ABSTRACT
According to Abraham Lincoln’s famous dictum, democracy is “government of the people, by, and for the people”. This chapter looks at the controversies over the meaning and value of democracy and how they relate to the question about the proper role of expert knowledge in democracies. Some theorists of democracy focus only on the procedural dimension and hold collective decisions to be legitimate if they result from decision procedures that give equal consideration to each citizen. The chapter discusses the proceduralist and epistemic accounts of democracy and describes the tension between participation and deliberation in the deliberative conception of democracy. Pure proceduralism gives a straightforward answer to the epistemic criticism of democracy. The idea that the core of democratic decision-making is not the aggregation of votes but public deliberation has been elaborated over the past 30 years in theories of deliberative democracy.
