Plural Voting for the Twenty-First Century

Recent political developments cast doubt on the wisdom of democratic decision-making. Brexit, the Colombian people's (initial) rejection of peace with the FARC, and the election of Donald Trump suggest that the time is right to explore alternatives to democracy. In this essay, I describe and defend the epistocratic system of government which is, given current theoretical and empirical knowledge, most likely to produce optimal political outcomes—or at least better outcomes than democracy produces. To wit, we should expand the suffrage as wide as possible and weight citizens’ votes in accordance with their competence. As it turns out, the optimal system is closely related to J. S. Mill's plural voting proposal. I also explain how voters’ competences can be precisely determined, without reference to an objective standard of correctness and without generating invidious comparisons between voters

On Legal Interpretations of the Condorcet Jury Theorem

There has been a spate of interest in the application of the Condorcet Jury Theorem to issues in the law. This theorem holds that a majority vote among a suitably large body of voters, all of whom are more likely than not to vote correctly, will almost surely result in the correct outcome. Its uses have ranged from estimating the correct size of juries to justifying the voting of creditors in Chapter 11 reorganizations. While the mathematics is unassailable, the legal interpretation of the conclusion is dependent on the model of probability one uses when invoking the assumption that the voters are more likely than not to vote correctly. In this paper I show how different probabilistic models lead to different interpretations of the results. Establishing which is the appropriate model has normative implications as well. This analysis is then employed in critiquing work of Levmore and Kornhauser and Sager

The doctrinal paradox : comparison of decision rules in a probabilistic framework

Correccions a aquest document es poden consultar a https://ddd.uab.cat/record/251900Altres ajuts: Acord transformatiu CRUE-CSICThe doctrinal paradox is analysed from a probabilistic point of view assuming a simple parametric model for the committee's behaviour. The well known premise-based and conclusion-based majority rules are compared in this model, by means of the concepts of false positive rate (FPR), false negative rate (FNR) and Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) space. We introduce also a new rule that we call path-based, which is somehow halfway between the other two. Under our model assumptions, the premise-based rule is shown to be the best of the three according to an optimality criterion based in ROC maps, for all values of the model parameters (committee size and competence of its members), when equal weight is given to FPR and FNR. We extend this result to prove that, for unequal weights of FNR and FPR, the relative goodness of the rules depends on the values of the competence and the weights, in a way which is precisely described. The results are illustrated with some numerical examples

Voting with public information

We study the effect of public information on collective decision-making in committees, where members can have both common and conflicting interests. In the presence of public information, the simple and efficient vote-your-signal strategy profile no longer constitutes an equilibrium under the commonly-used simultaneous voting rules, while the intuitive but inefficient follow-the-expert strategy profile almost always does. Although more information may be aggregated if agents are able to coordinate on more sophisticated equilibria, inefficiency can persist even in large elections if the provision of public information introduces general correlation between the signals observed by the agents. We propose simple voting procedures that can indirectly implement the outcomes of the optimal ex post incentive compatible mechanisms with public information. Our voting procedures also have additional advantages when there is a concern for strategic disclosure of public information

Due Process Traditionalism

In important cases, the Supreme Court has limited the scope of substantive due process by reference to tradition, but it has yet to explain why it has done so. Due process traditionalism might be defended in several distinctive ways. The most ambitious defense draws on a set of ideas associated with Edmund Burke and Friedrich Hayek, who suggested that traditions have special credentials by virtue of their acceptance by many minds. But this defense runs into three problems. Those who have participated in a tradition may not have accepted any relevant proposition; they might suffer from a systematic bias; and they might have joined a cascade. An alternative defense sees due process traditionalism as a second-best substitute for two preferable alternatives: a purely procedural approach to the Due Process Clause, and an approach that gives legislatures the benefit of every reasonable doubt. But it is not clear that in these domains, the first-best approaches are especially attractive; and even if they are, the second-best may be an unacceptably crude substitute. The most plausible defense of due process traditionalism operates on rule-consequentialist grounds, with the suggestion that even if traditions are not great, they are often good, and judges do best if they defer to traditions rather than attempting to specify the content of liberty on their own. But the rule-consequentialist defense depends on controversial and probably false assumptions about the likely goodness of traditions and the institutional incapacities of judges

No-Regret Learning Supports Voters’ Competence

Procedural justifications of democracy emphasize inclusiveness and respect and by doing so come into conflict with instrumental justifications that depend on voters’ competence. This conflict raises questions about jury theorems and makes their standing in democratic theory contested. We show that a type of no-regret learning called meta-induction can help to satisfy the competence assumption without excluding voters or diverse opinion leaders on an a priori basis. Meta-induction assigns weights to opinion leaders based on their past predictive performance to determine the level of their inclusion in recommendations for voters. The weighting minimizes the difference between the performance of meta-induction and the best opinion leader in hindsight. The difference represents the regret of meta-induction whose minimization ensures that the recommendations are optimal in supporting voters’ competence. Meta-induction has optimal truth-tracking properties that support voters’ competence even if it is targeted by mis/disinformation and should be considered a tool for supporting democracy in hyper-plurality