How Do Experts Democratize Democracy? How are Participants' Roles Pre-Structured by Epistemic Practices of Representing Publics

A lot is going on in terms of re-inventing democracy. Some of it happens spontaneously, other activities draw on ready-made formats like “mini-publics”. The surge of professionalized participation exercises has also brought up a critical debate about how and with which legitimacy these models pre-structure roles of “doing a good participant”. From a discourse-theory perspective, problematizing participants' roles that are inscribed in participation models cannot be done without critically examining scientific methods of representing the phenomenon of participation. Consequently, my contribution aims at opening the debate for a reflexive engagement with the relations between contingent epistemic methods of representing and the actual enactment of participatory models in local settings. In which sense can we talk about participatory designs as „machineries for making publics“ (Felt and Fochler 2010)? What is missing, is a methodologically sound understanding of how discourses of innovating democracy relate with practices of invited citizens and the subjectivities/publics being inscribed in models. In this paper, I argue on the basis of an explorative expert-discourse analysis on “deliberative mini-publics”, exemplified by a published volume comprising key actors from the field (Grönlund et al. 2014). I examine, how citizen roles are constructed by epistemic practices of representing participants, publics and central processes therein. The main finding is, that a need to support democratic innovation with epistemic authority and to legitimize procedural designs with evidence, sets the terms for a “laboratorization” of democracy: Striving for measuring the theorized quality of process and outcome, participants' interactions require to be standardized and controlled. This specific discourse-analysis method is focusing “typical” and “typically differing” articulations of scientific practices representing (Keller 2005). I proceeded by openly coding typical kinds of problematizing deliberation, typical rules signifying the phenomenon and legitimations for including or excluding issues. My findings substantiate critiques about expert engagement in the design of participatory spaces, bearing the potential to undermine the political judgment and autonomy of citizen-participants (Wynne 1996). Within the scientific discourse different versions of deliberative democracy are pursued, implying different citizen-subjectivities: communicative-disciplining; cognitive-educative and intersubjective-rational. It remains open if this is a widespread pattern in the discourse and how it translates into practices.