A Hidden Epistocracy on Public Committees?

In this paper I will address the use of dissents by members on Norwegian public committees, and in particular the observation that academic experts serving as members on such committees tend to dissent less than others. Public committees serve an important role on the input side of the Norwegian political system. They are appointed by the government on a temporary basis in order to recommend solutions for given problems, and members are invited to discuss and prepare future policies in face-to-face discussions behind closed doors among a handful of selected actors. These actors are typically representatives of affected parts of the government, organized interests and experts from the academic sector. In this way, committees bring together people whose authority rest on bureaucratic, corporatist or meritocratic structures respectively. While committees are organized as deliberative bodies, the composition of members nevertheless proposes some potential challenges for agreement formation as the values and belief systems of members differ substantially. What I will focus on here, is the observation in an examination of 256 reports from public committees between 1996 and 2009 which show that the uses of dissents are distributed quite unevenly among the members, with experts from the academic sector dissent significantly less than other members. I use this observation as a lever to discuss the challenges of deliberation and collective decision making between academic experts and others, such as bureaucrats and organized interest representatives. Experts lesser tendency to dissent may signal that experts as academics are less inclined to voice their opinions in public as they aspire to appear as disinterested and unbiased actors. Yet this could equally be proposed as reason to expect that academic experts would dissent more than others. Dissent could in this respect serve as a boundary-making activity - signalling independence from the political sphere of committees. Instead, I focus on the organization of committees as deliberative bodies and the challenges of attaining ‘free and reasoned agreement’ among members with different obligations and styles of reasoning. Both bureaucrats and interest representatives are accountable towards superiors and political constituencies which may challenge the deliberation. Academic experts, on the other hand, have apparently no such obligations or attachments as committee members. Moreover, experts’ endeavours as researchers are (ideally) characterized by communicative activities oriented at critical inquiry regulated by the force of the best argument. This suggests a correspondence between the regular activities of experts as researchers and the ideal reasoning within the deliberative procedure which may serve as a foundation for communicative influence in the committee setting. These structures, as well as the epistemic asymmetry among members on committees, serve as a foundation for a discussion of experts’ non-dissents a possible indicator of experts’ larger influence as members on public committees. This has consequences for how we should interpret public committees as a site for negotiation between experts and actors from other parts of society. Do committees then facilitate a hidden epistocracy, as their organization allows experts more influence than other members?