35

THE EPISTEMOLOGY
OF DEMOCRACY
An Overview
Robert B. Talisse

Preliminaries
The relationship between democracy and epistemology is tense. In theory, democracy embraces com-
mendable epistemic ideals that in practice it seems doomed to violate. To explain, familiar democratic
norms—equality, open discussion, a free Press, fair majoritarian elections—embody the aspiration for
informed, well-considered, and reason-based political decision-making. Democracy embraces the idea
that a group makes better decisions when its members discuss, debate, and challenge each other’s
ideas; democratic norms appear to be designed to foster precisely these activities. Furthermore, dem-
ocracy upholds an ideal of political accountability that presupposes an engaged citizenry that can con-
test standing policies. In a democracy, citizens may demand reasons from their government; and where
these are lacking, citizens may rightly object, and perhaps resist or even revolt. In general, one might
say that democracy is the political manifestation of the individual aspiration to practical rationality. As
Cass Sunstein puts it, a democracy aims to be a “republic of reasons” (1993: 20).
As appealing as the democrat’s image of collectively rational self-government may be, it prompts
an obvious query: Does democracy in fact enhance the epistemic quality of political decisions? Here
trouble looms. Not only is it unclear that democratic norms epistemically improve decision-making,
it may be that they tend to diminish the epistemic worth of public opinion. After all, democratic
norms of free expression and open discussion enable propagandists, demagogues, and strategic actors
of other kinds to manipulate and mislead democratic citizens.1 As will be discussed below, when
these norms are coupled with rights to free association, they can contribute to distinctive group-
epistemic pathologies. We also know that the communications environment that is enabled by
modern technology has exacerbated our epistemic vulnerabilities (Sunstein 2007). What’s more, there
is good reason to think that these dysfunctions are especially active in contemporary democracies:
Democratic citizens not only tend to be strikingly ignorant with regard to their political order, they
also seem increasingly unable to countenance reasonable political disagreement.2 One recent study
suggests that politically divided citizens in the United States inhabit “separate realities” (Kull 2004).
Despite its laudable epistemic ideals, real democracy is at best an epistemically mixed bag.
Given this, it is not surprising that a good deal of contemporary democratic theory attempts
to understand democracy in non-epistemic ways. The leading proposals cast democracy in moral
terms. On these views, democratic norms do not reflect a grand epistemological aspiration, but
instead respond to the moral requirement that governments and societies treat persons as equals

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(Dworkin 2000; Christiano 2008). Other views of this kind contend that democracy is that polit-
ical order that performs the moral function of constraining power and avoiding domination
(Pettit 2012; Shapiro 2016), or achieving a properly inclusive (Young 2002) or free (Gould 1988)
society. Still others propose that democracy’s driving aim is something that is neither moral nor
epistemic, but prudential, such as political stability (Riker 1982; Posner 2003). Nevertheless,
many of the moral conceptions, and (as we will see below) even some of the stability views in
currency invoke epistemic considerations. In any case very few theorists think that the epistemic
performance of democracies is entirely beside the point; that is, it would be difficult to find any
theorist who contends that entrenched, widespread, and irreparable incompetence among
a citizenry and government does not compromise the legitimacy of a democracy.
Hence much of the democratic theory now in currency aims to show how democracy might
yet be a “republic of reasons.” Some theories focus particularly on the task of enhancing the epi-
stemic value of democratic outputs (decisions, policies), whereas others seek to enhance the cap-
acity of democracy to epistemically improve democratic inputs (popular political opinion, votes).
To be sure, the better-developed views devote attention to the epistemic improvement of both
the inputs and the outputs. As these currents can be fruitfully viewed as continuations of long-
standing trends, it will be useful to begin this overview with a brisk (thus highly selective) survey
of the relevant background in democratic theory.

