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The trouble with experts – and why democracies need them

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Abstract

Many democratic thinkers believe that the values of expertise and the values of democracy are incompatible. Since practical realities require democratic governments to depend on experts, theorists focus on how to keep experts on a short leash. In contrast, this essay argues that experts are of greatest value to democracy when they stand up to those in government who hire them or seek their counsel, not when they surrender professional judgment to political masters. Dangers of the “short leash” model are explained. The essay offers proposals on how to think more wisely about the role of expertise in democracy. The role of the politician as a special kind of expert is also discussed.

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Notes

  1. March, J. G. & Olsen J. P. (1995). Democratic Governance (p. 178). New York: Free Press.

  2. The idea of the political observatory is a key element in Lippmann’s proposals for making democracy work in Public Opinion (New York: McMillan, 1922), but the colorful phrase itself does not appear there but in his book Liberty and the News (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Hone, 1920), 5.

  3. Dewey, J. (1927). The Public and Its Problems (p. 139). New York: Henry Holt.

  4. Dewey, J. (1927; pp. 207–208).

  5. “The quack, defined functionally and not in evaluative terms, is the man who continues through time to please his customers but not his colleagues.” This appeared originally in a 1951 article, “Mistakes at Work” reprinted in Hughes, E. C. (1971). The Sociological Eye: Selected Papers (p. 322). Chicago: Aldine.

  6. Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (p. 151). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  7. On law, see Auerbach, J. (1976). Unequal Justice. New York: Oxford University Press; on medicine, see Illich, I. (1976). Medical Nemesis. New York: Pantheon, and Ehrenreich, B. & English D. (1973). Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist; on psychiatry see Laing, R. D. (1969). The Divided Self. New York: Pantheon, Szasz, T. (1961). The Myth of Mental Illness. New York: Harper and Row, Szasz, T. (1963). Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry. New York: Macmillan, and Szasz, T. (1970). The Manufacture of Madness. New York: Harper and Row; on sociology, Friedrichs, R. (1970). A Sociology of Sociology. New York: Free Press; on professionals generally see Bledstein, B. (1976). The Culture of Professionalism. New York: Norton – and this is just a sample.

  8. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977. In C. Gordon (Ed.), (p. 118). New York: Pantheon.

  9. Foucault, M. (1980; p. 131).

  10. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of the partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14, 575–599.

  11. Turner, S. P. (2003). Liberal democracy 3.0 (pp. 19–23). London: SAGE.

  12. Shapiro, I. (1994). Three ways to be a democrat. Political Theory, 22, 124–151, 140. Shapiro borrows from himself here, making the argument that he made in “Principled Criticism and the Democratic Ethos” in Shapiro, I. (1990). Political criticism (pp. 283–285). Berkeley: University of California Press.

  13. Shapiro, I. (1994; p. 141).

  14. Shapiro, I. (1994; p. 141).

  15. Shapiro, I. (1994; pp. 141–142).

  16. Abramson, J. (1994). We, the jury (pp. 116–117). New York: Basic Books.

  17. See Landsman, S. (1999). The civil jury in America. Law and Contemporary Problems, 62, 295; Luneburg, W. V. & Nordenberg, M. A. (1981). Specially qualified juries and expert nonjury tribunals: Alternatives for coping with the complexities of modern civil litigation. Virginia Law Review, 67, 887–1007; and Sherry, S. F. (2004). Don’t let amateurs decide, in IP Law and Business (December, 2004) available at http://www.iplawandbusiness.com. There have been debates about the role of juries in complex cases in both Britain and New Zealand. See Cameron, N., Potter, S. & Young, W. (1999). The New Zealand jury. Law and Contemporary Problems, 62, 117–118. On the use of special masters in complex litigation, see Vairo, G. (2005). Why me? The role of private trustees in complex claims resolution. Stanford Law Review, 57, 1391–1428.

  18. See Wistrich, A. J., Guthrie, C. & Rachlinski, J. J. (2005). Can judges ignore inadmissible information? The difficulty of deliberately disregarding. University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 153, 1251–1345.

  19. Lloyd-Bostock, S. & Thomas, C. (1999). Decline of the ‘little parliament’: Juries and jury reform in England and Wales. Law and Contemporary Problems, 62, 13, 15.

  20. For example, close to two-thirds of trials in felony cases are jury trials, even though only a small percentage of felony cases go to trial at all. See King, N. J. (1999). The American criminal jury. Law and Contemporary Problems, 62, 159.

