Technocratic Tyranny or Democratic Dream?
Master Thesis Political Science: Public Policy and Governance
Word Count: 18,652
Author: J.N. Addison (Student ID 10890572)
Instructor: Dr Annette Freyberg-Inan
Second Reader: Dr Marcel Hanegraaff
University of Amsterdam – Graduate School of Social Sciences
Amsterdam
05/06/2020
Abstract
This thesis studies the nature of democratic governance, and whether established practices of democracy could be described as being in ‘crisis’. Following an examination of the differing perspectives of authority, accountability, technocracy and how they relate to the challenges facing contemporary representative democracy, the main hypothesis of a crisis characterised by ‘stasis’ is outlined, where unscientific political claims impede the maintenance of public institutions, which need to remain dynamic in order to reflect democratic ideals under changing social conditions. An understanding of unscientific political claims is developed from a Popperian definition of science. Based on this proposed relation between scientific principles and democratic ideals, the thesis ends by theorising how a ‘reign of science’ in politics could reinvigorate democratic practices, ensuring the continued realisation of democratic ideals.
Table of Contents
1. INTRODUCTION: THE VALUE OF DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE ... 3
2. THE CRISIS: TECHNOCRACY, STASIS AND THE CHALLENGE TO DEMOCRACY ... 7
2.1WHAT IS DEMOCRACY? ... 7
2.2DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS? ... 10
2.3A CRISIS BROUGHT ABOUT BY TECHNOCRACY, BUT NOT SCIENCE ... 16
2.4WHAT IS SCIENCE? ... 19
2.5THE CORRECT ROLE OF SCIENCE IN A DEMOCRACY ... 28
2.6THE TRUE CRISIS: UNSCIENTIFIC POLITICS ... 32
2.7SCIENTIFIC GOVERNANCE: ENVISIONING STRONG DEMOCRACIES ... 37
3. THE RESPONSE: RE-EMBEDDING GOVERNANCE IN SCIENCE AND NORMATIVITY ... 38
3.1DEVISING SCIENTIFIC ‘GUARDRAILS’ FOR DEMOCRACY ... 38
3.2STRENGTHENING POPULAR RULE WITH SCIENCE ... 41
3.3STRENGTHENING POLITICAL LIBERTIES WITH SCIENCE ... 45
3.4REALISING THE REIGN OF SCIENCE ... 48
4. CONCLUSION ... 50
5. REFERENCES ... 53
1. Introduction: The Value of Democratic Governance
Democracy is in crisis. Or at least, in contemporary political science discourse it has become rather commonplace to venture that it is (Tormey 2016, p. 1). In and of itself, this is nothing new. Rather than being able to point to one key event that marks the ‘birth’ of democratic governance, each new development or reform (such as the Bill of Rights 1689, the proliferation of the secret ballot in the mid-nineteenth century or the introduction of women’s suffrage at the turn of the twentieth century) has been heralded by advocates, and spurned by detractors, as ‘the end’ of good governance as we know it. In this way democracy, as an institutionalised discourse, could be said to be in permanent crisis. What is noteworthy about our current crisis of democracy, however, is that it is no longer just “oddball figures, radical and zealots” (Tormey 2016, p. 1) that see challenges and threats to its future, but mainstream political scientists (Illing 2017) and established civil society actors, too. As chapter two will explore in depth, democratic freedom is in decline around the world. Analysing the features of the contemporary crisis of democracy and what, if anything, can be done about it will be the central preoccupation of this thesis.
In spring of this year, Freedom House published its forty-eighth annual ‘Freedom in the World’ report, looking back at the previous year and cataloguing the ‘free’, ‘partly free’ and ‘not free’ nations of the world, based on the degree of political rights and civil liberties that can be exercised by the citizens of a given country (Repucci 2020, p. 11). The report finds that “countries that suffered setbacks […] outnumbered those making gains by nearly two to one”, marking the fourteenth consecutive year (every year since 2005) with more losses in democratic rights than gains (Freedom House 2020). Perhaps even more alarmingly, the global trends identified by Freedom House show that established democracies (those that have been rated as ‘free’ for over twenty years) are experiencing some of the greatest declines in terms of press freedom and quality of democratic institutions, while “authoritarian powers have expanded their global influence” (Freedom House 2020). These anti-democratic developments seem to go against prevailing notions that the sorts of representative democracy some enjoy today represent the ‘terminus’ or endpoint of societal development. This view was famously articulated at that most optimistic of moments, the vast wave of human emancipation that swept the world in late 1989, when Francis Fukuyama wrote in The National Interest: “What we may be witnessing is […] the end of history […] the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” (Fukuyama 1989, p. 4).
The end of history, with all its promise of a world free and at peace, has not materialised as prophesised. Given the ideological roots of past inter-state and societal conflict, this might well be considered puzzling. After all, the “fascist and communist challenges to liberalism” (Fukuyama 1989, p. 14) of the past really do seem extinct, so what then is causing this recent anti-democratic turn in global politics, if not the conventional, totalitarian enemies of liberalism? The aim of this thesis will be to identify and describe the crisis of democracy, what role science has played in these developments, and what possible governance arrangements could be put in place to safeguard the democratic process going forward.
And yet, since 1989 (when Francis Fukuyama proposed the inevitability of a global democratic future), we have, in Europe alone, seen efforts to curtail the power of the independent press and judiciary in EU member states Hungary and Poland, waves of conflict and nationalism in the west Balkans (with some west Balkan governments displaying authoritarian tendencies), substantive gains in vote share for nativist and xenophobic political parties across even established democracies (like France, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands), not to mention declining rates of voter participation and political party membership (Mair & van Biezen 2001, p. 12). The gaps between elite policy preferences, the preferences of ordinary citizens and policy outcomes identified by Gilens and Page (2014) highlight the worrying consequences of limited exercise of popular rule and political liberties.
These broad, anti-democratic developments in global politics are worrisome because, as citizens in an inter-connected world, we depend on the prudent and fair exercise of state power to tackle many of the collective problems (ranging from ecological degradation, via climate change to growing income and wealth inequality) that now bedevil the modern world. The importance of strengthening democracy lies in ensuring the continued prudent and fair exercise of state power, in tackling these challenges and for the future.
The plot further thickens if we consider that the values and practices of political democracy remain at least rhetorically unchallenged in all but a few states. The relatively unchallenged position of liberal democratic ideology across the globe is demonstrated by the ‘de jure’ democratic status of all but six governments, out of the one-hundred-and-ninety-seven (Marquez 2013), showing that many ‘partly free’ and ‘not free’ nations, outwardly at least, continue to profess to be democracies. The age of reason and associated advances in science dating from that period are hugely important for understanding how and why liberal democratic values have become so dominant in
contemporary governance, and the modern world more generally. A great deal of the normative political theorising as to both the development of democracy and the recent anti-democratic turn that will take place in the coming chapters will be related to the practice of science and the scientific method. I will argue that, just as the re-emergence of classical ideas in the philosophy of science was the catalyst for developments in democratic governance between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, so too can contemporary science provide solutions for the challenges democracy faces today, in terms of both bolstering liberal democratic values and conceiving of the right governance arrangements for our time.
