Sciences, politics, and associative democracy: democratizing science and expertizing democracy

Abstract

Relations between science and politics are under pressure because urgent problems create an increasing external demand on sciences while inside sciences the old idea that “science speaks truth to politics” is increasingly seen as unfeasible and undesirable. We are not forced to choose between such an objectivist and a skepticist model. Associative democracy provides more fruitful interactions between sciences and politics in order to “democratize science/expertise” and to “expertize democracy” compared with the outworn institutional alternative of parliamentary democracy – incapable of solving risk-decisions because of limited and misguided information, lack of qualification and practical knowledge – and neo-corporatist “shifts from government to governance” – suffering from rigidity, exclusion of legitimate stakeholders, intransparency and lack of democratic legitimacy. It introduces contest where it matters most and where it is most productive: in the framing of issues, in the deliberation/negotiation on alternatives, and in the implementation and control of the chosen problem solving strategy.

Keywords:

• science studies
• politics and public administration
• political theory of expertize and democracy

Notes

1. See Bader (1997, 166ff, 2001a, 2001b); Sabel and Zeitlin (2012).

2. I do not claim any priority of external societal and political demands over science-internal supplies. See for analogous contextualization in normative disciplines, Bader (2004), and in social sciences, Bader and Engelen (2003).

3. See Bhaskar (1978, 1986); Sayer (1992, 182 ff.); Humphreys (1989); Mitchell (2009).

4. In addition, strict prediction in the social world (by social sciences) is impossible for two specific reasons: (a) strategic interactions have, in principle, unintended consequences and unforeseeable side effects; (b) predictions themselves influence and change expectations and actions and, in doing so, undermine their own validity – self-fulfilling as well as self-destructing prophecies (see Collins and Evans 2002, 268f).

5. See CPB (1992); see for a brief overview and criticism, Bader and Berg (1993, 70–74).

6. These “sociological facts” (Collins and Evans 2003, 444) are clearly not a monopoly of defenders of a “strong program” (such as Latour 2007; Jasanoff 1995; Irwin and Wynne 1996, Wynne 2003) even if some, including Collins and Evans themselves, may not always take them fully into account. The normalizing and exclusionary working of science is, however, neatly erased from Luhmann's construction of science as an autonomous, autopoetic “system” governed by the binary code true/untrue (1990, 634, 641).

7. Practical knowledge and experience are often much more imaginative in finding new options and ways out of theoretically “unsolvable” problems. This is one of the reasons in favor of “democratic experimentalism” (see Zeitlin 2010; Bader and Engelen 2003; Bader 2007a). Obviously, constructivist rationalism results not only in mega-planning but also in mega-disasters (Scott 1998).

8. See my attempts in Bader (1988, 2007, Chap. 3). See for a pragmatist version, Putnam (2001) vs Rorty.

9. Critics of Collins/Evans rightly rejected (a) the construction of waves, (b) the crude schematics and decontextualization and (c) pointing out that it does not do much of the promised work. Instead of discarding the approach (Wynne 2003; Jasanoff 2004) we can elaborate it following Rip (2003) in this regard.

10. In this regard, the criticism of Collins/Evans by Jasanoff (2003, 397f) and Wynne (2003) is to the point.

11. See Bader and Benschop (1989, 161); Bader (2008, 3f.). It is quite astonishing that Latour (2007), Marres (2005, 2007) and de Vries (2007), all trying to use insights from the pragmatist tradition into science studies by going back to Dewey completely neglect the contributions by Benjamin Barber. They create a caricature of “the definition of politics taught in political science departments” by declaring that “framing” and “issues/issue definitions” would have been absent from the research agenda, and engage in one big “replacement” strategy: a “displacement of politics” (“from now on it is about issues”); and a replacement of ”institutions and procedures” by “issues”, of “existing or current architectures” by “experiments and performance” in settling affairs or controversies (resulting in a terrible underestimation of “democratic experimentalism” and of the crucial importance of the design of alternative institutions for making existing institutions and procedures more conducive and hospitable to “new” issues and movements), of “representative democracy”, “territorially bound decision making” or “sedentary publics” by “new, flexible, fluid, unbound assemblages”. The result of all this is a terrible lack of institutional concreteness and an irritating refusal to explicate the implicit normative standards. Lack of space prevents me from going into any detail.

12. See my brief discussion in Bader (1997, 165 and notes). See for policy-analysis studies, Knorr (1977); for political science communication literature, Boswell (2009).

13. Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons (2001, 256ff): “Real People enter Science” and “Science enters the Agora”. This contextualized “mode-2 model” of science intends to overcome excessive differentiation of science and society (see my criticism of Luhmann: Bader 2001c), and aims at “re-integration” or “co-evolution” without sacrificing reasonable cognitive autonomy: politicization and democratization of science in the service of new concepts of relational objectivity. In “Re-Thinking Science” (Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons 2001), however, this “pluralistic universalism” (258f.) is not elaborated institutionally in any detail. Hence, their plea for contextualization remains ambiguous. (How “strong” or “weak”? See also Harbers 2002.) In this regard, the texts combined in Nowotny et al. (2005) mark significant progress.

14. AD combines strong guarantees of individual as well as of collective autonomy and openly acknowledges the tensions between individual and collective or associational autonomy in the case of science as well as in many other cases such as religious freedoms (Bader 2007a, Chap. 4, 2011).

15. The executive summary on “greater opportunities for informed participation” (EC recommendation 8.iv) is full of high hopes but does not seriously discuss trade-offs: legitimacy vs efficiency, participation vs simplification (EC, 2001, 7); “often opposing criteria of quality and participation” (22).

16. Representation of organized Big Business is paramount now inside universities and research institutions; organized labor is underrepresented and the wide variety of other relevant stakeholders are virtually absent. Often, organizations of consumers and clients are massively sponsored by Big Business (e.g. the pharma industry).

17. See for a sharp criticism of “econocracy” in the recent crisis, Engelen et al. (2011) and Crouch (2011).

18. See Black's criticism: “It may well be that a thick conception of proceduralization must abandon the hope of normative consensus: that deliberative democracy seeks and aims instead for a discursively produced coordination rather than integration (Black 2001, 58, quoted by Trute 2005, 99).

19. See Schmitter (2000, 2001); Schmitter and Trechsel (2007); Joerges (1999a, 1999b); Neyer (2004); Bader (2007c, 2010).

20. Lack of space prevents me from dealing with some of the cultural preconditions preventing the proposal of AD from undermining basic principles of liberal-democratic constitutionalism, such as the risky impact of silent or anomic majorities mobilized as stakeholders if they have not “internalized” (see above Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons 2001, 260) basic civic and political virtues (see Bader 2007, Chap. 6.1 for the importance of such virtues in general, particularly for moderately agonistic varieties of democracy such as AD). An anonymous reviewer reminded me to at least mention these cultural requirements. Space also prevents me from dealing with the other issues mentioned: “time/future assessment” and the “impact of economization of social arenas” on the knowledgeability of consumers in relation to their roles of citizens (see for the latter the grim picture painted by Crouch 2005, Chap. 5 and Streeck 2012).

21. Indeed, “the self-organizing capacity of all participants needs to be enhanced” (Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons 2001, thesis 15: 260), yet negotiating and deliberating among many parties does in itself almost nothing to check serious background inequalities and the few remarks that “the emergence of Mode-2 society raises acute issues of social justice, economic equality and the further democratization of knowledge” (thesis 3: 252) do nothing to redress or soften these background inequalities. See also Harbers's criticism: Big Government (political power) and Big Business (money) may win (Harbers 2002, 16) pointing at a crucial weakness in the analysis of “Mode-2 societies” inherited from Giddens, Beck, Castells and other fashionable prophets of post-industrial, post-modern, or “risk” societies.

22. Objective power asymmetries not only result in drastic inequalities of political resources (Bader 1991, 265ff.) and consequently in serious political inequalities, but also may drastically restrict the freedom of groups to define their interests, their identities, their self-respect, their motivation to participate, and their strategic options (see Bohman 1997; Bader 2007b).

23. For the EU, see Greenwood (2007) and my brief discussion in Bader (2007c). Only if background inequalities are at least considerably softened or reduced may a roughly symmetrical form of communication between practical philosophy, political theory, (social) sciences, the arts of intervention and politics develop, the beginning of reasonable politics. The gap between such normative and institutional requirements and the actual state of affairs, particularly the actual working of media and public opinion, is enormous and disquieting. However, this should not make us despair: there are important empirical differences regarding the degree of information, qualification and critical power of public opinions in different countries, fields and periods. Normatively too, most interesting issues are matters of degree.

24. See Heritiér (1999); Heritiér and Rhodes (2011); Bader (2007c, 2010); Elstub (2008); Zeitlin (2010); and Sabel and Zeitlin (2012). See Bader (2013b) for a new role of political parties.