CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | Hardos, Pavol |
|---|---|
| Title | Expert Review: On Reconciling Politics of Expertise and Democracy |
| Summary | This dissertation addresses the problem of scientific expertise in democracy. At its center is the recognition that democratic procedural fairness seems to come into conflict with expert scientific input into political decision-making, as expert judgment can run against the perceived fair relationship between political equals in a democracy. The tension is about the place of truth in politics, since experts are understood as people who have better access to answering new questions in their field and to ‘track the truth’ more reliably than a layperson. Privileging experts in some of our political decision-making, however, raises fears about the subversion of democratic equality because political outcomes can no longer be reliably traced back to an equitable sense of self-government of the citizenry. The work argues that this conflict can be resolved by understanding expert input as ‘expert review’, analogically to judicial review. The debate around judicial review shows that a procedure-independent standard need not subvert self-government and political equality. Similarly, many practices of expertise can be viewed as supplying some epistemic, procedure-independent standards democracies should heed. By analogy, scientific expertise does not subvert democracy – provided that the epistemic institutional advantage supplied by various expert inputs is kept in check by in-built democratic procedures maintaining the respect-worthy character of democracy. Therefore, if not their substantive contribution, what needs to be kept within reach of democratic oversight is the experts’ reliability and transparency. Consequently, the challenge ahead for democratic theory is to outline the place of experts within a system of public knowledge. |
| Supervisor | Kis, Janos |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/hardos_pavol.pdf |
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