Democracy, epistocracy, and hybrid decision-making: information specificity and costs of political governance

This paper provides a new theoretical framework and a criterion to model the choice between democratic, hybrid, and epistocratic modes of political governance. From a normative perspective, we claim that the specificity of information should guide the choice between these modes of political governance because of its impact on costs of political governance. Any issue has a degree of information specificity that determines costs of political governance, which are combined in a Social Costs Function. Therefore, the model helps to assess the relative efficiency between democratic, hybrid, and epistocratic decision-making procedures to reach collective choices. The last section proposes extensions of the model by discussing how political, cultural, and epistemic institutions as well as polycentric governance modify the parameters of the model.