(iPoster) On the Possibility of Right Answers in Politics

• In Event: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory I

Abstract

There is a tension in democratic politics between popular rule and expertise. We want the people to rule, but we also in some sense want the "best" or the "right" decisions to be made. The propriety of delegating political decisions to experts is hotly contested. While many scholars argue that appeals to expertise are essential in order to make the right decisions, others suggest that this delegation is fundamentally undemocratic, insofar as it ignores or sidesteps real differences of opinion or value to which democratic politics ought to be attentive.

This article suggests that the scope for legitimate democratic delegation to experts varies with the political unit's degree of consensus on the paradigms used to understand the non-political world and the objectives to be furthered through collective action. Conditions of ideological diversity or polarization will restrict the range of political questions that can be legitimately delegated to experts. This is to suggest that political pluralism, though desirable for many reasons, imposes an efficiency cost on democratic politics. In cases of deep epistemological disagreement, these costs will be high, and the scope of legitimate delegation to experts will be low.

This variation in the legitimate role of expertise complicates democratic theories based on mechanisms for eliciting correct answers, such as Condorcet's Jury Theorem, and makes it difficult to situate democracy as a "good truth tracker" (e.g. Estlund 2008). There seem to be at least two senses in which political decisions can be correct or incorrect, one relating to achievement of the agreed objective through the agreed paradigm, and another relating to the correspondence between that objective and the requirements of justice. By disambiguating these cases, this article contributes to recent debates in epistemic democracy by clarifying the precise sense(s) in which a political question can be said to have a correct answer.

This article suggests that the scope for legitimate democratic delegation to experts varies with the political unit's degree of consensus on paradigms and objectives. To deepen this conjecture, I develop a crude taxonomy of the varieties of political choices that legislatures are called upon to make. Although many scholars have sought to develop a taxonomy of the varieties of expertise (e.g. Turner 2001), fewer authors have considered the background level of political consensus as a mediating factor in determinations of the legitimacy of expert delegation. I argue that there exist at least three distinct cases or situations of agreement or disagreement that characterize political units, and that the role of experts will differ according to the degree of contestation that attends each type.

Further, I suggest that the legitimate role of experts in a given society will depend on that society's degree of cohesion regarding the objectives to be sought through politics and the paradigms through which these objectives are to be pursued, and that conditions of ideological diversity or polarization will restrict the range of political questions that can be legitimately delegated to experts.
The connection identified in this article between consensus on objectives and paradigms and the propriety of administrative delegation has significant consequences. As a state's degree of political polarization increases, delegation to experts will seem decreasingly legitimate. This loss to legitimacy emerges from the presentation of certain political choices as simply the "right answers" in contexts where substantial minorities of citizens are unable to credit the "rightness" of these decisions. To these citizens, pursuit of "the truth" appears to be merely the application of political power to circumvent the democratic process.

By linking the propriety of expert delegation to the degree of consensus on political objectives and the paradigms through which they are to be pursued, this article introduces a novel standard for the comparative evaluation of constitutional arrangements. This revised standard allows us to make a contextual evaluation of constitutional institutions, investigating their appropriateness to the specific context of disagreement found in particular societies. Different institutions will be appropriate to different levels of disagreement. The approach set out here thus allows for widely different institutional frameworks, and suggests that a state's constitutional institutions will be shaped by the degree and kind of disagreement that they can be expected to confront.

Author

• Matthew Draper, Dickinson College