The Representative Turn and Political Roles of Experts

Current democracies seem to search for the philosophical stone of “solid evidence” to cope with complex and increasingly wicked decision problems they have to deal with. However, the processes of “expertisation of politics” have a byproduct in the form of “polarization of expertise”, or – as can be observed throughout various national and international advisory landscapes – even “the polarization of expertise” along the lines of ideological and political divisions. New actors, such as think tanks or expert-advocates, enter the policy process through the back-door, building on their cognitive authority, while – at the same time – acting on behalf of interest groups, constituencies or ideals. Such developments make it once again clear that expert knowledge used in advisory and decision-making contexts is marked by an immanent paradox of political influence based on epistemic, thus non-political (at least not in the pure sense of the term), premises. To resolve this puzzle and address the problem of expert legitimacy, the present article tries to frame the notable political and ideological engagement of experts through the prism of political representation theory, and explores the explanatory potential of such approach. It begins with proposing the several analytical constellations of „the representative"-"the represented"- "the expert" triad. Then, it discusses the possibility of conceptualizing experts as political representatives both in the light of traditional representation-mechanisms of authentication and accountability, as well as alternative, representative-turn concepts which significantly expand the number of channels for authorization and self-authorization of experts as representatives. The empirical point of reference for this reflection is provided by the insights from the study on expert engagement in the minimum-wage debates in Germany and the US.