dimension. Let us first turn to the former.
The task of advancing the justice of society demands of citizens that they order a broad range of normative principles and considerations in such a way that the result is a more or less encompassing and coherent vision of a just society. This, at least, is the presupposition of many civic conceptions of democracy advocating that citizens engage in a deliberate effort to arrive at an informed judgment of what decisions advance the justice of their society.
Looked at from a certain angle, however, the idea that we could order our perceived normative commitments in a consistent set with the help of a few basic principles and considered judgments arrived at in reflective equilibrium or through some other method seems preposterous. What is more likely is that no matter how much we try, we end up juggling various demands and, if we are lucky, arrive at a moral view of the world that is somewhat consistent but that leaves many questions, including the relative ordering of many of these demands and the way they relate to each other, unanswered. It actually seems that the more we reflect on justice, the more difficult it becomes to arrive at a clean-cut picture of what justice requires of us.
This task has not always seemed so complex. Philosophy, scientific progress, and emancipatory social movements all have contributed to a greatly enlarged notion of justice and the common good. We have broadened the reach of our reflections about the demands of justice to include the interest of those who have been neglected locally as well as of those who have been neglected globally, and of the members of future generations. If there is progress in political philosophy, a big part of it is the insight that justice is an ideal which pertains to many more issues than previous generations have thought and that we developed a much deeper understanding of our moral commitments and what they entail. While these developments should be hailed as progress, they surely do not make it easier to conceive a just world. We now see ourselves confronted with a plethora of moral demands and duties, some of which we already acknowledge, other which are made by others or on their behalf and which, at the very least, we take to deserve very careful scrutiny. This increased complexity of our moral deliberations imposes severe cognitive burdens on individual citizens, including those who spend a lifetime reflecting on these issues.
Political parties offer procedural and institutional mechanisms which significantly ease these cognitive burdens. Within political party structures, the epistemic labor is done by many; members work together in a collective process to produce party programs that reflect and give shape to the core normative commitments of their supporters. Party programs furthermore represent an attempt to produce a consistent ordering of these core commitments and a corresponding moral conception of society which is sufficiently coherent to count as a conception of justice and not just an assemblage of moral commitments. Given the normative complexity of advancing the justice of modern societies, political parties are necessary institutions of collective moral deliberation with the aim of arriving at a sufficiently coherent conception of justice.
The civic conception of democracy which I propose conceives party ideologies as based on certain fundamental values which their supporters endorse. They represent an attempt to structure these value judgments in a way that allows for a formulation of a coherent vision of a just society, thus addressing the political world in its comprehensiveness. Also, empirically, party ideology has proven a vital attribute of political parties. As Klaus von Beyme noted, “Over the longer term only parties based on an ideology have succeeded in establishing themselves.” 20 The formulation of party ideologies and programs is the result of their members’ collective effort of reasoned engagement with the social world.
The second dimension of complexity is the complexity of empirical knowledge relevant to the task of governing modern societies. Here, political parties prove vital instruments of collective reasoning as well. No doubt, there are individuals who are experts with regard to one or more of the fields of empirical research in the catalogue of modern sciences and academic disciplines. However, even if of direct relevance to the task of governing, such expertise does not underwrite a claim to political expertise (1) because it neglects the normative dimension of this task and (2) due to its immense complexity, it is never encompassing enough to make anyone an expert in this task tout court. Individual epistemic agents fail at the task of integrating expertise drawn from many areas. 21 A far superior way of generating political expertise is through the procedural mechanisms of political parties. Political parties have at their disposal experts in different disciplines who can formulate policy proposals for certain policy areas—be it health care, education, or tax systems. They thus harvest the diverse cognitive resources of a pluralistic society. It has long been argued, of course, that the fact that cognitive resources and local knowledge are dispersed among the members of society is an argument to let all members participate in decision making. 22 Participation is then most plausibly spelled out in terms of equal access to deliberative arenas. 23 In the context of the political party model of democracy, “the wisdom of the multitude” becomes an argument for a pluralistic political landscape dominated by political parties and for open-to-all intra-party deliberation among their pluralistic base. Crucially, intra-party deliberation structures deliberation in a way that is conducive to the task of integration outlined above. Unfortunately, theorists of democracy, and especially those of deliberative democracy, have neglected intra-party deliberation, just as the crucial role of political parties more generally, and left behind an academic void when it comes to assessing its importance in a systematic manner. 24
Political parties furthermore organize their decision process in layers, which serves to ensure the integration of policy proposals in line with a sufficiently coherent conception of justice. They are vital for the task of integrating expert knowledge from different domains and incorporating this knowledge into an active policy agenda in tune with a sufficiently coherent conception of justice. By doing so, they also produce a sufficiently specific conception of justice apt for the task of governing modern societies.
