Superior Political Judgements and Voting Equality

This essay offers an indirect epistemic argument for voting equality by rethinking the epistocratic idea of a superior political judgment. Epistemic critiques of democracy claim that experts or a knowledgeable minority should the ones who are supposed to make substantive political decisions. Epistemic democrats have rebutted this claim on several grounds: by stressing that disenfranchising persons on the grounds of incompetence is likely to produce epistemically sub-optimal decisions, by exposing the culpable character of political knowledge, by noting that democracies are much more than making decisions and selecting policies. Such sophisticated arguments, however, tend to add extra normative commitments to the theory. It is against this backdrop that I propose an internal argument for the epistemic presumption in favour of equal voting. This paper shows that even epistemic critiques of democracy admit a certain degree of fallibilism. This commitment, I argue, has at least one significant consequence for the idea of a superior political judgement. Superior political judgements should be measured both against the best available evidence and for their capacity to recognize that things might have been otherwise than they are. If the latter constitutes a valid requirement, as I argue in this paper, the idea that it is rational to defer political decisions to the knowledgeable elites loses some of its ground. In reality, the more knowledgeable minority among the electorate should be aware of the partiality of its own political judgement, and, therefore, be open to defer to both educated and uneducated citizenry.