Authority In Democracy Research Articles

Expert Authority in Crisis: Making Authority Real Through Struggle

There is an emerging consensus both within the social scientific research community and more widely in the public domain that expert authority is “in trouble.” However, there is much greater disagreement over the scope and scale of this trouble and what it might mean for the nature, status, and significance of expert authority in the 21st century. This paper identifies and assesses three different narratives concerning the crisis in expert authority. These constitute the delegitimation narrative, the demystification narrative, and the decomposition narrative. They can be seen as responses to the breakdown in the implicit social contract between experts, publics, and states under the extreme and continuous pressures exerted on expert authority by disjunctive change. We evaluate these various interpretations of the crisis in expert authority, particularly in terms of what they suggest about the future potency and stability of the concept of expert authority. In this process of evaluation, we also highlight the emergence of reflexive expert authority and its implications for organizational governance as potential outcomes of this ongoing crisis in the legitimacy and status of expert workers. Consequently, the paper provides a general analytical framework for understanding the emergent narratives around expert authority in democracies and highlights how all three narratives point to serious problems in sustaining this authority in the face of destabilizing change. Furthermore, in developing the notion of reflexive expert authority, we contend that theorization of expert authority needs to privilege the deeper dynamics of trust and control at the core of its analytical focus within organization theory.

The role of experts in the Covid-19 pandemic and the limits of their epistemic authority in democracy

Copyright © 2020 Lavazza and Farina. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative CommonsAttribution License (CC BY). It was originally published in Frontiers in Public Health, 14 July 2020 | Volume 8 | Article 356 (https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2020.00356) and is published here with permission.

The Role of Experts in the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Limits of Their Epistemic Authority in Democracy.

In the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, medical experts (virologists, epidemiologists, public health scholars, and statisticians alike) have become instrumental in suggesting policies to counteract the spread of coronavirus. Given the dangerousness and the extent of the contagion, almost no one has questioned the suggestions that these experts have advised policymakers to implement. Quite often the latter explicitly sought experts' advice and justified unpopular measures (e.g., restricting people's freedom of movement) by referring to the epistemic authority attributed to experts. The main goal of this paper is to analyze the basis of this epistemic authority and the reasons why in this case it has not been challenged, contrary to the widespread tendency to devalue expertise that has been observed in recent years. In addition, in relation to the fact that experts' recommendations are generally technical and supposedly neutral, we note that in the COVID-19 crisis different experts have suggested different public health policies. We consider the British case of herd immunity and the US case of the exclusion of disabled people from medical care. These decisions have strong axiological implications and affect people profoundly in very sensitive domains. Another goal is, therefore, to argue that in such cases experts should justify their recommendations-which effectively become obligations-by the canons of public reason within the political process because when values are involved it is no longer just a matter of finding the “best technical solution,” but also of making discretionary choices that affect citizens and that cannot be imposed solely on the basis of epistemic authority.

The Complementarity of Means and Ends

In his last two decades, Putnam turned with serious energy to reflecting upon the state of economics as an arena of inquiry. He marshalled a withering critique of neoclassical economics in terms of its confused and outdated positivist underpinnings, as well as its consequences for understanding human action. He also connected the prevailing theoretical accounts of economics to wider market forces undermining political practice in democracy. Our reading of Putnam’s critique of orthodox economics, and in particular the model of homo economicus at the base of neoclassical economics, brings to mind a diagnosis that Putnam made of an analogous but politically opposed reduction he had battled in his philosophy, a distillation of the social and political life of a society to its economic foundations. In his recent intellectual autobiography written for the volume on his work in the Library of Living Philosophers, he referred to activist fellow travelers he had been so familiar with over the course of a very politically engaged life as being tainted with the Marxist-Leninist version of this economic reductionism, and referred to the vision that grew from this ideology as a “terrifying sickness of the soul.” It is our contention that given the methodological confusions and practical commitments that neoclassical economics produces — its power in directing policy and the attendant consequences for democracy and the evaluation of our social processes — that this perspective also deserves serious consideration from a Putnamian and pragmatic perspective, to be classified as a similar “sickness of the soul.” Putnam characterizes this in two registers that give him the leverage to establish this diagnosis. First, a particular cast is given to the divorce of social inquiry — its methods and claims — from the common-sense realism of everyday life. Second, he connects this to the power of systems unchecked in their authority in democracy given this divorce and separation, specifically from coordinated practical coping among citizens in a common form of life.

A Study on Authority of Democracy

A Study on Authority of Democracy

A Study on Authority of Democracy

A Study on Authority of Democracy

Seen to be Done: The Roots and Fruits of Public Equality

What is the ethical basis for democracy? What reasons do we have to go along with democratic decisions even when we disagree with them? When can we justly ignore democratic decisions? These three questions are intimately connected: understanding what is ultimately important about democracy helps us to understand the authority of democratic decisions over our personal views, and the limits of such authority. Thomas Christiano’s ambitious new book, The Constitution of Equality, aims to provide such an understanding through a discussion of all three questions. Briefly put, in Christiano’s view, public equality is the moral foundation of both democracy and liberal rights, and it serves to explain the authority of democracy as well as its limits. The book aims first of all to ground the principle of public equality in a number of principles related to the nature of personhood, dignity, well-being and formal considerations of justice, on the one hand, and in the need for publicity for social justice, on the other (Chaps. 1 and 2). The book then aims to show how both democracy and basic liberal rights are grounded in the principle of public equality, which tells us that in the establishment of law and policy we must treat persons as equals in ways that they can see are treating them as equals (Chaps. 3 and 4). The account clarifies the nature and roles of adversarial politics and public deliberation in political life (Chap. 5). Finally, the book argues that democratic decisions have authority over personal views and that violations of democratic and liberal rights are beyond the legitimate authority of democracy, and that the creation of persistent minorities in a democratic society, and the failure to ensure a basic minimum for all persons weaken the legitimate authority of democracy (Chaps. 6 and 7). I shall begin by addressing Christiano’s view on the basis of equality, and then shall focus mainly on the central argument for public equality, democracy and its

