Epistemic Democracy and Political Legitimacy

© The Author(s) 2020

I. CerovacEpistemic Democracy and Political LegitimacyPalgrave Studies in Ethics and Public Policyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44602-4_1

1. Introduction

Ivan Cerovac¹  

(1)

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia

Ivan Cerovac

Email: [email protected]

Can political decisions we make be right or wrong, or true or false? Are they just the expression of our personal interests, and consequently have no truth value? If they can be true or false, are there people who are better at getting it right or wrong? And if there are, does this imply that those who are better in making correct decisions should have political authority over others? These are some of the key questions I try to answer in this book.

Though democracy is highly valued and widely accepted as a collective decision-making procedure with legitimacy-generating potential, there is little clarity regarding the grounds of the value of democracy or its legitimacy-generating potential. The general idea is that the democracy is a good thing and that is should be a part of a just society. This, however, does not enable us to evaluate different democratic systems and procedures, as well as to improve the democratic decision-making process. In order to be able to do that, we need to understand what grounds the democratic legitimacy . This book represents an inquiry into the source of legitimacy-generating potential of democratic procedures.

In this book I defend the standard account of epistemic democracy , a position that grounds democracy’s legitimacy-generating potential both in its moral and in its epistemic qualities. Though the very idea of an epistemic justification of democratic legitimacy might evoke very high expectations regarding its epistemic value, I argue no such thing: democracy does not have to be epistemically the best possible decision-making procedure. All it has to do is to perform better than other procedures that can meet the same moral requirements as democracy can (e.g. procedural fairness ). Democracy’s epistemic value is nonetheless an important part of its legitimacy-generating potential, and increasing its epistemic value is a good way to generally improve the democratic decision-making process.

Apart from some considerations in the final chapter, I do not offer an account how existing democratic practices can be improved. What I am concerned with are fundamental values that ground the legitimacy-generating potential of democratic procedures. Though this book represents a theoretical framework, it does not imply that the ideas presented here cannot be implemented into contemporary politics. This, however, represents a separate task, probably one more appropriate for political scientists than political philosophers.

1.1 Political Legitimacy

1.1.1 Introduction

This part of the chapter gives a brief clarification of the central concepts in the discussion, as well as an overview of different accounts of political legitimacy. I briefly discuss the difference between political authority and political legitimacy, as well as the difference between the descriptive and the normative account of political legitimacy. I proceed by sketching two basic (monistic) accounts of political legitimacy, and argue that we should adopt the third, non-monistic account (one that combines legitimacy-generating elements from both basic accounts). Finally, I briefly discuss and endorse the liberal criterion of legitimacy as a basic standard against which various decision-making procedures will be evaluated—in order to have legitimacy-generating potential, a decision-making procedure has to meet this standard. Furthermore, all other qualities of a procedure that could be considered as potential sources of legitimacy-generating potential have to be able to meet the liberal criterion of legitimacy.

1.1.2 Political Legitimacy

A discussion on political legitimacy lasts for more than 2500 years, and many prominent thinkers and philosophers have contributed with their own theories and accounts to this ongoing debate. However, an important turn in the debate took place several decades ago: John Rawls (1993, see also Peter 2011) shifted the discussion from the legitimacy of states and governments typical for the nineteenth and early twentieth century (Weber 1964) to the legitimacy of the decision-making process. It is also important to emphasize that Rawls started the debate on justice in 1970s with his book A Theory of Justice, and he shifted the debate to legitimacy in the 1990s with his book Political Liberalism. Political legitimacy is nowadays one of the central topics discussed within political philosophy and political theory, so it is important to make some specifications and define what kind of political legitimacy is this book about.

1.1.2.1 Political Authority and Political Legitimacy

Authority and legitimacy are connected by nonetheless distinct concepts. Authority is the moral power of one agent (e.g. the state) to morally require or forbid actions by others through commands. The state thus lacks authority if its requiring you to pay taxes has no tendency to make you morally required to do so (Estlund 2008, 2). A particular political decision is authoritative if one is morally obliged to follow it.

