Reconciling Epistemic and Democratic Legitimacy. A Plea for the Hand-picked Selection of Participants in Policy Formulation

Modern governance is confronted with increasing public demands to base policies on expertise. At the same time, the democratic principle calls for an involvement of the people into policy-making. Against this background it seems we have a choice between elitist rule of the knowing few and democratic rule of the ignorant masses. The paper discusses ways of reconciling democratic and epistemic standards that go beyond the ‘truth-tracking’ potential of majority voting and that problematise one of the most utopian and potentially harmful assumptions of deliberative democracy: open and equal access to political decision-making. Building on debates within Social Epistemology, Science and Technology Studies and Democratic Theory, it shows that the tension between good rule and democratic rule is overstated and partly emanates from idealised and simplified notions of ‘public participation’ and ‘expertise’ that overlook the social constitution of knowledge and the manifold sources of expertise as well as the systematic class bias of public participation and its complementary relationship with the representative principle. The paper’s main argument against the incongruity between epistemic and democratic standards is that in many instances of policy formulation, a careful selection of decision-makers and a “division of labour” is not only conducive to the development of expertise, but it is also essential for true democratic participation. If you select participants wisely, both epistemic and democratic standards can be met by the same, relatively small collective and the line between ‘experts’ and ‘citizens’ blurs. After all, ‘ordinary citizens’ have repeatedly shown their competences to engage meaningfully in discussions about science and technology, societal stakeholders can often fulfil double roles, and experts’ discourse and citizens’ deliberations in fact have to respond to similar quality criteria as regards their procedures of interaction.