IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/apsrev/v107y2013i01p104-122_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Democracy's Wisdom: An Aristotelian Middle Way for Collective Judgment

Author

Listed:
  • OBER, JOSIAH

Abstract

A satisfactory model of decision-making in an epistemic democracy must respect democratic values, while advancing citizens’ interests, by taking account of relevant knowledge about the world. Analysis of passages in Aristotle and legislative process in classical Athens points to a “middle way” between independent-guess aggregation and deliberation: an epistemic approach to decision-making that offers a satisfactory model of collective judgment that is both time-sensitive and capable of setting agendas endogenously. By aggregating expertise across multiple domains, Relevant Expertise Aggregation (REA) enables a body of minimally competent voters to make superior choices among multiple options, on matters of common interest. REA differs from a standard Condorcet jury in combining deliberation with voting based on judgments about the reputations and arguments of domain-experts.

Suggested Citation

  • Ober, Josiah, 2013. "Democracy's Wisdom: An Aristotelian Middle Way for Collective Judgment," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 107(1), pages 104-122, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:107:y:2013:i:01:p:104-122_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0003055412000627/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Franch, Fabio, 2021. "Political preferences nowcasting with factor analysis and internet data: The 2012 and 2016 US presidential elections," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 166(C).
    2. Eric A. Posner & E. Glen Weyl, 2017. "Quadratic voting and the public good: introduction," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 172(1), pages 1-22, July.
    3. Leslie Paul Thiele, 2020. "Integrating political and technological uncertainty into robust climate policy," Climatic Change, Springer, vol. 163(1), pages 521-538, November.
    4. Mirko Canevaro, 2018. "What was the law of Leptines’ really about? Reflections on Athenian public economy and legislation in the fourth century BCE," Constitutional Political Economy, Springer, vol. 29(4), pages 440-464, December.
    5. Jérôme Mathis & Marcello Puca & Simone M. Sepe, 2021. "Deliberative Institutions and Optimality," CSEF Working Papers 614, Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy, revised 09 Jun 2021.
    6. Täuscher, Karl, 2017. "Leveraging collective intelligence: How to design and manage crowd-based business models," Business Horizons, Elsevier, vol. 60(2), pages 237-245.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:107:y:2013:i:01:p:104-122_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/psr .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.