What expertise, for what, and whose democratic politics?

1. Introduction

The intimate and fraught relationship between expertise and democratic politics is the subject of the comprehensive 2023 handbook titled The Oxford Handbook of Expertise and Democratic Politics. This volume, edited by Gil Eyal and Thomas Medvetz, brings together leading scholars from a range of disciplines to examine the various ways in which expertise and democracy co-construct and maintain their boundaries.

This book builds on the so-called “paradox of expertise,” that is, while societies’ trust in expertise declines, they increasingly rely on expertise to run. Moreover, these two seemingly contradictory processes feed each other. According to Eyal and Medvetz, the handbook sets to add a democratic reading on top of that paradox. Broadly speaking, this paradox has fueled the political question of “who can participate” as an expert (p. 6) in democratic decision-making and what kind of expertise they can deploy. In this sense, this handbook is a crucial resource not only for those working directly with expertise but also for those engaging with democracy in theory and practice.

In the Introduction, Eyal and Medvetz define expertise as “a historically specific type of performance aimed at linking scientific knowledge with matters of public concern” (p. 5). In doing so, they propose an inexorable link between expertise and the construction of the public sphere, and not only the formal decision-making political institutions. In turn, this definition encourages a relational view of expertise, that not only brings to light the “complex, historically contingent give-and-take” (p. 5), but also the impact of social and political life in the production of scientific knowledge.

The handbook itself is structured into seven parts and twenty-four chapters. Beyond the introductory section by the Editors, the book provides the following thematic sections:

• The Fraught Relations between Expertise and Democracy

• Trust

• Objectivity

• Jurisdictional Struggles

• Making the Future Present

• The Transformation and Persistence of Professions

• New Media and Expertise

In this book review, we will cover each of the chapters of the handbook individually, presenting their central arguments and questions. Afterwards, we will return to the fundamental concern of this academic endeavor, namely, to provide an authoritative and detailed account of the relationship between expertise and democracy. In the final section of this review, we will discuss and examine the degree to which this aim is achieved, emphasizing the dimensions of democratic politics we believe need more attention.

2. Chapters analysis

The first section of the handbook deals with “The Fraught Relations between Expertise and Democracy,” exploring instances of conflict between democratic institutions or democratic participation and the political performance of expertise. In the first chapter, Weingart overviews how expertise lost the trust of public opinion. He links public distrust to the decline of the narrative of “science exceptionalism.” Particularly, 1980s' public participation movements in controversial environmental and technological issues as well as the rise of science medialization proved to be major blows to the exceptionalism narrative. Weingart contends that conflict in the expertise-policy interface is inevitable, despite all efforts made by institutions to shield expertise from public skepticism. As he puts it, “there is simply no perfect equilibrium, no middle ground, between legitimacy created by popular consent and expertise based on systematic knowledge” (p. 45). While we agree with the historical arguments made by Weingart, we wonder if asserting such a strong dichotomy between systematic knowledge and public legitimacy in contemporary societies is tenable. Is expertise not publicly funded and oriented towards popular concerns? Is public opinion and public life not co-constructed by systematic knowledge?

Collins et al. imagine science and expertise as a political institution. Contrary to most social theories of expertise, the authors conceive its role as a contribution “to the network of checks and balances needed to resist slipping, under the pressure of events, into more authoritarian styles of rule” (p. 60). Properly understood, they claim, expertise is a force for democracy. Authoritarian forces, such as populist leaders, try to take ownership of the “locus of legitimate interpretation” (p. 60) of facts away from expert bodies. This argument’s saliency when discussing the interplay between expertise and democracy will re-emerge throughout the handbook.

In his chapter, Epstein explores the concept of lay expertise. According to Epstein, lay expertise is not just lived experience, but a collective form of action. By nature, Epstein claims it is a hybrid collection of different modes of understanding, some of which are influenced by traditional professional expertise. In turn, credentialed expertise is equally permeated by lay understanding and experiential knowledge. According to Epstein, recognizing this hybridity is key for a more robust analysis of the “oxymoronic” study of lay expertise.