In so doing, this thesis takes up a major challenge for contemporary political scholarship: that of articulating what governance arrangements could foster a kind of politics embedded in scientific discourse, with the view that political life constrained by science would be more stable and effective at problem-solving and a truer expression of the principles of democracy. On the basis of the relation between these two key concepts (democracy and science) proposed in section 2.5, the research questions guiding my inquiry are as follows:
(1) What features characterise the current crisis of democracy?
(2) How can science enable legitimate and stable governance, while empowering citizens to participate in democratic institutions?
These questions are of societal relevance, because answering them provides insight into the nature of the anti-democratic turn many democracies are now experiencing, and into what potential governance arrangements could serve to further liberal and democratic principles in the twenty-first century.
My argument in the thesis can be summarised as follows: The practice of politics in democratic contexts in crisis is not reflective of scientific principles and has come to overlook the role of normative value conflict in structuring politics. Disagreement over values and theorised future relations are inherent to any kind of honest conversation about power, leaving citizens searching for a kind of politics with answers beyond technocratic considerations. At the same time, positivist conceptions of knowledge suggest that political choices should be made by citizens in a ‘value-free’ way. As a result, democratic politics has become too much about being able to choose both one’s own facts and one’s own values – leading to a fractious and extremely dysfunctional kind of political life, in the very states with among the richest and deepest science traditions.
Conducting democratic politics in this way, without sufficient grounding in empirical realities or normative values undermines the ability of public institutions to realise democratic ideals or tackle social problems, what I term as ‘unscientific politics’ – because of the gap between these practices and scientific principles. The risk of unscientific politics is to make us unconscious actors when it comes to our individual roles in society, alienating citizens from the means of governance and, in so doing, allowing for the abuse and manipulation of democratic politics, all of which has characterised the anti-democratic turn. It has now become necessary to devise scientific ‘guardrails’ to enclose the discursive power of democratic political life, in the way in which state regulatory power puts guardrails around the exercise of market power in economic life. This part of my argument will draw primarily on a Popperian conception of science, that sees scientific principles as being strongly compatible with democratic ideals, and as a tool for reinforcing democratic processes. Given the strong link in subject matter to questions of how to organise social relations, the analysis conducted throughout the thesis will be theoretical in nature, building a line of argument centred around the philosophy of science and drawing on empirical data for purposes of illustration.
In following this line of argument, and in order to speak to the research questions as posed, this thesis will be composed of three additional chapters. Chapter two will begin by laying out a conceptual and theoretical framework for analysing democracy. It will then discuss the role of science in the crisis of democracy, the nature of contemporary unscientific politics and how these factors shape the course of democratic governance. This is important as it will ground the identification of the ‘crisis’ contemporary democracy is undergoing, as I frame this crisis as characterised by a gap between the practice of democratic governance and the application of the scientific method. Chapter three, building on the description of the ‘crisis’, will theorise the appropriate governance response in terms of grounding democratic politics in science and normativity. The kinds of governance arrangements to be discussed include the inclusion of direct and associational democratic elements, the curtailing of the influence capital in the operation of the state, the re-politicisation of social relations and the possibility of more science and civic education for citizens. Finally, chapter four will end the thesis with a conclusion – summarising the arguments made as well as discussing limitations of the analysis and relevant other avenues of inquiry beyond the scope of this paper.
2. The Crisis: Technocracy, Stasis and the Challenge to Democracy
In order to come to an understanding of whether established democracies are undergoing a crisis, and what features define contemporary representative democracy, the first task of this chapter is to describe democracy, its origins and how its ideals are realised and perpetuated. This is grounded in an examination of political science literature on the subject of democracy in sections 2.2 and 2.3, which I divide into three broad perspectives on why democratic ideals are being undermined: authority, accountability and technocracy. After discussion of these perspectives on the existence of a crisis, sections 2.4 and 2.5 introduce Popperian notions of science as a tool to strengthen democratic governance, in light of the role played by normative values in structuring democratic politics in order to avoid ‘stasis’, wherein democratic ideals become eroded by changing social conditions. Finally, the chapter ends by identifying unscientific political claims as the real threat to realising democratic ideals in practice, and suggests a role for science in safeguarding democratic ideals, an idea which is developed further in chapter three.
2.1 What is democracy?
“The governors have nothing to support them but opinion. ‘Tis therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as the most free and most popular.” – David Hume, 1742 (Hume 1987)
To speak to how and why democracy is “under assault” (Repucci 2020, p. 1), it is necessary to define what is meant by ‘democracy’ and how it relates to the ideal of popular sovereignty. As brilliantly noted by Hume in his collection of writings “Essays: Moral, Political and Literary” (1987), no government can exist without a degree of consent from the governed. This notion is comforting for those of us who live under state-based governance arrangements, because it seems to suggest that we, the citizenry, are very much ‘in the driving-seat’ when it comes to determining our collective future and the courses of action taken by the government. After all, through merely expressing a change of opinion we exercise our individual judgement, which at the level of an entire society could represent a revolutionary change.
Accepting the claim that all governments draw their power from support by public opinion, some degree of consent is always necessary to legitimate ‘the governors’ of a polity. This explains the abundance of ‘de jure’ democracies across the world, with all but a few of today’s societies claiming to be based on popular sovereignty, of one sort or another (Marquez 2013). Applying
this observation regarding the role of consent in matters of governance, one might expect that those societies with the most accountable, transparent and reflexive systems of government would enjoy the highest levels of popular support and trust – given that under these kinds of governance arrangements we see greater opportunities to scrutinise ‘the governors’ and for the citizenry to develop informed opinions on the policies undertaken by the state. In fact, however, when looking empirically at the level of political trust across the world, it is those polities which practice more illiberal modes of governance, such as Uzbekistan, China, Azerbaijan, Qatar and Singapore, that consistently receive the highest levels of political trust (van der Meer 2017, p. 8), while established democracies in Europe and North America receive relatively low levels of trust in the institutions of government (idem).
