Abstract
We argue that some of the controversies over the democratic merits of (participatory) technology assessment can be traced to conflicting assumptions about what constitutes a legitimate democratic procedure. We compare how two influential normative models of democracy – ‘representative’ and ‘direct’ – value public engagement processes according to different criteria. Criteria drawn from this analysis are used to compare a series of case studies on xenotransplantation policy-making. We show that the democratic merits of participatory technology assessments probably owe as much to the institutional context as to the precise evaluative criteria or procedural designs. This calls for a closer interaction between science and technology studies research on public engagement and comparative politics scholarship.
Highlights
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This paper is part of a special issue which reports on work carried out as part of the project ‘Impact of Citizen Participation on Decision-Making in a Knowledge Intensive Policy Field’ (CIT-PART, Project No SSH-225327), which is funded within the European Commission 7th Framework Programme, 2009– 2012
There are more affirmative answers on the criteria drawn from representative theory, indicating that either the democratic standards are somehow easier to meet and/or that policy advice in most countries is adapted to these principles, whereas the direct democracy criteria are more at odds with actual existing policy practices
Summary
We argue that some of the controversies over the democratic merits of (participatory) technology assessment can be traced to conflicting assumptions about what constitutes a legitimate democratic procedure. We show that the democratic merits of participatory technology assessments probably owe as much to the institutional context as to the precise evaluative criteria or procedural designs This calls for a closer interaction between science and technology studies research on public engagement and comparative politics scholarship. One cluster of institutional innovations is discussed under the headings of technology assessment (TA) and participatory technology assessment (PTA), especially the latter, which claims to ‘democratise’ S&T governance through various forms of citizen and stakeholder participation (Durant, 1999; de Jong and Mentzel, 2001; Lengwiler, 2008) This claim is controversial, and the ability of TAs and PTAs to democratise techno-scientific developments can be contested on at least three levels. In this paper we focus on the relationship between the second and third issues, working backwards from
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