## 1. The Rationality of Voting



The act of voting has an opportunity cost. It takes time and effort
that could be used for other valuable things, such as working for pay,
volunteering at a soup kitchen, or playing video games. Further,
identifying issues, gathering political information, thinking or
deliberating about that information, and so on, also take time and
effort which could be spent doing other valuable things. Economics, in
its simplest form, predicts that rational people will perform an
activity only if doing so maximizes expected utility. However,
economists have long worried that, that for nearly every individual
citizen, voting does not maximize expected utility. This leads to the
"paradox of voting"(Downs 1957): Since the expected costs
(including opportunity costs) of voting appear to exceed the expected
benefits, and since voters could always instead perform some action
with positive overall utility, it's surprising that anyone
votes.



However, whether voting is rational or not depends on just what voters
are trying to do. Instrumental theories of the rationality of voting
hold that it can be rational to vote when the voter's goal is to
influence or change the outcome of an election, including the
"mandate" the winning candidate receives. (The mandate
theory of elections holds that a candidate's effectiveness in
office, i.e., her ability to get things done, is in part a function of
how large or small a lead she had over her competing candidates during
the election.) In contrast, the expressive theory of voting holds that
voters vote in order to express themselves and their fidelity to
certain groups or ideas. Alternatively, one might hold that voting is
rational because it is has consumption value; many people enjoy
political participation for its own sake or for being able to show
others that they voted. Finally, if one believes, as most democratic
citizens say they do (Mackie 2010), that voting is a substantial moral
obligation, then voting could be rational because it is necessary to
discharge one's obligation.


### 1.1 Voting to Change the Outcome



One reason a person might vote is to influence, or attempt to change,
the outcome of an election. Suppose there are two candidates, *D*
and *R*. Suppose Sally prefers *D* to *R*. Suppose she
correctly believes that *D* would do a trillion dollars more
overall good than *R* would do. If her beliefs were correct, then
by hypothesis, it would be best if *D* won.



Here, casting the expected value difference between the two candidates
in monetary terms is a simplifying assumption. Whether political
outcomes can be described in monetary terms as such is not without
controversy. To illustrate, suppose the difference between two
candidates came down entirely to how many lives would be lost in the
way they would conduct a current war. Whether we can translate
"lives lost" into dollar terms is controversial. Further,
whether we can commensurate all the distinct goods and harms a
candidate might cause onto a common scale is also controversial.



Even if the expected value difference between two candidates could be
expressed on some common value scale, such as in monetary terms, this
leaves open whether the typical voter is aware of or can generally
estimate that difference. Empirical work generally finds that most
voters are badly informed, and further, that many of them are not
voting for the purpose of promoting certain policies or platforms over
others (Achen and Bartels 2016; Kinder and Kalmoe 2017; Mason 2017).
Beyond that, estimating the value difference between candidates
requires evaluating complex counterfactuals, estimating what various
candidates are likely to achieve, and determining what the outcomes of
these actions would be (Freiman 2020).



These worries aside, even if Sally is correct that *D* will do a
trillion dollars more good than *R*, this does not yet show it is
rational for Sally to vote for *D*. Instead, this depends on how
likely it is that her vote will make a difference. In much the same
way, it might be worth $200 million to win the lottery, but that does
not imply it is rational to buy a lottery ticket.



Suppose Sally's only goal, in voting, is to change the outcome
of the election between two major candidates. In that case, the
expected value of her vote (\(U\_v\)) is:

 

\[
U\_v = p[V(D) - V(R)] - C
\]


where *p* represents the probability that Sally's vote is
decisive, \([V(D) - V(R)]\) represents (in monetary terms) the
difference in the expected value of the two candidates, and *C*
represents the opportunity cost of voting. In short, the value of her
vote is the value of the difference between the two candidates
discounted by her chance of being decisive, minus the opportunity cost
of voting. In this way, voting is indeed like buying a lottery ticket.
Unless \(p[V(D) - V(R)] > C\), then it is (given Sally's stated
goals) irrational for her to vote.



The equation above models the rationality of Sally's choice to
vote under the assumption that she is simply trying to change the
outcome of the election, and gets no further benefit from
voting. Further, the equation assumes her vote confers no other
benefit to others than having some chance of changing which candidate
wins. However, these are controversial simplifying assumptions. It is
possible that the choice to cast a vote may induce others to vote,
might improve the quality of the ground decision by adding cognitive
diversity, might have some marginal influence on which candidates or
platforms parties run, or might have some other effect not modeled in
the equation above.



Again, it is controversial among some philosophers whether the
difference in value between two candidates can be expressed, in
principle, in monetary terms. Nevertheless, the point generalizes in
some way. If we are discussing the instrumental value of a vote, then
the general point is that the vote depends on the expected difference
in value between the chosen candidate and the next best alternative,
discounted by the probability of the vote breaking a tie, and we must
then take into account the opportunity cost of voting. For instance,
if two candidates were identical except that one would save one more
life than another, but one had a 1 in 1 billion chance of being
decisive, and instead of voting one could save a drowning toddler,
then it seems voting is not worthwhile, even if we cannot assign an
exact monetary value to thee consequences.



There is some debate among economists, political scientists, and
philosophers over the precise way to calculate the probability that a
vote will be decisive. Nevertheless, they generally agree that the
probability that the modal individual voter in a typical election will
break a tie is small. Binomial models of voting estimate the
probability of a vote being decisive by modeling voters as if they
were weighted coins and then asking what the probability is that a
weighted coin will come up heads exactly 50% of the time. These models
generally imply that the probability of being decisive, if any
candidate has a lead, is vanishingly small, which in turn implies that
the expected benefit of voting (i.e., \(p[V(D) - V(R)]\)) for a good
candidate is worth far less than a millionth of a penny (G. Brennan
and Lomasky 1993: 56-7, 119). A more optimistic estimate in the
literature, which uses statistical estimate techniques based on past
elections, claims that in a typical presidential election, American
voters have widely varying chances of being decisive depending on
which state they vote in. This model still predicts that a typical
vote in a "safe" states, like California, has a
vanishingly small chance of making a difference, but suggests that
that a vote in very close states could have on the order of a 1 in 10
million chance of breaking a tie (Edlin, Gelman, and Kaplan
2007). Thus, on both of these popular models, whether voting for the
purpose of changing the outcome is rational depends upon the facts on
the ground, including how close the election is and how significant
the value difference is between the candidates. The binomial model
suggests it will almost never be rational to vote, while the
statistical model suggests it will be rational for voters to vote in
sufficiently close elections or in swing states.



