Performative equilibria and democratic coordination failure

Giulia Sicuro

University of Milan

The epistemic crisis of contemporary democracies is traditionally understood as a problem of misinformation (Benkler, Faris & Roberts 2018). This diagnosis is self-defeating because it assumes implicitly that some shared epistemic grounds are held among citizens (Fogelin 1985). This is not a lightweight premise within the technological advancement we are witnessing. If citizens cannot agree on what counts as credible information, appealing to “”better information”” is no remedy (Nguyen 2020).
This paper proposes to focus on this issue from the point of view of epistemic game theory (Pacuit & Roy 2017) and Guala’s (2016) account of institutions as coordination equilibria, I will defend a model of political reality as a two-level game where citizens must coordinate not only on actions but on the interpretive frames through which they process information about the world (Lakoff 2004; Lewis 1969). Crucially, these frames are performative (Austin 1962): when sufficient agents adopt a frame, collective adoption causally reshapes public behaviour, and institutional responses (MacKenzie 2006). That selected frame becomes strategically rational to adopt even for agents aware of its sub-optimal character (Schelling 1960).
The model identifies a threshold effect (Granovetter 1978). Below it, frame plurality sustains agonistic democratic debate (Mouffe 2013). Above it, frames become incommensurable (Kuhn 1962), mutual recognition collapses (Honneth 1995), and democratic meta-coordination becomes impossible. Algorithmic platforms in particular accelerate this transition by functioning as equilibrium selection devices, transforming epistemic infrastructure from a public good into a manipulable resource (Gillespie 2018; Couldry & Mejias 2019). The paper concludes that epistemic pollution constitutes a form of relational inequality (Lippert-Rasmussen 2018; Young 1990), and that maintaining epistemic commons (Ostrom 1990) is a constitutive condition of democratic legitimacy.

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