Post-1945 and with the discrediting of authoritarian forms of government, the reason for a state wishing to be perceived as a democracy is clear. When “being democratic, or claiming to be, is like a currency: Credibly holding it adds political capital to those who claim it as their type of rule” (O’Donnell 2007, p. 6). This supports the spread of ‘thin’ as opposed to ‘deep’ democracy, as Wright labels regimes that pay lip-service to being democratic without realising the ideals of democracy within society (2010, p. 134). It also raises an important definitional question: If all forms of government, even the “most despotic and most military” (Hume 1742), can reasonably claim to enjoy some degree of popular mandate, and if illiberal regimes receive the highest levels of political trust, what demarcates truly democratic polities, where citizens exercise power collectively, from those “rendering tribute to virtue by implicitly acknowledging the principle of popular sovereignty”? (O’Donnell 2007, p. 7)
The word ‘democracy’ is a derivation from the ancient Greek words demos, meaning ‘the people’, and kratos, meaning ‘to rule’ (Ober 2007, p. 2). The desirability of ‘rule of the people’ is very apparent in contemporary times, because it represents the culmination of the Republican tradition that casts “freedom as the opposite of slavery and […] exposure to the arbitrary will of another […] as the great evil” (Pettit 1997, p. 31). In other words, the personal benefit of maximising one’s own freedom is nearly universally recognised in today’s societies, so it is logical to expect denizens of a polity to prefer ‘rule of the people’, as the best defence against arbitrary forms of domination and interference.
While the ancient origins of democratic governance can be traced from the city-states of ancient Greece, a dozen other similar localised examples from antiquity, to the Magna Carta (Thorpe &
Jarvis 2006, p. 8), the contours of what we understand as contemporary democracy were developed during the age of reason and reflect the philosophical character of the time. Democratic governance arrangements emerged in parts of late-eighteenth century Europe, concurrently with the transition from feudalism to capitalism (Dunn 2018, pp. 38-39; Bollen 1993, p. 1208), and represent efforts to formalise Republican values through adopting measures including universal suffrage, a written constitution, and enshrining political liberties (freedom of speech, of assembly, to organise). The popularisation of democracy as a system of government around this time had a lot to do with two revolutions: the American and the French. By realising classical ideas of popular rule through a system of ‘representative democracy’ and by legitimating the republican system of government, both events have “marked the history of democracy in indelible ways” (Dunn 2018, p. 72).
Conceptions of democracy have changed greatly from its ancient Greek origins, and different democratic contexts display different sets of institutions. Therefore, the concept can be said to represent more of a set of ideals than one specific practice. This thesis is concerned with democratic governance arrangements in the here-and-now, and I understand democracy to mean a system of government that “draws its legitimacy from” the public and in which “we have a reasonable chance of being able to compel [the governors] to continue to do so” (Dunn 2018, pp. 19-20). Distilling this understanding of democracy down to its constituent parts, a set of governance arrangements can be described as being democratic to the degree to which they “allow the exercise of political liberties and popular rule” (Bollen 1993, p. 1208). Democratic systems can certainly differ in design, with the most obvious distinction being that between the earlier conception of participatory democracy and modern representative democracy – but also in terms of what institutional features are chosen – ranging across direct, representative and associational configurations (Wright 2010, p. 108). The two key elements I identified as being at the core of the ideal of democracy - political liberties and popular rule - are common throughout, however.1 We can employ these two features as a standard by which to judge differing systems of government, in terms of whether they meet the definition of a democracy and how democratic they are in comparison with each other.
1This is also reflected in the metrics used by Freedom House to identify and compare degrees of
political democracy: (1) political rights and (2) civil liberties that can be exercised by the citizens of a given country (Repucci 2020, p. 11).
2.2 Democracy in crisis?
“Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” – Elizabeth Powel “A republic, if you can keep it.” – Benjamin Franklin, 1787 (Brockell 2019)
While this quote was first attributed to one of the key figures of the American revolution in 1806 (the attribution therefore not being certain), it captures the tenuous, compromise nature of any democratic system of government. The caricature of the revolutionary is that of the firebrand, the zealot – but in this case, even at the height of revolutionary triumph with the adoption of a republican constitution, we see one of the authors of that very constitution expressing doubt, tempering the emancipatory promise of democracy with warnings of the fragility of that very system. As noted by political scientists and historians alike, the modern system of representative democracy is constantly subject to change (Manin 1997; Tormey 2016; O’Donnell 2007, p. 5) and therefore could be described as being in a state of perpetual crisis. To what extent is the current anti-democratic turn, manifest across many of the world’s established democracies, a continuation of that feature of evolution and change, and to what extent is it a threat to the furtherance of the ideal of democracy? In other words, is the present ‘crisis’ of democracy illusory – is there a real crisis at all?
According to some scholars, democracy has always been and remains a ‘contested concept’ (Whitehead 2002, p. 23). In the west, a significant decline in political trust and public support for current systems of government was well documented during the 1960s and 1970s (van der Meer 2019, pp. 9-18). However, to what extent this represents a trend and not simply ordinary fluctuations in levels of support is not universally agreed upon (Norris 2009). Some even suggest that distrust, in a functioning democracy, might not be such a bad thing, as it could represent scepticism rather than discontent, the sign of an engaged and critical citizenry (van der Meer 2017, p. 14). This perspective on the ‘normality’ of democratic crises is very alluring, because it suggests that the ‘genie’ of democratic ideals is out of the proverbial bottle and has become so universalised as to be ineradicable (O’Donnell 2007, p. 10), and that liberal democrats have little to be concerned about. That being said, not all crises of democracy are created equal, as the experience of Europe in the 1930s can attest – so putting aside for a moment this most optimistic of assessments, those scholars who believe that we are undergoing a significant crisis of democracy fall into two camps: those who believe the crisis of democracy stems from a problem of authority, and those who
identify accountability or ‘throughput’ legitimacy (Hoppe 2011, p. 130; Schmidt 2013, pp. 2-8) as the central problem. I will address each vision on the crisis in turn.
Crisis of authority
A key work in identifying the ‘authority problem’ of democracy is The Crisis of Democracy (1975) by Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki, because of its prescience in recognising the challenge of realising democratic ideals in a dynamic institutional landscape (Crozier, Huntington & Watanuki 1975, p. 158). Writing in a context of economic malaise following the 1973 Oil Crisis and the phenomenon of ‘stagflation’, and while still grappling with the implications of the counter-cultural and social movements of the 1960s (ibid., p. 61), this team of prominent scholars in the fields of political science and sociology identified an “excess of democracy” as threatening to overload the democratic system with demands (idem). As a consequence of increased demands on the state, the chance of perceived inadequate policy outcomes increases alongside the likelihood of disappointing some groups or individuals, leading to more disaffection with democracy. This view is summarised by Samuel Huntington regarding the United States in the 1960s as having: “produced a substantial increase in governmental activity and a substantial decrease in governmental authority” (ibid., p. 59), created by new civil society actors gaining entry into the political arena.
