What truth? I haven’t read this kind of research so the following is speculation. (And if I am way off about this kind of research then at least I can talk about epistemology as it applies to politics.)

Politics happens when different interests clash. Each agent have their own truth.[1]

Let’s model one-person rule: the Truth is whatever that person says is the truth. Thus the Truth is “unveiled” as long as the person who rules is rational with regards to their own interests. Now we haven’t modeled any other agent’s interests, i.e. their truths, so they might not like this Truth.

Rule by the elite: the Truth becomes whatever the group is fine with agreeing on after deliberating and competing amongst themselves.

Rule by the people: same as the previous but every person gets a say.

Now think about the likely course of this apparent research on “truth”: the academics decide what the truth is. What opinions on the economy, the environment, social issues, are within the bounds of the truth. An Overton Window. Then they gauge the population based on that.

But the people might have completely different concerns than the academics.

The book Seeing Like a State discusses things like the monocrop forest industry in Germany in 19th century Germany. The Truth of the German state was that it wanted to maximize efficiency, i.e. output of timber. What would a test on “unveiling the truth” reveal? How competent one is at maximizing yield. But what about ecology? What about the fact (as would later be learned) that chopping down organic forests and then planting the same kind of “crop” for miles ruins the ecosystem and is a bad long-term plan both for the local environment and for harvesting timber? That wasn’t even part of the “domain of discourse” to the German state.

What if you polled someone in a warehouse on the “truth” of running a warehouse? Would the truth be dictated by the management and only be about how to maximize profits? Or would it also include things like how to make a workplace that prevents injury, both of the repetitive and immediate kind? You see, maybe safety beyond things like avoiding employees getting stabbed by forklifts isn’t even part of the domain of discourse since the injured and chronically worn-out workers can easily be replaced. But once the workers become part of the decision-making apparatus then it becomes part of the domain of discourse, because the people on the floor have an interest in their own health and being able to keep their jobs.

But this is where (based on my limited understanding) the research on deliberative democracy (which might be unrelated to this research; idk) goes wrong. It seems to want to see if the general population is worthy of getting more democracy, i.e. getting more power. So then it tests them. But based on what? Based on the status quo domain of discourse, i.e. our liberal democracies where the average citizen does not really have much power (just ask some democratic theorists about it). So what are they really measuring? Whether the participants can have rational discourse based on the truth of upper-middle class academics. So the population has to prove that they are worthy of political power by reasoning within the status quo domain of discourse where they don’t have much power at all and are for the most part are spectators. This can in effect just be a sort of perpetual democratic gatekeeping with an academic veneer.

[1] This might be called relativism or post-modernism. But set aside whether there is an absolute truth or not for a minute: the truth in in this context, for all intents and purposes, is political. That’s after all the topic under discussion. (Not whether God exists and whether he has the ultimate Truth or something like that.) For example, a lot of Eurasia had to respect the truth of Genghis Khan that he had a right to rule over them.