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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Title: The Oxford handbook of expertise and democratic politics / edited by Gil Eyal, Thomas Medvetz. Other titles: Handbook of expertise and democratic politics
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2023. | Series: Oxford handbooks series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022030824 (print) | LCCN 2022030825 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190848927 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190848941 (epub) | ISBN 9780190848958
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022030824
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022030825
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190848927.001.0001
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
1. Introduction 1 Gil Eyal and Thomas Medvetz
PART I. THE FRAUGHT RELATIONS BETWEEN
2. Trust and Distrust of Scientific Experts and the Challenges of the Democratization of Science 29 Peter Weingart
3. The Third Wave and Populism: Scientific Expertise as a Check and Balance 52 Harry Collins, Robert Evans, Darrin Durant, and Martin Weinel
4. The Meaning and Significance of Lay Expertise 76 Steven Epstein
5. On the Multiplicity of Lay Expertise: An Empirical and Analytical Overview of Patient Associations’ Achievements and Challenges 103 Madeleine Akrich and Vololona Rabeharisoa
6. The Political Climate and Climate Politics—Expert Knowledge and Democracy 134 Nico Stehr and Alexander Ruser
PART II. TRUST
7. Mistrust of Experts by Populists and Politicians 155 Robert P. Crease
8. A Regulatory State of Exception 181 Andrew Lakoff
9. Experts in Law
Tal Golan
10. Institutions of Expert Judgment: The Production and Use of Objectivity in Public Expertise
Brice Laurent
11. Expertise and Complex Organizations
Stephen Turner
12. Data and Expertise: Some Unanticipated Outcomes
Theodore M. Porter and Wendy Nelson Espeland
13. Experts in the Regulation of Technology and Risk: An Ecological Perspective on Regulatory Science 282
David Demortain
14. Expert Power and the Classification of Human Difference
Daniel Navon
PART IV. JURISDICTIONAL STRUGGLES
15. Battle of the Experts: The Strange Career of Meta-Expertise
Frank Pasquale
16. Gender and Economic Governance Expertise
Maria J. Azocar
17. Field Theory and Expertise: Analytical Approaches and the Question of Autonomy
Zachary Griffen and Aaron Panofsky
PART V. MAKING THE FUTURE PRESENT
18. Addressing the Risk Paradox: Exploring the Demand Requirements around Risk and Uncertainty and the Supply Side Limitations of Calculative Practices
Denis Fischbacher-Smith
Andersson
PART VI. THE TRANSFORMATION AND
OF PROFESSIONS
PART VII. NEW MEDIA AND EXPERTISE
Jakob Arnoldi
Contributors
Madeleine Akrich
Mines Paris, PSL University, Centre for the Sociology of Innovation (CSI), i3 UMR CNRS
Jenny Andersson Sciences Po, Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics
Jakob Arnoldi Department of Management, Aarhus University
Maria J. Azocar College of the Sequoias
E. Summerson Carr
Department of Anthropology and Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, University of Chicago
Harry Collins
School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University
Robert P. Crease
Stony Brook University
David Demortain
Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences Innovations Sociétés (LISIS), French National Institute for Research for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (INRAE)
Darrin Durant
School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne
Steven Epstein
Department of Sociology, Northwestern University
Wendy Nelson Espeland
Northwestern University
Robert Evans
School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University
Gil Eyal
Department of Sociology, Columbia University
Denis Fischbacher-Smith
University of Glasgow Business School
Tal Golan
Department of History, University of California, San Diego
Zachary Griffen
University of California, Los Angeles
Ruthanne Huising
Emlyon Business School
Andrew Lakoff
Department of Sociology, University of Southern California
Brice Laurent
Mines Paris, PSL University, Center for the Sociology of Innovation (CSI), i3 UMR CNRS
Thomas Medvetz
Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego
Daniel Navon
Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego
Aaron Panofsky
University of California, Los Angeles
Frank Pasquale
Brooklyn Law School
Theodore M. Porter
Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles
Vololona Rabeharisoa
Mines Paris, PSL University, Centre for the Sociology of Innovation (CSI), i3 UMR CNRS
Alexander Ruser
University of Agder
Paul Starr
Princeton University
Nico Stehr
Zeppelin University
Eleanor Townsley
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Mt. Holyoke College
Stephen Turner
Department of Philosophy, University of South Florida
Martin Weinel
School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University
Peter Weingart
Bielefeld University
Introduction
Gil Eyal and Thomas Medvetz
When the idea for this handbook was first conceived, back in 2017, we knew that the topic was important. We just didn’t know how important, or how quickly it would come to dominate politics. If anybody thought that the role of experts in democratic politics is a sideshow to the more important distributional or ideological politics, the Coronavirus pandemic should have disabused them of this notion. There is hardly a variable currently more predictive of the distinctive fortunes of countries (and thus, of the life chances of millions of people) than the way in which the relations between experts, decision-makers, and the public are configured. Where these relations seem to be in deep crisis, further exacerbated by the pandemic, as in the United States and United Kingdom, the death toll is still climbing. Where there was no such crisis to begin with, as in China, Thailand, and South Korea, the response has been decisive and the recovery relatively swift. We venture, therefore, the immodest claim that this handbook is dealing with the most important challenge facing democratic politics in our era. Period.
