Mark B. Brown, Science in Democracy. Expertise, Institutions, and Representation: MIT Press, Cambridge, MA., and London, 2009.

Abstract

In January 2011, German science policy advisers at federal level, the 2008 appointed German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, produced a cautious but positive review of pre-implantation genetic screening (http://www.leopoldina.org/en/policy-advice/recommendations-and-statements/national-recommendations/praeimplantationsdiagnostik-pid.html - accessed 21 April, 2011). Immediately, the advice was attacked as an example of politics-contaminated, instead of value-free science. But simultaneously, many seasoned science policy advisers came to the rescue and defended an advice that clearly spoke to the present political debate; and thus also addressed normative and pragmatic issues. The response to keep science ‘value-free’ is the typical tradition of science politics under high modernity in a political system of representative democracy. Scientific experts are seen as ‘delegates’ of citizens’ best judgment on the issue; and the delegation occurs under public accountability of elected legislative bodies or an executive accountable to such bodies. But at present, democratization of expertise, public engagement or direct public participation in science is the more popular and dominant response. This is partly rooted in social and political theories arguing a shift from government to governance. If the state is unable to represent all public concerns and questions involving the uses of science and technology of a fragmented and inchoate ‘protopublic’ (Dewey), more directly participatory and deliberative routes for (individual) citizen influence become attractive. Therefore, an unlikely alliance of egalitarian STS scholars, radical analysts of science, democratic theorists, and promoters of science-driven industrial innovation and some state bureaucrats have come to effectively promote more public engagement and participation in science (Caswill 2010; Wesselink and Hoppe 2011). In a sentence: science is to become more democratic, and democracy more scientific (In ‘t Veld 2010).