The Baldy Center Blog Post 43. 
Blog Authors: Alexandra Oprea (UB Philosophy) and Daniel J. Stephens  (UB Philosophy)
Blog Title: How to Vote Competently

In the year 2024, there are national elections across 73 different democracies with different electoral systems. Over 1.5 billion voters (of an eligible 2.4 billion) have already cast a ballot in 56 of these elections and at least another billion are expected to do so by the end of the year*. We presume that these voters want to discharge their duty competently, but what would it mean for them to do so? 

In a recent paper, entitled “A minimal standard of democratic competence,” published in the journal, Politics, Philosophy & Economics**, we argue that democratic citizens ought to vote in ways that help to preserve the continuation of their democracy. At a minimum, this involves considering the democratic credentials of various candidates and refusing to vote for candidates or policies that, if chosen, would predictably lead to the end of their democracy. 

The standard we propose is minimal in two senses. First, it describes a floor that we should expect every democratic citizen to rise above in order to be considered competent as a voter. Second, it relies on minimally controversial assumptions about what democracy is and should be. Our highest aspirations for democratic politics may include reasonable deliberation, economically sound policies, a just distribution of benefits and burdens, and/or high levels of political participation. But the democratic floor that all these aspirations build upon is a system of free and fair elections together with the suite of civil and political liberties that enable those elections. For example, free and fair elections require candidates who are not afraid to challenge the incumbent, voters who can expect their electoral choices to be protected from interference or intimidation, and journalists who do not fear censorship or persecution for their work. 

One can think of this model of democratic competence as analogous to competence in other domains. For instance, if you want to be even a minimally competent chess player, you need to be able to make legal chess moves and refrain from flipping the board over. Similarly, if you want to be a competent democratic citizen, you need to know how to vote for candidates that will keep the democracy going and commit to doing so without flipping the board over, metaphorically speaking.

Out of the nearly 4 billion voters across the world with the right to cast a ballot in 2024, many will confront relatively “easy” choices where neither of the major candidates constitutes a predictable threat to their democracy. But a growing proportion of voters are living in democracies at high risk of backsliding into authoritarianism, where one or more of the major candidates or parties have systematically indicated their lack of commitment to free and fair elections by intimidating the opposition, persecuting journalists, advocating political violence, or otherwise seeking to remove existing guardrails to an authoritarian takeover. It is for this reason that a clear standard of democratic competence can be practically valuable. We see at least three ways in which this would be so. 

First and foremost, we hope that voters themselves will strive to be competent in the way we suggest by prioritizing information about candidates’ democratic credentials. This may require difficult decisions to vote for candidates with less appealing policy proposals for the sake of keeping the democracy going. In addition to adopting the standard for themselves, voters can aim to convince others to do the same through conversation, social media posts, and canvassing. Because preserving democracy should be a shared priority across the political spectrum, one can expect these social norms around voting competently to be more widely acceptable than norms about choosing economic, immigration, or other kinds of policies.

Second, we intend the standard to be used in crafting priorities for civic education, particularly at the K-12 level. Civic education has lagged behind as a policy priority in a number of democracies as achievement in core academic subjects that are measured on international tests have garnered disproportionate attention and resources. Our standard suggests that democracies ought to prioritize civic education, particularly when high numbers of their citizens appear to fall below the relevant standard. This supports both traditional programs of civics and course content that teaches students how to spot a would-be authoritarian, including the history of authoritarian transitions and common demagogic techniques.

Finally, we believe that understanding democratic competence in this way can provide democratic citizens with reasons to support various reforms to their electoral systems. There are as many combinations of electoral rules as there are democracies, and some of these electoral systems make it easier for voters to be competent by making it harder for anti-democratic candidates to make it either onto the ballot or to the final round of the election. Although more research is needed to rank such electoral systems on this measure, we believe that the proposed standard can guide the conversation in the right direction.