Political Epistemology: Democracy and the Problem of Strategic Manipulation

• Applicant: Dr. Simon Scheller
• Subject Area: Practical Philosophy ; Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 430621735

Democracy’s epistemic virtue and the ‘wisdom of crowds’ constitute central themes in democratic theory. However, recent political developments—particularly growing concerns about ‘fake news’, partisan polarisation and populist rhetoric—challenge the widely accepted proposition that democratic institutions facilitate epistemically superior collective decisions. This mismatch between ideal and practice alludes to ‘democracy’s epistemic crisis’ and invites the question: (How) can epistemic theories of democracy stand up to these novel challenges?This project will analyse the role of strategic manipulation in collective opinion formation and decision making, which stands at the heart of these troubling phenomena. It aims to identify conditions for epistemic groups to be successful in spite of the presence of manipulative actors. This will help to reassess and reaffirm democracy’s epistemic virtue in light of these newly emerging challenges. In doing so, the project contributes to a small but growing literature on Political Epistemology, which combines insights from social epistemology and political philosophy.While various contributions in social epistemology address questions of collective knowledge formation, only few abandon the assumption of individual honesty. This renders them largely inapplicable for many political contexts, as conflicting interests may incentivise misrepresentation of information. To bridge this lacuna, this project aims to provide a series of agent-based models (ABMs) for collective democratic decision making under in the presence of strategic manipulation.ABMs allow us to capture crucial dynamic aspects of social knowledge formation and to incorporate and analyse different manipulation strategies beyond standard equilibrium solutions. The proposed models also address specific sub-issues, such as the resilience of certain communication structures against various manipulation strategies, or the relationship between (dis-)trust and polarisation. Along with the formal modelling, Political Epistemology’s core issues will be conceptually analysed: How can different theories of epistemic democracy cope with manipulation and misinformed citizens? Are there implications for democratic legitimacy? And what countermeasures are normatively justifiable for democratic actors?These inquiries will contribute to an informed assessment of the societal implications of politicised epistemic discussions in general. In particular, the project aims to deepen our understanding of manipulation strategies, potential countermeasures and epistemically resilient institutional structures. At the same time, this advances the use of agent-based modelling in political philosophy.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants