“Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” –Ford Madox Ford

The Page 99 Test is a website that has authors post the 99th page of their book, and then comment on how it relates to the book as whole. You can read page 99 of Against Democracy there today. Page 99 contains part of my argument against Pettit, in which I claim that “stopping domination” arguments gives Pettit and other republicans no special reason to favor democracy over epistocracy.

Excerpt from the commentary:

Your individual right to vote does not stop you from being dominated, simply because your individual right to vote makes no difference. How we vote matters, but how any one of us votes does not. That’s why I say, at the beginning of the quoted passage, that if the rest of us decide to try to dominate you through politics, your right to vote provides you no more protection than a bucket provides against a great flood. Perhaps a better metaphor would be that your right to vote protects you from being dominated no better than a random lottery ticket protects you from dire poverty.

There may be other reasons to favor democracy or to hold that every citizen ought to have an equal right to vote. (I examine and debunk a bunch of these purported reasons elsewhere in the book.) But, my point here is just that republican political theorists have no particular reason to favor democracy over epistocracy. Or, more precisely, their arm-chair, a priori arguments give them no special reason to do so.