My research synthesizes political theory and empirical insights from different subfields of political science to explore questions of inclusion and performance in democratic theory, with particular focus on institutional design and political epistemology. I’ve addressed questions in the political ethics of democratic participation, the political economy of knowledge, epistemic democracy, political parties and partisanship in political theory, comparative institutional design (particularly regarding mandatory voting and deliberative mini-publics), and deliberative theory, among others. My past and ongoing research projects are detailed below.
I also maintain research interests in the areas of American political institutions, public opinion, political psychology, and American political development, particularly as they relate to political interest, participation, and the competence of mass publics.
Book: Democracy for Busy People
My book, Democracy for Busy People (forthcoming from University of Chicago Press), concerns how to realize democratic equality when people are unequally busy with their lives. The problem is that not everyone likes politics, but democratic reformers and theorists often act as if they do. They tend to advocate reforms that place great demands of time and effort on ordinary citizens even though many would not choose to spend their time on democracy. If reformers’ plans were carried out, they would likely fail to empower those who are short on time and other key resources, and may even exacerbate existing inequalities.
I propose a fundamentally different approach to democratic reform that focuses on making the practice of democratic citizenship undemanding for busy citizens so as to achieve the highest possible degree of democratic equality. This approach emphasizes the institutions of electoral democracy, such as political parties and voting rules like mandatory voting, rather than the deliberative institutions favored by many contemporary theorists and reformers.
The first half of the book considers how much democratic citizenship and participation is reasonable to expect of people, even if they are busy with other things. It focuses on questions in democratic theory and the ethics of participation, such as whether citizens can justifiably ignore politics and when, if ever, democracy asks too much of its citizens in terms of participation. This part of the book culminates with a new conception of democratic citizenship that can reasonably be expected of all citizens called stand-by citizenship. The second half of the book uses principles elaborated in the first half, as well as the model of stand-by citizenship, to design democratic institutions that can accommodate busy people. I focus on electoral institutions, political parties, and randomly selected deliberative institutions and argue that the former two—electoral institutions and parties—can, if properly designed, act as the central pillars of a democracy for busy people. I conclude that deliberative institutions, as so far imagined, are best deployed in a supplementary role to electoral ones, due not only to problems of scale but also to the way their empowerment would make politics much harder for the vast majority of ordinary citizens to understand.
The book will be published in May 2023 from the University of Chicago Press. I have presented chapters from the book at conferences and some elements appear in my dissertation (more on my dissertation here). A few ideas have been published in an article in Res Publica entitled “Making Attentive Citizens: the Ethics of Political Engagement, Political Equality, and Social Justice,” (link at Res Publica; ungated version). In that article, I argue that citizens paying attention to politics is necessary for the fundamental liberal democratic values of political equality and social justice, and so that the democratic state must take steps to cultivate it in its citizens. The article develops the notion of stand-by citizenship and shows how it furthers political equality and the empowerment of citizens.
Empirical and Institutional Dimensions of Epistemic Democracy
Epistemic democratic theory justifies democracy on the basis of its capacity to make better decisions or realize better governing outcomes. In a series of papers, I examine important empirical and institutional dimensions of epistemic theory which have been neglected or misunderstood. In one article, entitled “Democracy and the Epistemic Limits of Markets,” I critically assess claims that markets outperform democracy epistemically and so should be substituted for democracy wherever possible on epistemic grounds. I show that the recent arguments of people like Jason Brennan, Ilya Somin, Samuel DeCanio, and Mark Pennington fail to establish a general epistemic advantage for markets. Using the tools of political theory rather than economics or its related disciplines, I argue that markets face severe epistemic limitations which drastically restrict the types of decisions markets can make well. This article has been published in Critical Review (link at Critical Review; ungated version).
The second article, “Democracy’s Pin Factory: Issue Specialization, the Division of Cognitive Labor, and Epistemic Performance,” published in the American Journal of Political Science (link at AJPS; ungated version), elaborates an issue public-based theory of democratic competence and defends it against several objections. On this theory, democracy can make better decisions when citizens specialize by directing their political attention to a few issues they find especially important and vote on the basis of parties’ or candidates’ performance on these issues. In this way, the public is divided into a series of “issue publics” which provide informed vetting of candidates and parties for office, informed surveillance of officeholders, and higher quality informational cues for low-information citizens. I offer a revisionary account of the empirical evidence on issue publics and explain why a democratic public divided into issue publics would be expected to perform well epistemically, drawing in particular on the power of deliberation.
