Voting, aggregation and truth

LINARES LEJARRAGA, SEBASTIÁN; BODANZA, GUSTAVO ADRIÁN

Barcelona

Seminario; Seminario de Filosofía Política; 2022

Universidad Pompeu Fabra

In this paper, we want to delve into the epistemological tenets of voting, in order to study their implications on preference aggregation methods. We examine two basic perspectives: a liberal epistemological account, which takes disagreement -in the circumstances of politics- as a normal feature of democratic life, and a non-liberal or conformist account, which asks the minority voter to conform or to suspend judgment to the majoritarian opinion. We argue that these two approaches lead to different aggregation methods. However, and importantly, we show that the non-liberal or conformist account cannot be interpreted in epistemic terms. We then examine the epistemic implications of strategic voting and end up outlining our future lines of inquiry.