In sum, political parties are unique in the institutional landscape of modern democracy because of their unique ability to translate the abstract value judgments of citizens into party ideologies and subsequently into policy programs. This is a crucial step in obtaining not only a sufficiently coherent but also a sufficiently specific vision of a just society.
25
Political scientists have advanced the point before, pointing out that
to offer the electorate a choice, they have to package seemingly disparate claims into more of less coherent bundles. In effect, they create predetermined bargains. When multiple parties present the voters with different bundles of issues and solutions, voters have a choice. They choose from within a more or less crystallized, active policy agenda.
26
In all this, parties play the role of collective epistemic agents, that is, an entity capable of rational belief formation, to whom a range of beliefs is attributed, and which is made up of individual epistemic agents who individually do not hold all of the beliefs attributed to the collective agent but do so only collectively.
27
In modern democracies, such collective epistemic agents, not individuals, are the bearers of superior political expertise:
Within the process of an increase of complexity in politics, “competence” seems to emigrate from the individual and their ability, skill, and charisma and to take on the character of impersonal, efficient task fulfillment, protection of interests, and provision of services according to the functionality of a huge organizational, administrative, and structuring apparatus. The fact that leading politicians are nowadays as a matter of course identified in public as the representatives and “spokesmen” of their respective parties mirrors the relation of dependence.
28
This is part of the answer why we ought to reject epistocracy conceived as the rule of a few wise individuals even though the task of governing modern societies is immensely complex. It is precisely because it is so immensely complex that a few wise individuals ought not to be trusted to execute it with the skills it requires. This conclusion refutes a version of the argument for epistocracy. 29 However, the argument for egalitarian decision procedures is not yet complete.
Before further elaborating the argument, I should offer a more thorough defense of the claim that in the institutional landscape of modern democracy, parties are in a unique position to translate the abstract value judgments of citizens into a sufficiently coherent and sufficiently specific conception of justice. The claim has to be defended with respect to other institutional and non-institutional mechanisms through which citizens exercise their political agency.
First, those deliberative democrats who continue to neglect the role of political parties might simply invoke the epistemic benefits of public deliberation among the citizenry at large. It is certainly true that public deliberation increases the political competence of individuals with respect to the knowledge relevant to the issues at stake and with respect to their moral agency more generally. 30 Furthermore, deliberation in “mini-publics” can increase what Niemeyer calls the intersubjective consistency of participants, that is, it can help to establish “an overall correlation between subjectivity and preferences relationship across the whole range of discourse elements and preferences.” 31 Yet, as is the case in the quoted article, this only holds for preferences concerning isolated issues. It might of course also be true more generally. However, it seems fair to regard the claim that it might do so for all (potential) preferences regarding all (potential) issues as a gross overestimation of the capacities of collective public deliberation and individual cognitive abilities.
Other methods of democratic decision-making such as direct democracy and collective agency below the level of that of political parties face similar problems as do the deliberative innovations of creating various “mini-publics” and deliberative fora. The principal reason why they cannot replace political parties and take over their fundamental role as collective epistemic agents is that they do not address the political world in its comprehensiveness. They decide one issue at a time without the coherence of decision making required for a specific conception of justice to shape the social world. Furthermore, they lack the interest and the cognitive resources of doing so. 32 As I have argued above, even if an individual or a small group were to take the reins for a sustained period of time, they could not overcome the obstacles posed by the complexity of the task of advancing the justice of society. In modern democracy as we know it and as theorists of democracy envision it, political parties are the only (collective) epistemic agents up to the task. They ease the cognitive burdens of individuals when charged with producing a sufficiently coherent and sufficiently specific conception of a just society. The public deliberation of individuals lacks the structure of debates in political parties whose members aim collectively at producing a shared vision of a just society and do so with the procedural apparatus of votes and specialized discussion groups who later bring their insights together in a multi-layered process of integration. In this way, parties stabilize public debate and “help to provide structure to an otherwise unstable policy-making process.” 33 In all of this, political parties are also distinct from interest groups and social movements which represent particular interests or opinions which are detached from an encompassing conception of a just society.