Legitimacy, on the other hand, is the moral permissibility of one agent’s (e.g. the state’s) issuing and enforcing its commands owning to the process by which they were produced. The state acts illegitimately if it puts you in jail for not paying taxes when it is morally wrong for it to do so (Estlund 2008, 2). A particular political decision is legitimate if the one who issued and enforced it had the moral right to do so.

This book focuses primarily on political legitimacy since it analyzes different processes of making political decisions and tries to answer which qualities a decision-making process has to have in order to be able to make legitimate decisions.

1.1.2.2 Descriptive and Normative Concept of Political Legitimacy

Like many other ideas, political legitimacy can be understood as a descriptive as well as a normative concept . Its descriptive concept focuses on people’s beliefs about how the right to rule is exercised, as well as on people’s beliefs about the acceptability of a certain political decision. A particular political decision is thus legitimate if people see it as legitimate, and a decision-making procedure has a legitimacy-generating potential if people tend to accept the decisions produced by that procedure as legitimate. As Max Weber (1964, 130) puts it, political regime is legitimate when its participants have certain beliefs or faith in regard to it. Social and political scientists often use and analyze this concept of political legitimacy.

The normative concept focuses on a binding reason (or reasons) to support and not to challenge the coercive power of the state. Political decisions are seen as legitimate regardless of what other people think of them, as long as these decisions have certain legitimacy-generating qualities. When we try to assess whether a particular decision is legitimate, we do not analyze what other people think about it, but instead we analyze its moral and epistemic qualities, as well as the qualities of a decision-making procedure that has produced it.

The normative concept is primarily used by political philosophers, and it is the concept I use throughout this book. I do not write about the legitimacy of particular states in the real world, but instead on the normative conditions a decision-making procedure has to meet in order to have legitimacy-generating potential.

1.1.3 Accounts of Political Legitimacy

According to the definition given earlier, in order to be legitimate a decision has to be a product of a legitimacy-generating procedure. The state can legitimately enact and enforce political decisions owing to the procedure by which these decisions were made. What are these legitimacy-generating qualities that a decision-making procedure needs in order to be able to produce legitimate decisions?

The procedure’s legitimacy-generating qualities can generally be divided into two important groups: purely procedural qualities and instrumental qualities. Following these two groups of legitimacy-generating qualities, two basic positions of political legitimacy can be distinguished. These two accounts—pure proceduralism and instrumentalism—can be regarded as basic or monistic (Christiano 2004) positions since each appeals to only one group of legitimacy-generating qualities when determining the legitimacy-generating potential of a decision-making procedure (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

Political legitimacy: monistic and non-monistic accounts

1.1.3.1 Pure Proceduralism

Pure proceduralism focuses only on purely procedural qualities of a decision-making procedure when determining its legitimacy-generating potential. These purely procedural (sometimes called intrinsic) qualities are defined regardless of the procedure’s ability to produce a certain goal or outcome—a decision-making procedure has legitimacy-generating potential because it embodies some important moral (or epistemic) qualities. Procedural fairness (i.e. giving every citizen an equal chance to participate in the decision-making process) can be one such purely procedural quality. A collective decision is thus legitimate if (and only if) it was produced by a fair decision-making procedure. Positions developed by Hannah Arendt (1967), Thomas Christiano (2008), Gerald Gaus (1996), Fabienne Peter (2011), Iris Marion Young (2000) and Robert Dahl (1989) are some examples of pure proceduralism.

1.1.3.2 Instrumentalism

Instrumentalism, on the other hand, focuses only on the instrumental qualities of a decision-making procedure when determining its legitimacy-generating potential. These instrumental qualities are defined by the procedure’s ability to reach a desired aim or outcome—a decision-making procedure has legitimacy-generating potential because of its ability to generate decisions with some substantial, procedure-independent quality. The ability to produce correct, true or just decisions can be one such instrumental quality. A collective decision is thus legitimate if (and only if) it was produced by a decision-making procedure that has a tendency to produce correct or true decisions. Positions developed by Steven Wall (2007) and Richard Arneson (2003), but also by Robert Talisse (2009), Cheryl Misak (2000) and John Stuart Mill (1977), are some examples of political instrumentalism.

