Political Equality and Epistemic Constraints on Voting

I. INTRODUCTION

The idea that voting procedures should be accessible to every citizen who wishes to participate is a fundamental principle of democracy. In recent years, however, this idea has been challenged. As part of a resurgent skepticism about the epistemic qualities of democracy, some political philosophers have argued that participation in voting practices should be made conditional, through specifically designed formal mechanisms or procedures, upon having a sufficient level of political competence. Call these mechanisms epistemic constraints on voting (ECV).

The idea of employing criteria of competence to restrict participation in voting practices is taken, by many, to be inherently incompatible with political equality. In this paper, my purpose is to challenge this common claim and to show how, once properly reframed, the idea of setting up ECV need not violate political equality in any normatively significant fashion. I intend to do so by suggesting that it is possible to construct a justification for ECV that overcomes at least two problems that egalitarians commonly associate with ECV: the disrespect problem and the hierarchy problem.

Such a justification, which provides an alternative to the standard instrumental one presented in the literature, appeals to non-instrumental reasons. More precisely, it appeals to the idea that, qua participants in a shared practice, voters stand to one another in a normative relation that obligates them to act in an epistemically responsible fashion and makes them reciprocally accountable for their conduct in this regard. Modest ECV are justifiable because they ensure that voting practices conform to this relation and to the requirement of epistemic responsibility that follows from it. Call this the civic accountability justification for ECV.

The paper is structured in two parts. The first part clarifies the scope and assumptions of the paper (1) and sketches the broad outline of the civic accountability justification for ECV (2), with a particular focus on explicating its distinctive non-instrumental commitments. The second part discusses how the civic accountability justification for ECV can overcome two prominent issues of political equality: the disrespect problem (3) and the hierarchy problem (4).

For what concerns the former, which rests on a commitment to pay proper respect for the political judgments of all citizens, I will argue that the civic accountability justification does not resort to the kind of considerations of competence—i.e., comparative assessments, competence rankings, educational qualifications, etc.—that can be plausibly regarded as disrespectful. As for what concerns the latter, which rests on a commitment to avoid hierarchical social relations, I will argue that the civic accountability justification for ECV is based precisely on the idea that participation in voting creates a new normative relation, one that commands an epistemically responsible conduct. Consequently, this relation counterbalances the concerns with relational equality that underlie the hierarchy problem in the first place. Moreover, since the civic accountability justification is not committed to instrumental optimality, it can support ECV that avoid the instantiation of social hierarchies.