Most people believe democracy is a uniquely just form of government. They believe people have the right to an equal share of political power. And they believe that political participation is good for us—it empowers us, helps us get what we want, and tends to make us smarter, more virtuous, and more caring for one another. These are some of our most cherished ideas about democracy. But, Jason Brennan says, they are all wrong.
In this trenchant book, Brennan argues that democracy should be judged by its results—and the results are not good enough. Just as defendants have a right to a fair trial, citizens have a right to competent government. But democracy is the rule of the ignorant and the irrational, and it all too often falls short. Furthermore, no one has a fundamental right to any share of political power, and exercising political power does most of us little good. On the contrary, a wide range of social science research shows that political participation and democratic deliberation actually tend to make people worse—more irrational, biased, and mean. Given this grim picture, Brennan argues that a new system of government—epistocracy, the rule of the knowledgeable—may be better than democracy, and that it’s time to experiment and find out.
A challenging critique of democracy and the first sustained defense of the rule of the knowledgeable, Against Democracy is essential reading for scholars and students of politics across the disciplines.

Democracy has many attractive features. Among them is its tendency to track the truth, at least under certain idealized assumptions. That basic result has been known since 1785, when Condorcet published his famous Jury Theorem, which has typically been dismissed as little more than amathematical curiosity, with its assumptions being regarded as too restrictive to apply to the real world. In An Epistemic Theory of Democracy, Goodin and Spiekermann show that those assumptions can be substantially weakened and majoritarian democracy's truth-tracking properties still be preserved.The authors propose different ways of interpreting voter independence and competence that make jury theorems genuinely applicable to the real world, and assess wide range of familiar political practices and alternative institutional arrangements, to determine what constellation of them might mostfully exploit the truth tracking potential of majoritarian democracy. The book concludes with a discussion of how epistemic democracy might be undermined, using as case studies the Trump and Brexit campaigns.