Download or read book Toward a New Democratic Theory of Expertise written by Siri Sylvan and published by . This book was released on 2024 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Politics and Expertise written by Zeynep Pamuk and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-21 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new model for the relationship between science and democracy that spans policymaking, the funding and conduct of research, and our approach to new technologies Our ability to act on some of the most pressing issues of our time, from pandemics and climate change to artificial intelligence and nuclear weapons, depends on knowledge provided by scientists and other experts. Meanwhile, contemporary political life is increasingly characterized by problematic responses to expertise, with denials of science on the one hand and complaints about the ignorance of the citizenry on the other. Politics and Expertise offers a new model for the relationship between science and democracy, rooted in the ways in which scientific knowledge and the political context of its use are imperfect. Zeynep Pamuk starts from the fact that science is uncertain, incomplete, and contested, and shows how scientists’ judgments about what is significant and useful shape the agenda and framing of political decisions. The challenge, Pamuk argues, is to ensure that democracies can expose and contest the assumptions and omissions of scientists, instead of choosing between wholesale acceptance or rejection of expertise. To this end, she argues for institutions that support scientific dissent, proposes an adversarial “science court” to facilitate the public scrutiny of science, reimagines structures for funding scientific research, and provocatively suggests restricting research into dangerous new technologies. Through rigorous philosophical analysis and fascinating examples, Politics and Expertise moves the conversation beyond the dichotomy between technocracy and populism and develops a better answer for how to govern and use science democratically.
Download or read book Democracy and Expertise written by Frank Fischer and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-03-12 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the role of policy expertise in a democratic society. From the perspectives of both political theory and policy studies, the chapters explore the implications of deliberative democratic governance for professional expertise and extends them to specific policy practices. Following the lead of John Dewey, the discussion focuses in particular on the ways professional practices might be reoriented to assist citizens in understanding and discussing the complex policy issues of an advanced technological society. In doing so, it also explores how public deliberation can be improved through more cooperative forms of policy inquiry. Adopting a deliberative-analytic approach , policy inquiry is grounded in a postempiricist, constructivist understanding of inquiry and knowledge and the participatory practices that support it. Toward this end, the chapters draw on thriving theoretical and practical work dedicated to revitalizing the citizen's role in both civil society and newer practices of democratic governance, in particular deliberative democracy in political theory, practical work with deliberative experiments, the theory and practices of democratic governance, and participatory research. Deliberative practices are promoted here as a new component part of policy-related disciplines required for participatory governance. Calling for a specialization of "policy epistemics" to advance such practices, the second half of the book takes up issues related to deliberative empowerment, including the relation of technical and social knowledge, the interpretive dimensions of social meaning and multiple realities, the role of narrative knowledge and storylines policy inquiry, social learning, tacit knowledge, the design of discursive spaces, and the place of emotional expression in public deliberation.
Download or read book The Conception of Citizen Knowledge in Democratic Theory written by Lauri Rapeli and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Intelligent Democracy written by JONATHAN. BENSON and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-05 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether due to Donald Trump, Brexit, or the rise of populism, many are increasingly questioning the value of democracy. Complaints of ignorant voters, irrational public debate, and disconnected politicians have led some to suggest that democracies are destined to make bad decisions, and to propose alternatives. In Intelligent Democracy, political theorist Jonathan Benson rejects this new democratic scepticism. He argues that democracies can make effective use of knowledge, engage in experimentation, utilise diversity, and motivate decisions towards the common good-and that they can do all these things better than their rivals. Benson pleads that we value democracy, not only because it treats us all equally, but because it is intelligent. At the core of the book is the first systemic account of democracy's epistemic value. While it is common to focus on the faults of any one democratic body, Benson argues that democracy represents a much broader network of institutions which work together to produce a system which is more intelligent than any of its parts. The book examines how elections, deliberative assemblies, random sortition, and the open public sphere can be best connected, and offers innovative new proposals for improving our democratic systems. Through this approach, Benson shows that democracy is superior to regimes of epistocracy and political meritocracy which aim to empower the knowledgeable and exclude the ignorant, as well as proposals for granting greater powers to free markets or private companies. Drawing on work from political science, philosophy, and economics, Intelligent Democracy produces a unique epistemic justification of democratic politics and a robust answer to its critics.