The Crisis of Expertise
What is this challenge? What has gone wrong in the relations between experts and democratic politics? A headline run by the New York Times in August 2020 can serve as our way into this labyrinth: “Scientists worry about political influence over Coronavirus vaccine project.” (LaFraniere 2020) The article quotes Paul Offit, a member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee, who warns: “There are a lot of people on the inside of this process who are very nervous about whether the administration is going to reach their hand into the Warp Speed bucket, pull out one or two or three vaccines, and say, ‘We’ve tested it on a few thousand people, it looks safe, and now we are going to roll it out.’ ” At first sight, this seems fairly straightforward. There is a scientific process of developing and testing vaccines to make sure they are safe and efficacious. Impinging upon it from without, however, is political pressure—with the vivid image of a hand reaching “in”
and pulling “out.” The White House wanted to develop a vaccine at “warp speed” to boost Trump’s re-election chances. The scientists worried that this could lead to “cutting corners,” resulting in a vaccine that was neither safe nor efficacious. When you are dealing with a vaccine that will be administered to hundreds of millions of people, even the smallest error or the rarest of side effects could have potentially catastrophic consequences.
But things are not so simple. The White House wanted to short-circuit the threephase sequence of clinical trials. This sequence itself was established by a political process culminating in the celebrated Kefauver-Harris legislation in reaction to another politically charged public health crisis of global dimensions (the Thalidomide affair; Carpenter 2010, 228–297). The considerations that went into crafting the sequence were both scientific and political. The aptly named “confidence levels” designed by the statisticians had as much to do with the need to shore up public trust in the administrative process, as they did with the methods of statistical inference. Accordingly, perhaps even more than they were worried about the actual risks of fast-tracked vaccines, the scientists were worried about the appearance of haste and undue influence and its impact on trust. A failed effort, or merely the appearance that the process had been rushed and rife with conflicts of interest, would play directly into the hands of vaccine skeptics and “fuel public distrust of vaccines.”
Or, at least, this is what they said out loud. As Andrew Lakoff argues convincingly in this handbook, “While trust in the safety of technical objects such as vaccines is often seen as depending on the autonomy of regulatory agencies and the objectivity of experts, here the converse was the case: experts and regulatory officials used the construct of public trust—or rather, mistrust—as a means to preserve their autonomy.” What the experts discovered is that the bureaucratic device of the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), put in place in 2004 as part of a new logic of “preparedness,” could potentially undermine their autonomy, especially with an executive determined to use it to score political points. In the bureaucratic struggle that ensued, the danger of losing the public’s “trust” was mobilized as a resource in the scientists’ hands.
And so, once more, the tables turned. The vaccines’ skeptic-in-chief in the White House suddenly became their biggest booster, staking his political future on their expeditious rollout; and the champions of vaccination, including the much-maligned big pharmaceuticals standing to make a profit from a universal vaccination campaign, began sounding the alarm, worried about their “reputational risk.” The very mechanisms developed to generate trust, themselves became mistrusted. The threephase structure and deliberate pace of clinical trials were meant to give them the appearance of mechanical objectivity (Carpenter 2010; Daston and Galison 1992; Porter 1995). The religiously followed protocol was meant to draw a boundary between science and politics, between means and ends. Now the protocol, too, was dragged into the struggle. It no longer appeared as an umpire, but as a contestant. To cut corners would be unethical. It could endanger the public or its trust in vaccines or both. To not cut corners, however, “would also be unethical,” according to a White House
official, because it would entail withholding “an effective vaccine for an extra three or four months while more people died just to check the boxes of a more routine trial process.” Cynical political ploy? No doubt. But it is exactly the same argument that ACT UP activists made during the AIDS epidemic decades earlier (Carpenter 2010; Epstein 1995), and that other patients’ advocates have been making ever since. The protocol is not innocent, they argued; its objectivity is not objective. Its “mechanical” application is murderous and must be tempered with “compassionate use” exemptions. And so, they dance, round and round, changing places and exchanging costumes, the vaccine skeptic-in-chief rehearsing the arguments of the radical activists of ACT UP, and the champions of vaccines being forced to explain the risks they entail and to warn that short-circuiting the process would lead to loss of trust. The predictable result of this dance can only be further erosion of the public’s trust in vaccines.