However, some claim even these assessments are optimistic. One worry
is that if a major election in most places came down to a single vote,
the issue might be decided in the courts after extensive lawsuits
(Somin 2013). Further, in making such estimates, we have assumed that
voters can reliably identify which candidate is better and reliably
estimate how much better that candidate is. But perhaps voters cannot.
After all, showing that individual votes matter is a double-edged
sword; the more expected good an individual vote can do, the more
expected harm it can do (J. Brennan 2011a; Freiman 2020). 


### 1.2 Voting to Change the "Mandate"



One popular response to the paradox of voting is to posit that voters
are not trying to determine who wins, but instead trying to change the
"mandate" the elected candidate receives. The assumption
here is that an elected official's efficacy--i.e., her
ability to get things done in office--depends in part on how
large of a majority vote she received. If that were true, I might vote
for what I expect to be the winning candidate in order to increase her
mandate, or vote against the expected winner to reduce her mandate.
The virtue of the mandate hypothesis, if it were true, is that it
could explain why it would be rational to vote even in elections where
one candidate enjoys a massive lead coming into the election.



However, the mandate argument faces two major problems. First, even if
we assume that such mandates exist, to know whether voting is
rational, we would need to know how much the *nth*
voter's vote increases the marginal effectiveness of her
preferred candidate, or reduces the marginal effectiveness of her
dispreferred candidate. Suppose voting for the expected winning
candidate costs me $15 worth of my time. It would be rational for me
to vote only if I believed my individual vote would give the winning
candidate at least $15 worth of electoral efficacy (and I care about
the increased efficiency as much or more than my opportunity costs).
In principle, whether individual votes change the
"mandate" this much is something that political scientists
could measure, and indeed, they have tried to do so. 



But this brings us to the second, deeper problem: Political scientists
have done extensive empirical work trying to test whether electoral
mandates exist, and they now roundly reject the mandate hypothesis
(Dahl 1990b; Noel 2010). A winning candidate's ability to get
things done is generally not affected by how small or large of a
margin she wins by.



Perhaps voting is rational not as a way of trying to change how
effective the elected politician will be, but instead as a way of
trying to change the kind of mandate the winning politician enjoys
(Guerrero 2010). Perhaps a vote could transform a candidate from a
delegate to a trustee. A delegate tries to do what she believes her
constituents want, but a trustee has the normative legitimacy to do
what she believes is best.



Suppose for the sake of argument that trustee representatives are
significantly more valuable than delegates, and that what makes a
representative a trustee rather than a delegate is her large margin of
victory. Unfortunately, this does not yet show that the expected
benefits of voting exceed the expected costs. Suppose (as in Guerrero
2010: 289) that the distinction between a delegate and trustee lies on
a continuum, like difference between bald and hairy. To show voting is
rational, one would need to show that the marginal impact of an
individual vote, as it moves a candidate a marginal degree from
delegate to trustee, is higher than the opportunity cost of voting. If
voting costs me $15 worth of time, then, on this theory, it would be
rational to vote only if my vote is expected to move my favorite
candidate from delegate to trustee by an increment worth at least $15
(Guerrero 2010: 295-297).



Alternatively, suppose that there were a determinate threshold (either
known or unknown) of votes at which a winning candidate is suddenly
transformed from being a delegate to a trustee. By casting a vote, the
voter has some chance of decisively pushing her favored candidate over
this threshold. However, just as the probability that her vote will
decide the election is vanishingly small, so the probability that her
vote will decisively transform a representative from a delegate into a
trustee would be vanishingly small. Indeed, the formula for
determining decisiveness in transforming a candidate into a trustee
would be roughly the same as determining whether the voter would break
a tie. Thus, suppose it's a billion or even a trillion dollars
better for a representative to be a trustee rather than a candidate.
Even if so, the expected benefit of an individual vote is still less
than a penny, which is lower than the opportunity cost of voting.
Again, it's wonderful to win the lottery, but that doesn't
mean it's rational to buy a ticket.


### 1.3 Other Reasons to Vote



Other philosophers have attempted to shift the focus on other ways
individual votes might be said to "make a difference".
Perhaps by voting, a voter has a significant chance of being among the
"causally efficacious set" of votes, or is in some way
causally responsible for the outcome (Tuck 2008; Goldman 1999).



On these theories, what voters value is not changing the outcome, but
being agents who have participated in causing various outcomes. These
causal theories of voting claim that voting is rational provided the
voter sufficiently cares about being a cause or among the joint causes
of the outcome. Voters vote because they wish to bear the right kind
of causal responsibility for outcomes, even if their individual
influence is small.



What these alternative theories make clear is that whether voting is
rational depends in part upon what the voters' goals are. If
their goal is to in some way change the outcome of the election, or to
change which policies are implemented, then voting is indeed
irrational, or rational only in unusual circumstances or for a small
subset of voters. However, perhaps voters have other goals.



The expressive theory of voting (G. Brennan and Lomasky 1993) holds
that voters vote in order to express themselves. On the expressive
theory, voting is a consumption activity rather than a productive
activity; it is more like reading a book for pleasure than it is like
reading a book to develop a new skill. On this theory, though the act
of voting is private, voters regard voting as an apt way to
demonstrate and express their commitment to their political team.
Voting is like wearing a Metallica T-shirt at a concert or doing the
wave at a sports game. Sports fans who paint their faces the team
colors do not generally believe that they, as individuals, will change
the outcome of the game, but instead wish to demonstrate their
commitment to their team. Even when watching games alone, sports fans
cheer and clap for their teams. Perhaps voting is like this.



This "expressive theory of voting" is untroubled by and
indeed partly supported by the empirical findings that most voters are
ignorant about basic political facts (Somin 2013; Delli Carpini and
Keeter, 1996). The expressive theory is also untroubled by and indeed
partly supported by work in political psychology showing that most
citizens suffer from significant "intergroup bias": we
tend to automatically form groups, and to be irrationally loyal to and
forgiving of our own group while irrationally hateful of other groups
(Lodge and Taber 2013; Haidt 2012; Westen, Blagov, Harenski, Kilts,
and Hamann 2006; Westen 2008). Voters might adopt ideologies in order
to signal to themselves and others that they are certain kinds of
people. For example, suppose Bob wants to express that he is a patriot
and a tough guy. He thus endorses hawkish military actions, e.g., that
the United States nuke Russia for interfering with Ukraine. It would
be disastrous for Bob were the US to do what he wants. However, since
Bob's individual vote for a militaristic candidate has little
hope of being decisive, Bob can afford to indulge irrational and
misinformed beliefs about public policy and express those beliefs at
the polls.