  21. Lifton, R. J. (1986). The Nazi doctors: Medical killing and the psychology of genocide. New York: Basic Books.

  22. Lifton, R. J. (2004). Doctors and torture. New England Journal of Medicine, 352, 415–416 (July 29, 2004).

  23. Miles, S. H. (2004). Abu Ghraib: Its legacy for military medicine. Lancet, 364, 725–729 (Aug. 21, 2004).

  24. Halberstam, D. (1972). The Best and the Brightest. New York: Random House. On McNamara, see 257–259; on Rusk, 266–267, on Stilwell, 280. This is just a sampling. The book’s argument consistently supports experts and attacks the proud but ignorant social elite running foreign policy in Vietnam. Halberstam quotes John Kenneth Galbraith (p. 60) saying that “their expertise was nothing...mostly a product of social background and a certain kind of education.” To Galbraith, the likes of McGeorge Bundy and others who learned their foreign policy through the elite Council on Foreign Relations knew little of the United States and “had not traveled around the world” and so knew nothing of other nations, also.

  25. Haskell, T. (1998). Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (p. 177). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

  26. Haskell, T. (1998; p. 178).

  27. Mooney, C. (2005). The republican war on science. New York: Basic Books.

  28. Epstein, S. (2006). The new attack on sexuality research: Morality and the politics of knowledge production. Sexual Research and Social Policy, 3, 2 (March, 2006).

  29. Revkin, A. C. (2005). Bush aide softened greenhouse gas links to global warming. New York Times (June 8, 2005).

  30. Revkin, A. C. (2006). Climate expert says NASA tried to silence him. New York Times (Jan. 29, 2006) available at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/science/earth/29climate.html. See also Eilperin, J. (2006). Climate researchers feeling heat from White House. Washington Post (Apr. 6, 2006, A27).

  31. Phillips, K. (2006). American Theocracy. New York: Viking.

  32. Andrews, E. L. (2004). As congressional budget chief, former Bush economic aide isn’t keeping to script. New York Times (August 23, 2004, A12).

  33. Epstein, S. (1996). Impure science: AIDS, activism, and the politics of knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  34. Epstein, S. (2006; p. 8).

  35. Shapiro, I. (2003). The state of democratic theory (p. 58). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

  36. Manin, B. (1997). The principles of representative government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manin shows that Harrington, Montesquieu, and Rousseau among others took it for granted that selection by lot favored democracy, while elections favored oligarchic or aristocratic rule. The shift to treating election as the essential institution of democratic came in the eighteenth century with a new conception of citizenship – “citizens were now viewed primarily as the source of political legitimacy, rather than as persons who might desire to hold office themselves” (p. 92). When the notion of democracy as a government founded in popular consent replaced a notion of democracy as one in which all citizens would have equal opportunity to govern, then the centrality of elections followed.

  37. Quoted in Rosenthal, A., Loomis, B., Hibbing, J., & Kurtz, K. (2003). Republic on trial: The case for representative democracy (p. 105). Washington, D.C.:CQ.

  38. Rosenthal, A., Loomis, B., Hibbing, J., & Kurtz, K. (2003; p. 106).

  39. Kingdon, J. W. (1973). Congressmen’s voting decisions (p. 70). New York: Harper & Row.

  40. Evans, C. L. (2002). How senators decide: An exploration. In B. I. Oppenheimer (Ed.), U.S. senate exceptionalism (pp. 262–282, at pp. 268–69). Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

  41. Haskell, T. (1998; p. 215).

  42. Haskell, T. (1998; p. 215).

  43. Dahl, R. (1997). The problem of civic competence. In R. Dahl (Ed.), Toward democracy: A journey (pp. 211–228, at p. 222), vol. 1. Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies (Originally in Journal of Democracy 3, 1992, 45–59.).

  44. Fadiman, A. (1997). The spirit catches you and you fall down. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.

  45. Warren, M. E. (1996). Deliberative democracy and authority. American political science review, 90, 47. Warren’s essay is a particularly rich exploration of the problem of authority in a democracy. It is centrally concerned with the apparent contradiction between expertise and democracy. Warren believes, as I do, that there is in the end no contradiction but a need to think through how democratic forms of authority should be constituted.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Brian Balogh, Steven Epstein, Todd Gitlin, Valerie Hartouni, and Thomas Haskell, as well as to the Theory and Society Editors, for their careful and critical reading of this article. I also want to acknowledge the College of Communications, University of Texas, Austin, where an earlier version of this article was presented as the 2004 Wayne Danielson Award Lecture.

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  1. Communication Department, University of California – San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA, 92093-0503, USA

    Michael Schudson

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Schudson, M. The trouble with experts – and why democracies need them. Theor Soc 35, 491–506 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-006-9012-y

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