Against Democracy by Jason Brennan

Prof. Jason Brennan is Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

The book evaluates democracy as it is now. It looks at its major shortcomings.

It discusses if democracy can be improved by better voter education, participation and deliberation/debate/reflection.

The author concludes that democracy cannot be fixed, and there is no value in political participation of most citizens either.

We have "constructed highly idealized accounts of the democratic process that bore little semblance to real-world democracy".

Author says that "universal suffrage incentivizes most voters to make political decisions in an ignorant and irrational way, and then imposes these ignorant and irrational decisions on innocent people".

The author then proposed well-known political model Epistocracy: governance by the knowledgeable experts.

The books covers 3 concepts:

"first, that political participation tends to corrupt rather than improve our intellectual and moral character;

second, that political participation and the political liberties are not of much instrumental or intrinsic value;

and third, that we would probably produce more substantively just political outcomes if we replaced democracy with some form of epistocracy".

Politically illiterate voter

"some people know a lot, most people know nothing, and many people know less than nothing".

"Citizens don’t know who controls what, and so they’re often voting on irrelevant policy differences".

This is because: "voting, knowledge and rationality do not pay, while ignorance and irrationality go unpunished".

There is no incentive or reward for being an informed voter. There is no punishment for voting based on emotions and gut feel. The system is further rigged to make most of it irrelevant anyways.

Author calls it "rational ignorance". Voters stay ignorant as a rational choice as they see little value in becoming an informed voter.

This is not an unexpected development.

Author suggests and quotes Plato: "Thousands of years ago, Plato worried that a democratic electorate would be too dumb, irrational, and ignorant to govern well. He seemed to argue that the best form of government would be rule by a noble and wise philosopher king... Epistocracy means the rule of the knowledgeable".

Emotional and symbolic value of Democracy

Democracy claims to have emotional and symbolic value by symbolically treating everyone the same and respecting them.

However, "these kinds of symbolic, semiotic, and esteem-based claims fail to show that democratic rights have any real value to us".

The emotional and moral value should be irrelevant for a political system as its "goal is to produce better, more substantively just policy outcomes".

Recognition of equality can be expressed in other ways.

"Democracy is not a poem or painting. Democracy is a political system. It is at base a method for deciding how and when an institution claiming a monopoly on legitimate violence will exercise violence.

As Rawls himself believes, government and political structures are meant to help secure the benefits of cooperation, advance justice, and ensure the peace. They are not in the first instance institutions intended to boost, maintain, or regulate our self-esteem".

"failing to give everyone equal political power, might harm people’s self-esteem or lower their relative social status, it’s not yet clear why this matters from the standpoint of justice".

Why is voting or equality in a political system a matter of self-esteem?

"It is a contingent, psychological or cultural fact that people tend to associate human dignity with political power, or more specifically with the right to vote. We can easily imagine a world otherwise like ours, in which people lacked these kinds of attitudes".

Keeping the "bastards" out

Argument in favor of democracy is that "voters don’t need to be experts in politics. They just need to know enough to throw the incumbent bastards out when the bastards are doing a bad job".

"But knowing whether the bastards are doing a bad job requires a tremendous amount of social scientific knowledge".

Most voters cannot know who is the "bastard" as politicians are very good actors and at shifting the blame to others specially easily targeted foreigners.

Democracy fails at keeping the "bastards" out.

Political involvement and engagement is bad for most

For most people, "Most common forms of political engagement not only fail to educate or ennoble us but also tend to stultify and corrupt us".

The author recommends "for most us, political liberty and participation are, on the whole, harmful... We would be better off—and others would be too—if we stayed out of politics".

"we have strong presumptive grounds against encouraging more and more citizens to participate in politics, spend time thinking about politics, watch political news, or engage in political deliberation".

Alternatives not easy

"It’s hard to know whether epistocracy would be better, because we have not really tried it. Some governments have had epistocratic elements in the past, but not of the exact sort I advocate here.

When I argue that epistocracy could do better than democracy, I have to speculate more than I would like to. That said, we can speculate in an informed way. We have data about citizens’ knowledge and competence. We have significant knowledge of how institutions work and how people respond to incentives. We have significant evidence of which kinds of institutions tend to encourage corruption and which tend to reduce it.

Still, it’s easy to expose the pathologies of democracy; it’s harder to design institutions that would improve on it".

The author explores how to design a political system for an imperfect world: "What kind of political regime will best tend to promote and protect important moral values (such as justice and prosperity) given that people’s willingness and ability to comply are imperfect, people are sometimes incompetent and corrupt, institutions are not guaranteed to work as intended, and background conditions can be unfavorable?"

It is not easy.

"These kinds of ideas are now often called Burkean conservativism[named after Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke]. The basic thought is that we must be extremely cautious when making radical changes to existing institutions. Society is complex—more complex than our simple theories can handle—and our attempts to fix things frequently have deleterious unintended consequences".

"existing legal and political institutions have evolved over generations—they have, in effect, adapted. Just as we should be wary of interfering with an ecosystem, the Burkean conservative thinks we should be wary of replacing existing political systems. Experimentation with new forms of government is dangerous".

"the best argument for democracy is Burkean conservativism. Democracy is not a fully just social system, but it’s too risky and dangerous to attempt to replace it with something else".

Epistocracy: the rule of the knowledgeable

"Epistocracy is inherently elitist the way that plumbing or medical licensing schemes are inherently elitist".

How do we choose knowledgeable people? Exams and license are not the answer. Author gives examples of Jim Crow voting era exams and medical licenses which were racist.

Benevolent knowledgeable experts are rare.

"Aristotle responded to Plato that while the rule of philosopher kings would be best, we’ll never have any philosopher kings. Real people just aren’t wise or good enough to fill that role, nor, contrary to Plato, can we reliably train them to become that wise or good.

Aristotle is right: trying to develop someone into a philosopher king is hopeless. In the real world, governing is too difficult for any one person to do alone. Worse, in the real world, if we imbued an office with the discretionary power of a philosopher king, that power would attract the wrong kind of people—people who would abuse that power for their own ends".


Political involvement and engagement is bad as most people do not have knowledge to contribute in a constructive way.

Political involvement and engagement is doubly worse as mobs of people have to be pandered to by those in power. This attracts mob leaders who can emotionally manipulate crowds. A system with political involvement and engagement of masses does not attract good governors but crowd pleasers.

"Most democratic citizens and voters are, well, ignorant, irrational, and misinformed nationalists". They should be excluded from Political involvement and engagement.

"Politics Doesn’t Empower You or Me".

Democracy is now valued for "what it expresses or symbolizes", but the value is symbolic only.

Epistocracy: the rule of the knowledgeable - is a better form of government. The questions of deciding who is knowledgeable and an expert on a particular issue or issues is harder to solve.




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