Akrich and Rabeharisoa go further into the paradoxical nature of lay expertise, focusing on patient organizations’ epistemic practices. Their depiction reveals how organized individuals’ knowledge defies expectations set by the “deficit model,” which assumes the public lacks sufficient knowledge or understanding to fully appreciate and accept expertise. In this case, instead of making citizens more docile to established expertise, increased expert knowledge is strategically used by patient organizations to challenge settled practices. Familiarity with expert domains may even lead the “lay citizen” to transform into another expert peer, losing some activist identity. Nonetheless, the formation of epistemically robust communities appears integral to people’s capacity to access and contest power, involving persuading others and legitimizing experiences as valid subjects of inquiry.

Stehr and Ruser analyze the contemporary language used by climate activists concerning democratic politics. The authors highlight how some climate activists attribute society’s failure to address climate change to an excess of politics, specifically democracy’s reliance on negotiation. Urgency, promoting immediate action, can be wielded against democracy, serving to assert both epistemic certainty and a state of frustration towards slow institutional mediation. This frustration is coupled with the domestication of public opinion. Stehr and Ruser argue that there’s no inherent assurance that “the people” will unanimously agree on climate politics. However, as de León Escobedo (2023) argues, this discussion often lacks geographical sensitivity. For instance, in the Global South, the politics of urgency plays out locally such that social reflexivity is endangered more explicitly than institutionality.

The second section of the handbook centers around “Trust.” This section contains two chapters dealing with the breakdown and maintenance work of trust in expertise. In his chapter, Crease describes the anti-vaccination movement, where mistrust often arises among those in privileged positions. Rooted in an individualistic culture and a context of epistemic infrastructure breakdown, mistrust exhibits common features, including the construction of alternative experts, attributing corrupt motives, employing celebrity voices, and fostering feelings of solidarity and community. Despite acknowledging these historically contingent yet accurate patterns, the issue of symmetry persists; how to recognize what the “right” expertise is in the first place. Crease suggests an acoustical model as an analytical metaphor of expertise, envisioning multiple voices with varying volumes and hermeneutically distinct interpretations. Crease’s acoustical model provides an opportunity for a pluralistic view of expertise.

Lakoff reconstructs the interplay between experts and regulators during the COVID-19 crisis and the US vaccine development policy “Operation Warp Speed.” In this initiative, Lakoff observes an unusual alliance involving academic scientists, industry stakeholders, and regulators working to safeguard the regulatory process amid political demands for swift solutions. This relationship forms an industry-backed alliance of procedures, which is an interesting strategy to maintain public trust. Following democratic negotiations, the hybrid concept of “emergency use authorisation” emerged, allowing external pressures to influence without fully abandoning standard practices. His study construes a picture in which actors have clear and defined motives. Latin American researchers on the other hand have insisted on the ambivalence of the regulatory state (Salazar et al. 2019), and its conflicting relation with tradition and community practices (Sánchez-Acevedo and Sánchez-Díaz de Rivera 2019). With this background, Lakoff’s description is likely too neat for our experience of the regulatory state. For instance, the lack of accounts of institutional workarounds or corruption in the analysis seemed surprising to us.

The third theme of the handbook centers around “Objectivity.” It revolves around the hidden work behind maintaining the privileged epistemic status of expertise. Tal Golan presents the history of experts in the court, framing it as a narrative of a broken promise. Instead of seamlessly uniting justice and truth, the introduction of expertise into the adversarial Anglo-American common law court has led to a persistent struggle to meet each other’s expectations. Consequently, courts have faced pressure to establish parameters for the legitimate invocation of expertise, exemplified by the Frye rule and the more intricate set of rules found in the Daubert standard. This relates to the theme of “meta-expertise” that is further explored in Pasquale’s chapter.

In his chapter, Laurent inquires into the broader question of defining expertise for policymaking. Through a review of the social theory of objectivity in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and an examination of European institutions providing expert advice, Laurent illustrates the extensive effort required to establish institutional mechanisms accommodating both scientific robustness and political legitimacy. This accommodation involves challenging objectivity as a “view-from-nowhere” and favoring certain voices over others. In the European context, prioritizing political legitimacy has ironically entailed increasing the political access of skilled lobbyist compared to other stakeholders.