Another simple and plausible argument is that it can be rational to
vote in order to discharge a perceived duty to vote (Mackie 2010).
Surveys indicate that most citizens in fact believe there is a duty to
vote or to "do their share" (Mackie 2010: 8-9). If
there are such duties, and these duties are sufficiently weighty, then
it would be rational for most voters to vote.


## 2. The Moral Obligation to Vote



Surveys show that most citizens in contemporary democracies believe
there is some sort of moral obligation to vote (Mackie 2010:
8-9). Other surveys show most moral and political philosophers
agree (Schwitzgebel and Rust 2010). They tend to believe that citizens
have a duty to vote even when these citizens rightly believe their
favored party or candidate has no serious chance of winning (Campbell,
Gurin, and Mill 1954: 195). Further, most people seem to think that
the duty to vote specifically means a duty to turn out to vote
(perhaps only to cast a blank ballot), rather than a duty to vote a
particular way. On this view, citizens have a duty simply to cast a
vote, but nearly any good-faith vote is morally acceptable.



Many popular arguments for a duty to vote rely upon the idea that
individual votes make a significant difference. For instance, one
might argue that that there is a duty to vote because there is a duty
to protect oneself, a duty to help others, or to produce good
government, or the like. However, these arguments face the problem, as
discussed in section 1, that individual votes have vanishingly small
instrumental value (or disvalue)



For instance, one early hypothesis was that voting might be a form of
insurance, meant to to prevent democracy from collapsing (Downs 1957:
257). Following this suggestion, suppose one hypothesizes that
citizens have a duty to vote in order to help prevent democracy from
collapsing. Suppose there is some determinate threshold of votes under
which a democracy becomes unstable and collapses. The problem here is
that just as there is a vanishingly small probability that any
individual's vote would decide the election, so there is a
vanishingly small chance that any vote would decisively put the number
of votes above that threshold. Alternatively, suppose that as fewer
and fewer citizens vote, the probability of democracy collapsing
becomes incrementally higher. If so, to show there is a duty to vote,
one would first need to show that the marginal expected benefits of
the *nth* vote, in reducing the chance of democratic collapse,
exceed the expected costs (including opportunity costs).



A plausible argument for a duty to vote would thus not depend on
individual votes having significant expected value or impact on
government or civic culture. Instead, a plausible argument for a duty
to vote should presume that individual votes make little difference in
changing the outcome of election, but then identify a reason why
citizens should vote anyway.



One suggestion (Beerbohm 2012) is that citizens have a duty to vote to
avoid complicity with injustice. On this view, representatives act in
the name of the citizens. Citizens count as partial authors of the
law, even when the citizens do not vote or participate in government.
Citizens who refuse to vote are thus complicit in allowing their
representatives to commit injustice. Perhaps failure to resist
injustice counts as kind of sponsorship. (This theory thus implies
that citizens do not merely have a duty to vote rather than abstain,
but specifically have a duty to vote for candidates and policies that
will reduce injustice.) 



Another popular argument, which does not turn on the efficacy of
individual votes, is the "Generalization Argument":



> 
> What if everyone were to stay home and not vote? The results would be
> disastrous! Therefore, I (you/she) should vote. (Lomasky and G.
> Brennan 2000: 75)
> 



This popular argument can be parodied in a way that exposes its
weakness. Consider:



> 
> What if everyone were to stay home and not farm? Then we would all
> starve to death! Therefore, I (you/she) should each become farmers.
> (Lomasky and G. Brennan 2000: 76)
> 



The problem with this argument, as stated, is that even if it would be
disastrous if no one or too few performed some activity, it does not
follow that everyone ought to perform it. Instead, one conclude that
it matters that sufficient number of people perform the activity. In
the case of farming, we think it's permissible for people to
decide for themselves whether to farm or not, because market
incentives suffice to ensure that enough people farm.



However, even if the Generalization Argument, as stated, is unsound,
perhaps it is on to something. There are certain classes of actions in
which we tend to presume everyone ought to participate (or ought not
to participate). For instance, suppose a university places a sign
saying, "Keep off the newly planted grass." It's not
as though the grass will die if one person walks on it once. If I were
allowed to walk on it at will while the rest of you refrained from
doing so, the grass would probably be fine. Still, it would seem
unfair if the university allowed me to walk on the grass at will but
forbade everyone else from doing so. It seems more appropriate to
impose the duty to keep off the lawn equally on everyone. Similarly,
if the government wants to raise money to provide a public good, it
could just tax a randomly chosen minority of the citizens. However, it
seems more fair or just for everyone (at least above a certain income
threshold) to pay some taxes, to share in the burden of providing
police protection.



We should thus ask: is voting more like the first kind of activity, in
which it is only imperative that enough people do it, or the second
kind, in which it's imperative that everyone do it? One
difference between the two kinds of activities is what abstention does
to others. If I abstain from farming, I don't thereby take
advantage of or free ride on farmers' efforts. Rather, I
compensate them for whatever food I eat by buying that food on the
market. In the second set of cases, if I freely walk across the lawn
while everyone else walks around it, or if I enjoy police protection
but don't pay taxes, it appears I free ride on others'
efforts. They bear an uncompensated differential burden in maintaining
the grass or providing police protection, and I seem to be taking
advantage of them.



A defender of a duty to vote might thus argue that non-voters free
ride on voters. Non-voters benefit from the government that voters
provide, but do not themselves help to provide government. 



There are at least a few arguments for a duty to vote that do not
depend on the controversial assumption that individual votes make a
difference:


1. *The Generalization/Public Goods/Debt to Society
Argument*: Claims that citizens who abstain from voting thereby
free ride on the provision of good government, or fail to pay their
"debts to society".
2. *The Civic Virtue Argument*: Claims that citizens have a
duty to exercise civic virtue, and thus to vote.
3. *The Complicity Argument*: Claims that citizens have a
duty to vote (for just outcomes) in order to avoid being complicit in
the injustice their governments commit.