The sense of crisis hovers over practically all the contributions to this handbook. The relationship between expertise and democratic politics, which has always been full of friction, as E. Summerson Carr points out in her contribution, has now reached an impasse. This is not because experts are somehow less relevant or less needed in liberal democratic polities. On the contrary. The crisis is characterized by what Peter Weingart in his contribution calls the “paradox of expertise”: Experts are needed more than ever, and experts are less credible than ever. The two relations—dependence and distrust—feed off and amplify one another (see also Eyal 2019). Increasing dependence on experts leads to warnings about technocracy and undemocratic rule by experts. This was already a staple of New Left critiques in the 1960s (Habermas 1970) and of neoconservative analyses of the “new class” in the 1970s (Bruce-Briggs 1979). In the pandemic, it has taken the form of warnings from Supreme Court Justice Alito about “rule by experts” encroaching on constitutionally guaranteed liberties (Wehle 2020). This consciousness of a tension between democratic ideals and the authority of expertise can infuse not only academic discussions of politics with a capital P, but also how ordinary people perceive their interactions with a more mundane sort of expert, as Carr demonstrates in her analysis of Motivational Interviewing (MI), a form of nondirective therapy. But the obverse is also true. The increasing distrust and pluralization of expertise leads to even greater reliance on experts of some sort. This is happening today in dramatic fashion with the Extinction Rebellion movement, as Alexander Ruscher and Nico Stehr recount in their chapter. In his contribution to this handbook, Jakob Arnoldi calls it a “tragic paradox . . . at the heart of modern technological society”: The more there are different and conflicting types of knowledge, creating uncertainty about expertise, the greater the demand for authoritative syntheses provided by experts, though these syntheses may no longer be the official ones. As epidemiologists disagree with one another, people turn to “Coronavirus influencers” to sort out the mess (Broderick 2020). Even MI therapists, committed to being nondirective and to treating the patient as expert, find that they need to exert authority, however tacitly. So dependence breeds distrust, but distrust breeds further dependence, and the dance continues.
What Is Expertise?
A book about expertise and democratic politics could have begun with a definition of its subject matter—namely, expertise. We chose to start, instead, where there is agreement among our contributors—namely, the shared sense that expertise is in crisis. There is no similar agreement, however, about what expertise is and where (or whether) to draw the boundaries of the phenomenon. In fact, the broad outlines of the dance we have just described are replicated in the debates about the notion of expertise itself. Scholars concerned with this topic have often conceptualized expertise, in keeping with the term’s everyday use, as the knowledge or skill needed to perform a particular task in a particular area (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 2003; Collins and Evans 2007). But there are problems with this way of defining expertise for analytic purposes. These problems run parallel to the dilemmas of trust and credibility sketched above. In the first place, we cannot reduce expertise to knowledge or skill, even if we define both broadly to include both abstract and practical knowledge (i.e., explicit rules and ideas, on the one hand, and embodied mastery and tacit knowhow, on the other). To explain the successful performance of a task, after all, requires more than identifying the knowledge or skill mobilized by an expert. There are also tools, instruments, concepts, measures, and institutional and spatial settings that are all mobilized in the successful and speedy performance of a task, as well as, perhaps, the know-how of other participants who are not typically recognized as experts (Eyal 2013, 2019). By the same token, certain forms of complex knowledge and skill are not ordinarily seen as “expertise,” which suggests that something is left out by the innocent phrase “in a particular area.” Becoming a competent speaker of a language, for example, requires the mobilization of an enormously complex skillset. Collins and Evans (2007) are certainly correct to call this a “ubiquitous” form of expertise. Yet it is also clear that this is not the meaning of expertise indexed in the title of this book; nor would it be ordinary usage, for that matter, to call a child who becomes proficient in her native language an “expert.”
Recognizing these problems, other scholars have taken the alternate approach of defining expertise as an “attribution,” or a quality that attaches to someone by virtue of recognition granted by significant others (Friedson 1986; Abbott 1988). Experts, on this view, are those who succeed in earning and maintaining the designation of expert, particularly in their relationships with established authorities. This approach gets around the problem of having to define expertise in terms of substantive qualities, but it, too, is unsatisfying. Above all, it tends to trivialize the phenomenon by implying that expertise is a kind of fiction, a matter of attracting the right forms of approval, as opposed to a real and substantive skill (Fuller 2006).
