The reason democracy is useful isn’t because the majority knows best
Despite the fact that we call countries like the US “democracies”, very little is decided by an actual popular vote of the entire population. Nevertheless, critiques of representative democracies, the sort of which exist in most of America and Europe, often bring up the superior decision-making ability and knowledge of elites compared to the masses. This is irrelevant. The masses decide very little and their intelligence and knowledge of policy is entirely irrelevant to their usefulness as voters. Instead, voters serve a useful purpose as a crude gradient signal—if they perceive the country as having improved during a politician’s term, they’ll vote for them again, otherwise, they’ll vote for someone else. This is the ~only role of the voters and is responsible for the main benefit of democracy—policymakers have at least some incentive to improve the country for the people since that’ll decrease their chances of being voted out.
In summary, the role of modern democracies is to improve the incentives for the actual decision-makers, and not to involve the masses in the decision-making (not only that, but to maintain the incentive, the voters just have to be vaguely aware of whether “stuff has improved” vs. “stuff has worsened”—nothing skilled or detailed).
(Of course this has issues since “making the public think stuff has improved in your term” can be Goodharted in various ways, e.g. by delaying problems; kicking the can down the road, by trying to influence public perception more than real outcomes, etc. Also the public might punish policymakers for things actually out of their control like natural disasters.)
This doesn’t seem unique to democracy. If people notice that their country has got worse since the new king was crowned, they might revolt. The advantage of democracy is that we can skip the violence part since we already know who would win (historically, whoever had the majority).
The reason democracy is useful isn’t because the majority knows best
Despite the fact that we call countries like the US “democracies”, very little is decided by an actual popular vote of the entire population. Nevertheless, critiques of representative democracies, the sort of which exist in most of America and Europe, often bring up the superior decision-making ability and knowledge of elites compared to the masses. This is irrelevant. The masses decide very little and their intelligence and knowledge of policy is entirely irrelevant to their usefulness as voters. Instead, voters serve a useful purpose as a crude gradient signal—if they perceive the country as having improved during a politician’s term, they’ll vote for them again, otherwise, they’ll vote for someone else. This is the ~only role of the voters and is responsible for the main benefit of democracy—policymakers have at least some incentive to improve the country for the people since that’ll decrease their chances of being voted out.
In summary, the role of modern democracies is to improve the incentives for the actual decision-makers, and not to involve the masses in the decision-making (not only that, but to maintain the incentive, the voters just have to be vaguely aware of whether “stuff has improved” vs. “stuff has worsened”—nothing skilled or detailed).
(Of course this has issues since “making the public think stuff has improved in your term” can be Goodharted in various ways, e.g. by delaying problems; kicking the can down the road, by trying to influence public perception more than real outcomes, etc. Also the public might punish policymakers for things actually out of their control like natural disasters.)
This doesn’t seem unique to democracy. If people notice that their country has got worse since the new king was crowned, they might revolt. The advantage of democracy is that we can skip the violence part since we already know who would win (historically, whoever had the majority).
That seems unlikely. Plausibly, a less intelligent and knowledgeable electorate will tend to elect worse leaders.