Murderers on the Ballot Paper: Bad Apples, Moral Compromise, and the Epistemic Value of Public Deliberation in Representative Democracies

Abstract

Epistemic democrats typically argue that widespread public competence can empower democratic states to produce the correct decisions more effectively than antidemocratic alternatives. In reaction, this paper shows that epistemic democrats are too insensitive to a fundamental fact of representative democracies: the democratic choice of policy is mediated through a democratic choice of politician. Epistemic democrats neglect that party politicians potentially spoil the epistemic benefits of widespread public competence. Firstly, politicians must compete with each other for votes during elections. Secondly, politicians should compromise with each other to protect those they represent from the bad apples in the legislature. Politicians, as elected representatives with democratic integrity, have a profession-specific obligation to resist the bad apples, even if they must sacrifice their personal integrity in the process. They must compromise on promoting the correct decisions to gain critical political alliances and electoral support. Once political theorizing recognizes the significance of party politicians and their obligations more fully, public deliberation can be modelled as a compromise-discovery process: public deliberation can enable politicians to know which moral compromises will gain the alliances and votes necessary to resist the bad apples.