A Defense of Helene Landemore’s Argument for the Epistemic Superiority of Democratic Deliberation

Sammanfattning: In this essay I investigate whether political deliberation in an assembly of 300 people that is randomly selected from the entire population (democratic deliberation) is epistemically superior to political deliberation in an assembly of the same size where individuals have been selected based on certain criteria (non-democratic deliberation). I present Helene Landemore’s argument in favor of the epistemic superiority of democratic deliberation and consider Aaron Ancell’s critique of this argument. I argue the point that Ancell’s critique fails but that a conclusive result on whether democratic deliberation is epistemically superior to non-democratic deliberation has to await further investigations, some of which I take to be empirical in nature.