Reconceptualizing Mandatory Voting as Precommitment and Nudge
In researching mandatory voting for my doctoral work, I noticed that under certain conditions mandatory voting could work as a precommitment device for some and a nudge for others. In a paper entitled “Aid for Our Purposes: Mandatory Voting as Precommitment and Nudge” in the Journal of Politics (link at JOP; ungated version), I elaborate these conditions and argue that viewing mandatory voting this way neutralizes one of the most potent arguments against it, that it coerces political voice in violation of the right to free expression. Methodologically, this research exemplifies a mixed normative and empirical approach, combining public opinion evidence with philosophical analysis, comparative institutional design, and normative democratic theory. The abstract for the paper is below:
Mandatory voting has received public and scholarly interest as a solution for problems of unequal representation and policies that advantage the wealthy. Yet some oppose mandatory voting because it seems to coerce political expression, in violation of the human right to free expression. This article fundamentally reinterprets the point of mandatory voting as serving the self-identified purposes of citizens and so minimizes concerns about coercion. It uses survey evidence to show that mandatory voting can help the large majority of American citizens who believe they should vote to do so, thereby functioning as a precommitment mechanism. For the minority who do not think they should vote, mandatory voting functions as a nudge to surveillance which helps citizens protect their interests, whatever they may be, through encouraging surveillance of political actors. The argument concludes that mandatory voting would make all citizens better off by their own lights and without troubling coercion.
I maintain a research interest in mandatory voting as an institution that can address a number of serious issues facing contemporary democracies, and have underway additional research on mandatory voting and the duty to vote, about which I have a paper under review.
Can Comedy Be Convincing? The Persuasive Impact of Political Humor in Deliberative Systems (with Andrew Guess (Princeton))
The deliberative systems approach to democratic theory analyzes elements of democratic societies as potentially contributing to an interdependent system of deliberation. In this project, we examine empirically the possible role of political comedy in democratic deliberation through testing its persuasiveness. Though there has been a great deal of research in American politics, political psychology, and communication studies on political comedy in recent years due to the rise of programs like The Daily Show, there has been little high-quality investigation of whether political comedy has the power to actually change people’s minds. This is an important question since these programs reach massive audiences and could therefore play an underappreciated role in public deliberation by, for instance, bringing novel or controversial ideas to widespread attention.
In our study, we use a piece of political stand-up comedy with rich persuasive content to test the effect that humor has on persuasion regarding the issue of gun control. Our experiment has two treatment conditions in which one set of subjects watches the stand-up comedy routine and another watches a video that recreates the persuasive content of the comedic routine but without the humor. Our main initial hypothesis is that persuasion would be aided most by a comedic message. Results suggest that a comedic message can indeed be persuasive, but that this effect is mainly driven by its effect on those initially opposed to the message’s content. There thus seems to be a role for political comedy in deliberative systems.
This project has been funded by grants from Columbia University’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP) and Princeton University’s University Center for Human Values (UCHV).
Parties and Partisanship in Political Theory
Democratic theorists have recently taken an interest in political parties and partisanship, and I have so far completed two contributions to this development that are currently under review. The first is an article on partisanship that insists that there are a plurality in ways that citizens relate to parties, against contemporary popular and scholarly discourse which obscures this plurality. Through critical analysis of the survey methodology used to measure partisanship, I show that democratic citizens relate to parties both in terms of identity, as is conventionally emphasized, as well as in terms of psychological proximity, which is systematically suppressed in discussions of partisanship, particularly in the United States. I demonstrate that the value of partisanship as theorized by Nancy Rosenblum, Russell Muirhead, Lea Ypi, and Jonathan White often hinges on recognizing this value. This paper is currently under review, but I am happy to share a draft upon request.
My book, Democracy for Busy People, contains a chapter on political parties which emphasizes their invaluable role in extending the scope of democratic inclusion. This is not only because of parties’ direct mobilization work, such as get out the vote efforts, but mainly, I argue, because of how they render politics and the political world cognitively tractable for citizens who cannot devote much time to it. By packaging issues and policies and clarifying the stakes of electoral competition, parties make it possible for citizens to navigate the political information environment by giving it structure. Yet, in contrast to previous theorists of parties, I insist that parties’ salutary effects are strictly conditional on parties facing robust electoral competition. Competition presses parties into the service of democracy by driving them to seek out support and mobilize citizens, thereby generating large amounts of free information citizens can use to inform themselves. Without competition, parties can degenerate into cartels that capture power for narrow selectorates and their self-interested purposes. Finally, the chapter considers whether multiparty systems or two-party ones are likely to be better in terms of promoting inclusion, and engages with Francis Rosenbluth and Ian Shapiro’s recent defense of two-party democracy. Yet I conclude in the end that multiparty systems are likely to generate more robust and thoroughgoing competition, avoiding the demobilizing effects of party cartelization likely under more frequently incomplete two-party competition.
Book Reviews and Symposia
Review of Against Democracy by Jason Brennan, in Contemporary Political Theory, Vol. 17, No. 2 Supplement (2018).
“A Family Affair: Populism, Technocracy, and Democracy,” part of the Symposium on Jeffrey Friedman’s Power Without Knowledge, in Critical Review, Vol. 32, Nos. 1-3 (2020).
Kevin J. Elliott 