Public deliberation and the fact of expertise: making experts accountable

Abstract

This paper discusses the conditions for legitimate expert arrangements within a democratic order and from a deliberative systems approach. It is argued that standard objections against the political role of experts are flawed or ill-conceived. The problem that confronts us instead is primarily one of truth-sensitive institutional design: which mechanisms can contribute to ensuring that experts are really experts and that they use their competencies in the right way? The paper outlines a set of such mechanisms. However, the challenge exceeds that of producing epistemically optimal expert deliberations because a deliberative political system must also fulfil the ethical and democratic requirements of respect and inclusion.

The socio-political ties of expert bodies. How to reconcile the independence requirement of reliable expertise and the responsiveness requirement of democratic governance

“…Other approaches stress the need to design and re-design individual expert arrangements in such a way that 9 Although this is not necessarily the case, see for example Landemore (2012). they ensure both a certain level of respectful interaction and participatory credentials, but in ways that do not compromise these arrangements' independence and cognitive orientation (Holst & Molander, 2017). The double challenge and ways of dealing with it are also emphasised by many of the contributions to this special issue (see Krick; Landwehr & Wood; Lord; Rothstein, this issue) and these questions are also clearly reflected in empirically grounded research on the legitimate role of the expert in democracies from the fields of public administration and the sociology of knowledge (see e.g.…”

“…These approaches find solutions to the democratic-epistemic divide in expert recruitment procedures that pluralise the knowledge base and limit expert biases (e.g. Haas, 2004;Holst & Molander, 2017;Lentsch & Weingart, 2011;Nowotny, 2001).…”

“…The background of the study at hand, and the special issue it concludes, is the millennia-old tension between the rule of knowers and democratic rule, the tension that lies essentially in the specialisation and independence logic of reliable expert knowledge and the equality and inclusion imperative of democracy. 1 This democratic-epistemic divide or 'dilemma of expertise' (Nowotny, 2001) has been exacerbated by modern society's growing dependency on expertise for solving increasingly complex and technical collective problems (Holst & Molander, 2017;Turner, 2013) and by the legitimacy crisis of the representative model of democracy (Saward, 2010). 2 We focus on the democratic-epistemic divide as it manifests itself in the political role of expert bodies such as regulatory and executive agencies, nondepartmental public bodies, advisory boards and committees or independent central banks.…”

“…They have also been interpreted as the epitome of expertisation (or 'scientification') trends, i.e. the increasing reliance on science, evidence and expertise in modern policy-making (Gornitzka & Krick, 2018;Holst & Molander, 2017;Turner, 2013), and their relative independence is 4 Non-majoritarian institutions are defined by Thatcher and Stone Sweet (2002, p. 2) as 'those governmental entities that (a) possess and exercise some grant of specialised public authority, separate from that of other institutions, but (b) are neither directly elected by the people, nor directly managed by elected officials'. In Vibert's words, unelected bodies 'a) exercise official authority but are not elected or headed by elected official and are b) deliberately set apart or only loosely tied to elected institutions' (Vibert, 2007, p. 4).…”

“…both a source of their authority and a matter of concern from a perspective of democratic accountability (see e.g. Curtin, 2007;Holst & Molander, 2017). Their prevalence has triggered a new research field within public administration studies, which has traced the rise of these institutions not only on the EU level, but also within nation states (see e.g.…”