[nextaccountic]

The participation ought to be democratic in the sense of being open to everyone to participate. But, you can't do a vote and use it to decide who is right. Deep down we know that being right or wrong is independent from the scientific consensus. Mochizuki may be interacting with the scientific community in the wrong way, but it has no bearing on whether his theory is correct.

The consensus itself has some democratic features, but it's weighed by prestige and adherence to the current paradigm. I think Kuhn described its mechanism pretty well. It's far easier to convince people of a wrong result if you follow the established paradigm, than convince people of something right if you go against it. What really saves science from being pure dogma is that there are paradigm shifts, revolutions in which the scientific consensus change.