Reconciling Democracy and Expertise by Institutional Design

This paper engages with political science’s central theoretical debate about the relationship and tensions between the democratic legitimacy and epistemic quality of collective decisions. This ‘epistemic-democratic tension’ has lately been exacerbated by modern society’s growing reliance on expertise for solving increasingly complex and technical collective problems and by decreasing levels of confidence in the representative model of democracy and in elite-driven decision-making. The paper explores in how far these, partly conflictual, normative demands can be reconciled by institutional design. For that purpose, it combines in-depth empirical case studies of political institutions with a two-dimensional normative assessment framework and asks under which organisational conditions both knowledge-based and expert-approved as well as deliberative and participatory policy-making processes can be achieved. Epistemic and democratic standards are derived from normative debates within deliberative democracy, the sociology of knowledge and social epistemology and applied to particularly ambitious and innovative arenas of policy advice and consultation in energy and climate policy.