A Longstanding Tension
The tension between democracy’s epistemic ideals and its practical reality has been evident since
the dawn of political theory. In his famous funeral oration, Pericles celebrated democracy largely
on epistemic grounds. He lauded democracy’s capacity to foster civic participation and debate
among its citizens, affirming that these activities serve to “instruct” citizens about political mat-
ters, who thereby in turn can hold their governors (and each other) accountable (2011: 797). Yet
many of the same epistemic considerations are central to the formidable anti-democratic argu-
ments launched by Plato. Plato condemned democracy as that form of government which appor-
tions political power equally to the wise and the unwise (1997: 558c). He reasoned that as the
unwise vastly outnumber the wise in any populace, democracy is simply the rule of the foolish;
this arrangement, Plato thought, is not only imprudent, but also manifestly unjust and morally
preferable only to tyranny (1997: 562a). His infamous conclusion is that those who seek
a political order based in reason should embrace a kingship of the wise (1997: 473d).3 Aristotle
adopted a slightly moderated view in his Politics. He acknowledged that under certain conditions
a group of unwise people might be epistemically superior to a few wise ones (1984: 1281a42).4
Still, he regarded democracy as “deviant” (1984: 1289a27), as it gives individuals access to the
highest offices regardless of their intellectual excellence.
In the Modern period, several philosophers fashioned epistemic arguments for democracy.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau is one example; he argued that democracy is uniquely legitimate because
it alone could reveal and enact the General Will. He went so far as to claim that in a well-
functioning democracy, those who find themselves on the losing side of an election must con-
clude that they had been mistaken to vote as they did; again, when a proper democracy votes,
the result discloses the General Will, which is inerrant. According to Rousseau, democratic
majorities are, in this sense, infallible (1988: 100). Thus their authority: By submitting one’s judg-
ment to the General Will, one is guaranteed to arrive at the truth. Hence in a democracy the
individual “[unites] himself with all” and yet “[obeys] himself alone,” and “[remains] as free as
before” (1988: 92).
Rousseau’s conception of the General Will is notoriously obscure, and consequently its rele-
vance to democratic theory remains unclear.5 Yet Rousseau’s contemporary Marquis de Condorcet

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(1785) seems to have supplied a precise version of what Rousseau may have had in mind.6 Con-
dorcet’s renowned “jury theorem” shows that, assuming relatively weak conditions regarding indi-
viduals’ competence and cognitive independence, the majority vote in even a modestly-sized
population is nearly infallible when presented with a binary decision. Although the formal elements
of the theorem are straightforward, the institutional details are complicated and cannot be explored
here.7 But note that even if it is supposed that the details can be sorted out, the jury theorem is
not univocal in its support for democracy. The theorem entails that the majority in a modestly
sized group that fails to satisfy the weak competence condition is nearly surely mistaken, and it
offers no way to discern whether this condition has been satisfied in a given group. Additionally, it
is implausible to think that the actual political questions are adequately framed as binary choices; it
is similarly implausible to think that voters typically are cognitively independent in the respect that
is called for. Thus the applicability of the jury theorem is questionable.8
The nineteenth century saw other attempts to reconcile real-world democracy with its epistemic
ideals. John Stuart Mill argued that since democracy aims to promote the common good, and those
with higher levels of education and “mental superiority” are thereby better at discerning the
common good, those who “work with their heads,” or have graduated from universities should be
given “two or more” votes at the polls (1861: 336). Perhaps sensing trouble, Mill was sure to add
that this arrangement reflects the “true ideal” of democracy (1861: 337).9 Still, those who accept
Mill’s claim that plural voting is consistent with (or even required by) the kind of political equality
that democracy upholds must address the question of whether such a scheme would indeed
enhance the epistemic value of collective decision. That being a “graduate of a university” enhances
one’s ability to discern the general good is not evident. Neither is it obvious that higher levels of
education are positively correlated with a tendency to serve the general good.
New difficulty for democracy’s epistemic self-image emerged in the twentieth century, which
saw important advances in the social sciences as well as pioneering achievements in communica-
tions technologies. Writing in the earlier half of the century, Walter Lippmann (1922, 1925)
observed that the new technology placed in the hands of an elite strikingly reliable techniques for
manufacturing mass public opinion; he argued that, in this new communications environment,
democratic politics is dominated by opinions crafted by political insiders, while the democratic
citizenry is rendered a mass of ineffectual bystanders (1925: 110) by the overwhelming onslaught
of messages, symbols, and images provided by elites.
Lippmann’s arguments explicitly called into question the very idea of a democratic public
whose will could be represented in an election result or enacted in policy. On his view, the epi-
stemic situation of modern politics is so complex that the very idea of a citizen exercising polit-
ical “judgment” or forming a political “opinion” is misplaced. Following on this skepticism,
there emerged a conception of democracy that sought to fully jettison democracy’s epistemic
ambitions. The so-called “realist” conception of democracy, championed by Joseph Schumpeter
(1942), holds that democracy is “that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions
in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the
people’s vote” (1942: 269). Here there is no appeal to the common good, and no claim about
the ability of democratic processes to disclose the people’s will; according to the realist, democ-
racy rather is a mechanism that produces stable government by holding popular elections to
select “bosses” (1942: 269) who hold office for a limited period of time. On this view, the role
of the citizenry is not to discuss, deliberate, or debate, but simply to vote on Election Day, and
thereafter to attend to other matters (1942: 295).
By the middle of the twentieth Century, the Lippmann and Schumpeter line was bolstered
significantly by social choice theory. Results associated with Kenneth Arrow (1951) brought into
prominence the view that epistemic goods that democracy seeks to realize are not hard to meas-
ure or merely difficult to achieve in practice, but conceptually incoherent. In particular, Arrow’s