Recently, philosophers have brought up-to-date and advertised a systemic approach to deliberative democracy which lay dormant in the deliberative tradition. 34 Roughly put, the idea is that an institutional differentiation characterizes modern democracies which make it possible for other modes of decision-making and agency to be combined with public deliberation in various fora without the democratic system losing its overall “deliberative” character. Some of the reasons why these theorists endorse this systemic approach are decidedly epistemic: they allude to “the many factual contingencies and competing normative requirements” and the necessity of collective action in politics, which requires “the alignments of will” that make a division of epistemic labor between various agents necessary. 35 This epistemic argument also justifies partisanship and information heuristics entering the picture. 36 Furthermore, proponents of this approach also explicitly name political parties as a node in the deliberative system. 37 Parties are also given a role in the democratization of expertise and as trusted proxies signaling to citizens that the authority granted to experts is justified. 38
The systemic approach to deliberative democracy, then, makes the underlying orientation towards deliberation and deliberative standards of legitimacy of a normative conception of democracy compatible with the role of political parties in the decision-making process. This indicates another stage in the coming of age of deliberative democracy and is to be applauded. 39 However, it names political parties in the same breath as many other institutions which together from a deliberative system. At no point is the fundamental role of political parties which singles them out and makes them unique in the institutional landscape of modern democracy acknowledged. One might guess that this is a last residue of aversion to partisanship and institutions that are not part of the wave of deliberative innovations that came out of the deliberative turn in political philosophy.
Why Egalitarian Decision Procedures?
Crucial to my argument for epistemic political egalitarianism is the thesis I have mentioned in the introduction to this article. It is the claim that citizens ought to regard the judgments informing their votes as equally reliable given the relevant threshold of comparison defined by their epistemic role in the decision procedures of modern democracies.
What supports this claim? Modern democracies are not direct but representative democracies (although direct democratic elements are present to varying degrees, of course). And before representatives get to vote in legislative assemblies, they have to be elected. However, citizens in modern representative democracies do not vote for their representatives in a direct manner; instead, they cast their vote for a political party.
40
And it is the victorious political party or multi-party coalitions that will make up the government and legislate and execute specific policies.
41
This is a crucial—and often neglected—aspect of modern democracy. Indeed, as has been pointed out,
Parties alone operate in elections as well as in governments. They are consequently in a unique position to transform broad popular preferences into specific actions, thus providing the main channel through which democratic States can be made responsive (and responsible) to their citizens. Studying the way parties do this is just as essential as the analysis of their electoral strategies for an understanding of democratic processes. It is also vital to the justification of parliamentary democracy against other types of political systems.
42
Above, I have identified political parties as collective epistemic agents who are uniquely suited to help us cope with multidimensional complexity and the need for integration. Political parties as collective epistemic agents, the argument went, are the primary carriers of political expertise in modern democracies. It is a crucial fact about modern democracies and their electoral systems, which put political parties at the center of electoral competition, that this expertise is available to every voter to an equal extent. Casting a vote for a party turns the judgment of citizens informing their vote from a rather abstract value judgment into a judgment enriched with the political expertise of political parties. The latter integrate normative and a vast array of technical expertise and translate the abstract value judgment of voters into specific policy proposals in tune with a sufficiently coherent conception of justice. Because each citizen casts his or her vote for a party, all citizens benefit from their political expertise to an equal extent. Political parties thus constitute “epistemic enrichment facilities” in the political process.