With some distance from the tumult of the 1970s, the argument that the institutions of the state are ‘over-taxed’ as a consequence of a changing society might be less persuasive. If the scale and scope of governmental activity is the determining factor in undermining faith in democracy, then in those polities like in Scandinavia or the Low Countries, where the state plays a large and important role in many parts of society, we would expect to see the lowest levels of trust in government, while those places where the state practices more non-interventionism would enjoy the highest levels of trust. In fact, the reverse is true, with the more statist established democracies (like Sweden) enjoying relatively higher levels of trust and support, compared with other established democracies (van der Meer 2017, p. 8). The identification of declining governmental authority by Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki (1975) remains a fascinating observation however, that today resonates with the increasingly complex array of market and civil society actors who participate in multi-level governance (Nye and Keohane 1971, pp. 333-334) – and in so doing constrain government in particular ways, ultimately undermining the authority of state actors and the functionality of representative democracy.
This conception of an ‘authority problem’ caused by non-state actors constraining the autonomy of the state in the policy-process comes to us from the field of transnational governance (Nye and Keohane 1971). It has also been applied specifically to the crisis of democracy. Papadopoulos (2013) identifies the phenomenon as a “weakening” of the influence of democratic politics on political outcomes, describing a gap between the partially realised ‘standard model’ of democracy where popular rule is exercised, versus the growing ‘back stage’ of politics, where complex processes (involving supranational organisations, independent regulators, advocacy networks, juridical institutions etc.) increase the non-democratic element in matters of governance (idem. p. 4). This potentially explains how in many established democracies, since the 1970s, the number of opportunities for electoral participation have increased in real terms (Dalton and Gray 2003, p. 34) – while the role of democracy in determining political outcomes is relatively diminished. Crisis of accountability
While the authority problem of democracy identified by Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki (1975), Papadopoulos (2013), Nye and Keohane (1971) and others is a problem of institutional autonomy and efficacy, the other axis for assessing the crisis of democracy relates to questions of accountability between citizens and decision makers. Democracy derives its legitimacy (in other words, why its orders and injunctions are perceived as being worth obeying) from the circular nature of accountability in that idealised system (Hupe & Edwards, 2012, p. 179). What the policy-makers decide is influenced by expressions of the popular will (usually through the electoral system), the product of which is then implemented, and in turn this affects the views and behaviour of citizens going forward.
Irrespective of the efficacy of the output from the policy-making process, or the benevolence of those non-democratic forces involved in providing input (Hoppe 2011, p. 47), if citizens are aware of the ‘gap’ that exists between the democratic inputs and the outputs of the policy process – then it is easy to see how they could become disillusioned with ‘high-minded’ representative democracy that, when it comes to policy-making, does not demonstrate the features of popular rule or the benefits of meaningful political liberties (Papadopoulos 2013, p. 239).This is why I have termed this perspective as focused on the accountability or ‘throughput’ problem of democracy, because throughput legitimacy relates to the perceived procedural justice (fairness) of how the governance process works between inputs (the structuring of policy problems) and outputs (policy design and implementation) (Schmidt 2013). As for the role played by limited
accountability in the contemporary crisis of democracy, it is true that in established democracies we see evidence of a trend towards declining trust in parliaments and governments (Merkel 2017, p. 8) compared with other public institutions, which is consistent with citizens becoming disillusioned with practices of governance, or the ‘throughput’ of the policy process.
So, the two perspectives that identify a ‘crisis’ in democracy (either in terms of a problem of authority or one of accountability) are similar in problematising the failure to amend and deepen the role of democratic ideals in matters of policymaking and governance, while disagreeing on the main source and nature of the disaffection. I do not subscribe to the proposition of Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki (1975) that ‘excess democracy’ is the cause of declining government authority, because non-state actors involved in the policy process have proliferated rapidly (Abbott & Snidal 2009, p. 53), and this seems to better account for the role of growing complexity in any possible contemporary crisis of democracy. The idea of government constrained, with limited autonomy, and the associated impact on policy outcomes has become more acute since 1975 with the reality of globalisation and the broadening of actors beyond just ‘the citizenry’ and ‘the state’ engaged in governance.
Is the crisis of democracy real?
Having considered some available scholarship and now turning to the question at hand, whether democracy today could be characterised as being ‘in crisis’: those authors who highlight the evolving nature of democracy (O’Donnell 2007, p.10; Norris 2009; Tormey 2016, p.4) are unquestionably correct – that change and contestation do not necessarily constitute ‘a crisis’ or a threat to the future of democracy. At the same time, however, they illuminate the real threat to contemporary democracy: stasis. The challenges identified by Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki (1975) and others are the product of an expanding frontier of human knowledge and activity, being driven by economic globalisation and the fast rate of technological change, which has resulted in more complex systems of governance, with more actors beyond ‘the standard model’ of democratic government and more interactions at the levels above and below the state (Nye and Keohane 1971). Often, when we think about ‘democracy’, we only apply the normative standard of modern representative democracy – i.e. having regular, free and fairly organised elections and giving citizens the freedom to exercise their political rights (Papadopoulos 2013, p. 3), while not considering the demands of bringing about true ‘popular rule’.
Popular rule requires regimes and practices, beyond just electoral politics, within society and the state that deepen the opportunities for the expression of popular will and join those making the decisions with the real experiences of ordinary citizens. Without features designed to empower the citizenry, like the ability to scrutinise the state bureaucracy, sensible campaign finance regulation, or an independent judiciary, the iterative effect of constant social change is to ‘hollow-out’ the value of democracy, leading to ‘a veneer’ or ‘thin’ democracy (Wright 2010, p. 134) where citizens are unable to express a true choice between alternatives. The reason why democracy
must remain dynamic in order to retain its value lies in the nature of modern, globalised capitalism.
Modern society is made of ‘three pillars’ or essential elements: the state, the market and civil society. The relationship between these constituent parts varies across polities and time, but the inter-relationship between them is fundamentally organic, meaning it is insoluble to all but the most severe attempts at top-down interference or control (Harris 2016, p. 2). Here then is the threat to democracy. If those institutions entrusted with realising democratic ideals fail to sufficiently update themselves for the new social conditions (in terms of the relative power of the three constituent elements of modern capitalism), eventually democracy as conceived in a polity will reflect the social reality less and less, both losing its emancipatory power and losing support from those citizens who perceive themselves as being excluded from full participation in democratic governance. In this way, the crisis of democracy is a question of time, as the status quo becomes less and less of a true expression of democratic ideals.
Political liberties and popular rule are therefore contingent on normative values, and specific social conditions (that will be explored more fully in section 2.6) that could look quite different from one society to the next and are certainly liable to change and development over time. This in fact is not too difficult to imagine, because, as discussed previously when defining what is meaningful about the term ‘democracy’, it is as much an ideal as something actualisable in the real world. This ‘Schrödinger-esque’ position I adopt, that the crisis of democracy is real and is acute, and at the same time is inherent to the democratic process and ineradicable, is supported in the writings of political scientist Wolfgang Merkel.
