Experts, public policy, and the question of trust

Democratic education and the epistemic quality of democratic deliberation

“…For example, people seek out, uncritically accept, and remember evidence that allows them to maintain their previously held beliefs and tend to be critical towards and avoid counterevidence to these initial beliefs. This tendency of humans is typically referred to as motivated reasoning (Baghramian and Croce, 2021: 453; Wright, 2022: 26) or confirmation bias (Gunn, 2021: 196).…”

“…Based on this examination, my aim is to understand how democratic education could better contribute to the epistemic quality of public deliberation by taking into consideration citizens’ potential delimitations as epistemic agents, and the challenges that deliberation among lay citizens may face in contemporary democracies and concerning complex political problems. I particularly focus on two issues: first, the increasing public distrust in scientific experts , which jeopardizes the epistemic quality of public deliberation (Baghramian and Croce, 2021; Kabat, 2017), and second, motivated reasoning (Kahan, 2013; Wright, 2022) as a social and psychological mechanism that delimits citizens’ capabilities for reasoned belief-formation.…”

“…Landemore, 2013a) and the empirical findings that reflect the reality of citizens' political belief-formation and decision-making (e.g. Baghramian and Croce, 2021;Wright, 2022). Based on this examination, my aim is to understand how democratic education could better contribute to the epistemic quality of public deliberation by taking into consideration citizens' potential delimitations as epistemic agents, and the challenges that deliberation among lay citizens may face in contemporary democracies and concerning complex political problems.…”

Trust, but verify? Understanding citizen attitudes toward evidence‐informed policy making

“…Large numbers of the public voiced their skepticism about the extensive reliance of governments on scientific evidence, for example, in relation to vaccination, or lockdown measures. In literature, this skepticism is related to a plethora of factors, of psychological nature, normative, or social nature (Baghramian & Croce, 2021; Levy, 2019).…”

“…Still, despite a great deal of interest in the contribution of EIPM in fostering government trust, little is known about the inverse relationship, treating trust as an independent variable. While governments may be incentivized to rely on evidence‐based policy on rational motives, it is not rational per se to expect citizens to support the use of evidence in policy making, as they often know little about the process leading to this evidence (Baghramian & Croce, 2021). As such, whether citizens value the use of evidence in policy making can be expected to be a function of trust.…”