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The Intelligence of Democracy
Lindblom's 1965 book developing the full theoretical account of partisan mutual adjustment — the argument that democratic messiness is not a failure of collective intelligence but a superior form of it.
The Intelligence of Democracy: Decision Making Through Mutual Adjustment is the book in which Lindblom most fully developed the argument that democratic processes, despite their manifest inefficiency, generate a form of collective intelligence superior to the intelligence of any individual expert or central authority. The 'intelligence' of the title is literal: Lindblom argued that the interaction of competing partisans, each pursuing their own objectives with partial knowledge, produces outcomes that incorporate more information, accommodate more values, and adapt to more surprises than any centrally designed alternative.
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The argument is counterintuitive. Democratic processes are slow. Participants are often uninformed about technical details. Compromises between competing interests are suboptimal by definition. Surely, the objection runs, a society governed by experts with comprehensive understanding would produce better outcomes than one governed by the messy interaction of uninformed partisans.
Lindblom's response was structural. Every expert operates from within a perspective that illuminates certain features of the