Cognitive Diversity, Binary Decisions, and Epistemic Democracy

John Weymark

No 14-00008, Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Working Papers from Vanderbilt University Department of Economics

Abstract: In Democratic Reason, Hélène Landemore has built a case for the epistemic virtues of inclusive deliberative democracy based on the cognitive diversity of the group engaged in making collective decisions. She supports her thesis by appealing to the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem of Lu Hong and Scott Page. In practice, deliberative assemblies often restrict attention to situations with only two options. In this paper, it is shown that it is not possible to satisfy the assumptions of the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem when decisions are binary. The relevance of this theorem for democratic decision-making in non-binary situations is also considered.

Keywords: epistemic democracy; Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D7 Y8 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-08-13
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cdm, nep-hpe and nep-neu
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:van:wpaper:vuecon-sub-00008

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