Turner offers an examination of expertise within complex organizations, focusing on the economic crises of 2008 and 2010. The procedures organizations employ to create and apply legitimate knowledge introduce new biases and partialities themselves. According to Turner, these are inevitable, and sub-optimal solutions must be accepted, acknowledging that there is no God’s Eye view to resolve these conflicts. Only socially “organized procedures” are available (p. 254).

Furthering this point, Porter and Espeland assert that expertise involves a delicate balance between knowledge and craft. They delve deeper into this theme by examining the co-construction of quantitative ideals and expertise. Their analysis reveals that the modern notion of reasoning as computation aligns historically with ideals of knowledge devoid of opinion. In this context, they depict the construction of social science as a parallel process with the development of expert statisticians working for institutions. In turn, this unfolding has led to the transformation of social knowledge into something impersonal and systematic. The success of this transformation is partly attributed to the ease with which numbers traverse contexts. What is flagrantly understated in this analysis is the geopolitical role of data epistemologies in imposing social orders from center to periphery, and thus exerting colonial power (Ricaurte 2019).

Demortain describes the effect of the presence of industry members on how experts position themselves during technological regulation. Contrary to simplistic narratives of industrial capture of regulatory science, Demortain emphasizes the necessity of comprehending the ecologies of regulatory knowledge. Within this framework, influence is not merely a sign of corruption but signifies the embeddedness of practices and positions among various actors. This ecology emerges from the interaction of regulatory agencies and scientists in the administrative state, the academic field, the industrial realm of regulatory knowledge, and social movements. Consequently, regulatory science, with its paradoxical nature, serves as a meeting ground for these fields to negotiate and for power to be asserted, sometimes unfairly. Power, in this context, is not a flaw but a feature that warrants critical awareness.

Daniel Navon studies expert practices of human classification, specifically in the biomedical field. Inherently political, these classification practices reveal the rhetorical distribution of power in society. Crucially, classifications also impact the subjectivation processes of those being classified, creating a continuous loop of influence. In modern societies, classification categories are often shrouded in invisibility cloaks, shielding experts from democratic scrutiny. However, the people classified do not automatically align with these categories and may engage in resistance practices that loop back into the classification canon. But Navon conceives resistance as an individual or group endeavor. We add that there is a territorial and cultural dimension to resistance that the handbook tends to ignore.

The fourth part of the handbook, called “Jurisdictional Struggles,” contains three chapters dealing in general with actual expert possibilities to define the issues that have traditionally fallen within their field of action, the extension of that same field, and to assess their own performance.

The section starts with Frank Pasquale's chapter, “Battle of the Experts: The Strange Career of Meta-Expertise,” about the increasing importance of the role of the “meta-expert” in evaluating the performance of experts, while recognizing that nowadays this role is paradigmatically claimed by economists and computer scientists. The chapter articulates a valuable critique towards the alleged neutrality of economy and computer science to claim a meta-expertise over other disciplines.

The following chapter is titled “Gender and Economic Governance Expertise.” In this piece, María J. Azócar outlines the contributions of gender scholars to the study of expertise in economic governance and she argues in favor of an intersectional approach to expand and improve the reach of the analysis offered by gender studies. With her article, Azócar not only shows the gender effects of expertise in economic governance but also highlights the potential of an intersectional approach for a nuanced study of power in economic knowledge, practices, and institutions. For example, from an understanding of expertise as a practice, she shows how gender categories interact with other social categories as race or class when mobilized while performing expertise.

Finally, Griffen and Panofsky’s chapter explores the potential of field theory in analyzing expertise and experts’ efforts to safeguard their autonomy. They start by reviewing two competing uses for field theory: as a heuristic tool to elucidate how experts’ actions are confined within particular fields and as a substantial account of expertise relevance. The authors then scrutinize the normative value of fields’ autonomy and the maintenance work it requires, as well as how field theory can address these concerns. Drawing on contributions from scholars implicitly or explicitly using field theory, the chapter underscores the importance of science’s integrity, its epistemic and moral significance for democracy, and the conditions required for autonomous fields to fulfill their potential. The chapter navigates the complex relationships between the devaluation of expertise and the erosion of fields’ autonomy, raising questions about science’s capacity, under current conditions, to fulfill its democratic roles.

