Some authors believe that democracy is not simply a method of selecting rulers, but also has the potential to generate just and correct solutions to social problems, which other political systems would lack (Cerovac, 2020). The general idea is that there is an epistemic superiority of democratic procedures, since the decisions generated by public discussion procedures would be analogous to what should happen in an ideal epistemic discussion (Thompson, 2013). In literature, one of the influential definitions of this idea of epistemic democracy is due to Joshua Cohen, who initially labeled it as epistemic populism (Cohen, 1986; Coleman J., Ferejohn J., 1986; Ricker, 1982). Any conception of democracy as an epistemic system must exhibit at least three characteristics (Shapiro, 2003):
An independent standard of evaluation of fair procedures, i.e. a report in terms of (social) justice or common good that is independent of contingent general consensus and of outcomes of possible votes;
A cognitive account of voting procedures, in which the vote does not express the voter’s personal preferences, but is the expression of beliefs, which the voter deems justified, about what policies best fit the independent standard of (1);
An account of decision-making processes as a selective emergence of the beliefs produced by the considered judgments of political actors.