Plural Voting for the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Recent political developments cast doubt on the wisdom of democratic decisionmaking. Brexit, the Colombian people's (initial) rejection of peace with the FARC, and the election of Donald Trump suggest that the time is right to explore alternatives to democracy. In this essay, I describe and defend the epistocratic system of government which is, given current theoretical and empirical knowledge, most likely to produce optimal political outcomes-or at least better outcomes than democracy produces. To wit, we should expand the suffrage as wide as possible and weight citizens' votes in accordance with their competence. As it turns out, the optimal system is closely related to J. S. Mill's plural voting proposal. I also explain how voters' competences can be precisely determined, without reference to an objective standard of correctness and without generating invidious comparisons between voters.

An epistemic case for confucian democracy

“…One obstacle to democracy's epistemic power is the assumption that many voters have access to reliable information to develop informed choices. This assumption is problematic because several real-world voters are politically ignorant and make systematic errors (Brennan, 2011(Brennan, , 2016López-Guerra, 2014;Mulligan, 2015Mulligan, , 2017. As a consequence, many voters adopt and publicly endorse unreliable and even detrimental theories about society.…”

Inadequate for democracy: How (not) to distribute education

“…15 These proposals are not merely hypothetical. A number of recent books and articles by Jason Brennan, Thomas Mulligan, and Claudio Lopez-Guerra argue that deviations from universal suffrage understood as ‘one person, one vote’ may be morally justified (if not morally obligatory) in the light of expected incompetence by many citizens (Brennan, 2016; Lopez-Guerra, 2014; Mulligan, 2018).…”

The case for epistocratic republicanism

“…Plural voting: all citizens have a vote but citizens who have better educational credentials or pass a test would have additional votes (Mill, 2010: 174–176, Mulligan, 2018).…”

“…There are also what might be considered ‘sci-fi’ examples of epistocratic government in which a ‘simulated oracle’ produces the decisions that a fully informed democracy would choose or that an algorithm can be used to pick out which voters choose the wisest policies and give them greater weight (Brennan, 2016; Mulligan, 2018). Although distinct, each of these forms of government is epistocratic insofar as voices of the knowledgeable are amplified, whether through direct exclusion, uneven weighting, or programming the parameters of ideal information.…”

“…The voters may want a certain end, but the means selected by the experts may disproportionately benefit or burden certain parts of the citizenry in a way that they cannot dispute. The sci-fi solutions of ‘simulated oracle’ and algorithmic vetting cannot rest on the assumption that because these are machines that can find the ‘right’ or ‘best’ answer, they cannot be vehicles of domination (Brennan, 2016: 220–222, Mulligan, 2018: 300–302). The biases of programmers has become the subject of concern in recent years as experiments in artificial intelligence and other complex programming have shown themselves to be less than impartial (Crawford, 2016; Garcia, 2017).…”