Ruling as Knowers: Political Legitimacy between Epistemic & Civic Accountability

• Applicant: Dr. Michele Giavazzi, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Practical Philosophy
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 555153659

Democracy endows ordinary people with political decision-making powers. Many think that the challenges of post-truth politics obstruct the ability of citizens to act as informed, attentive, and competent political decision-makers. This raises questions concerning the legitimacy of democracy. Suppose there is evidence that a certain political decision is the product of an uninformed electorate. Does this evidence give us reason to question the authoritativeness of the public’s decision? Is the value of democratic decisions dependent on the ability of citizens to uphold a proper epistemic conduct? If so, why? Democratic theorists confront these issues in inadequate ways. Many mistakenly downplay their significance out of fear that a focus on the epistemic competences of the citizenry may undermine the egalitarian ideals underpinning democracy. And those who do acknowledge their significance do so with an overly narrow outlook that focuses exclusively on their impact on political outcomes. This research project articulates a new philosophical outlook on the relationship between political legitimacy, democracy, and the epistemic conduct of citizens. On this view, the epistemic conduct of citizens weighs on political legitimacy, but it does precisely because this is what a commitment to proper political co-authorship requires, independently from further concerns about political outcomes. Central to the theory is the idea that political decision-making should be understood as an instance of joint action, whereby citizens relate as reciprocally accountable co-participants. However, and this is the innovative hypothesis I work on, the values underpinning this joint endeavor cannot be articulated exclusively in terms of political equality. Rather, they include an epistemic dimension, in that participation in the endeavor of making political decisions together jointly commits citizens to contribute in an epistemically responsible manner. A theory of this sort breaks ground in at least two important theoretical ways. First, it illustrates how deficits in political information and citizens’ competence corrode the normative conditions for legitimate co-authorship of political decisions and thus how their damage goes far beyond suboptimal political outcomes. Second, it shows how demands of competence are embedded in the ideal of democratic co-participation, and thus how the concern for the potential anti-egalitarian implications of an epistemic approach to political legitimacy is misplaced. On a more applied level, the theory can inspire new strategies for tackling the epistemic deficits faced by contemporary democratic societies. It can also promote discussions on how to design and deliver competence-enhancing opportunities to the citizenry and provide the theoretical underpinnings for a shared political culture that pushes back against unthoughtful usages of democratic powers.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants