ABSTRACT
Equal electoral influence has been broadly accepted as the essential political norm for almost a century. Moreover, it is often considered a significant component of democratic legitimacy. However, substantial inequalities in income, wealth, and capital ownership repeatedly spill over from the economic and social spheres to the political arena. This chapter analyzes the considerable effect these inequalities have on decision-making processes. It demonstrates that such consequences might diminish democratic procedures’ moral and epistemic qualities, impairing their ability to produce legitimate and epistemically valuable political decisions. Several mechanisms within the informal political sphere transform economic into political power. They are used to affect the results of electoral (e.g., campaign contributions, ownership of media outlets) or policymaking (e.g., lobbying or using economic power to set the agenda or to limit the scope of political decisions) processes. The chapter thus contrasts two distinctly epistemic approaches assessing the spillover's impact on procedures’ epistemic value, the liberal epistemic and the egalitarian epistemic positions, and provides arguments for endorsing the latter. Ultimately, the chapter analyzes two broad approaches that can be used to preserve democracy's legitimacy-generating potential and epistemic quality. The first approach endeavors to curb the devices that transfer inequality from one sphere of life into another. In contrast, the second advocates for a more egalitarian system and tries to reduce the existing economic disparities. However, tackling the problem in real-world circumstances requires balancing measures and policies adopted from both approaches.