Though these two basic positions use very different argumentation and appeal to completely different qualities when assessing the procedure’s legitimacy-generating potential, they still have one thing in common—they both rely only on one group of the procedure’s qualities. Pure proceduralists completely disregard the instrumental qualities of a decision-making procedure, while instrumentalist completely disregard the purely procedural (intrinsic) qualities of a decision-making procedure. In this book I argue against both monistic positions—I claim that a decision-making procedure has to have both purely procedural and instrumental qualities in order to have legitimacy-generating potential.

1.1.3.3 Non-monistic Accounts of Political Legitimacy

Having rejected both pure proceduralism and instrumentalism as inadequate accounts of political legitimacy, non-monists try to incorporate both the procedural fairness of the process and the procedure-independent quality of outcomes into a single account of political legitimacy. These accounts are often referred to as rational proceduralist positions in order to differentiate them from pure proceduralist positions.¹ Accounts developed by Kenneth Arrow (1984), John Rawls (1993), Philip Pettit (1999), John Dewey (1987), Fabienne Peter (2012) and David Estlund (2008) are some examples of non-monistic approach to democratic legitimacy. Following Estlund, in this book I develop a non-monistic account that emphasizes both the fairness of the decision-making process and its ability to produce correct decisions.

1.1.4 The Liberal Principle of Legitimacy

The central principle of political legitimacy that I endorse and against which I evaluate all other qualities of a procedure that could be considered as potential sources of legitimacy-generating potential is the liberal principle of legitimacy .

Our exercise of political power is fully proper only when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution the essentials of which all citizens as free and equal may reasonably be expected to endorse in the light of principles and ideals acceptable to their common human reason. (Rawls 1993, 137)

The moral idea behind this principle is that no one can legitimately be coerced unless sufficient reasons can be given—reasons that do not violate his reasonable moral beliefs. There are two notable interpretations of the liberal principle of legitimacy and the idea of public reason that follows from it: the substantive and the procedural interpretation. The substantive interpretation applies the principle to the justification of (all) political decisions: a political decision is legitimate if it could be justified in terms of public reason, i.e. justified in accordance with ideas and principles acceptable to all citizens as free and equal (Quong 2011; Baccarini 2015; Zelić 2012). Not every reasonable citizen must agree with or be able to accept the final decision, but the premises used in the process of justification must be such that all reasonable citizens can endorse them. The procedural interpretation, on the other hand, applies the principle to the justification of the constitution that shapes and constrains the process of democratic decision-making (Peter 2011; Larmore 1996; Wenar 2013). Political decisions are legitimate if they are the product of a decision-making procedure that all reasonable citizens as free and equal may reasonably be expected to endorse. Particular political decisions are thus legitimate even if there are some reasonable citizens who cannot be expected to endorse them, as long as they are a product of a decision-making procedure that all reasonable citizens can endorse. In such cases, those who have no substantial reason to endorse a particular political decision still have a procedural reason to endorse it.

I follow the latter (procedural) interpretation of the liberal principle of legitimacy . However, I do not think that this plays an important role at this point in the debate since those who follow the substantial interpretation also agree that, in order to have legitimacy-generating potential, the decision-making procedure has to be acceptable to all reasonable citizens. The liberal principle of legitimacy enables us to reject various claims for power: claims like I can exercise political power over you because I am the King or We can exercise political power over you because we believe in the one true God can easily be rejected as illegitimate since not every reasonable citizen can, in the conditions of reasonable pluralism of moral and religious doctrines, agree with their justification. Since not all reasonable citizens can be expected to endorse a decision-making procedure in which one person has absolute political power and authority, nor can they be expected to endorse a procedure in which only leaders of a particular religion have political power and authority, these (and many similar) decision-making procedures can be rejected from the start. However, many other, more sophisticated decision-making procedures, some of which base their justification in the epistemic qualities of a decision-making procedure (like Mill’s scholocracy characterized by the plural voting proposal) can be disqualified on the basis of liberal principle of legitimacy .