We will probably not settle this debate here. It is perhaps better seen as an enduring feature of the phenomenon of expertise itself (namely, that its scope and nature are essentially contested). Instead, we would like to offer a maximally flexible analytical
framework that does not prejudge the answers to these contested questions yet is attuned to the specific subject matter of this volume. This can be done, we argue, by thinking of expertise as a historically specific type of performance aimed at linking scientific knowledge with matters of public concern. This approach has the immediate benefit of recognizing that expertise—say, the performance of a concert pianist—invariably requires advanced knowledge and skill to carry off. At the same time, it accounts for the fact that other ingredients are needed to perform expert tasks. Like the concert performance, expertise requires the proper tools and instruments; typically, it also depends on the contributions of various “backstage” figures (e.g., mentors, intermediaries), who are not, strictly speaking, performers themselves. And if we are concerned with how the performance becomes an authoritative intervention in public affairs, then we must include relevant features of the surrounding context in our conception, such as the venue in which the performance takes place and the response it elicits from audiences and critics, who must recognize the authority claim that the performance enacts. All these points speak to the historical variability of what counts as “expertise.” Indeed, it may even appear as its opposite, as “(in)expertise,” as Carr shows. But the second part of this definition is equally important: Expertise is a phenomenon of the interface between specialized (professional, technical, scientific, bureaucratic, or even “experience-based”) knowledge and (political, legal) decision-making. This means that studies of expertise train their attention on the modalities of speech and action, and the types of statements and performances, that are capable of enacting authority in this interface.
One virtue of thinking about expertise in this way, we argue, is that it encourages scholars to set aside the search for an immutable essence or substance in favor of a relational understanding of expertise. The value of a relational approach becomes visible, for example, in Dan Navon’s contribution to this volume, which focuses on the role of experts in the classification of human differences. Surveying recent research on this topic, Navon finds that thinking about expertise in relational terms reveals an aspect of the phenomenon that tended to elude scholars of the past. Whereas scholars once depicted categories of human difference as straightforward “outputs” of expert work, classification is better seen as a complex, historically contingent give-and-take between the experts and the “targets” of their classification. Factoring centrally into this account is Ian Hacking’s notion of “looping,” whereby a classification changes the people being classified in ways that ultimately require a change in the classification. The looping relationship has been observed most extensively in medical and psychiatric contexts, where classifications elicit organized responses among patients and stakeholders. The use of a new diagnostic category, for example, may “lead to the formation of support groups, foundations, social clubs, [and] activist organizations,” which may in turn increase public awareness of the condition. The loop is completed when this growing awareness leads to a change in the classification, as when an expanded pool of those seeking diagnosis and treatment leads doctors to identify new types and subtypes of the condition.
The Fraught Relations between Expertise and Democracy
The recognition that expertise is bound up with the dilemmas of political decisionmaking helps explain why the current crisis of expertise has given new urgency to the question of who may participate in expert debates. Among citizens, activists, and scholars who are engaged with this question, a broad opposition has intensified. On the one side, the critique of technocracy has fueled campaigns for democratizing expertise, or efforts to extend participation in expert debates to those who are not ordinarily described as “experts.” Prominent among these campaigns are the environmental and patients’ rights movements. Two contributions to this handbook—by Steven Epstein and by Madeleine Akrich and Vololona Rabeharisoa—eloquently argue that this has been a genuine, though still limited, democratization. Lay experts, they show, are typically collectives. The type of expertise they develop is a hybrid of quasiscientific practices and socially innovative forms of organizing. The combination challenges technocratic frames and, instead, creates a space where the experiences and values of the affected parties—patients and their families, communities suffering environmental degradation—are taken into account and often have priority. Although the authors recognize that the political consequences of lay expertise can sometimes be less than salutary—patients’ groups have sometimes been co-opted by pharmaceuticals (Abraham and Davis 2011); their focus can be quite narrow, to the detriment of other, less well-organized, affected parties; and there is likely to be conflict with scientists who consider them to have distorted research priorities—they assess their overall impact to have been an enhancement of what Callon et al. (2009) called “technical democracy.”
