Polycentric democracy: using and defusing disagreements

One of the main debates in political philosophy throughout the past four decades has been whether modern societies, despite their profound and ubiquitous disagreements, can find forms of association or institutional settings that are superior to our current modus vivendi arrangements. It is this question, I argue, that has motivated some of the most important recent contributions to political philosophy, such as John Rawls's A theory of justice (1971) and Political liberalism (1993), James Buchanan's work on constitutional economics (cf. 1975), and Gutmann and Thompson's approach to deliberative democracy (cf. 2004). We might think of these contributions as constituting the philosophical canon with respect to the question of how we should deal with deep and pervasive disagreements in society. While the philosophical approaches of the above-mentioned authors are construed around a diverse set of moral and methodological priors, they also have something important in common: these authors view disagreements about facts and norms not only as a problem of pure theory but also as a predicament that fundamentally endangers the stability of society. Not surprisingly, they regard pervasive political disagreements in modern liberal societies mainly as a threat that needs to be contained.As I show in the first chapter of the dissertation, the canonical approaches fail to produce institutional recommendations that can be viewed as an advancement beyond the current modus vivendi from a wide variety of comprehensive views. This motivates the thesis to propose a philosophical U-turn in the spirit of Adam Smith. This U-turn consists of three guiding ideas. The first is that a diversity of perspectives is not merely a nuisance, but an asset when solving hard problems. The second idea builds on the founding insight of institutional economics. Institutional economists have long held that whether self-interest works to the disadvantage or advantage of society depends on the rules of the game. By the same token, the dissertation argues that whether diversity-the cause of political disagreements- works to the advantage or disadvantage of society is a function of the rules of the game. The third idea is that an institutional structure that is construed around the idea of using diversity might have a better chance at generating an overlapping consensus than the canonical approaches that are based on a taming approach towards diversity.The second part of the dissertation aims at getting a better conceptual understanding of the gains of diversity by comparing the two main approaches for reaping the benefits from diversity: expert deliberation and polycentric systems. The core insight of this analysis is that polycentric systems outperform expert deliberation with respect to hard problems because they are able to ameliorate the psychological and epistemic inhibitors of collective deliberation. in other words, the core insight of the second part is that competition-allowing diverse people to act on their idiosyncratic hunches-is crucial to unlocking the gains from diversity.In the third part of the dissertation, I apply these insights to the political realm and advance the concept of a polycentric democracy. …