By easing the cognitive burdens of citizens in this way, political parties lower the relevant threshold for the comparison of the epistemic worth of the citizens’ political judgments. Because parties take over a significant part of the epistemic labor of arriving at informed judgments about how to advance the justice of society, the epistemic task of citizens as voters is a more modest one than proponents of epistocracy suppose. Citizens as voters do not individually have to accomplish the task of integrating multidimensional expertise into a sufficiently coherent and sufficiently specific conception of justice detailing the public policies that give effect to a vision of a just society. Instead, they can rely on political parties as collective epistemic agents to do a substantive part of this work for them. It is important to note, however, that we should not follow the bulk of political scientists in conceiving parties and citizens as separate entities. More to the point and more befitting of a broadly deliberative theory of political parties, their relationship is “an ongoing process of mutual constitution.” 43
What then specifies the epistemic task of citizens as voters in modern democracies, and what is the relevant threshold of comparison for the reliability of their judgments vis-à-vis those of other citizens? In modern democracies, voters do not necessarily have to be aware of all the many details of the policy alternatives they face in their electoral choice. Often, it is enough that they trust the political party they identify with on the more abstract level of party ideology to work out a set of policy proposals consistent with it. It is the business of parties to incorporate expert knowledge and integrate various public policy proposals and proposals for institutional reform in a way that these can be regarded as expressions of a sufficiently coherent moral outlook on the shared social world of citizens. As Alan Ware notes,
Ideologies provide a kind of guide to the “policy world” that enables voters to make more informed voting decisions than they would otherwise; parties have an incentive to develop an ideology because the simplified understandings of the political world that ideologies provide will assist voters in making their decisions.
44
The task of citizens as voters in modern democracies is to arrive at an informed judgment about the platform of which political party best corresponds to their abstract value judgments regarding the justice of their society. 45 It is with respect to this task and with respect to their abstract value judgments that citizens ought to count as equally reliable.
To understand why this is a reasonable suggestion might require a shift of perspective on the question. Instead of asking, do some people know better than others what values ought to determine our common course of action?, we should ask, are some people (epistemically) more justified than others to claim special epistemic authority on this questing? While we certainly could give an affirmative answer to the first question, it is easy to point to reasons why we ought to negate the second.
In cases of democratic disagreement, epistemic humility is called for given the complexity of the issues at hand and the cognitive limitations of individual reasoners in decentered public deliberation. What is more, citizens face persistent disagreement with persons whom they generally accept as equally competent moral judges. It would be irrational not to experience this persistent disagreement on particular issues as deeply unsettling and not to let it undermine the confidence they have in their political judgments.
I thus believe that citizens as voters and given the relevant threshold of comparison consequently ought to regard each other as equal epistemic authorities regarding the issues at stake in decision making. Consequently, we ought to reject the inference from complexity to epistemic political elitism.
From Party Democracy to Conciliatory Democracy
I now want to address the question of how citizens who regard each other as equal epistemic authorities ought to react to their political disagreements and why parties are part of the answer to this question. The discussion of these questions will build up to the second argument for epistemic political egalitarianism I present in this article.
The question of how non-political disagreements between epistemically symmetrical reasoners, also called “epistemic peers,” ought to be treated has been at the center of a virulent debate among contemporary epistemologists. Roughly speaking, epistemic peers are individuals who regard each other as equally likely to get the answer to a given question right. As it happens to be the case in a debate, there are various views on offer. At the extremes, we find The Right Reasons view (RR) and the Equal Weight view (EW). RR argues that awareness of disagreement with a peer should not influence our confidence in our judgments. As the name indicates, it holds that the sole criterion for the rationality of our judgment is that we took the right reasons into account. 46 EW, on the other hand, argues that we should view our peer as an equally reliable indicator of what the right answer to the issue at hand might be. Hence, we should assign their judgment equal weight. 47 In instances of peer disagreement, EW takes this to imply that we should respond in a conciliatory fashion. The idea of epistemic conciliation is that we should seek epistemic middle ground with our opponent. On some issues, this might lead us to adopt an agnostic stance. In other cases, the conciliatory response will take a different shape. It is important to emphasize that epistemic conciliation is the rational response to peer disagreement according to EW. Hence, rational agents willingly adopt the conciliatory judgment; in other words, they respect the judgment of others in the sense that they accord it equal weight and therefore defer to a conciliatory position.
Due to the limited reach of this paper, I cannot lay out the debate in full detail. In what follows, I proceed on the assumption that EW gets the answer right in core cases of peer disagreement, although we would need to develop a dynamic model of epistemic peerhood to accomodate the dynamic nature of peerhood ascriptions in the face of evolving dis-/agreement constellations. Hence, I believe that in many cases of political disagreement, at least in democratic or deliberative disagreements, citizens ought to pursue the epistemic conciliation of their judgments. Let us call the particular conception of democracy that emerges from this conclusion and other insights “conciliatory democracy.”