Download or read book Rationalist Visions of Expertise in Contemporary Democratic Theory written by Mark Brown and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many democratic theorists continue to view scientific expertise as either an apolitical resource for competent decision making or a dangerous source of technocracy and disenchantment. Constructivist science studies, in contrast, shows how expert claims often embody and perpetuate political values and decisions. Although many democratic theorists are generally sympathetic toward constructivist theories of expertise, they have not sufficiently integrated such theories into their conceptions of democracy. In particular, this paper argues, a rationalist view of expertise underlies the longstanding debate between elite and participatory democrats. Elite democrats implicitly expect deliberation among public representatives to emulate an idealized image of science, and participatory democrats conceive lay participation in opposition to this image, as a matter of common sense. By conceiving representation with reference to a narrow view of scientific rationality, democratic theorists of different stripes have unwittingly conspired to render representative democracy impossible. Hence, moving beyond the dichotomy between representation and participation in democratic theory requires rethinking prevailing conceptions of scientific expertise.
Download or read book Politics and Expertise written by Zeynep Pamuk and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-21 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new model for the relationship between science and democracy that spans policymaking, the funding and conduct of research, and our approach to new technologies Our ability to act on some of the most pressing issues of our time, from pandemics and climate change to artificial intelligence and nuclear weapons, depends on knowledge provided by scientists and other experts. Meanwhile, contemporary political life is increasingly characterized by problematic responses to expertise, with denials of science on the one hand and complaints about the ignorance of the citizenry on the other. Politics and Expertise offers a new model for the relationship between science and democracy, rooted in the ways in which scientific knowledge and the political context of its use are imperfect. Zeynep Pamuk starts from the fact that science is uncertain, incomplete, and contested, and shows how scientists’ judgments about what is significant and useful shape the agenda and framing of political decisions. The challenge, Pamuk argues, is to ensure that democracies can expose and contest the assumptions and omissions of scientists, instead of choosing between wholesale acceptance or rejection of expertise. To this end, she argues for institutions that support scientific dissent, proposes an adversarial “science court” to facilitate the public scrutiny of science, reimagines structures for funding scientific research, and provocatively suggests restricting research into dangerous new technologies. Through rigorous philosophical analysis and fascinating examples, Politics and Expertise moves the conversation beyond the dichotomy between technocracy and populism and develops a better answer for how to govern and use science democratically.
Download or read book Science in Democracy written by Mark B. Brown and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument that draws on canonical and contemporary thinkers in political theory and science studies--from Machiavelli to Latour--for insights on bringing scientific expertise into representative democracy.
Download or read book Experts and the Will of the People written by Harry Collins and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-10-11 with total page 99 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of populism in the West has led to attacks on the legitimacy of scientific expertise in political decision making. This book explores the differences between populism and pluralist democracy and their relationship with science. Pluralist democracy is characterised by respect for minority choices and a system of checks and balances that prevents power being concentrated in one group, while populism treats minorities as traitorous so as to concentrate power in the government. The book argues that scientific expertise – and science more generally -- should be understood as one of the checks and balances in pluralist democracies. It defends science as ‘craftwork with integrity’ and shows how its crucial role in democratic societies can be rethought and that it must be publicly explained. This book will be of value to scholars and practitioners working across STS as well as to anyone interested in decoding the populist agenda against science.
Download or read book Developing Democracy written by Larry Diamond and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1999-05-07 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book concludes with a hopeful view of the prospects for a fourth wave of global democratization.