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impossibility theorem showed that there could be no collective decision procedure that reliably
avoids certain forms of irrationality.10 Consequently, the very idea of a popular will fell under
greater suspicion; social choice theory suggests that the very thing that democracy was supposed
to reveal—the General Will, the common good, the public interest, the majority opinion, and so
on—was a fiction, “empty” (Riker 1982: 239).
According to such views, democracy cannot deliver a more rational citizenry or better-
justified decisions, because democracy is inescapably vulnerable to collective irrationality. Hence
these views maintain that democracy’s choice-worthiness derives from non-epistemic consider-
ations, such as stability. The social choice theorists claimed that democracy’s central virtue con-
sists in its ability to “restrain officials” (Riker 1982: 9) by empowering citizens to “get rid of
rulers” (1982: 244) who “offend” (1982: 242) by not performing to the citizens’ satisfaction. As
Riker puts it, then, democracy is “not popular rule, but rather an intermittent, sometimes
random, even perverse, popular veto” (1982: 244).
Yet this view is fragile. If the idea of a “popular will” is “empty,” how could a vote count as
a “veto”? How could democratic electoral mechanisms impose discipline on elected rulers (Cohen
1986; Coleman and Ferejohn 1986; Miller 1992)? In order for elections to impose discipline, results
must express the prevailing opinion of an official’s performance; that is, votes must be treated as
judgments if elections are to impose political restraint. But if votes express judgments, they manifest
epistemic properties; they can be well-informed, highly-justified, ignorant, erroneous, and so on.
Thus the tension between democracy’s epistemic ideals and its practical reality simply re-emerges.
John Dewey set the stage for the contemporary modes of democratic theory that concern us
here. Largely reacting to Lippmann, Dewey introduced two reorientations that have since
become central to theorizing the epistemic dimensions of democracy.11 First, Dewey expanded
the site of democracy. Second, Dewey proposed an expanded, socialized epistemology. Each
bears comment.
First, Dewey contends that democracy is not primarily a form of government, but a type of
society, a “way of life” (1939: 155).12 This extension of democracy’s site calls theorists to look
beyond the institutional mechanisms of democracy (votes, electoral systems, campaigns, represen-
tative bodies) that previously had been their nearly exclusive focus, and towards a larger social
environment, where citizens daily interact, cooperate, communicate, compete, discuss, and work
together. The fundamental question for an enlarged democratic theorist regards the character of
these encounters; thus the democratic theorist’s concern expands to encompass the system of
public education, the economy, the workplace, the media, civic associations, and more.
Second, Dewey promotes an epistemology that takes inquiry as the primary epistemological
activity. Inquiry, Dewey holds, is fundamentally the social process of experimentally addressing
emergent problems (1938: 108). Hence he sees problem-solving, not the acquisition of justified
true belief, as the primary epistemic goal.13 Epistemology hence becomes the study of
a distinctive kind of conduct. Accordingly, the scope of epistemology expands to include matters
that are today regarded as distinctively social epistemic, including the social distribution of informa-
tion, the channels by which new problems are recognized and taken up by communities, the
division of social-epistemic labor, and the social role of experts.
These reorientations enable one to locate the epistemic ideals of democracy within the oper-
ations of the society, and not exclusively in electoral processes and outcomes. Democracy then can
be understood as a society devoted to the ongoing collective epistemic enterprise of addressing
shared problems. Hence the epistemic power of democracy lies not in its ability to render correct
electoral outcomes, but rather in its capacity to pool information, harness socially distributed cogni-
tive resources, incorporate new perspectives and considerations, and revise its practices and policies
in light of new findings (Anderson 2006). Democracy becomes a “republic of reasons” in virtue of
being a society of citizens committed to sharing epistemic resources in their continuing effort to

