Analytical Democracy: A Microfoundational Approach – with Hugo Mercier and Melissa Schwartzberg

Henry Farrell, Hugo Mercier and Melissa Schwartzberg (2023), “Analytical Democracy: A Microfoundational Approach,” American Political Science Review. 117,2:767-772.

A prominent and publicly influential literature challenges the quality of democratic decision making, drawing on political science findings with specific claims about the ubiquity of cognitive bias to lament citizens’ incompetence. A competing literature in democratic theory defends the wisdom of crowds, drawing on a cluster of models in support of the capacity of ordinary citizens to produce correct outcomes. In this Letter, we draw on recent findings in psychology to demonstrate that the former literature is based on outdated and erroneous claims and that the latter is overly sanguine about the circumstances that yield reliable collective decision making. By contrast, “interactionist” scholarship shows how individual-level biases are not devastating for group problem solving, given appropriate conditions. This provides possible microfoundations for a broader research agenda similar to that implemented by Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues on common-good provision, investigating how different group structures are associated with both success and failure in democratic decision making. This agenda would have implications for both democratic theory and democratic practice.

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Other Writing:

Academic Article

Stability of Democracies: A Complex Systems Perspective – with Karoline Wiesner, Alvin Birdi, Tina Eliassi-Rad, David Garcia, Stephan Lewandowsky, Patricia Palacios, Don Ross, Didier Sornet and Karim Thebault

Karoline Wiesner, Alvin Birdi, Tina Eliassi-Rad, Henry Farrell, David Garcia, Stephan Lewandowsky, Patricia Palacios, Don Ross, Didier Sornet and Karim Thebault (2019), “Stability of Democracies: A Complex Systems Perspective,” European Journal of Physics 40, 1:014002. The idea that democracy is under threat, after being largely dormant for at least 40 years, is looming increasingly large ...
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Essay

Reading Milton Friedman in Dublin

When I first came to the United States from Ireland in the early 1990s, Americans thought of my home country as a land of green fields, bibulous peasants, and perhaps the occasional leprechaun. Once, on a bus from Ann Arbor to Detroit, a fellow passenger heard my accent and asked if she could touch me ...
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