Epistocracy and populism: second-order ideologies challenging democracy

Epistocracy and populism are usually seen as opposites. The first finds error in democracy’s reliance on the sub-optimal decisions by the supposedly incompetent masses, and argues that political decisions should be tied to epistemic merit, not popularity. The populist critique of democracy, contrarily, finds that there is not enough political confrontation in standard representative democracies where the ‘real people’ are not properly embodied, and thus pits an imagined direct will of the unified and virtuous people against a self-serving establishment. This article demonstrates that these ideologies have surprising underlying similarities concerning their categorization, political ontology, epistemology and a conception of political authority. Firstly, they both are second-order political ideologies that are not directly tied with substantive political content but rather with the interpretation of how to govern assuming disagreement concerning first-order political ideologies. Secondly, their political ontology divides citizens into two constitutively differing parts, one of which they (partly) exclude from political membership. Thirdly, their political epistemology assumes the existence of political truths which makes their conception of authority anti-proceduralist, either instrumentalist or moralist. Fourthly, they downplay the value of pluralism, deliberation and dissent. Uncovering these commonalities helps us detect and understand the dynamics of some anti-democratic tendencies better.