The advantages I see in EW over its rivals, especially RR, are that it adopts the first-person perspective in its assessment of the epistemic significance of peer disagreement. Take the following often-cited example:
RR asserts that you should stick to your guns; all that matters for the evaluation of your rationality is taking into account the right reasons, in this case your perception of which horse won the race, that is, your first-order evidence. If you respond correctly to the evidence at hand (and the evidence is reliable), it follows that the person disagreeing with you takes into account the wrong reasons, their in this case unreliable perception. The point adherents of RR now make is that it would be irrational to allow these wrong reasons to soil your otherwise perfectly reliable belief formation, and they have a point: from the third-person perspective, it seems that we should not reward an epistemic agent for so deviating from the path of rationality.
However, it is precisely the fact that this third-person perspective is not available to rational agents in the world that explains why we should indeed take the disagreement itself into account as higher-order evidence, evidence about the reliability of your first-order evidence, in this case your perception. If you adequately respond to this new evidence, EVW has it, you will no longer see your perception as a reliable guide to the truth on the issue and consequently remain agnostic about the outcome of the horse race.
If we are firmly committed to assessing cases of peer disagreement from the first-person perspective, an epistemological principle comes into focus which has been dubbed “Independence.” Roughly, the principle states that downgrading your opponent is permissible only if your reason to do so is independent of your and their reasoning that let you to make your respective judgments. 49 The principle’s function is to shield the assessment of the epistemic significance of disagreement from the arbitrary downgrading of one’s opponent’s epistemic status. The simple fact that we disagree is not sufficient warrant to regard you as less reliable as I have regarded you before I learned of the disagreement. Only when we have reasons that are independent of the fact of disagreement and, it is crucial to note, that do not likewise apply to me, am I warranted to discount the epistemic significance of our disagreement. It deserves mention that the principle has come under fire from various sides in the virulent peer disagreement debate. 50 Again, I can merely assert at this point that the main objections can be fended off, a claim which I cannot substantiate further in this article. I therefore invite the reader to a charitable reading of my argument in this section, which allows me to proceed from this tenuous basis on the presumption that the EVW gets it right in core cases of peer disagreement and that epistemic conciliation is the rational reaction to many instances of peer disagreement.
However, this might still not be wholly satisfactory to everyone as I have not yet demonstrated that these insights apply to cases of moral disagreement. Philosophers sometimes argue that the epistemology of moral reasoning is in some fundamental ways different from theoretical reasoning. One example of such views is the idea that disagreement on contested moral issues is reasonable, meaning that (1) there are reasons which explain the fact of disagreement between reasonable persons who argue sincerely on the basis of their reasonable conceptions of the good and the right, and that (2) each party to the disagreement is entitled to their opinion without their confidence being shaken by the fact of such reasonable disagreement. This view is famously advocated by Rawls, who points to the burdens of judgment as the explanans for the fact of disagreement. 51 If we apply Independence to such reasonable disagreement, however, (2) becomes untenable for the simple reason that the burdens of judgment apply symmetrically to all parties in the disagreement. Hence, there is no independent reason, i.e. evidence that the opposing party in the disagreement is in a disadvantaged epistemic position relative to the other, which explains why we can discount the epistemic significance of disagreement. This holds even when there is a ready explanation for the fact of disagreement, and it does so because this explanation applies to all parties to the disagreement. Furthermore, I regard the Rawlsian insistence that we should “not argue that we should be hesitant and uncertain, much less skeptical, about our own beliefs” 52 as phenomenologically implausible. It is precisely the epistemically unsettling experience of encountering persistent moral disagreement with persons whom we regard as equally competent moral reasoners that often does, and I maintain should, shake our confidence in our normative beliefs. I thus proceed on the assumption that epistemic conciliation is a rational ideal that applies to disagreement in both theoretical and moral reasoning.
We can give shape to the idea of epistemic conciliation in moral reasoning by contrasting it with the idea of a (fair) compromise. Both ideas include the notion of moving two opposites towards each other along a scale until they eventually converge. However, the idea of a compromise indicates the weighing of preferences against each other in a conflict of interest, and it is part of the characteristic of a compromise that these original preferences survive the compromise intact. In contrast, the idea of epistemic conciliation denotes a doxastic response to a conflict of opinions that is not the product of moral or prudential reasoning but is a demand of rationality on reasoners, that is, of theoretical, not practical reason. In addition and because of this, the original judgments do not survive the epistemic conciliation.
