| Abstract: |
In Democratic Reason, Hélène Landemore has built a case for the epistemic
virtues of inclusive deliberative democracy based on the cognitive diversity
of the group engaged in making collective decisions. She supports her thesis
by appealing to the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem of Lu Hong and Scott
Page. In practice, deliberative assemblies often restrict attention to
situations with only two options. In this paper, it is shown that it is not
possible to satisfy the assumptions of the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem
when decisions are binary. The relevance of this theorem for democratic
decision-making in non-binary situations is also considered. |