What does governance need to become?: Epistocrats

The bus that won

Before the Brexit referendum, Ipsos MORI found British voters overestimated EU immigrants by a factor of three and believed £350 million per week went to Brussels — a number so thoroughly debunked the head of the UK Statistics Authority called it a clear misuse. The number was painted on the side of a bus. The bus won.

We are precise about these numbers because precision is the point. Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter documents systematic biases — anti-market, anti-foreign, make-work, pessimistic — that persist across education levels. Brennan’s Against Democracy compiles decades of data showing the median American voter cannot name their representative or identify which party controls the House. This is not an insult. It is a measurement. The measurement has been stable for sixty years.

We know this sounds like a villain’s argument. A philosophy beginning with most people are too ignorant to govern wisely will never win a popularity contest. But the question is whether it is true. And the data says democratic outcomes correlate poorly with informed preference and strongly with tribal identity.

The digital democracy camp says voter ignorance is an artifact of a system offering no practice. Ireland’s assembly comprised ninety-nine people given weeks of expert briefings. Of course they were informed. They were a seminar, not a democracy. Scale that to 330 million and the seminar becomes a comment section.

We propose weighting votes by demonstrated knowledge of the ballot’s issues. We already exclude children. We already require jurors to hear evidence. The question is whether we are willing to measure competence for governance.

Where we concede ground: Every historical attempt to restrict the franchise based on competence was captured to exclude by race, class, or gender.

What would change our mind: Hundreds of thousands in digital deliberation outperform expert panels on policy outcomes, judged by pre-registered criteria.

Read the full synthesis: What does governance need to become?