Conspiracy theorizing can sometimes have regrettable features that speak for suppressing it. Yet, given that an adequately knowledgeable citizenry is a prerequisite of a healthy democracy, the public should be informed about politically important events, including political conspiracies. In this article, I focus on the relationship between informing citizens about political conspiracies and the kind of conspiracy theorizing that arguably should be suppressed. More precisely, I maintain that informing citizens about political conspiracies threatens to lead to the kind of conspiracy (...) theorizing there is reason to suppress, and I examine how the potential drawback ought to be dealt with. I propose that informing citizens about political conspiracies should both proceed in light of pertinent research on conspiracy theorizing and pay heed to adequate knowledge about the circumstances in which conspiracies are publicized. (shrink)

The ideal of publicity plays an important role in contemporary legal and political philosophy. Yet, to date, it has not been brought to bear on the question of voting method choice. This paper aims to fix this. I argue that voting method publicity is a well-motivated requirement which reveals tradeoffs inherent to democracy between procedural and epistemic equality. I further explore the implications of voting method publicity to the normative status of plurality voting and its possible alternatives.

Concerned about widespread incompetence among voters in democratic societies, epistocrats propose quasi-democratic electoral systems that amplify the voices of competent voters while silencing (or perhaps just subduing) the voices of those deemed incompetent. In order to amplify the voices of the competent we first need to know what counts as political competence, and then we need a way of identifying those who possess the relevant characteristics. After developing an account of what it means to be politically competent, I argue that (...) there is no way for the epistocrat to identify such persons. Therefore, epistocracy cannot be implemented. (shrink)