Deliberating, Fast and Slow: Civic Productivity under Technological, Institutional, and Cognitive Constraints

In most democracies, citizens do not consume much of their time acquiring political knowledge. An already old promise, information and communication technologies have changed our relationship both with time and politics but with mixed results. On the one hand, less time is necessary for citizens to articulate their immediate demands; on the other hand, recent research suggests no positive impact of these new technologies on political knowledge. In this paper, I use a behavioral economics framework to discuss how the traditional design of electoral institutions induces low cognitive effort by voters. New technologies constrained by this institutional environment do increase the opportunities for action, but they do not leverage the benefits of acting using better information. I define democracy to be under a partial acceleration scheme characterized by such increased participation without proper feedback between voters and the consequences of their political demands. Under new technologies and old institutions, voters are prone to fast and biased responses to frequent and urgent matters, but do not feel their efforts to solve them are relevant, demotivating slow and thoughtful reflection over social themes. The outcomes of partial acceleration are manifold: reinforcement of conflicting identities, spread of fake news, and the collapse of democratic deliberation. This malaise is not a symptom of a particular ideology, such as populism, but a trait of a liberal democracy struggling to produce political knowledge. Finally, I suggest that the design of traditional representation institutions, in particular aggregative procedures such as elections, must be adjusted to incentive higher knowledge production, thus matching participation demands and leveraging the epistemic value of democracy. I compare my proposed solution to alternative standards such as epistocracy and open democracy.