Guardian Models of DD: Knowledge, Expertise and the Revival of Epistocracy

The chapter discusses rational choice critiques of democracy as the main inspiration for the emergence of a set of models of Guardian Deliberative Democracy (GDDs). Although their development has been stimulated by the epistemic models (EDDs) discussed in Chap. 3 , GDDs hark back to the postwar behavioural revolution in American political science, and are heavily influenced by the analytical approaches to democratic politics made available by the New Political Economy (NPE) (Inman. Markets, governments, and the ‘new’ political economy. In Auerbach & Feldstein (Eds.), Handbook of public economics (Vol. 2. pp. 647–777). Elsevier, 1987; Mitchell. American Behavioral Scientist, 11(2), 8–37, 1967). A synthesis of those perspectives was proposed at the end of the 1970s by F. A. Hayek (Law, legislation and liberty. Routledge, 1982), Riker (Liberalism against populism. Waveland Press, 1982) and other fathers of the neoliberal counter-revolution (Plehwe et al. Nine lives of neoliberalism. Verso, 2020). More recently, these perspectives have been revived by Jason Brennan (Against democracy. Princeton University Press, 2016), and other political economists wishing to restrict deliberation to selected groups of experts. In this context, ‘epistocracy’, the government of the experts, represents a conceptual alternative to the idea of foot-voting democracy subscribed to by neoliberal authors seeking an ultraminimal form of democracy (Somin. Democracy and political ignorance. Stanford University Press, 2012). By contrast with EDDs, the analytical features that characterise GDDs are derived from two juxtapositions: personal vs. impersonal forms of guardianship, and instrumental vs. procedural approaches to democratic politics. Democratic engagement is supposed to be limited to experts, rather than specific forms of reasoning, or reserved for non-controversial issues. As a result, the legitimacy of democratic politics is made dependent on the instrumental ability of the practices, norms and institutions established by an epistocracy to satisfy the needs of the people supposed to abide by them. The next section of this chapter proposes an intellectual genealogy of guardianship from Plato to Brennan, via Schumpeter and Hayek, highlighting the overlapping conceptual innovations and institutional solutions devised each time. In Sect. 2.3 those overlapping conceptual innovations and institutional solutions are put together so as to arrive at the definition of an ideal-type of epistocracy. Section 2.4 will then develop a number of critical points affecting epistocracy as both a form of government and a strategy of justification.