Political Safeguards in Democracies at War

Wartime challenges democracies both from without and within. The need to marshal resources against a foreign enemy prompts the centralization of authority which, in turn, threatens to compromise domestic liberty. This article, originally delivered as the 2008 Hart Lecture, examines the ability of democracies to survive military threat with their core liberties intact. The focus is not on the more familiar liberty versus security trade-offs, but on the ways in which divided political authority in democracies serves as a check to both military misadventure and excessive internal suppression. The article begins with a historic account of how political accountability in democracy, from Athens forward, helps explain the relative military success that democracies have enjoyed. Furthermore, even where military emergency has forced emergency measures, the longer-term result tended to be an expansion of democratic accountability, as with the grant of the franchise to those who had served. The core argument is that the political accountability of executive authority, even in times of war, has had both military and political benefits. The article then turns to an examination of the modern war on terror. Here the historic advantages of democracy in terms of citizen involvement and common enterprise are least apparent. The final sections of the article question how well our inherited institutions will perform over long-term conditions of asymmetric warfare against non-state adversaries. The final conclusion is that the new frontier of war may place greater strains on judicial oversight of executive claims of exceptional authority precisely because the political safeguards of democracy, while still critical, may not be sufficient.

Whither Tocqueville in American Sociology?

This essay addresses the declining influence of Alexis de Tocqueville on contemporary American sociology. While Tocqueville was must reading some decades ago, inspiring several classic sociological studies published in the 1950s and 1960s, and while he remains an authoritative source in other social science disciplines, he has virtually disappeared from present-day sociology. Sociologists, it would seem, have left behind works such as Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the French Revolution despite Raymond Aron’s (Main Currents in Sociological Thought, vol. I, Anchor Books, New York, 1968) insistence that Tocqueville be counted among the discipline’s founders. While Meyer (J. Cl. Socio., 3:197–220, 2003) presumed to have addressed this subject, his argument sheds no light on the matter as he ignores the driving concern of Tocqueville’s work, namely, the tensions between the principle of equality and human freedom. I argue that conceptually sociologists today are in no position to reflect critically on equality and its relation to freedom. Since the turbulent 1960s egalitarian commitments have become embedded in the discipline and are thereby shielded from critical inquiry. At the same time, a conceptual fixation on power effectively pushed to the periphery the kinds of questions Tocqueville raised about the problem of authority in democracy and how authority may be encouraging of human freedom. Committed to advancing the principle of equality, however understood, and seeing nothing in authority but power, sociologists espouse faith in egalitarian, mass democracy whereas Tocqueville sought a critical understanding of it. This is much to the detriment of present-day sociologists, so many of whom demonstrate in their own work and professional behavior the democratic dilemmas Tocqueville warned us about.

Debate: Democracy's Authority: Reply to Wall*

Debate: Democracy's Authority: Reply to Wall*

The Authority of Democracy*

D decision-making has two very different evaluative aspects that sometimes collide and usually complement each other to some degree. On the one hand, we judge democratic decisions from the point of view of the quality of the outcomes. We concern ourselves with whether the outcomes are just or whether they are efficient or protect liberty and promote the common good. This is sometimes called the substantive or outcome dimension of assessment of democratic procedures. On the other hand, we evaluate the decisions from the point of view of how they are made or the quality of the procedure. We are concerned to make the decision in a way that includes everyone who by right ought to be included and that is fair to all the participants. Here we may think that the method by which the decisions are made should be intrinsically fair. In my view these two dimensions of assessment are irreducible. But this is not the way everyone sees it. Some, whom I shall call monists, think that there is only one form of assessment and that other assessments are reducible to it. For example, instrumentalists or best results theorists like Philippe Van Parijs think that the way in which democratic decisions ought to be made is entirely a matter of what will produce the best outcomes. On their view, the only question to be asked in evaluating democratic procedures regards the quality of the outcomes of these procedures. Pure proceduralists, on the other hand, see outcomes as essentially evaluable solely in terms of the procedure that brought them about. There are two versions of this kind of view. One version of the view is attributed to some American legal theorists who wish to justify a rather strong form of judicial restraint with regard to the decisions of the American Congress. They argue that the Supreme Court of the United States ought to defer to virtually all The Journal of Political Philosophy: Volume 11, Number 2, 2003, pp. 000–000

A NOTE ON PROUDHON'S FEDERALISM

No social disorder ever inspired greater aversion in Proudhon than the arbitrary aggrandizement of the powers of the State. Indeed, the vehemence of his pages castigating the Statist tendencies both of Jacobin democracy and of plebiscitarian monarchy has seldom been matched by any other writer. In our time, however, we might legitimately wonder whether Proudhon had really seen anything. Obviously, the Second French Empire can hardly be compared to the totalitarian monsters of our time. Nevertheless, Proudhon seems to have foreseen it all: the extreme centralization of authority in democracies as well as the rise of devouring dictatorships. And so, while his own ideals have been negated by events, Proudhon's critique of modern social and political developments appears today more relevant than ever.