However, there is a general challenge to these arguments in support of
a duty to vote. Call this the *particularity problem*: To show
that there is a duty to vote, it is not enough to appeal to some goal
*G* that citizens plausibly have a duty to support, and then to
argue that voting is one way they can support or help achieve
*G*. Instead, proponents of a duty to vote need to show
specifically that voting is the only way, or the required way, to
support *G* (J. Brennan 2011a). The worry is that the three
arguments above might only show that voting is one way among many to
discharge the duty in question. Indeed, it might not be even be an
especially good way, let alone the only or obligatory way to discharge
the duty.



For instance, suppose one argues that citizens should vote because
they ought to exercise civic virtue. One must explain why a duty to
exercise civic virtue specifically implies a duty to vote, rather than
a duty just to perform one of thousands of possible acts of civic
virtue. Or, if a citizen has a duty to to be an agent who helps
promote other citizens' well-being, it seems this duty could be
discharged by volunteering, making art, or working at a productive job
that adds to the social surplus. If a citizen has a duty to to avoid
complicity in injustice, it seems that rather than voting, she could
engage in civil disobedience; write letters to newspaper editors,
pamphlets, or political theory books; donate money; engage in
conscientious abstention; protest; assassinate criminal political
leaders; or do any number of other activities. It's unclear why
voting is special or required.



Note that the particularity problem need not be framed in
consequentialist terms, i.e., both defenders and critics of the duty
to vote need not say that what determines whether voting is morally
required depends on whether voting has the highest expected
consequences. Rather, the issue is whether voting is simply one of
many ways to discharge an underlying duty or respond to underlying
reasons, or whether voting is in some way special and unique, such
that these reasons select voting in particular as an obligatory means
of responding to these underlying reasons.



Maskivker (2019) responds partly to this objection by saying, in
effect, "Why not both?" J. Brennan (2011a) and Freiman (2020) say
that the underlying grounds for any duty to vote can be discharged
(and discharged better) through actions other than voting. Maskivker
takes this to suggest not that voting is optional, but that one should
vote (if one is already sufficiently well-informed and
publicly-spirited) and also performs these other actions. Maskivker
grounds her argument on a deontological duty of easy aid: if one can
provide aid to others at very low cost to oneself, then one should do
so. For already well-informed citizens, voting is an instance of easy
aid. 


### 2.1 A General Moral Obligation Not to Vote?



While many hold that it is obligatory to vote, a few have argued that
many people have an obligation not to vote under special
circumstances. For instance, Sheehy (2002) argues that voting when one
is indifferent to the election is unfair. He argues that if one's
vote makes a difference, it could be to disappoint what otherwise
would be have been the majority coalition, whose position is now
thwarted by those who, by hypothesis, have no preference. 



Another argument holds that voting might be wrong because it is an
ineffective form of altruism. Freiman (2020) argues that when people
discharge their obligations to help and aid others, they are obligated
to pursue effective rather than ineffective forms of altruism (see
also MacAskill 2015). For instance, suppose one has an obligation to
give a certain amount to charity each year. This obligation is not
fundamentally about spending a certain percentage of one's money. If
a person gave 10% of their income to a charity that did no good at
all, or which made the world worse, one would not have discharged the
obligation to act beneficently. Similarly, Freiman argues, if a person
is voting for the purpose of aiding and helping others, then they
would at the very least need to be sufficiently well-informed to vote
for the better candidate, a condition few voters meet (see section 3.2
below). In part because most voters are in no position to judge
whether they are voting for the better or worse candidates, and in
part simply because individual votes make little difference, votes and
most other forms of political action (such as donating to political campaigns,
canvassing, volunteering, and the like) are highly ineffective forms
of altruism. Freiman claims that we are instead obligated to pursue
effective forms of altruism, such as collecting and making donations
to the Against Malaria Foundation. 


## 3. Moral Obligations Regarding How One Votes



Most people appear to believe that there is a duty to cast a vote
(perhaps including a blank ballot) rather than abstain (Mackie 2010:
8-9), but this leaves open whether they believe there is a duty
to vote in any particular way. Some philosophers and political
theorists have argued there are ethical obligations attached to how
one chooses to vote. For instance, many deliberative democrats (see
Christiano 2006) believe not only that every citizen has a duty to
vote, but also that they must vote in publicly-spirited ways, after
engaging in various forms of democratic deliberation. In contrast,
some (G. Brennan and Lomasky 1993; J. Brennan 2009, 2011a)
argue that while there is no general duty to vote (abstention is
permissible), those citizens who do choose to vote have duties
affecting how they vote. They argue that while it is not wrong to
abstain, it is wrong to vote *badly*, in some theory-specified
sense of "badly".



Note that the question of how one ought to vote is distinct from the
question of whether one ought to have the right to vote. The right to
vote licenses a citizen to cast a vote. It requires the state to
permit the citizen to vote and then requires the state to count that
vote. This leaves open whether some ways a voter could vote could be
morally wrong, or whether other ways of voting might be morally
obligatory. In parallel, my right of free association arguably
includes the right to join the Ku Klux Klan, while my right of free
speech arguably includes the right to advocate an unjust war. Still,
it would be morally wrong for me to do either of these things, though
doing so is within my rights. Thus, just as someone can, without
contradiction, say, "You have the right to have racist
attitudes, but you should not," so a person can, without
contradiction, say, "You have the right to vote for that
candidate, but you should not."



A theory of voting ethics might include answers to any of the
following questions:


1. *The Intended Beneficiary of the Vote*: Whose interests
should the voter take into account when casting a vote? May the voter
vote selfishly, or should she vote sociotropically? If the latter, on
behalf of which group ought she vote: her demographic group(s), her
local jurisdiction, the nation, or the entire world? Is it permissible
to vote when one has no stake in the election, or is otherwise
indifferent to the outcome?
2. *The Substance of the Vote*: Are there particular
candidates or policies that the voter is obligated to support, or not
to support? For instance, is a voter obligated to vote for whatever
would best produce the most just outcomes, according to the correct
theory of justice? Must the voter vote for candidates with good
character? May the voter vote strategically, or must she vote in
accordance with her sincere preferences?
3. *Epistemic Duties Regarding Voting*: Are voters required
to have a particular degree of knowledge, or exhibit a particular kind
of epistemic rationality, in forming their voting preferences? Is it
permissible to vote in ignorance, on the basis of beliefs about social
scientific matters that are formed without sufficient evidence?


