Expertise Policy Making And Democracy

This book offers a concise and accessible introduction to debates about expertise, policy-making and democracy. It uniquely combines an overview of recent research on the policy role of experts with discussions in political philosophy and the philosophy of expertise. Starting with the fact that well-functioning democracies require experts and expert knowledge, the book examines two types of objections against granting experts a larger role in policy-making: concerns that focus on the nature and limits of expert knowledge, and those that concentrate on tensions between expertization and democracy. With this, the book discusses how expert arrangements can be organized to ensure the epistemic qualities of policies and democratic credentials, at the same time. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of political theory and democracy, public policy and administration, and to anyone interested in the role of expertise in society.

Based on in-depth studies of the relationship between expertise and democracy in Europe, this book presents a new approach to how the un-elected can be made safe for democracy. It addresses the challenge of reconciling modern governments’ need for knowledge with the demand for democratic legitimacy. Knowledge-based decision-making is indispensable to modern democracies. This book establishes a public reason model of legitimacy and clarifies the conditions under which unelected bodies can be deemed legitimate as they are called upon to handle pandemics, financial crises, climate change and migration flows. Expert bodies are seeking neither re-election nor popularity, they can speak truth to power as well as to the citizenry at large. They are unelected, yet they wield power. How could they possibly be legitimate? This book is of key interest to scholars and students of democracy, governance, and more broadly to political and administrative science as well as the Science Technology Studies (STS).

This book re-imagines expert authority for an age of critical citizens, and shows how expertise can contribute in a deliberative system.

A new model for the relationship between science and democracy that spans policymaking, the funding and conduct of research, and our approach to new technologies Our ability to act on some of the most pressing issues of our time, from pandemics and climate change to artificial intelligence and nuclear weapons, depends on knowledge provided by scientists and other experts. Meanwhile, contemporary political life is increasingly characterized by problematic responses to expertise, with denials of science on the one hand and complaints about the ignorance of the citizenry on the other. Politics and Expertise offers a new model for the relationship between science and democracy, rooted in the ways in which scientific knowledge and the political context of its use are imperfect. Zeynep Pamuk starts from the fact that science is uncertain, incomplete, and contested, and shows how scientists’ judgments about what is significant and useful shape the agenda and framing of political decisions. The challenge, Pamuk argues, is to ensure that democracies can expose and contest the assumptions and omissions of scientists, instead of choosing between wholesale acceptance or rejection of expertise. To this end, she argues for institutions that support scientific dissent, proposes an adversarial “science court” to facilitate the public scrutiny of science, reimagines structures for funding scientific research, and provocatively suggests restricting research into dangerous new technologies. Through rigorous philosophical analysis and fascinating examples, Politics and Expertise moves the conversation beyond the dichotomy between technocracy and populism and develops a better answer for how to govern and use science democratically.

‘Scientific advice to politics’, the ‘nature of expertise’, and the ‘relation between experts, policy makers, and the public’ are variations of a topic that currently attracts the attention of social scientists, philosophers of science as well as practitioners in the public sphere and the media. This renewed interest in a persistent theme is initiated by the call for a democratization of expertise that has become the order of the day in the legitimation of research funding. The new significance of ‘participation’ and ‘accountability’ has motivated scholars to take a new look at the science – politics interface and to probe questions such as "What is new in the arrangement of scientific expertise and political decision-making?", "How can reliable knowledge be made useful for politics and society at large, and how can epistemically and ethically sound decisions be achieved without losing democratic legitimacy?", "How can the objective of democratization of expertise be achieved without compromising the quality and reliability of knowledge?" Scientific knowledge and the ‘experts’ that represent it no longer command the unquestioned authority and public trust that was once bestowed upon them, and yet, policy makers are more dependent on them than ever before. This collection of essays explores the relations between science and politics with the instruments of the social studies of science, thereby providing new insights into their re-alignment under a new régime of governance.

This book examines the role of policy expertise in a democratic society. From the perspectives of both political theory and policy studies, the chapters explore the implications of deliberative democratic governance for professional expertise and extends them to specific policy practices. Following the lead of John Dewey, the discussion focuses in particular on the ways professional practices might be reoriented to assist citizens in understanding and discussing the complex policy issues of an advanced technological society. In doing so, it also explores how public deliberation can be improved through more cooperative forms of policy inquiry. Adopting a deliberative-analytic approach , policy inquiry is grounded in a postempiricist, constructivist understanding of inquiry and knowledge and the participatory practices that support it. Toward this end, the chapters draw on thriving theoretical and practical work dedicated to revitalizing the citizen's role in both civil society and newer practices of democratic governance, in particular deliberative democracy in political theory, practical work with deliberative experiments, the theory and practices of democratic governance, and participatory research. Deliberative practices are promoted here as a new component part of policy-related disciplines required for participatory governance. Calling for a specialization of "policy epistemics" to advance such practices, the second half of the book takes up issues related to deliberative empowerment, including the relation of technical and social knowledge, the interpretive dimensions of social meaning and multiple realities, the role of narrative knowledge and storylines policy inquiry, social learning, tacit knowledge, the design of discursive spaces, and the place of emotional expression in public deliberation.

Voters expect their elected representatives to pursue good policy and presume this will be securely founded on the best available knowledge. Yet when representatives emphasize their reliance on expert knowledge, they seem to defer to people whose authority derives, not politically from the sovereign people, but from the presumed objective status of their disciplinary bases. This book examines the tensions between political authority and expert authority in the formation of public policy in liberal democracies. It aims to illustrate and better understand the nature of these tensions rather than to argue specific ways of resolving them. The various chapters explore the complexity of interaction between the two forms of authority in different policy domains in order to identify both common elements and differences. The policy domains covered include: climate geoengineering discourses; environmental health; biotechnology; nuclear power; whaling; economic management; and the use of force. This volume will appeal to researchers and to convenors of post-graduate courses in the fields of policy studies, foreign policy decision-making, political science, environmental studies, democratic system studies, and science policy studies.

In the world of Wikipedia, blogging and citizen journalism where huge masses of information and the capability to disseminate opinions, thoughts and ideas is available at the click of a mouse what is the role and impact of political experts? The contributors to this insightful and original volume argue that across the western world in general, the political expert occupies as important a role today as at any time in the past. The ubiquity of information and the fact that the experts and the organizations to which they are affiliated may be viewed as having an ideological agenda has not diminished their role, influence or status. Governments and the media still rely on them for information and advice whilst organizations in civil society need them in order to provide the evidence, arguments and policy recommendations that are essential to having a voice in the public conversation. By examining how these policy experts and their think tanks continue to exert influence across a range of modern western democracies a better understanding of the role of policy expertise and an examination of how it may develop and evolve throughout the rest of the world is reached.