New Articles Published on Polycentric Democracy and Double Heuristics

Studies in Emergent Order is pleased to publish “Polycentric Democracy and Its Enemies” by David Emanuel Andersson and “Double Heuristics and Collective Knowledge: the Case of Expertise” by Stephen Turner.

David Emanuel Andersson’s paper is an examination of how polycentric liberal democracies are created by people and resources relocating from jurisdictions with substandard public-policy bundles by ‘voting with their feat.’ The paper explains however that unlike the tight constraints in markets for goods and services, the system constraint that governments confront is looser, as inherited agglomeration economies may enable them to postpone institutional reforms and allow elected officials can extend their reach beyond policies with possible social benefits to rent-extracting policies that cater to distributional coalitions.

Stephen Turner’s paper examines how representations of the aggregation of decisions, estimates, and the like in the literature on expert knowledge are neither sufficiently social nor epistemic. The paper presents a more naturalistic approach, which appeals to a model of epistemic gain from others, as mutual consilience—a genuinely social notion of epistemology. Using the example of Michael Polanyi’s account of science as an illustration, it introduces the notion of double heuristics: that individuals, each with their own heuristics, each with cognitive biases and limitations, are aggregated by a decision procedure, like voting, and this second order procedure produces its own heuristic, with its own cognitive biases and limitations.

David Emanuel Andersson is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Public Affairs Management at National Sun Yat-sen University. Stephen Turner is a Graduate Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Florida.

Studies in Emergent Order (SIEO) is an open-access journal dedicated to fostering research, discussion and publication concerning the roles played by and implications of emergent order phenomena, particularly in society but not excluding other areas.