1.2 Plan of the Book

In this part of the chapter I shall first present three tenets that are typically ascribed to epistemic accounts of political legitimacy and emphasize that various epistemic accounts of political legitimacy can acknowledge a different number of these tenets. According to the number of tenets endorsed, I differentiate between various positions of political legitimacy. In the final part of this chapter I present the plan of the book by briefly summarizing each chapter.

1.2.1 The Epistemic Account of Political Legitimacy

The epistemic account of political legitimacy can take all three approaches described in the first part of this chapter. Epistemic pure proceduralism will thus claim that a decision-making procedure has legitimacy-generating potential if it embodies certain intrinsic epistemic virtues and qualities (Peter 2011), epistemic instrumentalism will claim that a decision-making procedure has legitimacy-generating potential if it represents the best means to have political decisions and outcomes that are true, correct or just according to some procedure-independent standard (Talisse 2009; Misak 2000), and epistemic non-monism (e.g. the standard account of epistemic democracy ) will claim that a decision-making procedure has legitimacy-generating potential if it is able to meet both purely procedural (fairness ) and instrumental (epistemic quality of outcomes) requirements (Estlund 2008). All these positions, as well as several other non-epistemic accounts of political legitimacy, are discussed in detail in this book.

There are three tenets that are usually related to the epistemic account of political legitimacy (Estlund 2008, 30) (Table 1.1).

Table 1.1

The three tenets

Three tenets presented here are connected and come in a specific order: if we reject one tenet, we are bound to reject every tenet that comes after it (e.g. if we reject the first tenet we are bound to reject the second and the third tenets as well). We cannot endorse the third (authority) tenet if we deny the first (truth) or the second (knowledge) tenet. It is also very important to emphasize that, just as epistemic account of political legitimacy can take a form of pure proceduralism, instrumentalism and rational proceduralism, so can it reject any number of these tenets. Fabienne Peter’s (2011) pure epistemic proceduralism, for example, clearly rejects the truth tenet (and therefore all other tenets as well), but it still represents a clear case of the epistemic account of political legitimacy. In this book I try to establish an epistemic account of political legitimacy that acknowledged the first (truth) and the second (knowledge) tenet but rejects the third (authority) tenet.

1.2.2 Structure of the Book

Democracy has epistemic value, and its legitimacy-generating potential should be established in part due to its ability to produce political decisions of satisfying (procedure-independent) quality. This is the central claim of this book. In order to properly support this claim, I reject the idea that democracy does not have epistemic value (or that this epistemic value does not establish its legitimacy-generating potential), as well as the idea that democracy’s epistemic value is the only source of its legitimacy-generating potential. The former claim is a part of pure proceduralists’ (monistic) argumentation, while the latter is a part of instrumentalists’ (monistic) argumentation. I reject both monistic positions, arguing that a non-monistic account should be established: democracy’s legitimacy-generating potential is the result of both its moral and epistemic qualities.

When establishing the epistemic account of the procedure’s legitimacy-generating potential, we should set our position according to the three tenets discussed earlier. Though it is possible to build an epistemic account of the procedure’s legitimacy-generating potential without endorsing any of them, most epistemic accounts at least accept the truth tenet. In order to systematically analyze various positions that introduce procedure’s epistemic qualities when constituting its legitimacy-generating potential, I set them against the three tenets and distinguish them (in part) due to the number of tenets they endorse. First, I discuss positions that reject the truth tenet (and consequently the knowledge tenet and the authority tenet as well) (Chapter 2), and proceed by discussing positions that accept the truth tenet but reject the knowledge tenet (and consequently the authority tenet) (Chapter 3). I reject these positions, arguing that both the truth tenet and the knowledge tenet should be endorsed. Since more than one account meets this requirement, I analyze and ultimately reject positions that also endorse the authority tenet (Chapter 4). Having concluded that the truth tenet and the knowledge should be granted, but the authority tenet should be rejected, I have considerably narrowed the scope of eligible accounts of political legitimacy . Finally, since there are still a few different decision-making procedures that meet the abovementioned criteria, I have narrowed the selection further by arguing that these positions should be evaluated according to their epistemic qualities, thus rejecting aggregative and establishing deliberative (epistemic) democracy as the procedure with legitimacy-generating potential (Chapter 5).