The presupposition of a scale along which conciliation and compromise is possible limits the applicability of the ideas of epistemic conciliation and compromise, albeit not as much as one might suppose. When conflicts arise, they often confront us initially as of an “either/or” type, that is, as necessitating an exclusive choice between irreconcilable positions. It is only when we engage with them more profoundly and bring our experiences with past conflicts to bear on new ones that they appear as of a “more or less” type and compromise thus emerges as an additional option. This is one aspect of “the art of compromise.” And part of mastering this art relates to the ability to conceive scalar dimensions to conflicts which previously confronted us as a simple either/or question.
53
Epistemic conciliation requires very similar skills and it is part of the constructive function of public deliberation to conceive issues in a way that allows for them to be mapped on a scale along which compromise and conciliation are possible.
54
Thus says Alfred O. Hirschman,
I suspect, for example, that the category of either-or or nondivisible conflicts is essentially a convenient label for a vast array of new and unfamiliar problems having quite different degrees of manageability. These conflicts can only be properly mapped out as we experience them. . . . What is actually required to make progress with the novel problems that a society encounters on its road is political entrepreneurship, imagination, patience here, impatience there, and other varieties of virtù and fortuna.”
55
The aim of epistemic conciliation at the heart of the conciliatory conception of democracy furthermore replaces the notion of consensus at the center of much of contemporary democratic thought. Postulating a consensus among idealized reasoners in idealized circumstances as criterion of moral validity and political legitimacy is of little help when it comes to dealing with real-world disagreement among real-world reasoners, even when we allow for some idealizations such as their sincerity and level of information. 56 The structural feature of decenteredness that pertains to public deliberation in complex modern societies, the intrinsic entropy of reasoned debate, and the cognitive limitations of individual reasoners make disagreement the outcome of public deliberation about sufficiently complex issues even under ideal circumstances. The conciliatory conception of democracy takes this disagreement seriously and regards it not as a problem but as a resource for theorizing democracy.
Yet, how can these insights inform a conception of democracy, and how do they play out in the particular context of the party model of democracy? The key to an answer to this question lies in the dynamics of multi-party electoral competition and public choice theory.
Multi-party Electoral Competition and the Quest for Conciliatory Outcomes
At the roots of the discipline, we find Duncan Black’s Median Voter Theorem. The theorem states that in committee voting, majority rule tends to satisfy the preferences of the median voter, that is, the voter who has an equal number of voters on either side of his preference point in a one-dimensional space, because of their unique bargaining position. 57
In the epistemic framework I have advocated, we can thus conceive the median voter as the voter who endorses a judgment that expresses, or is close to, the conciliatory position between disagreeing peers. Consider the following example:
If these legislators act rationally to their disagreement and conciliate their judgments, what tax rate should they eventually settle on? The correct answer is a tax rate of 60%. This is the outcome they ought to reach if they give equal weight to each of their judgments. It is also the judgment of Legislator 3, who happens to be the median voter in the above example. As the Median Voter Theorem predicts, furthermore, it will also be the outcome of majoritarian voting in our imaginary committee. 58 This congruence between the ideal outcome after epistemic conciliation and the median voter’s judgment is an important first step in the argument for the conciliatory conception of democracy. If democratic institutions viewed in their real-world complexity can be shown to produce policies that correspond to the preferences of the median voter, and hence track conciliatory positions, then the argument for an epistemic political egalitarianism can get off the ground.
A theoretical clue that democracy indeed tracks conciliatory outcomes comes from Anthony Downs’s model of multi-party electoral competition, which predicts a similar centripetal dynamic in modern democracies which he also analyzes within a framework of a spatial model of policy preferences. Drawing on models prevalent in the discipline of economics, he analogizes the competition of political parties to Hotelling’s spatial model of open-market competition of private businesses for costumers. 59 Downs’s idea was that the leaders of political parties use their parties as vehicles for their goal of obtaining power. Hence, his definition of a political party reads, “a political party is a team of men seeking to control the governing apparatus by gaining office in a duly constituted election.” 60 Within the market/democracy analogy, they are the businessmen (and -women) who offer their product (the party program) to potential costumers (the voters) who then invest their resources (their votes) in the product of their choice. 61 With a few more assumptions, Downs then develops a very neat and slender theory of multi-party electoral competition which entails powerful predictions for the behavior of political parties. Crucially, both Black and Downs predict a convergence of political outcomes on median voter positions. Within the conception of democracy I am developing in this article, we can term such results “conciliatory outcomes,” that is, political outcomes which correspond to the epistemic conciliation of the divergent positions which constitute the input to the procedure.