### 3.1 The Expressivist Ethics of Voting



Recall that one important theory of voting behavior holds that most
citizens vote not in order to influence the outcome of the election or
influence government policies, but in order to express themselves (G.
Brennan and Lomasky 1993). They vote to signal to themselves and to
others that they are loyal to certain ideas, ideals, or groups. For
instance, I might vote Democrat to signal that I'm compassionate
and fair, or Republican to signal I'm responsible, moral, and
tough. If voting is primarily an expressive act, then perhaps the
ethics of voting is an ethics of expression (G. Brennan and Lomasky
1993: 167-198). We can assess the morality of voting by asking
what it says about a voter that she voted like that: 



> 
> To cast a Klan ballot is to *identify oneself* in a morally
> significant way with the racist policies that the organization
> espouses. One thereby lays oneself open to associated moral liability
> whether the candidate has a small, large, or zero probability of
> gaining victory, and whether or not one's own vote has an
> appreciable likelihood of affecting the election result. (G. Brennan
> and Lomasky 1993: 186)
> 



The idea here is that if it's wrong (even if it's within
my rights) in general for me to express sincere racist attitudes, and
so it's wrong for me to express sincere racist commitments at
the polls. Similar remarks apply to other wrongful attitudes. To the
extent it is wrong for me to express sincere support for illiberal,
reckless, or bad ideas, it would also be wrong for me to vote for
candidates who support those ideas.



Of course, the question of just what counts as wrongful and
permissible expression is complicated. There is also a complicated
question of just what voting expresses. What I think my vote expresses
might be different from what it expresses to others, or it might be
that it expresses different things to different people. The
expressivist theory of voting ethics acknowledges these difficulties,
and replies that whatever we would say about the ethics of expression
in general should presumably apply to expressive voting.


### 3.2 The Epistemic Ethics of Voting



Consider the question: What do doctors owe patients, parents owe
children, or jurors owe defendants (or, perhaps, society)? Doctors owe
patients proper care, and to discharge their duties, they must 1) aim
to promote their patients' interests, and 2) reason about how to
do so in a sufficiently informed and rational way. Parents similarly
owe such duties to their children. Jurors similarly owe society at
large, or perhaps more specifically the defendant, duties to 1) try to
determine the truth, and 2) do so in an informed and rational way. The
doctors, parents, and jurors are fiduciaries of others. They owe a
duty of care, and this duty of care brings with it certain
*epistemic responsibilities*. 



One might try to argue that voters owe similar duties of care to the
governed. Perhaps voters should vote 1) for what they perceive to be
the best outcomes (consistent with strategic voting) and 2) make such
decisions in a sufficiently informed and rational way. How voters vote
has significant impact on political outcomes, and can help determine
matters of peace and war, life and death, prosperity and poverty.
Majority voters do not just choose for themselves, but for everyone,
including dissenting minorities, children, non-voters, resident
aliens, and people in other countries affected by their decisions. For
this reason, voting seems to be a morally charged activity (Christiano
2006; J. Brennan 2011a; Beerbohm 2012).



That said, one clear disanalogy between the relationship doctors have
with patients and voters have with the governed is that individual
voters have only a vanishingly small chance of making a difference.
The expected harm of an incompetent individual vote is vanishingly
small, while the expected harm of incompetent individual medical
decisions is high. 



However, perhaps the point holds anyway. Define a "collectively
harmful activity" as an activity in which a group is imposing or
threatening to impose harm, or unjust risk of harm, upon other
innocent people, but the harm will be imposed regardless of whether
individual members of that group drop out. It's plausible that
one might have an obligation to refrain from participating in such
activities, i.e., a duty to keep one's hands clean.



To illustrate, suppose a 100-member firing squad is about to shoot an
innocent child. Each bullet will hit the child at the same time, and
each shot would, on its own, be sufficient to kill her. You cannot
stop them, so the child will die regardless of what you do. Now,
suppose they offer you the opportunity to join in and shoot the child
with them. You can make the 101st shot. Again, the child will die
regardless of what you do. Is it permissible for you join the firing
squad? Most people have a strong intuition that it is wrong to join
the squad and shoot the child. One plausible explanation of why it is
wrong is that there may be a general moral prohibition against
participating in these kinds of activities. In these kinds of cases,
we should try to keep our hands clean.



Perhaps this "clean-hands principle" can be generalized to
explain why individual acts of ignorant, irrational, or malicious
voting are wrong. The firing-squad example is somewhat analogous to
voting in an election. Adding or subtracting a shooter to the firing
squad makes no difference--the girl will die anyway. Similarly,
with elections, individual votes make no difference. In both cases,
the outcome is causally overdetermined. Still, the irresponsible voter
is much like a person who volunteers to shoot in the firing squad. Her
individual bad vote is of no consequence--just as an individual
shot is of no consequence--but she is participating in a
collectively harmful activity when she could easily keep her hands
clean (J. Brennan 2011a, 68-94).


## 4. The Justice of Compulsory Voting



Voting rates in many contemporary democracies are (according to many
observers) low, and seem in general to be falling. The United States,
for instance, barely manages about 60% in presidential elections and
45% in other elections (Brennan and Hill 2014: 3). Many other
countries have similarly low rates. Some democratic theorists,
politicians, and others think this is problematic, and advocate
compulsory voting as a solution. In a compulsory voting regime,
citizens are required to vote by law; if they fail to vote without a
valid excuse, they incur some sort of penalty.



One major argument for compulsory voting is what we might call the
Demographic or Representativeness Argument (Lijphart 1997; Engelen
2007; Galston 2011; Hill in J. Brennan and Hill 2014: 154-173;
Singh 2015). The argument begins by noting that in voluntary voting
regimes, citizens who choose to vote are systematically different from
those who choose to abstain. The rich are more likely to vote than the
poor. The old are more likely to vote than the young. Men are more
likely to vote than women. In many countries, ethnic minorities are
less likely to vote than ethnic majorities. More highly educated
people are more likely to vote than less highly educated people.
Married people are more likely to vote than non-married people.
Political partisans are more likely to vote than true independents
(Leighley and Nagler 1992; Evans 2003: 152-6). In short, under
voluntary voting, the electorate--the citizens who actually
choose to vote--are not fully representative of the public at
large. The Demographic Argument holds that since politicians tend to
give voters what they want, in a voluntary voting regime, politicians
will tend to advance the interests of advantaged citizens (who vote
disproportionately) over the disadvantaged (who tend not to vote).
Compulsory voting would tend to ensure that the disadvantaged vote in
higher numbers, and would thus tend to ensure that everyone's
interests are properly represented.



