The interdependence of social deliberation and judgment aggregation

Project info

Work package
  • Theory
Sustainability threat
  • Feedback Cycles
Challenge
  • Shared responsibility and sustainable cooperation

Study info

Description of Study
Imagine that the judgments of some individuals on some issues are aggregated into collective judgments. Social deliberation about the issues prior to aggregation can lead to improved judgments, on both the individual and the collective level. In this study I show that the epistemic justification for a social deliberation design depends on the chosen judgment aggregation rule, and vice versa. This claim consists of two parts. First, the epistemic justification of a deliberation design depends on the chosen procedure that transforms profiles of individual judgments into collective judgments. Second, the epistemic justification of such an aggregation rule depends on how the preceding social deliberation is structured. These claims are substantiated by presenting two models, which illustrate that (i) the epistemic justification for the presence of social deliberation can depend on the choice of aggregation rule, (ii) the epistemic ranking of different deliberation designs can depend on the choice of aggregation rule, and (iii) social deliberation can make individual and social epistemology come apart, raising the competence of individual group members while simultaneously reducing the collective performance of their group. This latter phenomenon of 'tragic competence-raising', where individual epistemic gains result in a collective epistemic loss, illustrates the general point that the epistemic effects of social deliberation designs and procedures for aggregating post-deliberative opinions are intertwined.
Study research question
This study investigates the relation between norms for social deliberation and the epistemic adequacy of collective opinions produced by different opinion aggregation rules
Collection provenance
  • -
Collection methods
Personal data
-
External Source
Source description
File formats
Data types
Languages
Coverage start
Coverage end
Spatial coverage
Collection period start
Collection period end

Variables

Unit
Unit description
Sample size
Sampling method
Hypothesis
Theory
Variable type
Variable name
Variable description
Discipline-specific operationalizations
Conflict of interest

Data packages

Publications

Documents

Filename
Description
Date

Ethics

Ethical assessment
Unknown
Ethical committee