On the other side of the debate, however, are Harry Collins and his coauthors, Darrin Durant, Robert Evans and Martin Weinel, who worry that there is an elective affinity between lay expertise—and the science studies scholars who champion it—and populism. Lay expertise has undermined the distinction between laypeople and experts, failing to recognize that this distinction, when institutionalized, is one of the “checks and balances” necessary for the functioning of liberal democracies. Expertise is a check and balance because it makes it more difficult for a government to do whatever it wants to do (like distribute a vaccine that has not yet been fully vetted, as Russia did in the summer of 2020), and then justify it as “the will of the people.” Expert calculations—however dry and seemingly neutral they may be—can contest the political elites’ monopoly over the ability to represent “the will of the people,” because they can demonstrate that it is not in the people’s interest to take a particular step. The risk will be too high. This was demonstrated with particular force in the Thalidomide affair. The FDA emerged from the affair with new powers because it was able to present itself as a bulwark, defending the American public even as national politicians and national corporate champions had failed it (Carpenter 2010). The more it is possible, therefore, for self-appointed “alternative” experts to present their viewpoints as being equal in value to those of the scientific
establishment, the weaker this check and balance is and the more vulnerable the polity is to populism, understood as “a discursive and stylistic repertoire, a set of tropes, gestures, and stances” (Brubaker 2017, 2021) that makes an invidious distinction between the “real people” and the others, who do not really belong (be they “elites,” ethnic minorities, or the “undeserving poor”; Müller 2016).
An extreme version of this diagnosis is currently articulated by some in the environmentalist movement, especially activists and scientists affiliated with the Extinction Rebellion. The problem of climate change, they argue, is symptomatic of a crisis of representative democracy, its inability to act decisively because alternative experts (some of whom are funded by corporations, and some of whom articulate a populist position) have weakened the check and balance represented by climate scientists. As Ruscher and Stehr recount in this handbook, some of these activists feel that the urgency of the crisis justifies exceptions to democratic politics, a sort of “expertocracy” defending the true interests of the people. In the language of Collins et al., they feel that this check and balance has been so weakened that a radical counterweight must be introduced to restore equilibrium. It is deeply ironic—and symptomatic of the crisis of expertise—that the demand for an expertocracy is being made from within the very same circles that formulated the critique of technocracy. Dependency led to distrust. Distrust, however, led to uncertainty and the heterogeneity of expertise, and these provoke the most extreme demand for an “authoritative synthesis,” as Arnoldi argues. Ruscher and Stehr reject this proposal, saying that it reflects a simplistic understanding of the relations between science and democracy. They concur with Collins et al. about the need to redraw the line between the technical and the political. But they also note that, in this matter, there are distinct differences depending on how the relations between experts and decision-makers are institutionalized. The crisis is more acute, they argue, where these relations are organized in a competitive and adversarial fashion, as they are in the United States. Experts become identified with partisan positions and issue advocacy organizations. Their public clashes undermine trust in experts. In Germany, on the other hand, the relations between experts and decision-makers are organized as a “closed shop.” There is a relatively small network of academics who collaborate with the ministries, and alternative experts are excluded. The differences, however, are a matter of degree, not essence.
Collins et al. draw mostly on Durkheim in explicating their thesis, but theirs is an eminently Weberian theme: the process of democratization, by increasing inclusion, undermines itself. It weakens the mechanisms by which the governed can hold the governing accountable, expertise being one of those mechanisms (Weber 1978, 956–1005). For Weber, this was an irreconcilable antinomy. It is arguable that with the current crisis of expertise, we are still in its tentacles. After all, lay expertise, too—as described by Steven Epstein, Madeleine Akrich, and Vololona Rabeharisoa—is a way of making the authorities more accountable to ordinary people. Administrative agencies cannot hide behind “what the experts say,” but must explicate the hybrid technopolitical calculus behind their decisions and regulations (as in the three-phase structure of clinical trials). Yet if Collins et al. are right, this salutary democratization has the unsavory effect of
weakening the very institutions that hold the other authorities accountable. If scientists are worried that politicians can simply “reach in” and “pull out” vaccines before they are fully tested, this is partly because the FDA of today is a pale shadow of its former formidable self. Its authority and actual powers were undermined by a confluence of opponents, not only by lay experts. Not by a long shot. Yet all these opponents claimed that they were making the FDA “more accountable.”