Table 1.2 systemizes the positions discussed in this book and sets them according to the number of tenets they endorse. Note the order of chapters in the first column—since it was my intention to first reject a number of positions in order to determine what an appropriate position on political legitimacy should look like (i.e. to narrow the set of eligible positions), I have first rejected positions that do not endorse the truth and the knowledge tenet (claiming that they are not epistemic enough or in the right way), and then I have rejected positions that accept the authority tenet (claiming that they are too epistemic) before discussing positions that reject the authority tenet but endorse the other two (which is an approach I find appropriate).

Table 1.2

Plan of the book

1.2.3 The Plan of the Book

This book has three parts: in the first part ( Chapters 2–4) I discuss which (if any) tenets should be endorsed and which (if any) should be rejected by a collective decision-making procedure with a legitimacy-generating potential. In the second part (Chapter 5) I defend Estlund’s (2008) standard account of epistemic democracy and analyze which kind of democracy can have legitimacy-generating potential. In the third part of the book (Chapter 6) I consider what the social and economic preconditions for epistemic democracy’s legitimacy-generating potential are.

In the second chapter I discuss two positions that reject the truth tenet. Fabienne Peter’s (2011) Pure Epistemic Proceduralism states that democratic decision-making procedures have legitimacy-generating potential owing to some moral and intrinsic epistemic qualities—the epistemic quality of a procedure is not its ability to produce correct outcomes, but its tendency to enable citizens to critically engage each other in a transparent and non-authoritarian way. I reject this view and claim that instrumental epistemic value is needed in order to evaluate and to be able to improve our epistemic practices. Thomas Christiano’s Pure Deliberative Proceduralism is discussed in the second part of the chapter—Christiano (2008) thinks that we cannot have an instrumental account of democratic legitimacy because we would have to have a public agreement on the qualities of outcomes. I reject Christiano’s position by claiming that he himself uses an instrumental argumentation when he argues in favor of deliberative democracy (i.e. when he claims that a state with more well-being is better than a state with less well-being). I end the second chapter by claiming that the truth tenet should be endorsed.

Positions that endorse the truth tenet but reject the knowledge tenet are discussed in the third chapter. Proponents of Pragmatist Deliberative Democracy thus claim that political decisions can be right or wrong, and that we should evaluate the decision-making system by its ability to produce correct decisions (Talisse 2009; Misak 2004). However, since the relevant knowledge is distributed equally among citizens, and since public deliberation is the best means for arriving at correct decisions, we should favor deliberative democracy. I reject this position by claiming that it is successful in defending the epistemic value of public deliberation, but not necessarily the epistemic value of democracy. The second position I discuss in this chapter is Fabienne Peter’s (2012) Second-Personal Epistemic Democracy. Peter now endorsed the truth tenet, but nonetheless still claims that democratic procedures have some intrinsic epistemic qualities. I find Peter’s idea of epistemic peers unpersuasive and argue that the knowledge tenet should be granted. I end the third chapter by concluding that the knowledge tenet should be endorsed.

Having concluded that the truth and the knowledge tenet should be acknowledged, in the fourth chapter I discuss whether the authority tenet should be endorsed as well. First, I discuss epistocracy, the rule of those who know, and claim that, though this decision-making procedure might have considerable epistemic value, it cannot meet the liberal criterion of legitimacy. Namely, we cannot expect all reasonable citizens to see the same group of people as experts in politics, and therefore the rule of any group would be rejectable to at least some reasonable citizens. In the second part of this chapter I discuss Mill’s (1977) scholocracy, a decision-making procedure in which everyone has at least one vote, but those better educated have more than one. Though it presents a more sophisticated version of epistocracy, I believe that scholocracy can be rejected as well, since it is not unreasonable to think that some epistemically damaging features (biases) might be present in the group that is given greater political authority. I end this chapter by claiming that the authority