The Role of Experts in a Democratic Society

Abstract

Democratic procedures are characterized by the equal status of all citizens participating in the decision-making process. This procedural fairness represents one of the central aspects of democracy's legitimacy-generating potential and should not be rejected or weakened. However, citizens specialize in different areas and inevitably some citizens become more competent (i.e. become experts) regarding some political issues. Democratic procedure would loose much of its appeal if it would be unable to take advantage of the experts' knowledge. In this paper I follow Kitcher and Christiano in embracing a form of division of epistemic (and political) labour - citizens and their political representatives should deliberate and set aims the political community is to pursue, while experts and policy-makers should devise means (laws, public policies and political decisions) needed to achieve the aims set by citizens. However, citizens should not blindly trust the experts - their epistemic authority is derivative and social and academic networks and structures should be employed in order to enable citizens to assess and evaluate experts' competence, but experts' impartiality regarding the issue at hand as well. Consequently, the process should not be unidirectional: experts should be able to help citizens select feasible and coherent aims, while citizens should be able to help experts in creating policies and decisions. Deliberative democracy is an appropriate political setting for this kind of bidirectional communication.

Descripción y análisis del ecosistema de ciencia para la política en España durante la COVID-19

“…Esta actitud es una limitación para que el conocimiento científico, comúnmente provisional e incierto, pueda traducirse directamente en políticas públicas. Se precisa mayor deliberación multidisciplinar dentro del propio mundo científico (Moore, 2018;Pont, 2021), mayor sensibilidad hacia la acción política (Mair et al, 2019;Pielke, 2007) y mayor transparencia y rendición de cuentas pública en su labor asesora (Cerovac, 2016;Pamuk, 2021). Asimismo, el modelo de déficit de información, propio de los enfoques científicos clásicos hacia la ciudadanía de tipo unilateral, no es válido; la ciudadanía forma frecuentemente sus opiniones al margen de la realidad objetiva (Katwala et al, 2014), buscando atajos informativos (Lupia, 1994) y pudiendo mostrarse escépticos ante los expertos aunque tengan la información científica (Sapienza y Zingales, 2013).…”