The Problem of Trust
In theory, making official experts more accountable does not necessarily weaken them. To understand why this is an irreconcilable dilemma, or at the very least the trickiest of tightrope acts, one must delve into the nether realms of trust and mistrust, as Robert Crease does in his contribution. Collins et al. end their chapter with a plea for democratic education. There is a deficit, they claim, in the public’s understanding, not of the substance of science, but of the process of science and science’s role in a democracy. Yet, as Crease notes, the very qualities of science that they want people to understand—its collective nature, its fallibility, and its long-termism—are precisely what make it vulnerable to mistrust. Instead of an “architectural model,” concerned with how the boundary between the technical and the political can be redrawn, he suggests an “acoustical model” attuned to the hermeneutics of mistrust. Unlike the spatial imagery of boundaries, acoustics is something that takes place in time, and so does trust. Duration, sequence, tempo, resonance, and repetition are of the essence. A note, having been struck, shapes a context in which another note can appear as in harmony with it, or as a “false note.” It can continue a melodic line, or it can appear discordant because it is played too early or too late. Collins et al. want people to understand that science is “craftwork with integrity,” driven by “a search for truth rather than profit.” Yet they hasten to acknowledge that this “imposes a serious responsibility on scientists that has a clear moral dimension”—namely, that “the activity be [actually] done with the utmost integrity.” They know full well that the public is aware of many instances in which scientists did not conduct themselves with the utmost integrity, as well as the routine ways in which science is conducted precisely with the search for profit in mind. It does not help to “educate” citizens about how science “should” be conducted, or even to point out that “most” of it is conducted with integrity, because the mysterious quality of trust, as everyone knows, is that it is “typically created rather slowly, but it can be destroyed in an instant—by a single mishap or mistake” (Slovic 1999). A beautiful melody can be destroyed by a single discordant note. The dischord transforms the “acoustical environment” in which both the preceding and following “notes” are heard. Trust is lost and can be regained only slowly and with difficulty.
Several contributions to the handbook analyze how this “acoustical environment” has changed over the last few decades, leading to the present crisis of trust. Peter Weingart
provides the most comprehensive account, describing a threefold process in which science has been socialized, politicized, and mediatized. For reasons probably having to do with the present manifestation of the crisis, as well as with the composition of the contributors, most of the chapters in the handbook dwell on the politicization of science. Hence, our discussion of politicization is longer than our discussion of socialization and mediatization. We should also acknowledge that the framework itself is partial because an important dimension—the commercialization of science (Mirowski 2011)— is absent. A different combination of contributors, no doubt, would have brought this dimension much more to the fore.
Science Socialized
The socialization of science means the end of its “exceptionalism,” its status as a realm set apart, due to two partially interrelated, partially independent processes. One of these entails the rise of lay experts and expansion of public participation in science. The other is the subjection of science, especially in universities, to forms of public accountability such as new public management (NPM) rankings (Espeland and Porter, this volume), performance measures, citation counts, and other attempts to quantify and promote innovation. It is important to emphasize that one impetus for these forms of accountability was the increasing dependence on science and expertise, the recognition that both are essential to economic growth and require increasing levels of public investment (Berman 2012). The hen laying the golden eggs could no longer remain cage-free. The two processes of socialization—lay expertise and NPM rankings, if you will—though they are distinct and often originate from opposing political perspectives, share a set of elective affinities. Both articulate mistrust and demystify the halo that used to surround scientists (Shapin 2008)—public accountability was often demanded after incidents of scientific misconduct, for example. Both replace trust in science with a demand for transparency—that is, the NPM or rankings make science transparent by quantifying it, replacing trust in experts with trust in numbers (Porter 1995). And both lead in the direction of a pluralization of expertise.
In the Bourdieusian language Arnoldi has introduced in this volume, this process of socialization of science means that universities and scientific institutions have lost their monopoly over the production and dissemination of symbolic capital—that is, over scientific capital that can be parlayed as expertise outside one’s field. This symbolic capital is now produced in a much more plural and competitive field that includes new types of knowledge-generating organizations, such as think tanks (Medvetz 2012), R&D–intensive private corporations, consultancies, NGOs, and social movements. We can include here also the lay expert collectives and hybrid forums analyzed by Epstein and by Akrich and Rabeharisoa. The acoustical environment, if you will, is characterized by a certain tendency toward cacophony or, at least, competing melodies developed in parallel.
Science Politicized
The politicization of science is due to the processes that we analyzed earlier in reference to the debate about Covid-19 vaccines. To put it in a formula used by Weingart: the scientization of politics leads to the politicization of science. Governmental reliance on expertise, especially in the form of regulatory science, means that technical questions— How long is an adequate clinical trial for vaccines? What is the “acceptable level” of a pollutant? How can we measure the quantifiable benefits of convalescent plasma? What is the positivity rate in a neighborhood?—are ipso facto political questions, and multiple factors make it impossible to draw the bright line between the technical and the political. In the first place, the questions posed to experts are usually “trans-scientific” questions incorporating matters of value (e.g., what level of protection should be provided to the population?) and requiring expert judgment to supplement calculation. Moreover, the same questions often cut across the jurisdictions of multiple groups of experts, prompting intense jurisdictional struggles over their “ownership” (Weinberg 1972; Beck 1992; Eyal 2019; Abbott 1988). Finally, because even the most technical questions entail decisions with profound redistributive consequences, the government requires input from experts not just to supply answers but to legitimate its decisions. Every aspect of expert judgment, therefore, including the choice of the experts themselves, inevitably becomes politicized. As Crease says: “It is too late to choose the experts after understanding the controversy. They are then no longer experts; they have been determined by the debate itself instead of helping to carry it forward; they are pieces of evidence in an agonistic situation rather than a part of meaning-formation.”