Download or read book Democracy and Expertise written by Frank Fischer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-12 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the role of policy expertise in a democratic society. From the perspectives of both political theory and policy studies, the chapters explore the implications of deliberative democratic governance for professional expertise and extends them to specific policy practices. Following the lead of John Dewey, the discussion focuses in particular on the ways professional practices might be reoriented to assist citizens in understanding and discussing the complex policy issues of an advanced technological society. In doing so, it also explores how public deliberation can be improved through more cooperative forms of policy inquiry. Adopting a deliberative-analytic approach , policy inquiry is grounded in a postempiricist, constructivist understanding of inquiry and knowledge and the participatory practices that support it. Toward this end, the chapters draw on thriving theoretical and practical work dedicated to revitalizing the citizen's role in both civil society and newer practices of democratic governance, in particular deliberative democracy in political theory, practical work with deliberative experiments, the theory and practices of democratic governance, and participatory research. Deliberative practices are promoted here as a new component part of policy-related disciplines required for participatory governance. Calling for a specialization of "policy epistemics" to advance such practices, the second half of the book takes up issues related to deliberative empowerment, including the relation of technical and social knowledge, the interpretive dimensions of social meaning and multiple realities, the role of narrative knowledge and storylines policy inquiry, social learning, tacit knowledge, the design of discursive spaces, and the place of emotional expression in public deliberation.
Download or read book The Conception of Citizen Knowledge in Democratic Theory written by L. Rapeli and published by Palgrave Pivot. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What according to democratic theorists should the ordinary citizen know about politics? What does several decades of empirical research about citizens' political knowledge tell us? And why should we care? This book offers a comprehensive outline of the vast literature on political knowledge and by providing an analytical framework for its studying
Download or read book Behavioral Political Economy and Democratic Theory written by Petr Špecián and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-06-08 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on current debates at the frontiers of economics, psychology, and political philosophy, this book explores the challenges that arise for liberal democracies from a confrontation between modern technologies and the bounds of human rationality. With the ongoing transition of democracy’s underlying information economy into the digital space, threats of disinformation and runaway political polarization have been gaining prominence. Employing the economic approach informed by behavioral sciences’ findings, the book’s chief concern is how these challenges can be addressed while preserving a commitment to democratic values and maximizing the epistemic benefits of democratic decision-making. The book has two key strands: it provides a systematic argument for building a behaviorally informed theory of democracy; and it examines how scientific knowledge on quirks and bounds of human rationality can inform the design of resilient democratic institutions. Drawing these together, the book explores the centrality of the rationality assumption in the methodological debates surrounding behavioral sciences as exemplified by the dispute between neoclassical and behavioral economics; the role of (ir)rationality in democratic social choice; behaviorally informed paternalism as a response to the challenge of irrationality; and non-paternalistic avenues to increase the resilience of the democratic institutions toward political irrationality. This book is invaluable reading for anyone interested in behavioral economics and sciences, political philosophy, and the future of democracy.
Download or read book Evolution and Progress in Democracies written by Johann Götschl and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a ground-breaking series of articles, one of them written by a Nobel Laureate, this volume demonstrates the evolutionary dynamic and the transformation of today's democratic societies into scientific-democratic societies. It highlights the progress of modeling individual and societal evaluation by neo-Bayesian utility theory. It shows how social learning and collective opinion formation work, and how democracies cope with randomness caused by randomizers. Nonlinear `evolution equations' and serial stochastic matrices of evolutionary game theory allow us to optimally compute possible serial evolutionary solutions of societal conflicts. But in democracies progress can be defined as any positive, gradual, innovative and creative change of culturally used, transmitted and stored mentifacts (models, theories), sociofacts (customs, opinions), artifacts and technifacts, within and across generations. The most important changes are caused, besides randomness, by conflict solutions and their realizations by citizens who follow democratic laws. These laws correspond to the extended Pareto principle, a supreme, socioethical democratic rule. According to this principle, progress is any increase in the individual and collective welfare which is achieved during any evolutionary progress. Central to evolutionary modeling is the criterion of the empirical realization of computed solutions. Applied to serial conflict solutions (decisions), evolutionary trajectories are formed; they become the most influential causal attractors of the channeling of societal evolution. Democratic constitutions, legal systems etc., store all advantageous, present and past, adaptive, competitive, cooperative and collective solutions and their rules; they have been accepted by majority votes. Societal laws are codes of statutes (default or statistical rules), and they serve to optimally solve societal conflicts, in analogy to game theoretical models or to statistical decision theory. Such solutions become necessary when we face harmful or advantageous random events always lurking at the edge of societal and external chaos. The evolutionary theory of societal evolution in democracies presents a new type of stochastic theory; it is based on default rules and stresses realization. The rules represent the change of our democracies into information, science and technology-based societies; they will revolutionize social sciences, especially economics. Their methods have already found their way into neural brain physiology and research into intelligence. In this book, neural activity and the creativity of human thinking are no longer regarded as linear-deductive. Only evolutive nonlinear thinking can include multiple causal choices by many individuals and the risks of internal and external randomness; this serves the increasing welfare of all individuals and society as a whole. Evolution and Progress in Democracies is relevant for social scientists, economists, evolution theorists, statisticians, philosophers, philosophers of science, and interdisciplinary researchers.