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resolve common problems. The familiar mechanisms of democracy hence derive their legitimacy
from the democratic quality of the broader society in which they function.14 Thus well-established
data concerning the extent of public ignorance, the vulnerability of democratic populations to epi-
stemic pathologies, and the general tendency of democracy to make epistemically sub-optimal deci-
sions do not pose a refutation of democracy’s epistemic ideals, but rather identifies problems that
democratic societies must address.15 Hence for Dewey, as for many contemporary epistemic demo-
crats, the most urgent issue for modern democracy is “the improvement of the methods and condi-
tions of debate, discussion, and persuasion” that prevail in society (1927: 365).

Some Current Trends

We turn to the contemporary scene. Deliberative democracy has been the predominant framework
in democratic theory for several decades. Deliberativists disagree over a range of issues, but all
hold that the legitimacy of democratic government, and the bindingness of its decisions, require
more than fair elections among political equals; democratic decisions must be preceded by oppor-
tunities for citizens to deliberate publicly about the social and political issues they face. Thus delib-
erativists embrace the enlarged vision of democracy’s site: Democratic political mechanisms must
function within a society characterized by norms of open and inclusive discussion, debate, cri-
tique, and civic participation. Importantly, as deliberation is understood explicitly as reason
exchanging,16 deliberativists also embrace a social epistemological stance: The epistemic goods of
democracy are not to be sought exclusively in its outputs, but also in the quality of the social
processes of reasoning that democracy enables.
The deliberativist framework opens several distinctive avenues of research concerning the epis-
temology of democracy. In the remainder of this overview, I discuss briefly only three major and
interlocking trends: (1) the epistemic capabilities of groups; (2) vulnerabilities to group-epistemic
pathologies; (3) the epistemic character of public discourse.
The first trend picks up on themes found in both Aristotle and Rousseau. Much of this litera-
ture has roots in Scott Page’s “diversity trumps ability” theorem, which holds that, given the
satisfaction of a few relatively undemanding conditions, “a randomly selected collection of prob-
lem solvers outperforms a collection of the best individual problem solvers” (2007: 162).
Although some—notably Elizabeth Anderson (2006)—have questioned the value of Page’s the-
orem, Helene Landemore (2013) recently has developed a series of arguments showing that
majority rule under democratic norms of inclusive deliberation within a large and cognitively
diverse population tends to produce decisions of greater epistemic value than decision-making
processes that involve only experts. On her view, democracy uniquely realizes a powerful form
of collective intelligence, which she calls “democratic reason” (2013: 233).
Others working on the epistemic abilities of groups have attended to the ways in which indi-
viduals’ preferences and judgements change within the context of well-ordered group deliber-
ation. Here James Fishkin’s experiments with “deliberative polls” have been especially influential.
A deliberative poll “models what an electorate would think if, hypothetically, it could be
immersed in intensive deliberative processes” (1991: 81). The idea is to take a sample of citizens,
record their antecedent views regarding some political question, and then have them participate
in an orchestrated deliberation event focused on that question. These events involve, among
other things, presentations by experts who hold opposing viewpoints, question-and-answer ses-
sions with the experts, and open dialogue within the deliberating group. The point is to chart
opinion change among the group’s members and to get a sense of what an “informed and engaged
public opinion” on the question at hand would be (Ackerman and Fishkin 2003: 12).
Large-scale deliberative polling events have been staged, and Ackerman and Fishkin (2003)
have even proposed a “new national holiday” devoted to public deliberation. However, some

