Can Democracy Be Improved?

On epistocracy

The journal entries of Albert Camus, the French novelist and playwright, were published incrementally after his death in 1960. The following is from the Notebooks 1935–1942 collection. His thoughts on the political personalities and commentary at the time were encapsulated in this entry:

"Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human.

It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people's anger have not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble―yes, gamble―with a whole part of their life and their so-called "vital interests".

After the first US presidential debate last Thursday, one of the more dispiriting reflections is that very seldom do people worthy of power actually seek it. The mixture of humility, talent, wisdom, with a dash of hubris, is a rare cocktail. Camus’ diary excerpt makes one wonder about the causality of it all. Does the public secretly desire to be ruled by clowns? To keep themselves in a state of discontent, able to blame their misfortunes on a political scapegoat?

Regardless, democracy is under threat in America. If it is not possible to incentivize the best people to run for office, perhaps the other avenue should be to improve the system itself. The following is an idea that might be marginally better than the current voting structure in America. It would by no means be perfect—no method would be—but it could nudge democracy in the right direction.

One of the main issues with democracy is that voters are hilariously uninformed. Two leading books about why are The Myth of the Rational Voter by Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University, and Against Democracy by Jason Brennan, a political philosopher at Georgetown University. The facts are truly staggering, and will be bypassed here simply due to the hangover of disillusionment from the Thursday’s debate. One way to remedy political ignorance is by means of an epistocracy—privileging knowledge and competence in the voting process.

This idea can be extremely divisive since people traditionally believe that the right to vote is a natural right within a democratic system. This is a sentiment that should have our sympathy, especially given the fact that many groups of people were disenfranchised from voting throughout history. Brennan, however, reverses the lens of the problem:

“[W]hy should we assume there’s a right to participate in democratic process? It’s actually quite weird and different from a lot of other rights we seem to have.

We have the right to choose our partner, to choose our religion, to choose what we’re going to eat, where we live, what job we’ll do, etc. While some of these things do impose costs on others, they’re primarily about carving out a sphere of autonomy for the individual, and about preventing other people from having control over you.

A right to participate in politics seems fundamentally different because it involves imposing your will upon other people. So I’m not sure that any of us should have that kind of right, at least not without any responsibilities.”

One of those responsibilities is to be informed. Although, such a duty might seem incongruent with the overall right to vote. Why should one’s knowledge of political affairs matter? The right to vote comes with no strings attached. Well, the concern is that of arbitrariness. To illustrate the point, it is not difficult to see how nobody would want to adopt this as a feature of the justice system, for instance. Imagine if a jury was not properly informed on the facts, context, and other dynamics at play when issuing a verdict on a case. This would be an affront to the entire system. It is reasonable to treat voting in a similar way, especially because the outcomes that originate from your will have a significant effects, as Brennan articulates, on the lives of others.

Certain proposals to introduce competency as a requirement for voting would be politically impossible. Instead, Brennan has an idea that would still require everyone to take a test, but everyone would keep their right to vote. Here is how it would look in his own words (from a Vox interview):

Here’s what I propose we do: Everyone can vote, even children. No one gets excluded. But when you vote, you do three things.

First, you tell us what you want. You cast your vote for a politician, or for a party, or you take a position on a referendum, whatever it might be. Second, you tell us who you are. We get your demographic information, which is anonymously coded, because that stuff affects how you vote and what you support.

And the third thing you do is take a quiz of very basic political knowledge. When we have those three bits of information, we can then statistically estimate what the public would have wanted if it was fully informed.

Under this system, it’s not really the case that you have more power than I do. We can’t really point to any individual and say you were excluded, or your vote counted for more. The idea is to gauge what the public would actually want if it had all the information it needed.

This controversial idea is based on the premise that government should be instrumental. It should be meant for enacting the policies desired by the public. The issue is that, in the American duopoly, voters do not have a varied selection of representatives from which to choose. Brennan’s system would invite more candidates onto the ballot, and more political parties, which would look more like European systems. This could potentially alleviate part of the tension and gridlock of the two-party system.

But the part of the plan which would receive the most backlash would undoubtedly be the exam. A perennial concern for a nation concerned with autonomy and coercion is: who gets to decide what goes on the test? Brennan’s answer is excellent.

He says we should let democracy decide. First, a large sample size of the population would be randomly selected. And it would be truly random—Brennan does not want to know anything about the chosen individuals apart from if they can breathe. Then, this group would be instructed to create a political competency test without any guidance.

The reason why this might feasibly work is because it is extremely unlikely that any of these questions would be privileged, or unfair. Additionally, this experiment has already been partially run. Brennan loves to talk about studies in which citizens are asked: “What should a voter know?” Unsurprisingly, regardless of who is asked, everyone replies with the same, sensible answers. They say voters should probably know how the government operates, which laws have been passed recently, the policy stances of the candidates, who their elected officials are, the current unemployment rate, and all of that. And an informed voter also should have some knowledge about what it means to be an everyday person, such as the price of a gallon of milk or bus ticket. And then the other shoe drops. “Great, and what are the answers to those questions?” And the respondents do not know.

Operating from a place of ignorance can, perhaps paradoxically, lend itself to raising the epistemic aspirations of a polity. To add a competency ingredient in the voting process could allow for democratic systems to reach for a higher standard of what it means to be an informed citizen and a government official. It would also yield a further alignment with the policies requested by voters and the politicians that offer them. To ameliorate the quality of politics, instead of being constantly disappointed with the process, should be a worthwhile future goal and worthy of some risk.

Change should be welcomed when the status quo seems moribund. A majority of people want the Electoral College to be abolished. Most Americans do not want Biden nor Trump. If novel approaches to improving democracy are not taken seriously, then, as Camus said, it is a confirmation of apathy and a true gamble with the fate of an admirable system of government.