The dominant response to this politicization of science and the crisis of mistrust it has provoked has been to conjure “objectivity” as the source of trust. Numerous contributions to the handbook—by Brice Laurent, David Demortain, Tal Golan, Stephen Turner, Frank Pasquale, Wendy Espeland, and Ted Porter—discuss this response, but cast grave doubts about its ability to put the political genie back into the bottle and re-establish trust. One factor behind this doubt is that “objectivity,” as Daston and Galison (1992) argue, is a profoundly negative concept—its meaning being variable and deriving from whatever facet of subjectivity is problematized as dangerous or misleading. As they write evocatively: “Objectivity is related to subjectivity as wax to seal, as hollow imprint to the bolder and more solid features of subjectivity.” Accordingly, the objectivity campaigns that have been waged in response to the politicization of expertise generally contribute to, rather than resolve, the crisis of trust. Inevitably, they proceed by constructing some aspect of expert judgment as problematic, subjective, and untrustworthy; then they build upon this construction a particular meaning of objectivity. But the problematization of subjectivity on which the campaign rests is likely to be self-defeating, since an element of judgment informs every calculation, procedure, or algorithm, however mechanical seeming. By the same token, there is hardly any form of expert judgment that does not rely on some prior measurement or protocol. The real
questions, says Brice Laurent, are how different institutions articulate objectivity with judgment; whether they dramatize an opposition between them or, on the contrary, seek to reconcile the tension between them; and by what means.
It is important to recognize, too, that objectivity campaigns are often intertwined with jurisdictional struggles, as one group of experts seeks to capture the jurisdiction of another. Accordingly, the specific forms of objectivity these campaigns uphold reflect how the different groups of experts involved negotiate their jurisdictional settlements (Abbott 1988). The chapters in this volume that deal with this response to the politicization of expertise uncover at least three different meanings and organizational formats of objectivity.
Objectivity as the “View from Nowhere”
Objectivity, perforce, is constructed as “the view from nowhere,” a consensus view attributable to no single expert. This is accomplished by means of a theatrical division that hides the differences, negotiations, and jurisdictional struggles between experts backstage and foregrounds the consensus view that is placed frontstage (Bijker et al 2009; Hilgartner 2000). Expert advisory organizations such as the American National Academy of Sciences or the Dutch Gezondheidsraad (Health Council), for example, begin by problematizing the subjectivity inherent in the fact that experts differ in their judgments. But this is a tricky tightrope act, and one that has become far trickier as the mediatization of science collapses the buffer between backstage and frontstage—think about the now common practice of making preprints widely available.
Moreover, conjuring objectivity as the “view from nowhere” has the unintended effect of undermining trust in expert judgment whenever a disagreement between experts erupts into public view. This becomes clear in Tal Golan’s chapter about the history of expert scientific testimony in Anglo-American law. The spectacle of experts clashing in court and reaching opposite conclusions with the same degree of confidence is not new. Nor is it obvious why it should cause moral panic. The adversarial setup of AngloAmerican law expects and encourages this phenomenon. Legal truth should emerge out of a robust adversarial contestation. Moreover, when scientists are questioned about this, they often point out that this is how science, too, works. Science proceeds by means of disagreement and critique. Why, then, are judges so exasperated when experts clash in court, so much so that in recent decades they have arrogated to themselves ever-greater gatekeeping powers and taken on “the difficult task of weighing the merit of highly specialized scientific claims”? Golan’s answer is that this is not caused by declining trust in science. On the contrary, it is judges’ faith in science, he says, that leads them to see clashing experts as sign of some moral corruption necessitating the intervention of the judge “in an attempt to . . . differentiate between good and bad science.” One should
slightly revise Golan’s formulation and say that it is the judges’ faith in regulatory science that leads them to suspect the clashing experts of moral failure. It is regulatory science, as we saw, that is compelled to hide differences backstage and to present objectivity as “the view from nowhere.” The unintended consequence is that judges problematize the (legally and scientifically unexceptional) fact that experts differ in their judgments.
This bears out nuclear physicist Alvin Weinberg’s fears about regulatory science, as David Demortain recounts in his chapter. An inferior, mongrel kind of science, from Weinberg’s point of view, regulatory science pretends to be able to provide policymakers with clear answers to problems that are shot through with insurmountable uncertainties. In return, it is validated when policymakers use the answers as the basis for their regulatory decisions.