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have questioned the relevance of the results of deliberative polls (Richardson 2010), and others
have found that deliberative events can actually encourage extremism, entrenchment, and division
(Schkade, Sunstein and Hastie 2007). Relatedly, Diana Mutz (2006) has found that discussion in
heterogeneous groups positively correlates with political nonparticipation, whereas those who dis-
cuss politics only with like-minded others are more likely to vote. The conclusion of this
research is that, in order for it to be democratically enriching, deliberation must be conducted
under highly specific conditions.
The question, then, is what the appropriate conditions are. Hence a second trend of research
explores distinctive types of epistemic dysfunction that can affect deliberating groups. The touch-
stone is Cass Sunstein’s work on group polarization. Group polarization means that, in the course
of a discussion, “members of a deliberating group predictably move toward a more extreme
point in the direction indicated by the members’ predeliberative tendencies” (Sunstein 2003: 81);
in other words, deliberation with like-minded others can cause individuals to shift to more
extreme versions of their original positions. The phenomenon has been studied across an impres-
sively broad range of deliberative contexts; it affects groups irrespective of political orientation,
level of education, economic class, ethnicity, and gender. It has been documented around the
world, in groups ranging from political parties, corporate boards, judicial panels, consumer
groups, and local citizen assemblies (Sunstein 2009: 1ff.). The result is remarkably robust.
That deliberation can encourage extremism is troubling. Note that polarization apparently is not
driven by reason or argument, but by group dynamics. Individuals shift to more extreme versions
of their prior views mainly in order to affirm their group identity and solidarity. And as individ-
uals polarize, they become less able to see their opponents as rational (Hardin 2002); hence polar-
izing groups tend towards epistemic insularity, which generates further polarization.
Consequently, deliberation within doxastically homogeneous groups not only breeds extreme
versions of individuals’ prior beliefs, it also engenders extremism. The problem, of course, is that
social movements and activist projects require a good deal of in-group discussion and solidarity.
What can be done? Sunstein has found that polarization is counteracted when groups adopt
norms that go beyond free participation and open discussion. In order to guard against polarization,
groups must also develop mechanisms to protect—and perhaps even incentivize—contestation,
challenge, and dissent (2003: 211–212) within their membership, as well as norms that expose the
group to criticisms and objections from without (2003: 165). However, the mere exposure to dis-
senting voices and countervailing considerations is not yet sufficient; what is needed is for dissenters
not only to have a voice, but to get a hearing. This means that citizens must bring to the delibera-
tive activity a set of competencies that enable them to engage in civil disputation.
Thus a third research trend concerns the epistemic nature and quality of public discourse. If,
indeed, public deliberation is the key to a legitimate, accountable, and inclusive democracy, then
citizens and institutions must be able not only to reason well together; they must also be
equipped to manage disagreement. After all, public deliberation is necessary largely because citi-
zens hold different beliefs concerning political matters. Often these differences run deep, engaging
citizens’ fundamental value commitments (Talisse 2009: 11, ff.). Accordingly, public deliberation
is likely to incite heated disagreement, perhaps even hostility, among citizens. So, if deliberation
is to serve democracy’s epistemic ideals, citizens must bring to the enterprise the capacities that
enable them to argue well, even under heated conditions.
Hence some work in this area has been focused on the nature of civility in public discourse
(Carter 1998; Kingwell 2012), though others have challenged the thought that proper public dis-
course always calls for this (Estlund 2001; Young 2001). Still others have pursued a distinctively
Rawlsian (2005: 217) conception of civility by restricting the kind of reason that is admissible into
public deliberation. Here the thought is that political disagreement can be domesticated by intro-
ducing a norm of reciprocity whereby citizens may offer only those reasons that other citizens can

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be expected to recognize the force of (Gutmann and Thompson 2004: 133). Of course, the issue
here concerns the contours of the restraints; many have argued that the very idea is objectionable
(Eberle 2002; Vallier 2014).
Another strand within this general trend focuses on the dynamics of political argumentation,
including argumentation mediated by contemporary media and technology (Walton 2007; Lynch
2016). One concern has to do with the ways in which political argumentation conducted for the sake
of an onlooking audience can satisfy the usual requirements for acceptable and even civil debate
among the interlocutors, while nonetheless activating within the onlookers the epistemic pathologies
mentioned above. Aikin and Talisse (2006, 2008, 2014) have developed the concept of a dialectical
fallacy to capture these phenomena.17 One particularly vivid case is the “weak man” fallacy. In the
“weak man,” one soundly refutes an especially feeble critic of one’s view, but then proceeds as if the
feeble critic is the best the opposing side has to offer, thereby signaling to one’s audience a distorted
view of the argumentative state of play. The effect of dialectical fallacies is to project to an audience
the view that there is no serious opposition to one’s favored position; when successful, one’s audience
is disinclined to seek out cogent opposition, and thus primed for polarization and insularity. Again,
the lesson is that the epistemic power of democracy depends largely on the epistemic character of its
citizens and their interactions. In this way, research in the epistemology of democracy is increasingly
integrated with social epistemology as such. Hence it may be time for there to be recognized within
the field of social epistemology a sub-field of “political epistemology.”

