“Trust Me, I’m an Expert”: Conceptualizing Trust in Epistemic Regulation in the Internal Market

The global regulatory order increasingly relies on self-regulation, and in particular, on regulation by experts. This is the case for the newly emerging regulatory domains, such as digital infrastructure and Artificial Intelligence, and the more established fields, such as food quality. Experts making crucial regulatory decisions are typically organized in closed committees or standard setting bodies, which are market-driven private sector institutions. More often than not, such experts are employed by companies, governmental agencies, or research centra, and would typically be subjected to the “conflict of commitments”: while they are expected to have allegiance to their employer, being part of a close expert’s community also requires them to have loyalty to this community. Experts thus have different incentives that govern their professional and political ambitious and that determine their behaviour in private regulatory bodies, leading also to a “conflict of incentives.” Why do we trust these expert-based communities with decisions that have profound regulatory consequences? How do the conflict of commitments and the conflict of incentives square with their accountability? And is this trust in the “democracy of experts” sufficient to legitimize this type of regulation? The proposed contribution will inquire into these questions at the conceptual level by conducting multidisciplinary research, with insights from legal, management, economics, but also sociology and phycology literatures, that would unveil the meaning of “trust in law” and fine-tune it to expertise-based or epistemic regulation in highly specialized regulatory areas. The proposed contribution aims to lay the theoretical foundation on how trust should be conceptualized for expert-driven regulation and relate it to the concept of legitimacy. It then aims to test these findings on the example of some self-regulatory bodies operating in the field of Internet and food safety regulation.