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

ABSTRACT

This study questions the traditional story of the detachment and independence of expert bodies such as agencies, central banks and expert committees. It directs attention to the numerous institutional links with elected bodies and societal actors that we typify as mechanisms of stakeholder inclusion, government control and public and parliamentary scrutiny. With reference to EU examples, we illustrate that these socio-political ties of expert bodies are intensifying and attend to the normative implications of this ‘representative turn’. When expert bodies increasingly link up with societal and political actors, this can be a source of democratisation, but it can also politicise and undermine the independence of expertise. Against this background, the key question becomes how to reconcile the independence requirement of reliable expertise and the responsiveness requirement of democratic governance. We approach this question by, first, delineating a way of incorporating ideal and non-ideal concerns in normative assessment. Second, we identify the key normative challenges related to the legitimate role of experts in democracies and discuss institutional solutions to the ‘democratic-epistemic divide’ that strike a balance both between the two norms, and between ideal requirements and feasibility constraints.

KEYWORDS:

• Expert bodies
• non-majoritarian institutions
• EU governance
• socio-political ties
• representative turn
• normative assessment

Notes

1 We define expert as a social status that is attributed to a person who is considered more knowledgeable than others on a certain issue.

2 We define expertise as the knowledge claims of experts that have advisory, guiding, instructing character and that are of particular relevance in the policy context where they inform and shape collective decisions (‘policy expertise’).

3 An expert body here refers to a norm-setting or advising public body, the authority of which builds chiefly on the specialised knowledge of its participants/staff, who are neither elected nor directly steered by governments.

4 Non-majoritarian institutions are defined by Thatcher and 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). Greve et al. (1999, p. 130) understand quangos as ‘organisations which spend public money and fulfil a public function, but exist with some degree of independence from elected politicians’, which includes executive agencies, ‘non-departmental public bodies’, public expert committees, and even state-owned corporations and NGOs.

5 European Parliament, Council and Commission. (2012). COM(2015) 179 final.

6 Corporate Europe Observatory (2017) lists 22 such advisory groups in October 2017 and points to the ‘corporate bias’ of these groups.

7 This is not to say that the ECB is sufficiently held to account from a perspective of democratic legitimacy. This is another, and contested, issue that is beyond the scope of this article.

8 Compare expert groups from the early days to latest entries in terms of the data provided: http://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regexpert/index.cfm?do=transparency.showList.

9 Although this is not necessarily the case, see for example Landemore (2012).