Notes
1 See Stanley (2015) for a recent discussion of how democratic norms secure the conditions that enable
their own undermining. Kelly (2013) examines how framing effects can be employed for the purpose of
manipulating citizens. See also Lakoff (2016).
2 Ackerman and Fishkin write, “If six decades of moral public opinion research establish anything, it is
that the general public’s political ignorance is appalling by any standard” (2003: 8). The literature on
public ignorance in democratic societies cannot be surveyed here but see Delli Carpini and Keeter
(1997); Somin (2016); and the essays collected in Elkin and Soltan, eds. (1999).
3 Ahlstrom-Vij (2013) and Brennan (2016) both argue for epistemic elitism.
4 See Surowiecki (2004) and Page (2007) for contemporary versions of this.
5 Cohen (2010) provides a current interpretation.
6 See Grofman and Feld (1989), and responses by Estlund (1989) and Waldron (1989).
7 Goodin (2008: 80ff). provides a nice discussion of both the simplicity of the math and the complexity of
the institutional details, as does Sunstein (2006: 25ff).
8 For reasons similar to the ones stated, Estlund (2008: Ch. XII) declares the jury theorem “irrelevant.”
Anderson (2006) also doubts that the jury theorem is of use to democracy. Others have sought to salvage
the theorem; see List and Goodin (2001), and Dietrich and Spiekermann (2013). See also Peter (2016).
9 Lopez-Guerra (2014) argues for a significant deviation from democracy’s standard conception of fran-
chise. Estlund (2000) develops an epistemic argument for plural voting.
10 See Maskin and Sen (2014) for helpful discussions of Arrow’s theorem.
11 Dewey’s 1927 The Public and its Problems is self-consciously a direct response to Lippmann’s The Phantom
Public (1922). See Bohman (2010) for an assessment; see also Rogers (2009).
12 Elsewhere I have criticized Dewey’s conception of “democracy as a way of life” for being an untenable
form of political perfectionism. That matter is not in play here. One can follow Dewey in holding that
democracy is fundamentally a mode of social association without accepting Dewey’s conception of the
content of that mode of society. See my (2007) and (2011) for discussion.
13 See Peter (2009: 117ff). For helpful discussion.
14 Hence Dewey, “Majority rule, just as majority rule, is as foolish as its critics charge it with being. But it
never is merely majority rule … the way a majority comes to be a majority is the more important thing:
antecedent debates, modification of views to meet the opinions of minorities, the relative satisfaction
given the latter by the fact that it has had a chance and that next time it may be successful in becoming
a majority.” (1927: 365)
15 See my (2005) for discussion.

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16 Some early critics, notably Iris Young (1997) and Lynn Sanders (1997), objected that the focus on rea-
soning revealed exclusionary tendencies within deliberativism. The force of these arguments is challenged
effectively by Dryzek (2000: 64ff.). In any case, most deliberativists subsequently have been keen to
espouse a broad conception of reasoning that preempts such concerns.
17 See also Aikin and Casey (2011), and Aikin and Casey (forthcoming).

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Further Reading
Brennan, J. (2016) Against Democracy, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Estlund, D. (2008) Democratic Authority, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Landemore, H. (2013) Democratic Reason, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Landemore, H. and Elster, J. (eds.) (2012) Collective Wisdom: Principles and Mechanisms, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Peter, F. (2016) The Epistemic Circumstances of Democracy, In: M. Brady and M. Fricker, eds., The Epistemic
Life of Groups, New York: Oxford University Press.
Sanders, L. (1997) Against Deliberation, Political Theory 25, pp. 347–376.
Somin, I. 2016. Democracy and Public Ignorance, 2nd edition, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Sunstein, C. (2003) Why Societies Need Dissent, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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