The same type of exchange marks the rise of macroeconomic expertise as a policymaking tool since World War II. As Maria Azocar describes in her chapter, and as other scholars have shown (Babb 2001; Fourcade 2009), economists have positioned themselves as indispensable figures in the governance of the world’s economies. But a pernicious feedback loop underpins this process. Azocar argues that although they are presented in the guise of objectivity, economists’ constructions of the economy embed sexist and androcentric assumptions. When used by politicians, they provide intellectual cover for policies that harm or hinder women, especially in the global South. For example, Azocar points out that by separating housework and childcare from “real” economic activity, economists have lent tacit support to policies that denigrate the domestic sphere as a “realm of dependency, need, and biological vulnerability.” In some cases, the effect of these policies has been to intensify women’s care work responsibilities (as in the case of the austerity measures implemented in the global South during the 1980s) or to cast women’s labor-market nonparticipation as a moral failing (as in the Chilean pension reform debates of the 1980s). Thus, Azocar suggests that the particular “view from nowhere” conjured by economists is based on an unreflexive and highly gendered view of the world.
Epistemic Subsidiarity
But the “view from nowhere” invoked by regulatory science is only one of the guises that objectivity can take. Other organizations—and Laurent claims that this is more characteristic of European institutions and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—do not hide the differences between experts behind a wall of secrecy. On the contrary, they are either compelled by their very nature or have reached this point by trial-and-error to leverage differences as the basis for what Laurent calls “epistemic subsidiarity.” The memberships of European expert bodies, for example, are selected to represent the relevant stakeholders (countries, sectors, publics). Under pressure from critics, the IPCC has taken similar steps to diversify the membership of its expert panels and peer reviewers to include dissenting voices and a broad range of stakeholders from
governments, industries, and NGOs. The wager is that objectivity will emerge out of the aggregation and mutual relativization of different perspectives and interests, and that perhaps the stakeholders will provide a check on the groupthink of the experts, and the experts will provide a check the biases of the stakeholders.
Stephen Turner in his chapter shows how such organizational arrangements were supposed to guarantee optimal decision-making at the International Monetary Fund, and how it fell dramatically short of this goal during the Greek default crisis. Epistemic subsidiarity may draw on forms of mechanizing expert judgment such as models or algorithms, but even then, legitimacy will presumably flow, not from their supposed neutrality, but precisely from the prior process of negotiation between experts from different countries and sectors. The experts open the black boxes of the models and reshuffle them to create a device that coordinates the interests of the different stakeholders (or, unfortunately, encodes the assumptions of the dominant actor, as Turner shows happened with IMF models that were tailored to support the German position). The result is a paradoxical or oxymoronic form of “interested objectivity” that emerges from negotiation and institutional coordination between all the relevant parties. Laurent thinks that this model is preferable to the “view from nowhere,” but he is also clear that it is highly unstable and vulnerable. The oxymoron can easily fall apart. Inclusion can be a token gesture when there are significant imbalances of power. Regulated industries tend to dominate the proceedings. Transparency is always partial because of the need to sort out differences and reach compromise. When failure happens, such as the “mad cow” disease crisis, or when the backstage is exposed, as in the “Climategate” affair, the matter quickly becomes a scandal and critics hasten to point out the proximity of the regulators to industry or the collusion among experts to exclude competing interpretations.
Epistemic subsidiarity is exceptionally vulnerable to the accusation of “capture.” The fact that this type of arrangement is increasingly the norm in regulatory science therefore exacerbates the crisis of mistrust in expertise. In his chapter, David Demortain develops a more balanced and nuanced approach to how regulatory knowledge is formed. The concepts, tools, and measures of regulatory science, he argues, do not simply reflect the interests of industry, as the theory of capture suggests. They are “hinges” (Abbott 1995) linking at least four different fields—academic science, the administrative state, industry, and environmental activism (i.e., social movements and lay experts) with varying levels of input into their makeup. Regulatory science is an interstitial field “between” these adjacent fields (see Medvetz 2012), and the production of regulatory knowledge reflects the interactions of all the actors. If we have heard more concerns about “capture” in recent years, Demortain thinks it is due to a globalization of regulatory science. Increasingly, standard setting is done by transnational communities of specialists in product evaluation, operating in international fora such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) or the International Conference on Harmonization for pharmaceuticals. In the absence of a strong international regulator, industry influence is perhaps stronger in these fora, but Demortain thinks that, overall, the diagnosis of capture is overblown, ignoring diversity in both the forms and outcomes of regulation.