Fischbacher-Smith inaugurates the fifth section of the book, inquiring into the theme of “Making the Future Present.” In his chapter, he examines the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study to explore the tensions between the demand and supply of models predicting damaging events, primarily requested by policymakers. In this context, the author discusses the limitations of risk analysis in meeting the expectations of this demand, which gives rise to a “risk paradox.” Fischbacher-Smith asserts that the risk paradox emerges from the demand for measurable certainty in a landscape characterized by “radical uncertainty,” resulting in ambiguity. This complex process encompasses various factors: the arguable impossibility of achieving quantifiable certainty, the existence of legitimate expertise in unprecedented events, expert disagreements, and the challenges of communicating systemic uncertainty. Therefore, comprehending the limitations of risk analysis extends beyond the demanding standards for prediction; it also involves recognizing expertise’s incapacity to deliver, both stemming from and contributing to the devaluation of scientific knowledge.

Furthering this point, Anderson argues that forecasting expertise owes its influence to historical shifts in the State-expertise relationship, a theme she reviews throughout her paper. According to Anderson, the prominence or devaluation of expertise of specific types must be contextualized within the roles they serve for governing structures. Since the 1970s, future-oriented expertise has facilitated governing populations and territories by providing images of the future. In this vein, the author’s analysis broadens our comprehension of the interplay between expertise and the exercise of governing. Specifically, through forecasting, expertise extends governance space and time limits, without weakening State authority. Understanding these developments is of capital importance for any agenda or theory that aims to further democratize the process of governing.

Ruthanne Huising opens the sixth section of the handbook, titled “Transformation and Persistence of Professions.” Huising’s chapter “Professional Authority,” surveys the sources of professional authority. Her contribution offers a lucid review of the relevant literature and presents an analysis challenging the efficacy of expertise, in its current understanding as abstract systems of knowledge, to successfully produce professional authority. On the contrary, in contemporary workplaces, several means produce authority, including interdependence, contextual expertise, interactive expertise and ethos. All of this suggests a conception of expertise centered on practical delivery rather than abstract knowledge.

The following chapter studies the factors contributing to the limited institutional professionalization of fields such as mathematics, computer, and new media occupations in post-industrial societies. In a concise yet insightful chapter titled “The Post-Industrial Limits of Professionalization,” Starr provides a direct analysis, drawing on theoretical resources and empirical evidence to elucidate the dynamics of professionalization and non-professionalization across various fields. His purpose, rather than offering definitive conclusions, is to raise critical questions about the interaction between professional institutionalization and broader social and economic structures while stressing the utility of using the sociology of professions as an analytical standpoint.

In the final chapter of this section, titled “(In) Expertise and the Paradox of Therapeutic Governance,” Summerson Carr shares a compelling narrative regarding the tensions between respecting clients’ autonomy and employing directive and goal-oriented therapeutic practices in motivational interviewing. The author contends that these tensions mirror broader challenges encountered in United States politics, such as the struggle between expertise authority and the democratic ideal of self-governing – a debate that has endured over time and gets updated under novel circumstances.

The final section of the book presents the intersection of “New Media and Expertise,” beginning with Arnoldi’s chapter on the public legitimization of expertise. The chapter asserts that changes in technological and institutional landscapes have reshaped how expertise is publicly acknowledged and attributed. Over the past five decades, Arnoldi has identified two significant stages. Firstly, the distribution of knowledge production beyond universities into private organizations alongside growing public concerns regarding science and technology. Secondly, the relative loss of power of the news media in the public sphere, mainly due to the irruption of social media. Consequently, both the production and legitimation of expertise are now highly socially distributed, producing what Arnoldi designates as “authoritative synthesis” in the public domain. Of particular interest to democratic thinkers concerned with communication is Arnoldi’s concluding question: where can authoritative synthesis be found? And what are the effects these new modes of attributing expertise have on the manipulation and politicization of expertise?

