Political Equality and Epistemic Constraints on Voting

In recent years, the incompetence challenge against democratic legitimacy has resurfaced. Proponents of this challenge argue that democracy is illegitimate because it grants political decision-making powers to politically incompetent citizens. As part of this challenge, we can often find proposals for designing institutional mechanisms that bar incompetent political decision-makers from participating in voting procedures. Call these mechanisms epistemic constraints on voting (ECV). The debate surrounding the justifiability of these mechanisms follows a standard dialectic. The standard justification for these constraints appeals to instrumental reasons and to the idea that, once these restrictions are in place, better political decisions will unfold. This justification meets a standard objection grounded in a commitment to political equality: restricting participation in voting practices on the basis of a criterion of competence is deemed inherently incompatible with a commitment to treat all citizens as equal members of the political community. In this paper, my purpose is to show that it is possible to offer an alternative justification for ECV that is not vulnerable to standard objections from political equality and, hence, to outline a middle ground position in the debate. This justification appeals to non-instrumental reasons. More precisely, it appeals to the idea that, qua participants in an instance of joint agency, voters stand to one another in a normative relation that obligates them to act in an epistemically responsible fashion. Modest epistemic constraints on voting (e.g. participation in competence-enhancing exercises as a precondition for accessing voting) are justifiable because they secure that participation in voting practices is conforming to this normative requirement. Call this the civic justification for ECV. The paper is structured in two parts: The first part sketches the broad outline of the civic justification for ECV, with a particular focus on showing how its non-instrumental nature does not commit it to epistemic optimality and hence allows for less exclusive constraints on participation. The second part of the paper discusses how the civic justification for ECV would deal with two standard objections from political equality: the disrespect objection and the hierarchy objection. The former rejects ECV because they embody the contemptuous idea that the political judgements of some citizens are not worth paying attention to. The latter rejects ECV because they would instantiate a civic relationship marked by power differences and social hierarchies. In response to the disrespect objection, I argue that the civic justification cannot be accused of resorting to the kind of considerations of competence – i.e. comparative assessments, competence rankings, educational qualifications, etc. – that are usually regarded as disrespectful. In response to the hierarchy objection, I argue that the civic justification for ECV is based precisely on the idea that participation in voting creates a new normative relation (one that commands an epistemically responsible agency) that counterweighs the concerns with relational equality that prompt the hierarchy objection in the first place. Moreover, since the civic justification is not committed to instrumental optimality, it can support ECV that avoid the instantiation of social hierarchies.