Democratic Competence Amid Scientific Advance: Public Views on Genetic Biobanks

• In Event: Reconsidering Ideology in Mass Publics

Abstract

As society and governance grow evermore complex, longstanding doubts about the public’s ability to participate meaningfully in governmental decision-making suggest to many that technocracy is the only way to make many important policy choices. While technocracy promises evidence-based policy solutions, it simultaneously poses a vexing normative problem: governance without meaningful public input.

In this paper, we argue that social scientists have become too pessimistic about citizens’ capacity to participate in self-governance. The gap between expert and lay knowledge is indeed large; however, borrowing from literatures in cultural sociology and science and technology studies, we argue that citizens routinely draw on culturally available tools to create relatively stable policy-oriented dispositions that are reflective of their interests. In this way, much of the public is able to form sensible and durable opinions about public policies, even new or highly technical ones.

We test this framework with a case study of the American public’s views about medical and legal biobanks—relatively new, sophisticated, and not well-understood initiatives that pose profound questions relevant to individuals’ interests and normative perspectives.

We analyze data from two KnowledgeNetwork surveys conducted in 2011 (N=4,291) and 2017 (N=1,777), which include a panel component (N=959). In addition to measuring respondents’ demographic characteristics, partisanship, and knowledge about genetics, we asked respondents for their views on medical and legal biobanks, willingness to donate DNA samples to biobanks, and justifications—in their own words—for this willingness or lack thereof. We argue that citizens’ policy-oriented dispositions are best captured with these open-ended justifications, which we code into several distinct categories—different types of value commitments, self versus other orientation, social identification, and commitment to scientific advance.

On balance, both the quantitative and qualitative evidence supports our framework. People’s support for biobanks is relatively stable over time; their dispositions link in expected ways to their support for biobanks; and these disposition-policy support linkages are also evident over time.

We conclude that these findings justify listening to, and taking seriously, the public’s intuitions about policy proposals, even highly technical ones.

Authors

• Meredith Dost, Harvard University

• Jennifer L. Hochschild, Harvard University

• Elizabeth Suhay, American University