It is important to understand, however, that the Downsian model of party competition is not only an expansion of Black’s Median Voter Theorem but builds on top of it a game-theoretic model. This model employs quite detailed assumptions about institutions such as electoral systems and the number of political parties as well as about the substantive motives of actors such as vote- or office-seeking party elites and their strategic interactions. 62 Furthermore, voters are assumed to be competent enough to identify the party which is closest to their preferences. This, they do with the help of the particular ideologies political parties proclaim to stand for. Party ideologies provide information shortcuts for voters who then do not have to be familiar with the details of policy making but can identify the party closest to their position in the issue space in a more coarse-grained manner. Thus, they minimize the costs of obtaining information for voters. 63
Based on these modest—though by no means unimpeachable—assumptions, Downs makes far-reaching predictions. Having in mind the example of the political system of the United States with its combination of single member district (SMD) elections and a two-party system, he predicted the convergence of party programs on the position of the median voter. The rationale behind this becomes obvious in Figure 1.
Two-party competition with centrist majority. 64
This model models a two-party competition for a maximum share of votes in a society where the majority of voters share a centrist ideology. Because there is no party to its left, the leaders of Party A can safely assume that everybody on that side will vote for their party. Reversely, the same holds for Party B. Hence, both parties have a motive to edge as closely as possible to the position of the other party. Because both parties share this motive, the predicted result is that they arrive at almost indistinguishable positions just to the right and just to the left of the median voter. In fact, they will be so close to each other that they effectively converge on the median voter’s position. Politics, in the words of Anthony Downs, loses its ideological impregnation and becomes Tweedledee-Tweedledum politics. 65
According to Downs, party competition in a society will have a different form, however, where the ideological distribution of voters is multi-modal or in an electoral system which aims at proportional representation (PR). Here, parties who abandon the fringes and focus exclusively on centrist voters will much sooner face competitors to their right and their left (Figure 2). Furthermore, he predicted that this constellation will foster the persistence of ideological positions among parties. As a system for electing government, PR is also for this reason often credited with a broader spectrum of options from which voters can choose relative to SMD systems with a unimodal ideological distribution.
Party competition with multi-model voter distribution. 66
As noted above, in the background of Downs’s elitist theory of democracy stand assumptions such as that voters only care to advance their selfish interests and party leaders sole worry is the attainment of profitable positions in government. These assumptions do not go down well with a civic conception of democracy which puts the advancement of justice at the center of political participation. If we ameliorate Downs’s assumptions and substitute the motivational premises with those of citizens striving to advance the common good of their societies and political party platforms to articulate sincerely held conceptions of justice - in other words, if we conceive political parties not exclusively as vote- or office-seeking but primarily as policy-seeking 67 - we obtain a more suitable model with very similar results. 68 Even in SMD systems, the convergence on median voter preferences should no longer be as pronounced on the level of party ideology since party members are not easily swayed to give up sincerely held beliefs for short-term political gain. Because producing conciliatory outcomes is what democracies should do, this stability could be a problem for the conciliatory conception.
What we observe in PR systems, however, is simply that the centripetal forces in politics appear more powerfully at a later stage, the stage of coalition formation, when the various parties struggle to find a winning coalition able to implement policies closest to their original positions. 69 The pressure towards epistemic conciliation kicks in when parties endorsing different visions of society have to agree on a common government program. 70
Taking coalition formation into account is enlightening for another reason. Even single party governments, which do not have to enter into complicated negotiations with other parties to convert their electoral success to access to power and the opportunity to shape public policy, are not exempt from the pressure to form coalitions. Only in their case, the pressure comes from the opposing factions within their own ranks. For this reason, “even singly-party majority governments are more accurately seen as being supported by parliamentary coalitions formed on the basis of bargaining between senior politicians—except in this case the bargaining takes place within rather than between parties.”
