Who gets it right? On the epistemic performance of democratic and autocratic decision-making procedures

Abstract

The question of how to govern well has been a central topic of inquiry in both political science and philosophy. We contribute to this discourse by examining the epistemic foundations of good governance within democratic and autocratic systems. Drawing on the existing debate surrounding the epistemic justification of democratic procedures (Estlund, 2000; Goodin & Spiekermann, 2018; Landemore, 2012), we construct a thought experiment where agents are tasked with collectively identifying some optimal collective decision. We hypothesize that, for such tasks, democratic decision making systems possess an institutionally driven epistemic advantage compared to autocratic ones. To explore this hypothesis, we develop a simulation where a group of agents sets out to estimate the optimal level of public good provision. To this end, group members engage in individual learning, collective deliberation and voting. We then assess and compare two distinct mechanisms for aggregating individual estimates to the group level: one reflecting a democratic process and the other an autocratic setting. Our findings reveal three key insights. First, democratic decision-making outperforms autocratic methods in terms of judgment accuracy. Second, democratic decision-making processes turn out to fare best when individual citizens are not impartial but instead employ a mild bias towards their own needs when assessing the optimal level of public good supply. A last finding is that, under certain conditions, restricting the duration of deliberation can enhance the epistemic precision of collective decisions.