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Political Epistemology: Democracy and the Problem of Strategic Manipulation

Subject Area Practical Philosophy
Theoretical Philosophy
Term from 2020 to 2024
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 430621735
 
Final Report Year 2025

Final Report Abstract

Understanding and Navigating Politicized Knowledge. Democracy is a tool to reach compromise between competing interests, and to collectively find better solutions for societal challenges. We may disagree, but we do so based on a shared factual reality. Many argue that the common epistemic foundation of Democracy is weakening. Trust in expertise is declining, misinformation spreads rapidly, and political identities increasingly shape what people see as true or false. Some call this the “post-truth era”—a time when facts become less important than narratives or partisan affiliations. But how exactly do political beliefs form and spread? Why are people’s beliefs often resistant to factual correction? And what happens when political actors no longer operate on a shared understanding of reality? “Political Epistemology” explored how knowledge is structured in politicized environments—how people come to believe what they believe, how they evaluate sources of information, and how their social networks shape their perceptions of truth. Social Identity, Homophily and Epistemic Populism. Political debates are rarely just about facts; they are shaped by social identity, trust, and patterns of information flow. One particularly pronounced phenomenon that we identify is epistemic populism—the idea that the "common sense" immediately accessible to “ordinary people” is more trustworthy than expert knowledge produced by “elites”. Political actors may strategically frame experts as detached or corrupt, shifting trust toward in-group beliefs and intuitions. This has profound consequences for democracy: when expertise is delegitimized, facts themselves become politically contested. Further, when contributions to political debate function as expressions of identity rather than factual claims, belief formation follows a different logic. A statement like “taxing the rich is harmful to the economy” may function not only as an economic argument but as an expression of group identity—signaling political alignment rather than engaging with empirical data. As a result, people tend to increasingly interact with others who think like them. This homophilic segregation creates information bubbles, where individuals are mainly exposed to confirming viewpoints. Over time, this leads to polarization, making it harder for different political groups to engage with each other’s perspectives. Implications for Democracy. Our findings highlight a key challenge for modern democracies: how to sustain a shared factual foundation in an era of increasing fragmentation. The issue is not just misinformation, but how people choose whom to trust and how knowledge is socially organized. Democracy is not just about who has power—it is also about how societies determine what they collectively “know”. Our research contributes to understanding these processes and provides new ways to think about how a shared factual basis can be safeguarded in democratic systems.

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