Relatedly, one might argue compulsory voting helps citizens overcome
an "assurance problem" (Hill 2006). The thought here is
that an individual voter realizes her individual vote has little
significance. What's important is that enough other voters like
her vote. However, she cannot easily coordinate with other voters and
ensure they will vote with her. Compulsory voting solves this problem.
For this reason, Lisa Hill (2006: 214-15) concludes,
"Rather than perceiving the compulsion as yet another unwelcome
form of state coercion, compulsory voting may be better understood as
a coordination necessity in mass societies of individual strangers
unable to communicate and coordinate their preferences."



Whether the Demographic Argument succeeds or not depends on a few
assumptions about voter and politician behavior. First, political
scientists overwhelmingly find that voters do not vote their
self-interest, but instead vote for what they perceive to be the
national interest. (See the dozens of papers cited at Brennan and Hill
2014: 38-9n28.) Second, it might turn out that disadvantaged
citizens are not informed enough to vote in ways that promote their
interests--they might not have sufficient social scientific
knowledge to know which candidates or political parties will help them
(Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; Caplan 2007; Somin 2013). Third, it
may be that even in a compulsory voting regime, politicians can get
away with ignoring the policy preferences of most voters (Gilens 2012;
Bartels 2010).



In fact, contrary to many theorists' expectations, it appears
that compulsory voting has no significant effect on individual
political knowledge (that is, it does not induce ignorant voters to
become better informed), individual political conversation and
persuasion, individual propensity to contact politicians, the
propensity to work with others to address concerns, participation in
campaign activities, the likelihood of being contacted by a party or
politician, the quality of representation, electoral integrity, the
proportion of female members of parliament, support for small or third
parties, support for the left, or support for the far right (Birch
2009; Highton and Wolfinger 2001). Political scientists have also been
unable to demonstrate that compulsory voting leads to more egalitarian
or left-leaning policy outcomes. The empirical literature so far shows
that compulsory voting gets citizens to vote, but it's not clear
it does much else.



## 5. The Ethics of Vote Buying



Many citizens of modern democracies believe that vote buying and
selling are immoral (Tetlock 2000). Many philosophers agree; they
argue it is wrong to buy, trade, or sell votes (Satz 2010: 102; Sandel
2012: 104-5). Richard Hasen reviews the literature on vote
buying and concludes that people have offered three main arguments
against it. He says,



> 
> Despite the almost universal condemnation of core vote buying,
> commentators disagree on the underlying rationales for its
> prohibition. Some offer an equality argument against vote buying: the
> poor are more likely to sell their votes than are the wealthy, leading
> to political outcomes favoring the wealthy. Others offer an efficiency
> argument against vote buying: vote buying allows buyers to engage in
> rent-seeking that diminishes overall social wealth. Finally, some
> commentators offer an inalienability argument against vote buying:
> votes belong to the community as a whole and should not be alienable
> by individual voters. This alienability argument may support an
> anti-commodification norm that causes voters to make public-regarding
> voting decisions. (Hasen 2000: 1325)
> 



Two of the concerns here are consequentialist: the worry is that in a
regime where vote-buying is legal, votes will be bought and sold in
socially destructive ways. However, whether vote buying is destructive
is a subject of serious social scientific debate; some economists
think markets in votes would in fact produce greater efficiency
(Buchanan and Tullock 1962; Haefele 1971; Mueller 1973; Philipson and
Snyder 1996; Hasen 2000: 1332). The third concern is deontological: it
holds that votes are just not the kind of thing that ought be for
sale, even if it turned out that vote-buying and selling did not lead
to bad consequences.



Many people think vote selling is wrong because it would lead to bad
or corrupt voting. But, if that is the problem, then perhaps the
permissibility of vote buying and selling should be assessed on a
case-by-case basis. Perhaps the rightness or wrongness of individual
acts of vote buying and selling depends entirely on how the vote
seller votes (J. Brennan 2011a: 135-160; Brennan and Jaworski
2015: 183-194). Suppose I pay a person to vote in a good way.
For instance, suppose I pay indifferent people to vote on behalf of
women's rights, or for the Correct Theory of Justice, whatever
that might be. Or, suppose I think turnout is too low, and so I pay a
well-informed person to vote her conscience. It is unclear why we
should conclude in either case that I have done something wrong,
rather than conclude that I have done everyone a small public service.




Certain objections to vote buying and selling appear to prove too
much; these objections lead to conclusions that the objectors are not
willing to support. For instance, one common argument against voting
selling is that paying a person to vote imposes an externality on
third parties. However, so does persuading others to vote or to vote
in certain ways (Freiman 2014: 762). If paying you to vote for
*X* is wrong because it imposes a third party cost, then for the
sake of consistency, I should also conclude that persuading you to
vote for *X*, say, on the basis of a good argument, is equally
problematic. 



As another example, some object to voting markets on the grounds that
votes should be for the common good, rather than for narrow
self-interest (Satz 2010: 103; Sandel 2012: 10). Others say that
voting should "be an act undertaken only after collectively
deliberating about what it is in the common good" (Satz 2010:
103). Some claim that vote markets should be illegal for this reason.
Perhaps it's permissible to forbid vote selling because
commodified votes are likely to be cast against the common good.
However, if that is sufficient reason to forbid markets in votes, then
it is unclear why we should not, e.g., forbid highly ignorant,
irrational, or selfish voters from voting, as their votes are also
unusually likely to undermine the common good (Freiman 2014:
771-772). Further these arguments appear to leave open that a
person could permissibly sell her vote, provided she does so after
deliberating and provided she votes for the common good. It might be
that if vote selling were legal, most or even all vote sellers would
vote in destructive ways, but that does not show that vote selling is
inherently wrong.



One pressing issue, though, is whether vote buying is compatible with
the secret ballot (Maloberti 2018). Regardless of whether vote buying
is enforced through legal means (such as through enforceable
contracts) or social means (such as through the reputation mechanism
in eBay or through simply social disapproval), to enforce vote buying
seems to require that voters in some way actively prove they voted in
various ways. But, if so, then this will partly eliminate the secret
ballot and possibly lead to increased clientelism, in which
politicians make targeted promises to particular bands of voters
rather than serve the common good (Maloberti 2018).



Not all objections to vote-buying have this consequentialist flavor.
Some argue that vote buying is wrong for deontological grounds, for
instance, on the grounds that vote buying in some way is incompatible
with the social meaning of voting (e.g. Walzer 1984). Some view voting
is an expressive act, and the meaning of that expression is
socially-determined. To buy and sell votes may signal disrespect to
others in light of this social meaning.


## 6. Who Should Be Allowed to Vote? Should Everyone Receive Equal Voting Rights?



The dominant view among political philosophers is that we ought to
have some sort of representative democracy, and that each adult ought
to have one vote, of equal weight to every other adult's, in any
election in her jurisdiction. This view has recently come under
criticism, though, both from friends and foes of democracy.



Before one even asks whether "one person, one vote" is the
right policy, one needs to determine just who counts as part of the
demos. Call this the boundary problem or the problem of constituting
the demos (Goodin 2007: 40; Ron 2017). Democracy is the rule of the
people. But one fundamental question is just who constitutes
"the people". This is no small problem. Before one can
judge that a democracy is fair, or adequately responds to
citizens' interests, one needs to know who "counts"
and who does not.



One might be inclined to say that everyone living under a particular
government's jurisdiction is part of the demos and is thus
entitled to a vote. However, in fact, most democracies exclude
children and teenagers, felons, the mentally infirm, and non-citizens
living in a government's territory from being able to vote, but
at the same time allow their citizens living in foreign countries to
vote (Lopez-Guerra 2014: 1).



There are a number of competing theories here. The "all affected
interests" theory (Dahl 1990a: 64) holds that anyone who is
affected by a political decision or a political institution is part of
the demos. The basic argument is that anyone who is affected by a
political decision-making process should have some say over that
process. However, this principle suffers from multiple problems. It
may be incoherent or useless, as we might not know or be able to know
who is affected by a decision until after the decision is made (Goodin
2007: 52). For example (taken from Goodin 2007: 53), suppose the UK
votes on whether to transfer 5% of its GDP to its former African
colonies. We cannot assess whether the members of the former African
colonies are among the affected interests until we know what the
outcome of the vote is. If the vote is yay, then they are affected; if
the vote is nay, then they are not. (See Owen 2012 for a response.)
Further, the "all affected interests" theory would often
include non-citizens and exclude citizens. Sometimes political
decisions made in one country have a significant effect on citizens of
another country; sometimes political decisions made in one country
have little or no effect on some of the citizens of that country.



One solution (Goodin 2007: 55) to this problem (of who counts as an
affected party) is to hold that all people with *possibly* or
*potentially* affected interests constitute part of the polity.
This principle implies, however, that for many decisions, the demos is
smaller than the nation-state, and for others, it is larger. For
instance, when the United States decides whether to elect a
warmongering or pacifist candidate, this affects not only Americans,
but a large percentage of people worldwide.



Other major theories offered as solutions to the boundary problem face
similar problems. For example, the coercion theory holds that anyone
subject to coercion from a political body ought to have a say
(Lopez-Guerra 2005). But this principle might be also be seen
as over-inclusive (Song 2009), as it would require that resident
aliens, tourists, or even enemy combatants be granted a right to vote,
as they are also subject to a state's coercive power. Further,
who will be coerced depends on the outcome of a decision. If a state
decides to impose some laws, it will coerce certain people, and if the
state declines to impose those laws, then it will not. If we try to
overcome this by saying anyone *potentially* subject to a given
state's coercive power ought to have a say, then this seems to
imply that almost everyone worldwide should have a say in most
states' major decisions.



The commonsense view of the demos, i.e., that the demos includes all
and only adult members of a nation-state, may be hard to defend.
Goodin (2007: 49) proposes that what makes citizens special is that
their interests are interlinked. This may be an accidental feature of
arbitrarily-decided national borders, but once these borders are in
place, citizens will find that their interests tend to more linked
together than with citizens of other polities. But whether this is
true is also highly contingent.


### 6.1 Democratic Challenges to One Person, One Vote



The idea of "One person, one vote" is supposedly grounded
on a commitment to egalitarianism. Some philosophers believe that
democracy with equal voting rights is necessary to ensure that
government gives equal consideration to everyone's interests
(Christiano 1996, 2008). However, it is not clear that giving every
citizen an equal right to vote reliably results in decisions that give
equal consideration to everyone's interests. In many decisions,
many citizens have little to nothing at stake, while other citizens
have a great deal at stake. Thus, one alternative proposal is that
citizens' votes should be weighted by how much they have a stake
in the decision. This preserves equality not by giving everyone an
equal chance of being decisive in every decision, but by giving
everyone's interests equal weight. Otherwise, in a system of one
person, one vote, issues that are deeply important to the few might
continually lose out to issues of only minor interest to the many
(Brighouse and Fleurbaey 2010).



There are a number of other independent arguments for this conclusion.
Perhaps proportional voting enhances citizens' autonomy, by
giving them greater control over those issues in which they have
greater stakes, while few would regard it as significant loss of
autonomy were they to have reduced control over issues that do not
concern them. Further, though the argument for this conclusion is too
technical to cover here in depth (Brighouse and Fleurbaey 2010; List
2013), it may be that apportioning political power according to
one's stake in the outcome can overcome some of the well-known
paradoxes of democracy, such as the Condorcet Paradox (which show that
democracies might have intransitive preferences, i.e., the majority
might prefer A to B, B to C, and yet also prefer C to A).



However, even if this proposal seems plausible in theory, it is
unclear how a democracy might reliably instantiate this in practice.
Before allowing a vote, a democratic polity would need to determine to
what extent different citizens have a stake in the decision, and then
somehow weight their votes accordingly. In real life,
special-interests groups and others would likely try to use vote
weighting for their own ends. Citizens might regard unequal voting
rights as evidence of corruption or electoral manipulation (Christiano
2008: 34-45). 


### 6.2 Non-Democratic Challenges to One Person, One Vote



Early defenders of democracy were concerned to show democracy is
superior to aristocracy, monarchy, or oligarchy. However, in recent
years, *epistocracy* has emerged as a major contender to
democracy (Estlund 2003, 2007; Landemore 2012). A system is said to be
epistocratic to the extent that the system formally allocates
political power on the basis of knowledge or political competence. For
instance, an epistocracy might give university-educated citizens
additional votes (Mill 1861), exclude citizens from voting unless they
can pass a voter qualification exam, weigh votes by each voter's
degree of political knowledge while correcting for the influence of
demographic factors, or create panels of experts who have the right to
veto democratic legislation (Caplan 2007; J. Brennan 2011b;
Lopez-Guerra 2014; Mulligan 2015).