71
This idea can be generalized as it applies to all political parties, even those that are not in a position to form a government exclusively from their ranks. Every political party is a roof under which many individuals gather whose views and values are close enough for them to associate with each other yet so disparate that the emerging party ideology reflects lower-level epistemic conciliation of their judgments. Hence,
In a very real sense . . . the notion of any government as a coalition of diverse interests is fundamental to all political systems. In Britain (and in the United States), such coalition of interests are found for the most part inside political parties as a result of the distorting effects of the plurality electoral system. In most continental European countries, election results are translated more or less proportionally into parliamentary seat distributions, and so bargaining to form a government takes place both within and between political parties.
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The crucial point of this exposition of the dynamics of the decision-making process in modern democracies is this: democratic decision making in the complex institutional settings we find in modern democracies tends to produce results which correspond to conciliatory judgments on the issues at stake. While looked at individually, political compromises might not correspond to epistemically conciliatory judgments on the matter, if we adopt both a broad and a long-term perspective, this impression changes drastically. Over time, the political process in modern democracies produces outcomes which correspond to epistemic conciliation at a grand scale. 73 It is the epistemic conciliation of the different sufficiently coherent and sufficiently specific conceptions of justice propagated by political parties and in tune with the abstract value judgments of their supporters. Because citizens ought to regard each other as equal epistemic authorities regarding the judgments informing their votes, they ought to pursue the epistemic conciliation of their judgments. Because equal participation in multi-party electoral competition tends to track conciliatory outcomes, citizens thus have a reason to endorse political egalitarianism on epistemic grounds. This concludes my second argument for epistemic political egalitarianism.
Conclusion
I have begun this article with the observation that the complexity of the task of governing modern societies lends appeal to the ideal of epistocracy, the rule of experts. My attempt to counter the siren calls of the argument from complexity has led me to explore the nature of the kind of complexity citizens face when tasked with governing the social world. Given the normative aim of advancing the justice of society, this complexity acquires a multidimensionality that does not allow for a reductionist reading of political expertise as technical expertise. We thus became aware of the need for integration of the various strands of expertise into a coherent set of policies.
This is an immensely demanding task, I have further argued, for which the cognitive resources of individual epistemic agents do not suffice. As I have attempted to demonstrate, within the institutional landscape of modern democracy, political parties constitute themselves as collective epistemic agents uniquely capable of processing abstract value judgments and individual expertise in a way that renders sufficiently coherent and sufficiently specific conceptions of justice.
Given the fact that modern democracies are effectively characterized by multi-party competition and parties constitute “epistemic enrichment facilities” for the votes of individual citizens, the claim that citizens ought to view each other’s judgments as equally reliable gained plausibility. Their status as equal epistemic authorities in this regard is what makes a weak version of epistemic political egalitarianism a tenable position.
In a subsequent step, I have argued that it is rational for citizens regarding each other as equal epistemic authorities—or epistemic peers—to pursue the epistemic conciliation of their conflicting judgments. Because democratic competition between parties has a strong tendency to converge on median voter positions, the conciliatory conception of democracy claims that citizens can accept these conciliatory results of the democratic process as rational. The fact that equal political participation in multi-party electoral competitions is a precondition for obtaining such results, the conciliatory conception of democracy offers a second argument for epistemic political egalitarianism.
The presentation of the epistemic argument for democracy might lead some to conclude that the conciliatory conception is in essence a conservative, status quo–oriented conception of democracy. This assessment might derive from the focus I have laid on the “traditional” institutions of democracy, political parties, and multi-party electoral competition. This focus has not been coincidental, of course. I do indeed believe that deliberative conceptions—with all the praise they deserve—should move closer still to an appreciation of these traditional institutions. However, this is not to deny the legitimacy of their criticism of elitist and minimalist conceptions of democracy with their exclusive focus on electoral competition between elites. The aim should rather be to reconcile the foci of democratic theory on the traditional and progressive elements of democracies. Far from leaving either side behind on opposite riverbanks of democratic theory, the conciliatory conception of democracy is the bridge that unites them.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank audiences of the workshop “Deliberation after consensus: Democracy, epistemic quality and public discourse” held by the Centre franco-norvégien en sciences sociales et humaines at Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’homme (FMSH) in Paris, the conference “Compromise and Disagreement” at the University of Copenhagen, and the political philosophy colloquium at the Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders” at Goethe University Frankfurt for helpful comments on the arguments and ideas presented in this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.