Laminar Democracy: A Design and Simulation Study of Tiered Direct Democracy with Adaptive Epistemic Friction

Direct democracy applies a single, uniform decision procedure to questions of wildly varying epistemic difficulty, and the costs of that uniformity fall exactly where the stakes are highest: on technical questions where the median voter's individual accuracy is near chance and errors are correlated by shared misinformation. This paper develops tiered direct democracy with adaptive epistemic friction (TDD), an institutional design in which the franchise on highly technical questions is conditional on demonstrated domain competence, while a universal basic franchise is retained for ordinary civic questions. Status is acquired through open, criterion-referenced, domain-scoped certification with mandatory decay, and referendum signature thresholds fall with the initiator's status, creating a price signal for civic investment. We evaluate the design with a paired agent-based simulation (N = 2,000; 240-300 replications) comparing pure direct democracy, a two-tier variant, a three-tier variant, and a briefed citizens' assembly. The three-tier design attains 0.992 decision accuracy on highly technical issues against 0.536 under direct democracy, dominates the two-tier design at every certification validity tested, and is most advantageous precisely when certification tests are noisy. Capture experiments show certified tiers are nearly immune to mass-persuasion attacks but expose a bribery surface that a democratic veto overlay largely neutralizes. We conclude that the three-tier design is preferred under the paper's pre-registered decision rule, conditional on test-governance institutions that the design itself specifies but whose political feasibility remains an open question.