Arguments for epistocracy generally center on concerns about
democratic incompetence. Epistocrats hold that democracy imbues
citizens with the right to vote in a promiscuous way. Ample empirical
research has shown that the mean, median, and modal levels of basic
political knowledge (let alone social scientific knowledge) among
citizens is extremely low (Somin 2013; Caplan 2007; Delli Carpini and
Keeter 1996). Further, political knowledge makes a significant
difference in how citizens vote and what policies they support
(Althaus 1998, 2003; Caplan 2007; Gilens 2012). Epistocrats believe
that restricting or weighting votes would protect against some of the
downsides of democratic incompetence. 



One argument for epistocracy is that the legitimacy of political
decisions depends upon them being made competently and in good faith.
Consider, as an analogy: In a criminal trial, the jury's
decision is high stakes; their decision can remove a person's
rights or greatly harm their life, liberty, welfare, or property. If a
jury made its decision out of ignorance, malice, whimsy, or on the
basis of irrational and biased thought processes, we arguably should
not and probably would not regard the jury's decision as
authoritative or legitimate. Instead, we think the criminal has a
right to a trial conducted by competent people in good faith. In many
respects, electoral decisions are similar to jury decisions: they also
are high stakes, and can result in innocent people losing their lives,
liberty, welfare, or property. If the legitimacy and authority of a
jury decision depends upon the jury making a competent decision in
good faith, then perhaps so should the legitimacy and authority of
most other governmental decisions, including the decisions that
electorates and their representatives make. Now, suppose, in light of
widespread voter ignorance and irrationality, it turns out that
democratic electorates tend to make incompetent decisions. If so, then
this seems to provide at least presumptive grounds for favoring
epistocracy over democracy (J. Brennan 2011b). 



Some dispute whether epistocracy would in fact perform better than
democracy, even in principle. Epistocracy generally attempts to
generate better political outcomes by in some way raising the average
reliability of political decision-makers. Political scientists Lu Hong
and Scott Page (2004) adduced a mathematical theorem showing that
under the right conditions, cognitive diversity among the participants
in a collective decision more strongly contributes to the group making
a smart decision than does increasing the individual
participants' reliability. On the Hong-Page theorem, it is
possible that having a large number of diverse but unreliable
decision-makers in a collective decision will outperform having a
smaller number of less diverse but more reliable decision-makers.
There is some debate over whether the Hong-Page theorem has any
mathematical substance (Thompson 2014 claims it does not), whether
real-world political decisions meet the conditions of the theorem, and
if so, to what extent that justifies universal suffrage, or merely
shows that having widespread but restricted suffrage is superior to
having highly restricted suffrage (Landemore 2012; Somin 2013:
113-5).



Relatedly, Condorcet's Jury Theorem holds that under the right
conditions, provided the average voter is reliable, as more and more
voters are added to a collective decision, the probability that the
democracy will make the right choice approaches 1 (List and Goodin
2001). However, assuming the theorem applies to real-life democratic
decisions, whether the theorem supports or condemns democracy depends
on how reliable voters are. If voters do systematically worse than
chance (e.g., Althaus 2003; Caplan 2007), then the theorem instead
implies that large democracies almost always make the wrong
choice.



One worry about certain forms of epistocracy, such as a system in
which voters must earn the right to vote by passing an examination, is
that such systems might make decisions that are biased toward members
of certain demographic groups. After all, political knowledge is not
evenly dispersed among all demographic groups. (At the very least, the
kinds of knowledge political scientists have been studying are not
evenly distributed. Whether other kinds of knowledge are better
distributed is an open question.) On average, in the United States, on
measures of basic political knowledge, whites know more than blacks,
people in the Northeast know more than people in the South, men know
more than women, middle-aged people know more than the young or old,
and high-income people know more than the poor (Delli Carpini and
Keeter 1996: 137-177). If such a voter examination system were
implemented, the resulting electorate would be whiter, maler, richer,
more middle-aged, and better employed than the population at large.
Democrats might reasonably worry that for this very reason an
epistocracy would not take the interests of non-whites, women, the
poor, or the unemployed into proper consideration. 



However, at least one form of epistocracy may be able to avoid this
objection. Consider, for instance, the "enfranchisement
lottery": 



> 
> The enfranchisement lottery consists of two devices. First, there
> would be a sortition to disenfranchise the vast majority of the
> population. Prior to every election, all but a random sample of the
> public would be excluded. I call this device the exclusionary
> sortition because it merely tells us who will not be entitled to vote
> in a given contest. Indeed, those who survive the sortition (the
> pre-voters) would not be automatically enfranchised. Like everyone in
> the larger group from which they are drawn, pre-voters would be
> assumed to be insufficiently competent to vote. This is where the
> second device comes in. To finally become enfranchised and vote,
> pre-voters would gather in relatively small groups to participate in a
> competence-building process carefully designed to optimize their
> knowledge about the alternatives on the ballot. (Lopez-Guerra
> 2014: 4; cf. Ackerman and Fishkin 2005)
> 



Under this scheme, no one has any presumptive right to vote. Instead,
everyone has, by default, equal eligibility to be selected to become a
voter. Before the enfranchisement lottery takes place, candidates
would proceed with their campaigns as they do in democracy. However,
they campaign without knowing which citizens in particular will
eventually acquire the right to vote. Immediately before the election,
a random but representative subset of citizens is then selected by
lottery. These citizens are not automatically granted the right to
vote. Instead, the chosen citizens merely acquire permission to earn
the right to vote. To earn this right, they must then participate in
some sort of competence-building exercise, such as studying party
platforms or meeting in a deliberative forum with one another. In
practice this system might suffer corruption or abuse, but,
epistocrats respond, so does democracy in practice. For epistocrats,
the question is which system works better, i.e., produces the best or
most substantively just outcomes, all things considered.



One important deontological objection to epistocracy is that it may be
incompatible with public reason liberalism (Estlund 2007). Public
reason liberals hold that distribution of coercive political power is
legitimate and authoritative only if all reasonable people subject to
that power have strong enough grounds to endorse a justification for
that power (Vallier and D'Agostino 2013). By definition,
epistocracy imbues some citizens with greater power than others on the
grounds that these citizens have greater social scientific knowledge.
However, the objection goes, reasonable people could disagree about
just what counts as expertise and just who the experts are. If
reasonable people disagree about what counts as expertise and who the
experts are, then epistocracy distributes political power on terms not
all reasonable people have conclusive grounds to endorse. Epistocracy
thus distributes political power on terms not all reasonable people
have conclusive grounds to endorse. (See, however, Mulligan 2015.)