Merkel poses the question ‘is there a crisis of democracy?’ and proposes three mechanisms for evaluating the extent of any potential crisis: (1) expert indices; (2) domestic public opinion; and (3) analysis of ‘partial regimes’ underpinning democratic governance (Merkel 2014, pp. 12-15). The findings of his analysis are startling: From the evidence of expert indices (like the Democracy Barometer or Freedom House), as well as through studying public opinion, there is no significant
evidence of a crisis of democracy. Indeed, the opposite seems to be the case with trends towards increased electoral participation and similar levels of trust in institutions on aggregate as thirty years ago (ibid., pp. 18-21). At the same time as reporting no crisis by those measures, Merkel identifies the exact opposite trend in what are termed “partial regimes of embedded democracy” (idem), in other words, those features designed to enhance political liberties and popular rule that have been tacked-on to the standard model of democracy over time, and which mark the difference between ‘thin’ and ‘deep’ democracy (Wright 2010). According to Merkel:
1. There is an increasing dropout of the lower classes from political participation and a trend to neglect the representation of their interests in parliament. 2. Parliaments have been weakened over the last decades to the benefit of executive power and supra- or transnational modes of governance. 3. Executives have lost effective governmental power to deregulated markets, central banks, and global economic actors. 4. National democracies have lost sovereign democratic prerogatives to supranational regimes, which are less transparent, scarcely accountable, and far away from citizens’ participation. (Merkel 2014, p. 23)
The author ends the research by commenting: “We are witnessing some ‘subterranean’ erosion of democracy not recognised by the demos.” (Merkel 2014, pp. 23-24.). The consequence of this ‘erosion’ is the loss of democratic sovereignty by those citizens excluded from popular rule in practice, as the social conditions on which established democracies have built their institutions have changed and developed over time. In summary, while democracy may not appear to be in crisis on the surface, it is the imperfect, worldly realisation of an ideal. Democracy furthermore constantly drifts away from its starting point, as social and power relations change the realities of realising popular rule. By failing to recognise that democratic governance is dynamic, and by presuming that history has ended and has nothing more to teach us, we in established democracies risk ‘sleepwalking’ into crisis, by losing sight of democratic ideals. This in spite of the fact that democratic governance is among our most important endowments from the past, as a tool for protecting freedom from arbitrary domination, through safeguarding the values of popular rule and political liberties.
Now that the nature of the crisis of democracy has been elaborated, before one can speak about any potential solutions or responses from policy-makers to preserve democratic ideals, the next pertinent questions are: ‘how does contemporary science relate to the crisis of democracy?’ and ‘why has the “hollowing-out” of democracy now become so acute?’. These questions will be addressed in the following sections of this chapter.
2.3 A crisis brought about by technocracy, but not science
To reiterate, the crisis of democracy outlined above can be characterised in terms of (1) reduced authority, meaning that representative democratic institutions are unable to act with as much autonomy, and (2) reduced accountability, where the ‘standard model’ of representative democracy becomes blurred, impacting the throughput legitimacy of the policy-making process. This makes sense of the ‘subterranean’ nature of democratic erosion identified by Merkel (2014), because the challenge to democracy does not come from some alternate system of organisation (as in the past), but from growing social complexity and the ‘gap’ that emerges between existing governance practices and new challenges over time.
If this diagnosis of a growing gap between the populace and the decision-making process sounds familiar, it may be because it bears resemblance to the features and expected development of ‘plebiscitary leadership democracy’ (Held 2006, p. 14) towards ‘competitive elitism’, as described by Max Weber and articulated in the work of Joseph Schumpeter (ibid., p. 18). In political science discourse, the term ‘technocratic governance’ has emerged to describe this kind of ‘rule of experts’ elitism (Neto & Strøm 2006). According to these theorists, considering modern representative democracy as ‘rule of the people’ is fundamentally a misunderstanding based on classical conceptions of democracy. Instead, over time the process of ‘rationalisation’ (Held 2006, p. 14), driven by technological advancement and the pressures of market capitalism, has led to “considerable power accruing to bureaucrats through their expertise, information and access to secrets” (ibid., p. 10). ‘Rationalisation’ as Weber understood the term means “the extension of calculative attitudes of technical character to more and more spheres of activity, epitomised by scientific procedures and given substantive expression in the increasing role that expertise, science and technology play in modern life” (Giddens, cited in Held 2006, p. 26). According to this view, “the people are, and can be, nothing more than ‘producers of governments’, a mechanism to select the men who are able to do the deciding” (Schumpeter 1942, p. 264), in contrast with the general understanding of democracy that rests on the centrality of popular rule.
Weber and Schumpeter both saw the expanding domain of scientific expertise as encroaching on opportunities for popular expression through mediums like parliaments and political parties. For them, bureaucracy is an inevitable consequence of modernity, and while both prescribed differing solutions and problematised rationalisation to varying degrees – both saw (and lamented) a fundamentally ‘technocratic’ future (Held 2006) for social organisation. From looking at the two
identified perspectives on the ‘crisis of democracy’ (the authority and accountability crises), the idea of science and rationality threatening the continuation of meaningful democracy, superficially at least, seems to be borne out. The logic of ‘rationalisation’ and science at least in part explains the proliferation of ‘back-stage’ actors (Papadopoulos 2013) and processes that exert influence and constrain the authority and autonomy of democracy – as well as undermining the idea of accountability or ‘throughput legitimacy’ that exists in the policy-process, by blurring the lines between principals (the citizens) and their agents (public institutions) (Neto & Strøm 2006, p. 623). If this Weberian perspective on the rationalising influence of science is applied to the aforementioned ‘crisis of democracy’, then it becomes tempting to characterise the current global anti-democratic turn as fundamentally a ‘crisis of technocracy’, caused by the rationalising influence of science.
However, as a political spectator and an avowed believer in the value of democratic ideals, it is difficult for me to consider scientific expertise as a possible root cause of the identified challenges facing democracy. The utility of science is essentially as a methodology. A way of thinking and inquiring about the world which gives primacy to scepticism over credulity, and evidence over appeals to authority. While scientific knowledge has no inherent quality that makes it different from other kinds of knowledge, scientific principles including the peer-reviewing of research, inductive reasoning from the specific to the general,2 and the importance of falsifiability all coincide to make the scientific method a self-correcting system of learning, one of (if not) the most powerful tools humans possess for discovering truth about the world. This principle was articulated by Vannevar Bush (1945), who recognised science as ‘an endless frontier’ that was a crucial resource for any society and a ‘good’ unto itself.
