Democracy

The definition is deliberately flat, naming a mechanism rather than an ideal, and the argument is elsewhere. Democracy is a universally failed concept in Marsh's account, and the failure is in the design rather than in the implementations, which is the claim that separates her from most critics. Representative systems elect people by land mass and time span rather than by system, so a person is chosen to speak on everything affecting a territory for a fixed term regardless of what they know, and they are chosen for charisma rather than expertise. Subjects the majority is unqualified to speak on are delegated to representatives equally unqualified, and the experts those representatives appoint owe their positions to cronyism rather than to recognition by the population affected. Feedback from the people using a system is limited to occasional polls. Direct democracy removes the representative and keeps the underlying problem, since Athenian sortition made no attempt to combine expertise with authority either. Her objection is not that voters are foolish but that voting attaches decisions to territory and popularity rather than to knowledge and to the people affected. The alternative she develops replaces both with user groups, everyone affected by an action, and concentric circles in which expertise is peer promoted and amplified without acquiring any power of command.

Democratic theory contains its own long list of internal criticisms. Robert Michels formulated the iron law of oligarchy in 1911, holding that any organization tends towards rule by a few. Joseph Schumpeter reduced democracy to competition between elites for votes. Public choice theory questions whether aggregated preferences mean anything, following Kenneth Arrow, and Jason Brennan has argued against the competence of electorates. Deliberative and epistemic democrats reply that properly structured deliberation produces better decisions than any alternative. Marsh sits nearest the epistemic strand in caring about whether decisions are good, and departs from all of them in rejecting voting itself rather than proposing a better version of it, since her objection is to attaching authority to territory and popularity at all.