Second‐Order Political Equality and the Limits of Civic Accountability: A Reply to Giavazzi

ABSTRACT This paper critically examines Michele Giavazzi's recent argument for epistemic constraints on voting (ECV), which attempts to reconcile such constraints with democratic equality through a noninstrumental justification based on civic accountability. I argue that Giavazzi's account fails on two grounds: first, it violates what I call second‐order political equality by privileging a particular conception of voting over reasonable alternatives in pluralistic societies; second, justifying institutional constraints requires epistemic duties with substantial normative force, and establishing this force depends heavily on instrumentalist assumptions about efficacy. This creates dialectical difficulties for Giavazzi's reconciliation project, as the strength needed to justify ECV reintroduces tensions with egalitarian values that his noninstrumental framing was meant to avoid. These problems suggest that attempts to reconcile epistemic constraints with political equality face deeper challenges than Giavazzi acknowledges. This, in turn, points toward the need for more modest approaches that focus on the practical requirements of maintaining democratic cooperation rather than deriving institutional constraints from contested theories about voting's essential purpose.