Download or read book Democracy for Realists written by Christopher H. Achen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why our belief in government by the people is unrealistic—and what we can do about it Democracy for Realists assails the romantic folk-theory at the heart of contemporary thinking about democratic politics and government, and offers a provocative alternative view grounded in the actual human nature of democratic citizens. Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels deploy a wealth of social-scientific evidence, including ingenious original analyses of topics ranging from abortion politics and budget deficits to the Great Depression and shark attacks, to show that the familiar ideal of thoughtful citizens steering the ship of state from the voting booth is fundamentally misguided. They demonstrate that voters—even those who are well informed and politically engaged—mostly choose parties and candidates on the basis of social identities and partisan loyalties, not political issues. They also show that voters adjust their policy views and even their perceptions of basic matters of fact to match those loyalties. When parties are roughly evenly matched, elections often turn on irrelevant or misleading considerations such as economic spurts or downturns beyond the incumbents' control; the outcomes are essentially random. Thus, voters do not control the course of public policy, even indirectly. Achen and Bartels argue that democratic theory needs to be founded on identity groups and political parties, not on the preferences of individual voters. Now with new analysis of the 2016 elections, Democracy for Realists provides a powerful challenge to conventional thinking, pointing the way toward a fundamentally different understanding of the realities and potential of democratic government.
Download or read book Toward Leader Democracy written by Jan Pakulski and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2012-01-15 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In today’s liberal democracies, does the political process focus on the people, or on the political leaders representing them? Building upon the ideas of Joseph Schumpeter and Max Weber, ‘Toward Leader Democracy’ argues that we are currently seeing a movement toward an increasingly pronounced focus on political leaders – ‘leader democracy’. This form of democracy is fashioned by the political will, determination and commitment of top politicians, and is exercised through elite persuasion that actively shapes the preferences of voters so as to give meaning to political processes. As the text reveals, this marks a definite evolution within the world’s ‘advanced democracies’: democratic representation is today realised increasingly through active political leadership, as opposed to the former practices of statistically ‘mirroring’ constituencies, or the deliberative self-adjustment of the executive to match citizen preferences.
Download or read book Critical Elitism written by Alfred James Moore and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Democracies have a problem with expertise. Expert knowledge both mediates and facilitates public apprehension of problems, yet it also threatens to exclude the public from consequential judgments and decisions located in technical domains. This book asks: how can we have inclusion without collapsing the very concept of expertise? How can public judgment be engaged in expert practices in a way that does not reduce to populism? Drawing on deliberative democratic theory and social studies of science, Critical Elitism argues that expert authoritydepends ultimately on the exercise of public judgment in a context in which there are live possibilities for protest, opposition and scrutiny. This account points to new ways of looking at the role of civil society, expert institutions, and democratic innovations in the constitution of expert authority within democratic systems. Using the example of climate science, Critical Elitism highlights not only the risks but also the benefits of contesting expertise"--