One step further far away, Townsley’s chapter traces the origins of the Meta-Commentary as a critique of media expertise performance, reviewing its developments in the United States since the 1980s. She then examines the use of meta-commentary by the Last Week Tonight show, and the changes it introduces to the genre. Her analysis not only offers an example of the media criticism genre but also illustrates the evolving conditions under which expertise performance unfolds in the media. In addition, it emphasizes aspects that media expertise ought to consider, including the importance of the audience, the instability of the authority of former institutionally stable expertise or the relevance of media skills when performing expertise.

3. Conclusion

Many of the handbook’s chapters discuss the old and new challenges of legitimizing expertise, most of them deriving from the erosion of objectivity as a normative justification for its involvement in democracy. Significantly, this erosion manifests in the challenges of defining who is an expert. This is explored by Golan in the case of courtrooms, or Epstein, Akrich and Rabeharisoa’s chapters on the construction of lay expertise. Nonetheless, according to the “paradox of expertise,” the devaluation of expert knowledge comes with an ever-increasing democratic demand for it. If that is the case, where then can the normative basis for that demand be situated?

Huising claims that today’s legitimizing force of expertise comes from the capacity to deliver valuable outcomes in particular contexts, thus stemming from “competence.” Pasquale observes that normative standards are still required, but they are dominated by economists and computer scientists using their own disciplinary fields to attribute merit and worth to one expert over another. Laurent identifies institutional settings favoring lobbyists and social groups and not just traditional experts. With this in mind, he reframes expertise around the idea of producing “interested objectivity” rather than a “view from nowhere” traditional to liberal democracies.

Despite their practical efficacy in their respective fields, these new sources of legitimacy are not extensively examined in the handbook nor challenged from the standpoint of democratic theory and practice. The handbook would benefit from a more systematic examination of the role expertise should play in democratic politics based on what we expect democracies to be. In that sense, beyond empirical accounts of practice, a nuanced analysis of expertise in democracy ought to take into account the contemporary developments of democratic theory and practice. This, in our view, is somewhat neglected in this volume.

For example, for epistemic democracy approaches, democracy is justified for its ability to arrive at better decisions. To support that claim, they resort to the epistemic merits of the “wisdom of the crowds.” What place would expertise, in its varied forms, play in these approaches (see, for example, Holst and Molander 2019)? This is further complicated by examining the role of “experts in democratic participation” (Voß and Amelung 2016), but also considering that experts play a relevant role not only in their traditional role as policy advisors but also in several democratic innovations seeking to engage citizens directly (Lightbody and Roberts 2019).

One of the elements of democratic politics that requires more attention in the handbook is the dimension of geopolitics. This involves both the role of expertise in the practice of geopolitics (for example, in the case of science diplomacy or warfare technologies) and also an interest in how “Southern” knowledges would help provide more nuance to the study of expertise. From our experience, we can at least highlight how Latin America's recent history and literature could enrich the discussion offered by this book.

For instance, Collins and colleagues assert the importance of experts as actors in the checks and balances of state power. At least in Latin America, expert institutions, like universities, have indeed played critical roles during dictatorial times. Staff, and mostly students, have been at the forefront of defending democracy, but not necessarily through purely epistemic means (Garatte 2011; Póo 2016; Raíces 2011).

Epstein’s and Akrich and Rabeharisoa’s chapters underscore hybridity as essential for understanding lay expertise. The concept of hybridity resonates strongly with the inescapable plurality enclosed in the “Mestizo” identity, essential to Latin American history and societies (cf. Anzaldúa 1987). However, there are some divergences between how contemporary scholars of expertise and the participatory tradition within Latin America would address the legitimate role of experts. For example, Latin American Participatory Action Research (PAR) and popular education movements prioritize dismantling power imbalances between experts and citizens (Fals Borda 1987), advocating for the dissolution of the expert category itself.

The historical transformation of expertise within and among nation-states also holds a geopolitical dimension. Since its origins in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the global dissemination of technocratic governance models in Latin America was closely intertwined with coloniality (Baud 1998). Understanding how expertise-society models, as social technologies, traveled and adapted across different regions requires deeper exploration. This is crucial to prevent historical narratives that presume practices originating in the Global North as universal.

To summarize our points in this conclusion, when Gil Eyal and Thomas Medvetz, as editors of this handbook ask, “Who can participate?”, we would like to follow up with the questions: “From where? For whose and what democratic politics?”