Weberian conceptions of rationalisation, modern political rhetoric and the contours of the contemporary ‘crisis of democracy’ all seem to challenge this optimistic, conventional interpretation of how science structures the social domain, and seem to point to a horrifying thesis: that scientific progress is not necessarily inherently good. While a massive boon to naturalist fields such as medical science or archaeology, might science actually retard progress in fields of politics and governance, by obscuring democratic ideals and undermining the notion of popular rule? If this is the case, then science is become Ouroboros – greedily and blindly devouring meaningful
2 Although, as section 2.4 will discuss more fully, in a Popperian conception of science no purely
inductive scientific knowledge can be said to exist, since observations are value-laden and depend on some use of deductive reasoning also. (Popper 2002, p. 85)
democracy with no regard for the consequences, and that science can also manifest a destructive quality, as opposed to being an inherent good.
To speak to this quandary of whether the crisis of authority and accountability experienced in established democracies is fundamentally technocratic in nature and caused by the influence of science, it is necessary to examine more deeply what the ‘reign of science’ over politics would truly entail. Once a definition of ‘science’ has been established, it will be possible to theorise what the correct relation between science and democratic governance is, and how to employ this relation to bring about the legitimate and stable governance of a polity, while still empowering citizens to participate in democratic institutions.
2.4 What is science?
When using the terms ‘technocracy’ or ‘technocratic governance’, I do not refer specifically to governments composed of non-partisan leaders and ministers (McDonnell and Valbruzzi 2014, p. 656), but to the trend towards increasing non-majoritarian governance practices, in terms of more powerful regulatory agencies, experts and a growth of politics focused on the right ‘means’ to achieve commonly held ‘ends’, rather than any sort of ideological divergence (Mair, 2008 p. 212). Identified by Ingrid van Biezen as a “technocratic challenge” (van Biezen 2014, p. 188) to democratic politics, the rule of experts is highly problematised today, compared with the ‘competitive elitism’ envisaged by Max Weber in the 19th century. One only has to look at the ascendant political movements in Europe of the recent past, ranging from Sinn Fein, via the Five Star Movement, the United Kingdom ‘Leave Campaign’ of 2016, to the Dutch Forum for Democracy (FvD), to see that the decrying of expert elitism is popular with voters across the ‘traditional’ left-right spectrum (Motta 2017) and a political strategy common to very different political movements. As phrased by UK Conservative Party grandee Michael Gove, the public has “had enough of experts” (idem). Is this the crux of today’s ‘subterranean erosion’ of democracy and, if so, how has the proliferation of scientific expertise caused this crisis?
The most definitive explanation of what science is comes from the philosopher Karl Popper. The
Logic of Scientific Discovery provides an explanation of the inductive and deductive processes
that delineate scientific thought from other kinds of knowledge (Popper 2002). Popper’s exhaustive inquiry maps out the principles and methods underpinning how science operates in theory and practice, and can be summarised in three key features: falsifiability, scepticism and non-verifiability. These will now be laid out.
Epistemic features of science
Falsifiability is the central concept that demarcates ‘science’ from ‘non-science’. This is because, for Popper, all knowledge creation relies on a certain degree of deductive reasoning: “Science […] starts with problems rather than with observations—it is, indeed, precisely in the context of grappling with a problem that the scientist makes observations in the first instance: his observations are selectively designed to test the extent to which a given theory functions as a satisfactory solution to a given problem” (Thornton 2018). Accordingly, no purely inductive science exists, because all observations are informed by our own reasoning and are theory-laden.
The implication of this view on claim-making is that a statement or theory can only be described as scientific if the number of occurrences that would refute the theory in question is greater than 0. The Humean origins of this perspective were reinforced for Popper by encounters with Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxism, which in his mind displayed the non-scientific features of ad-hoc theories, capable of incorporating any observation or claim into the theory or worldview (Popper 1966, p. 301).
Following directly from the idea of falsifiability is the centrality of scepticism and doubt in defining science vs non-science. An implication of applying a falsifiability standard to observable reality is that no piece of scientific ‘knowledge’ can really exist – all science products are theories corroborated by observation, but could not be considered as being ‘proved’ and are best described as provisional knowledge (Popper 2002, p. 93). In other words: “Science is not a system of certain, or well-established, statements; nor is it a system which steadily advances towards a state of finality” (ibid., p. 278), but it is one where understanding is empirically founded, and constrained by the limitations of human reasoning and observation. While this point is seemingly tangential to defining ‘science’ vs ‘non-science’, it is manifestly central to how science is conducted in the world, because it implies that all scientific theories are built on ‘non-absolute’ foundations, and that any overly-objective or positivistic standard of knowing or proof is non-scientific in claiming a higher degree of certainty than is defensible.
The last feature of the scientific method is non-verifiability. Rather than accepting the predictive power of a theory as a way of validating its claims, Popper recognises the non-neutral nature of observation – and that no general rule or claim can be arrived at by reasoning from the specific to the general, without a degree of input from the observer (Popper 2002, p. 249). While related to the idea of falsifiability, non-verifiability implies that purely deductive forms of knowing do not meet a scientific standard, and that science knowledge can only be arrived at through empirical experimentation and testing.
Science as a problem-solving methodology
Thus far we have identified the epistemic features of scientific knowledge, but from a sociological perspective ‘science’ also exists as an applied methodology which functions as a tool for learning and knowledge acquisition. Scientific knowledge is recognised by policy-makers and the public as showing “relevance to a wide range of societal problems” (Pielke 2007, pp. 9-10) and as “a key resource for facilitating complicated decisions that involve competing interests in society” (idem). The view that the utility of science to democratic politics is essentially as a problem-solving tool is echoed in the Popperian account of ‘science’, which suggests that science is best understood as “an instrument whose purpose is […] to predict from immediate or given experiences later experiences, and even as far as possible control them” (Frank, cited in Popper 2002, p. 82). It is in this way, as a unified set of practices in the hands of human practitioners, that the influence of science is able to make itself felt in matters of politics and governance.
Popper even goes one step further and identifies ‘science’ as being directly linked to conceptions of democracy and democratic ideals, as one of the means for a society to move towards “break[ing] out of the cage of the closed society, and to form an open society” (Popper 1966, p. 625). The link from science principles and practices to democracy is therefore best described as the logic of ‘problem-solving’ that runs through both domains. This is a key insight of Popper that will be crucial to later sections of this thesis that aim to speak to the correct relation between science and the realisation of democratic ideals.
Here, then, is the definition of ‘science’. Something can be described as conforming to ‘scientific principles’ to the degree it reflects the premises of 1. falsifiability, 2. scepticism and 3. non-verifiability, and science exists in the world as one of the possible ‘tools’ available to human beings to turn observations and data into theories and predictions about the future. Now that an understanding of ‘science’ has been reached, the next section will apply this definition to the identified ‘crisis of democracy’, to answer whether it truly is a crisis of ‘technocratic tyranny’ caused by scientific expertise, or something else entirely.
