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 In this Letter, we draw on recent findings in psychology to demonstrate that the former literature is based on outdated and erroneous claims and that the latter is overly sanguine about the circumstances that yield reliable collective decision making.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:

Essay

Promoting Norms for Cyberspace

The United States defined its preferred cyberspace norms—Internet openness, security, liberty, free speech, and with minimal government oversight and surveillance—in its 2011 International Strategy for Cyberspace. Although the United States has had little success so far in establishing norms against commercial espionage in cyberspace, it has had some early gains with the recognition that international ...
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Essay

Information Attacks on Democracies – with Bruce Schneier

Democracy is an information system. That’s the starting place of our new paper: “Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy.” In it, we look at democracy through the lens of information security, trying to understand the current waves of Internet disinformation attacks. Specifically, we wanted to explain why the same disinformation campaigns that act as a stabilizing influence ...
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