Roundtable - Who should 'speak' for democracy? Experts, Non-experts, or both?

Abstract

The book, The Sciences of the Democracies (forthcoming), has fifty authors. That’s a lot for a monograph (a manuscript in one voice) and, for that fact alone, the book signals that an experiment is in play for is it even possible that 50 scholars devoted to "democracy" can sufficiently agree to speak as one? The answer is yes and no: yes in so far as authors wish to see this work explained and deepened; no in that most, if not all, authors agree to only parts of the book. The main site of the divide between authors embodies a much wider phenomenon in democracy studies which is over the control of expertise. On the one side are those who argue that knowledge of democracy is already so ill-understood among lay persons globally that it is the duty of experts to defend truths and guard against falsities. On the other side are those who argue that democracy is not the same, in terms of subject matter, as, say, the Earth’s elements or the principles of crystallography. It is, rather, a subject of, for, and by all people and it is they who are the controllers of democracy’s knowledge, for they produce it, and embody it (making them objects of analysis for experts!). The purpose of this roundtable is to present arguments for both positions and to explore whether there is a consensual position between the two: could, for example, experts act as "knowledge advisors" to its owners (humanity?) or could, for example, a growth in research partnerships with so-called "lay persons" develop a more accessible science of democracy?