Dispelling the myth of the ‘reign of science’
“When scientific imagination and knowledge of Nature's Laws are substituted in our economics for chance, mystery, and magic; when the regulation of our Nation-wide industry is taken out of the hands of quibbling “lawyers”, and nature's forces, resources, and the mechanical instrumentalities for their transformation into human necessaries and desirables are no longer the play-things of money-juggling gamblers, and the products of Nature and Mechanic Arts no longer glut the instinctive craving of Acquisitive Cunning; when this economic childish irrationality is sanely substituted by organized Science, Technology, and specialized Skill coordinated in National Industrial Management, then will begin real civilization, the Age of Social Sanity, - Technocracy.” – William Henry Smyth (Smyth 1919)
When William Henry Smyth conceived the notion of a ‘technocracy’, a society organised by the logics of science, technology and expertise, in a 19th century context, it was quite possible to imagine such a development as positive – utopian even, perhaps. Smyth was writing in a time of rapid and vast progress across natural science disciplines, when the application of the scientific method to questions of mechanical engineering, economic organisation, chemistry, biology, physics, metaphysics and so much more was yielding massive social benefits, promising a radically different future from the feudalism and squalor of the recent past. Science and the application of the scientific method were a (seemingly) limitless panacea.
Since the 19th century, much more has come to be known about the limitations and pitfalls of the scientific method as a tool for furthering human progress. The emancipatory power and utility of newly acquired scientific knowledge is tempered, by the potential for the misuse and misapplication of that knowledge, such as the creation of more deadly biological, chemical, nuclear and conventional weapons of war, the use of new technologies for social control or the unintended consequences of chemicals and manufacturing processes on humans and the biosphere. With the lived-experience of the 20th century and the benefit of much hindsight, we now recognise Smyth’s vision of a world governed by rationality as a dystopia. Indeed, there is something slightly myopic and totalitarian in the apparent wish for one ideology or worldview to govern all of human affairs, as seems to be implied by Smyth’s technocratic vision.
If one accepts the Weberian view of the ‘rationalising’ influence of science on forms of social organisation, it seems quite possible that the inevitable fate of democracy is ‘competitive elitism’
(Held 2006, p. 11), a kind of technocratic future where popular rule is substituted for mere ‘popular oversight’ of a class of expert elites. This is circumstantially corroborated by the features of the ‘crisis of democracy’ thus far identified in my inquiry, of democratic institutions losing authority to act and a growing chasm of accountability between citizens and decision-makers in the policy process. Is this then the origin of todays ‘crisis of democracy’? Has modernity realised Smyth’s vision of a technocratic existence, with the unintended consequences of alienating citizens from modes of governance and from each other? To answer this question, let us compare the principles that define the scientific method, democracy and the identified ‘crisis’ of democracy.
Returning to those key scientific principles articulated by Karl Popper, the first (and most central) element is that of ‘falsifiability’. For any claim or theory to conform to a scientific standard it must concern itself with what kinds of events or occurrences would disprove or ‘falsify’ the prevailing opinion. The corollary to this point is that no scientific facts can be said to be ‘certain knowledge’ (Popper 2002, p. 281). When considering the rhetoric and ideals tied-up with our conceptions of democracy, the notion of identifying a modern falsifiability standard seems absurd. The narrative that we collectively, in established democracies, tell ourselves is a romantic one, based around the absolute moral rectitude of our contemporary conceptions of democracy, the idea of history having led to a pinnacle in civilisation and the unmitigated heroism of the struggle to attain it (Ferguson 2012, p. 324). This pervasive attitude, that ‘history might not have ended; but it should have!’ – is as far as can be from the humility and caution extolled by the creators of modern democracy, like Jefferson, Locke, Paine, Rousseau and Walpole. This relates to the Popperian conception of science, because the absence of a falsifiable standard is one of the key distinctions of ‘historicist’ politics (Popper 1966, p. 22), which seems to be present in the notion that contemporary conceptions of representative democracy are ideal. If contemporary conceptions of representative democracy are elevated to mythic status, they become immutable to critical scrutiny, which aligns with the ‘stasis’ that defines the crisis of democracy.
If in possession of a ‘time-machine’ and the opportunity to speak with one of these progenitors of contemporary notions of democracy, an interesting question one might ask is by what metrics we could judge if their experiment(s) had failed. In other words, was a falsifiability standard conceivable when these ideas were undergoing a renaissance? While no such modes of time travel are forthcoming, I am quite certain that they each-to-a-man could have clearly identified such criteria, because in their time the horrors of the ‘state of nature’ (Hobbes 1996, pp. 86-91) were much closer to lived human experience. Today, in societies that enjoy such stability and material
wealth relative to the recent past, it is harder to conceive of the true meaning of ‘tyranny’ or ‘want’, and thus the significance of popular rule, civil liberties and meaningful democracy as a tool for realising human emancipation is less clear also. When considering if the crisis of democracy is a consequence of a scientific falsifiability standard, the unexamined nature of the democratic governance arrangements under which we live seems to point to the opposite conclusion – that for historical reasons, notions of democracy today exists outside cultural critique, and that the impetus to apply falsifiability standards to our governance arrangements has declined, relative to the recent past. Therefore, in this respect, the modern crisis of democracy does not seem to conform to a vision of realised technocracy.
The second key principle that defines ‘science’ vs ‘non-science’ is scepticism, a general view that claims ought not to be taken at face-value because of a particular belief or dogma, but should instead be subject to some form of systematic inquiry, ideally in the form of an empirical experiment (Popper 2002, pp. 105-107). In the recent past, one of the most widespread lines of argument against expanding the influence of science on society is that overt scepticism risks ‘rationalising away’ that which cannot be understood (particularly with regards to metaphysics, and the possibility of some sort of creator or divinity) at the expense of the transcendent or the numinous (Musgrave 1993, pp. 17-21). While the concept of scientific scepticism pertains to much more than just belief or non-belief in religion, this does provide a starting point for judging if scientific scepticism is the culprit in undermining democracy. The argument goes something like this:
1. Science only concerns itself with the rational and explicable 2. Some phenomena remain inexplicable to us
3. Ignoring the inexplicable, or rationalising it in terms of known phenomena, without empirical basis, is reductive
This relates to the crisis of democracy, because functional democratic politics must naturally reflect the views and opinions of its participants, in terms of ideology and values, in order to retain its value as a means of realising popular rule and exercising political liberties. These normative considerations are not demonstrable or observable in the empiricist scientific manner, and so under a realised technocracy, such important considerations could become marginalised and thereby impede the continued realisation of democratic ideals.
