Epistemic Failures of Majority Rule: Real and Imagined

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

This chapter addresses a series of objections to the claimed epistemic properties of majority rule and, more generally, aggregation of judgments. It first considers a general objection to the epistemic approach to voting, which supposedly does not take seriously enough the possibility that politics is about aggregation of interests, rather than aggregation of judgments. The chapter also considers the objection from Arrow's Impossibility Theorem and the doctrinal paradox (or discursive dilemma). Next, the chapter addresses the problem of informational free riding supposedly afflicting citizens in mass democracies, as well as the problem of the voting paradox (as a by-product). Finally, the chapter turns to a refutation of the objection that citizens suffer from systematic biases that are amplified at the collective level.