#david runciman

The name for this view of politics is epistocracy: the rule of the knowers. It is directly opposed to democracy, because it argues that the right to participate in political decision-making depends on whether or not you know what you are doing. The basic premise of democracy has always been that it doesn’t matter how much you know: you get a say because you have to live with the consequences of what you do. In ancient Athens, this principle was reflected in the practice of choosing office-holders by lottery. Anyone could do it because everyone – well, everyone who wasn’t a woman, a foreigner, a pauper, a slave or a child – counted as a member of the state. With the exception of jury service in some countries, we don’t choose people at random for important roles any more. But we do uphold the underlying idea by letting citizens vote without checking their suitability for the task. Critics of democracy – starting with Plato – have always argued that it means rule by the ignorant, or worse, rule by the charlatans that the ignorant people fall for. Living in Cambridge, a passionately pro-European town and home to an elite university, I heard echoes of that argument in the aftermath of the Brexit vote. It was usually uttered sotto voce – you have to be a brave person to come out as an epistocrat in a democratic society – but it was unquestionably there. Behind their hands, very intelligent people muttered to each other that this is what you get if you ask a question that ordinary people don’t understand. To say that democrats want to be ruled by the stupid and the ignorant is unfair. No defender of democracy has ever claimed that stupidity or ignorance are virtues in themselves. But it is true that democracy doesn’t discriminate on the grounds of a lack of knowledge. It considers the ability to think intelligently about difficult questions a secondary consideration. The primary consideration is whether an individual is implicated in the outcome. Democracy asks only that the voters should be around long enough to suffer for their own mistakes. The question that epistocracy poses is: why don’t we discriminate on the basis of knowledge? What’s so special about letting everyone take part? Behind it lies the intuitively appealing thought that, instead of living with our mistakes, we should do everything in our power to prevent them in the first place – then it wouldn’t matter who has to take responsibility.

A century or more of democracy may have uncovered its failings, but they have also taught us that we can live with them. We are used to the mess and attached to the benefits. Being an epistocrat like Mill before democracy had got going is very different from being one now that democracy is well established. We now know what we know, not just about democracy’s failings, but about our tolerance for its incompetences. The great German sociologist Max Weber, writing at the turn of the 20th century, took it for granted that universal suffrage was a dangerous idea, because of the way that it empowered the mindless masses. But he argued that once it had been granted, no sane politician should ever think about taking it away: the backlash would be too terrible. The only thing worse than letting everyone vote is telling some people that they no longer qualify. Never mind who sets the exam, who is going to tell us that we’ve failed? Mill was right: democracy comes after epistocracy, not before. You can’t run the experiment in reverse. The cognitive biases that epistocracy is meant to rescue us from are what will ultimately scupper it. Loss aversion makes it more painful to be deprived of something we have that doesn’t always work than something we don’t have that might. It’s like the old joke. Q: “Do you know the way to Dublin?” A: “Well, I wouldn’t start from here.” How do we get to a better politics? Well, maybe we shouldn’t start from here. But here is where we are.

For Plato, democracy suffered from the basic defect of putting decision-making in the hands of people who were not competent to decide. Politics was a skill – and most people were simply clueless. Worse, that made them prey for hucksters and demagogues who would promise the earth and get away with it. Democracy was fertile ground for fantasists with a taste for power. If you tell the people that up is down, and the people believe you, then who is going to let them know that they are wrong? These fears have never really gone away, and they reassert themselves at times of political crisis. In the 1920s, the American political commentator Walter Lippmann updated Plato for the 20th century by arguing that modern citizens simply lacked the mental capacity to process the information needed for intelligent decision-making. Lippmann had worked in American propaganda during the first world war and had seen at first hand just how easy it was to manipulate public opinion. “It is no longer possible,” he wrote, “to believe in the original dogma of democracy: that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart.” People will vote on the basis of anything that grabs their attention in a passing moment, filtered by whatever deep prejudices they harbour beneath the surface. Evidence means little to the average voter; reasoned argument means even less. Lippmann concluded that democracy could only be rescued by establishing a cadre of specially trained experts, whose job was to steer politicians away from the dubious instincts of the people and back towards what the evidence required. Otherwise, the manipulation of public opinion would become the be all and end all of democracy, which is all the encouragement demagogues ever need.

The contest between the educated and the less educated is different. Many of the safeguards that have been put in place to bypass popular politics – above all, the authority that now resides in central banks – have had the effect of empowering a new class of experts, for whom education is a prerequisite of entry into the elite. These are not just the bankers, but the lawyers, the doctors, the civil servants, the technicians, the pundits, the academics. Not all of the educated are winners in this world, but almost all of the winners are educated. It gives the impression that knowledge has become a proxy for influence. When Gove suggested that the experts should not be trusted because they have a vested interest in what they are saying, that was his point: once knowledge becomes a prerequisite of power, then it no longer speaks for itself. It appears to speak for the worldview of the people who possess it. At that point it ceases to be knowledge and simply becomes another mark of privilege. The education divide has the potential to break apart the careful ties that hold representative democracy together. Regardless of our different interests, we elect representatives to take decisions on our behalf on the understanding that we share certain basic values, including a respect for knowledge, wherever it comes from. Once knowledge is assumed to be just another one of the perks of power, then the basis to trust others to take decisions for us becomes eroded. Asserting the facts and asserting your privilege grow increasingly difficult to distinguish.

Elderly Democracies: Hospice or New Life?

Setting imaginary tests before allowing enfranchisement is an essentially 19th-century idea. The basis of the principle of universal suffrage that replaced it is that we no longer believe voting is a right that belongs to individuals on the grounds of their competence to exercise it. Instead, it is a right that belongs to each of us because we are members of a democratic political community, and will have to live with the consequences of the decisions that are made by politicians on our behalf. If we suffer the consequences of those decisions, we should have a right to express a view about who gets to decide. That applies to children just as much as adults. Perhaps, instead, the argument against letting children vote is less a principled one than a pragmatic one. Surely more adults are likely to understand what is at stake in an election than a group of schoolchildren. But that depends a great deal on how we conceive of the groups in question. It is striking how often sceptical audiences jump to the conclusion that lowering the voting age to six would mean giving six-year-olds a decisive say in the running of the country. That is absurd: the lower age group would be a small minority of children overall, just as children would still be a minority of the overall electorate. Older voters in any instance can always outvote the young. But if we take children in education as a whole, there is a good chance that some groups will be better informed than many adults. They have the time and the resources to learn what is at stake if they want to. No one can be obliged to take an interest in politics, but that is as true of adults as of children. The difference is that children in school are better placed to make up the gaps in their knowledge. The question of competence – and the difficulty of using it as an argument against extending the vote to children – is especially acute in ageing societies such as our own. As the population ages, so the number of voters suffering from dementia and other forms of cognitive decline rises. But we don’t take the vote away from old people, and we don’t apply tests of competence to individuals in their 80s and 90s. Again, it is very striking how often I find that when pressed on this point, audiences will say that rather than giving votes to children it would be better – safer? – to disenfranchise elderly people. The 19th-century assumption that we ought to discriminate on grounds of competence has not gone away. […] There is a lot to be said for the principle of universal suffrage, not least that it sticks to the basic democratic idea of one person, one vote. It does not play around with quotas and competencies and tests. Taking the vote away from elderly people would violate that principle. Giving the vote to children upholds and extends it.