There is a true quality to this argument. Stephen J. Gould’s famous view that science and the transcendent are “non-overlapping magisteria” (Gould 1999, p. 111) is not just a quirk of logic but conforms to the scepticism principle. The history of science is filled with examples of what we believe to be established or known collapsing into disorder, from which better more comprehensive theories can emerge. Take, for example, the discipline of physics, and aether theories. Dating back to the ancient Greeks and formalised as an empirical theory by astronomer Christiaan Huygens, it was believed that there could be no such thing as ‘empty space’, and that all matter and energy propagated through a material that bound the universe together: aether (Swenson 2013, pp. 18-25). This conception of ‘aether’ fell apart in the late 19th century, when two physicists falsified Huygens’ theory (ibid., p. 23), laying the groundwork for later scholars to develop more comprehensive physics theories of relatively, gravitational waves, and so on. Without room for the unknown and the inexplicable, without awareness of possible limits of the explanatory power of our own theories, we risk imbuing the products of science with too high a degree of certainty that crowds out room for better, more comprehensive understanding.
This demonstrates how scepticism could conceivably contribute to a crisis of democracy. Politics is fundamentally concerned with questions of how human beings live together, and human beings do not conform to the image of the perfectly rational ‘homo economicus’ (Thaler 2000). If scientific scepticism reduces the opportunity for legitimate political participation to only the known and the rational, then the potential for innovation and building more comprehensive understanding could be curtailed. Is it radical uncertainty, scepticism and doubt, then, that are paralysing democracy?
The notion that scientific scepticism may have unduly limited the kinds of human experiences relevant to governance and the policy process is not reflected in the empirical reality. Now more than ever, the maxim of the nineteen-sixties – ‘the personal is political’ – is recognisable in the reality of political discourse and the policy-making process, with more opportunities for electoral participation (Dalton & Gray 2003, pp. 31-33), a greater breadth and diversity of opinions considered legitimate and more global interest in popular sovereignty and direct-democratic mechanisms like participatory budgeting, local community planning and political referenda (Buček & Smith 2000, p. 8). The claim of The Crisis of Democracy (Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki 1975) that we are witnessing an “explosion of demands” on the state certainly appears true, with a situation today of more ‘inputs’ into the policy process compared with forty years ago, and more opportunities for exercising political (civil) liberties. So, it appears that scientific
scepticism is not creating a situation of exclusionary democracy, as could be expected in a realised technocracy.
The third and final scientific principle is non-verifiability. In Popperian science, observations are capable of corroborating a theory, not verifying or proving it. No matter how established an opinion, it only takes one case that does not conform to refute a theory in question (Popper 2002, pp. 248-251). In practice this does not mean that every unexpected observation or outlier is given equal weight to established knowledge (because of the possibility of an anomalous observation or error), but it does mean that scientific statements must reflect this epistemic caution, and not claim more certainty or predictive power than can be achieved.
Contrast this entreatment to humility with the development of democracy, characterised by growing non-majoritarian influences on policy outcomes and a more complex set of governance arrangements compared with the ‘standard model’ of representative government. According to the principle of non-verifiability, in the face of changing conditions we would expect to see democracy undergoing efforts to test and corroborate to what extent it is realising popular rule and political liberties. Instead, the challenges of authority and accountability faced in established European democracies are invariably attributed externally, described as the consequences of economic globalisation, or the break-down of conventional party politics (Peters 2018, p. 8; Mair & van Biezen, 2001). By not considering how currently conceived notions of democracy might be shaping their own crisis of democracy, established democracies are erroneously elevating their systems of government to the status of ‘proved knowledge’. Not only does this false certainty reveal the ‘static’ nature of contemporary democratic governance arrangements in the face of challenge, it also fails to conform with the principle of non-verifiability, as would be demanded in a realised form of technocracy.
Having made an attempt to analyse how the features of a technocracy map onto the identified crisis of authority and accountability experienced in many established democracies, it appears that hollowed-out democracy cannot be attributed to an overly rationalising scientific logic or faith in expertise. For this to be the case, one would expect to see governance arrangements constrained by scientific methodology and scepticism, and there is little empirical reason to think that. The current crisis of democracy is therefore the product of something else, which could only be described as scientific if contemporary practices of representative democracy were reflective of the epistemic principles we’ve analysed thus far. Nothing like a reign of science has been brought
into how democratic governance works, because Popperian notions of science acknowledge the role played by practitioners in knowledge creation, and so democratic politics governed in a scientific way would have to acknowledge the role played by both subjective human values and empirical realities in realising democratic ideals.
What is missing from Weber’s and Smyth’s visions of a rationalised, bureaucratised technocratic future is that not all science is a matter of dealing with observation and prediction in a positivist way, and that a true reign of science need not imply the abolition of pre-scientific knowledge or modes of understanding (like the values that are represented by the two central democratic ideals) but is able to incorporate and coexist with other subjective aspects of human nature.
If it is not science and rationalisation that is driving the disaffection of citizens from democracy, what is? The goal of the next two sections is to articulate the proper role of science in democratic politics, before going on to address why ‘unscientific’ political claims are behind the crisis of democracy, rather than some creeping ‘technocratic challenge’ as a result of the rationalising influence of science.
2.5 The correct role of science in a democracy
So far, we have considered how science might conflict with realising democratic ideals of popular rule and political liberties. The vision of a ‘technocratic challenge’ (van Biezen 2014) is an established and popular view of the relation between science and the public sphere. Beyond the sociological tradition of Weber, Schumpeter and the theorised rationalising and bureaucratising influence of expertise on forms of social organisation, it does seem logical that democracy and science could come into conflict. If “democracy is about choice […] unpopular policies are unsustainable” (Alonso 2013, p. 16), which implies that sometimes the empirically corroborated policy option or response to a dilemma will be rejected – dependent on its level of popularity with the public at large. The ideal of democracy at its core concerns itself with what is thought and felt across a population, while science is fundamentally more non-majoritarian and concerned only with what is empirically observed and corroborated. The disconnect between science-led policymaking and the views of the general populace as a cause of declining levels of trust in political decision makers is also identified by contemporary political science scholars (Mair 2013, p. 23; Ruser 2015, p. 89), who emphasise how “technocratic decision making has deepened disenchantment with politics” (Ruser 2015, p. 90).
While it is certainly the case that ‘William Henry Smyth’-type technocratic governance, where all elements of human life are governed by the logic of rationality, would undermine democratic politics, our understanding of what constitutes science, standards of objectivity and the role of pre-scientific values in human affairs have all deepened since the 19th century. As described in section 2.4, science is best understood as a set of values that function as a problem-solving tool for humans to understand and interpret the world, turning observations and data into hypotheses and theories. The modern relation of science to the state and matters of policymaking was developed during the Second World War. In a report compiled for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, scientific progress is described as an ‘endless frontier’ due to the potential scientific capital has in economic and broader spheres of human activity. Scientific knowledge therefore functions as an ultimate good and should be pursued as an end unto itself (Bush 1945). This conception of how science and policy interact, articulated by Vannevar Bush, is also called the ‘linear model of science’, where research is viewed as possessing an objective quality and as directly applicable to societal problems.
