Problems of Polarization

Political commentators across the spectrum point to polarization as the cause of dysfunctions that recently have beset democratic societies. But the concept of polarization is rarely examined. This chapter presents several distinct kinds of polarization, starting by distinguishing political polarization from belief polarization, and offers a view of how their interaction gives rise to political problems ranging from legislative deadlock and partisan animosity to escalating extremism. Although the aim of the chapter is largely diagnostic, it concludes with an indication of how polarization might be managed.

Political Disagreement, Arrogance, and the Pursuit of Truth

This chapter explores two contributing factors to cognitive polarization. The first is what is known as epistemic disagreement—or disagreement over what is known, who knows it, or how we know. Crucially, even the perception that such disagreement is widespread—whether or not it actually is—can be dangerous. The second factor is intellectual arrogance. This is arrogance about what we know or think we know; it is the kind of arrogance that tells whites they have nothing to learn about racism from people of color and that reassures those who believe they know more about infectious diseases than those who spend their lives studying them. The chapter also attempts to argue that these two factors can be mutually reinforcing. This makes them doubly dangerous, because by increasing cognitive polarization, they in turn undermine the democratic value of the pursuit of truth.

Does Public Reason Liberalism Rest on a Mistake? Democracy’s Doxastic and Epistemic Problems

Public reason liberalism is a normative theory meant to adjudicate citizens’ conflicting beliefs about the right and the good. However, it rests upon controversial and likely mistaken empirical claims about voter psychology and voter knowledge. In political science, there are two major paradigms—populism and realism—about the relationship between voters’ beliefs and political outcomes. Realism holds that most citizens lack the kinds of beliefs and attitudes which public reason liberals believe are normatively significant. If so, then most citizens lack the kinds of ideological disputes which public reason liberalism is supposed to adjudicate. Worse, most citizens lack the kinds of normatively significantly beliefs upon which public justification must rest.

What Lies Beneath

Our ability to dismantle white supremacy is compromised by the fact that we do not fully appreciate what, precisely, white supremacy is. In this chapter, I suggest understanding white supremacy as an epistemological system—an epistemic frame that serves as the foundation for how we understand and interact with the world. The difficulty in dismantling an epistemological system lies in its resilience—a system’s capacity to resist change to its underlying structure while, at the same time, offering the appearance of large-scale reform. Using white supremacy as a case study, here I explore what features enable this resilience. An analysis of white supremacy that presents it as more than a tool of social and political oppression, but as an epistemic system that makes this oppression possible, allows us to better understand, and eventually overthrow, such systems.

Epistemic Bubbles and Authoritarian Politics

Contemporary U.S. political discourse is distorted by “epistemic bubbles.” In social epistemology, an epistemic bubble is a self-segregated network for the circulation of ideas, resistant to correcting false beliefs. Dominant models of epistemic bubbles explain some of their features, but fail to account for their recent spread, increasing extremity, and asymmetrical distribution across political groups. The rise of populist authoritarian politics explains these recent changes. I propose two models of how populism creates epistemic bubbles or their functional equivalents: (1) by promulgating biased group norms of information processing; and (2) by replacing empirically-oriented policy discourse with an identity-expressive discourse of group status competition. Each model recommends different strategies for popping epistemic bubbles. My analysis suggests that social epistemology needs to get more social, by modeling cognitive biases as operating collectively and outside people’s heads, via group epistemic and discursive norms.

Disagreement or Badmouthing? The Role of Expressive Discourse in Politics

A striking feature of political discourse is how prone we are to disagree. Political opponents will even give different answers to factual questions, which suggests that opposing parties cannot agree on facts any more than they can on values. This impression is widespread and supported by survey data. This chapter will argue, however, that the extent and depth of political disagreement is largely overstated. Many political disagreements are merely illusory. This claim has several important upshots. The implications of this idea for theories about voter misinformation, motivated reasoning, deliberative democracy, and a number of other issues are explored.

The Basis of Political Equality

This chapter vindicates democracy against recent criticism and shows how democracy can be improved and made more egalitarian. Critics argue that democracy is rule by the ignorant or by those who must appease the ignorant, basing this idea on an economic theory of information, backed by data suggesting widespread ignorance among citizens. They argue either for radically diminishing the size of the state or for rule by experts. But this pessimism is unfounded. There are good grounds for thinking that democracy can work well despite having to work in a context of low information decision-making. The critics point usefully to an underdeveloped aspect of political equality: the theory of citizen participation. To remedy this shortcoming, this chapter first argues for the instrumental and intrinsic values of democracy, relying on the expectation that citizens can act on the basis of adequate information about politics. Second, it critiques the crude model of citizen participation which is meant to undermine the expectation that citizens act on the basis of adequate information. Third, it proposes a collaborative conception of how citizens participate in a democracy and fourth, it suggests how democracy can be made more effective and egalitarian.

The Epistemic Pathologies of Elections and the Epistemic Promise of Lottocracy

There are many ways of evaluating legal and political institutions. This chapter introduces a new way to evaluate legal and political institutions: in terms of their sensibility. I define sensibility as the ability to appreciate and to respond to the world as it is, with two distinct components: (1) appreciating (or understanding or knowing) the world as it is, and (2) responding to the world in light of this appreciation. The first of these concerns the epistemic capacities of institutions. The second of these concerns the agential capacities of institutions. Having introduced the idea of sensibility, the chapter then focuses on a comparison of two different institutional arrangements—(1) electoral representative systems and (2) lottocratic systems of government, as introduced in this chapter—in terms of their epistemic quality or expected epistemic quality. I begin by drawing attention to several concerns about the sensibility of electoral representative institutions, focusing particularly on epistemic pathologies of those institutions. The second part of the chapter discusses an alternative kind of political institution, which I call a lottocratic political institution, and argues that we might well expect these institutions to be more sensible alternatives, at least under some conditions, on epistemic grounds. The negative contribution of the chapter, then, is to raise a series of challenges to the sensibility of electoral representative institutions. The positive contribution of the chapter is to suggest a direction for future institutional thinking, empirical study, and experimentation.

Epistocratic Paternalism

Epistocracy—roughly, political rule by the wise—is similar to paternalism. In both cases, knowing better is not enough to justify taking charge. But also in both cases, the prohibition is unlikely to be absolute. If one person’s competence is low enough, and the other person would do enough better by taking over, then (simplifying) it is plausibly justified. Arguably it is partly on such grounds that children may be governed by others in ways that adults may not be. May political subjects likewise be ruled by those who know enough better? A right to collective self-rule is not enough by itself to answer this, any more than a right to individual self-rule tells us whether and when the competence disparity is enough to justify paternalism. This rough analogy exposes important issues in the project of defending a requirement of democracy as against epistocracy.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book. It has three goals. First, it situates the field of political epistemology within its broader historical context and explains why this area of research is especially significant for contemporary politics. Second, this chapter provides an overview of the main themes in the book: the role of truth and knowledge in politics; epistemic problems for democracy; and disagreement and polarization. Third, it provides a summary of each chapter in the book. The introduction concludes by drawing connections across the various topics and chapters in this book.