Epistemic Injustice and the Electoral Connection

Abstract

This article argues office seekers’ messaging gives rise to a distinct and underappreciated epistemic form of political inequality. Electoral incentives push representatives to orient their rhetoric toward appealing to strategically valuable constituencies, yielding flows of elite cues that disproportionately reflect those groups’ perspectives. When inequalities in strategic value overlap with other inequalities of social power, politicians’ messaging strategies exacerbate the epistemic marginalization of disadvantaged citizens by denying them equal influence on the frames and understandings circulated in mainstream debate. This dynamic is best understood as a democratically perverse form of epistemic injustice distinct from but mutually reinforcing with citizens’ unequal influence on political outcomes. Moreover, I show how such inequalities distort otherwise epistemically salutary mechanisms of electoral accountability and undermine the quality of representative decision‐making. I conclude by suggesting hypotheses for testing electoral reform's potential to mitigate these discursive consequences.