The Political Literacy of Experts

• Author: Andreas Eriksen
• Published date: 01 March 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/raju.12269
• Date: 01 March 2020

© 2020 The Authors. Ratio Juris published by University of Bologna and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution

and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Ratio Juris. Vol. 33 No. 1 March 2020 (82–97)

NOTES • DISCUSSIONS • BOOK REVIEWS

The Political Literacy of Experts*

ANDREAS ERIKSEN

1. Introduction

Expert agencies are entrusted with public authority in virtue of their technical

competence. Areas such as environmental protection, food safety, or market stability

are regulated with the backing of professional judgments regarding complex techni-

cal matters. But there is a clear political dimension to the work; regulation involves

particular ways of framing problems and solutions. The very practice of regulation

is bound up with evaluative concepts that are “essentially contested” (Gallie 1956)

or “interpretive” (Dworkin 2011, chap. 8). Terms such as proportionality, reasonable

precaution, or acceptable risk cannot be operationalized without taking a stand on eval-

uative matters on which there is reasonable disagreement. Moreover, expert agencies

must apply these concepts in regulatory fields of heated political debate, concerning

issues such as sustainability, security, and social justice. This paper seeks a model for

capturing what it means for expert agencies to exercise political judgment responsi-

bly. How can they engage with political values reflectively yet in a nonpartisan way?

The proposal developed in this paper is that expert agencies must possess a form

of “political literacy.” This approach departs from typical ways of connecting the

terms literacy and competent rule. Traditionally, the connection has been made as part

of some account of the deficiency of the public. The lack of “scientific literacy” in

the general public has long been deemed a problem for the democratic quality of

political life and the legitimacy of regulatory policies (Miller 1983). Similarly, political

literacy is commonly taken to refer to a deficit on the part of the public: “Although

the explanation of political literacy is unclear, political scientists agree that the extent

of political literacy among mass publics is only modest” (Cassel and Lo 1997, 331).

* This paper is part of the REFLEX project (Research Council of Norway, project no. 250436). The

work has been helped by discussions with Erik Oddvar Eriksen, Ben Baumberg Geiger, Torbjørn

Gundersen, Alexander Katsaitis, and Ainar Miyata-Sturm. Earlier versions of the paper have

been presented at the Counterfactual Union in Oslo, and at workshops organized by the

Evidence, Causation & Argumentation project in Helsinki and the EUREX project in Oslo. I am

grateful to the organizers and the audiences. The two anonymous reviews for the journal have

contributed to extensive improvements.

83

Ratio Juris, Vol. 33, No. 1 © 2020 The Authors. Ratio Juris published by University of Bologna and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

The Political Literacy of Experts

This is the sort of claim that is taken to have fundamental normative consequences in

books such as Against Democracy (Brennan 2016).

This paper develops a conceptual tool for turning the literacy question around:

Expert agencies wield regulatory powers largely under the guise of scientific author-

ity, but do they have the political literacy needed to pursue their goals in a legitimate

manner? Importantly, the idea of political literacy to be developed does not simply

refer to possession of a stock of independent facts. Rather, it follows the lead of theo-

rists who have gestured towards political literacy as a “moral competence” (Goodin

2003, 2). Here, literacy is not primarily about having the right answers, but about

the ability to form political judgments responsibly. The methodological approach of

the paper is related to “institutional” or “practice-sensitive” readings of John Rawls

(cf. James 2005; Sangiovanni 2008). That is, certain basic features of existing insti-

tutions or practices are taken as given (in this case, public authority exercised by

expert agencies), and the question is what it takes for them to be political in the

right way. In light of a practice-sensitive approach, it is to be expected that the form

of public reason served by political literacy may diverge from standards of Rawls’s

(2005, 442–3) “public political forum.” Rawls explained public reason in terms of a

principle of reciprocity—justifications must be acceptable to all reasonable members

of the community—that may be appropriate in forums that concern constitutional es-

sentials and matters of basic justice. The decisions of expert agencies, by contrast, are

often advisory, open to ongoing contestation, preconstrained by rights, and highly

targeted. Such factors seem to mitigate the need justify decisions by appeal to a com-

mon reason. Moreover, the political aspects of expert agency work are intertwined

with technical considerations that flout accessibility criteria that govern the public

political forums of basic justice. For example, Rawls (2001, 90) explicitly excludes

elaborate economic theories of general equilibrium from the content of public reason

if these are in dispute.

The account of political literacy to be developed here is not about shying away

from contestedness but about being able to recognize and deal appropriately with

the contested political values at stake in the public missions we entrust to experts.

The mandates of expert agencies will require them to appeal to controversial claims,

and to some extent this passes the buck of legitimation to the delegating authorities.

However, such factors clearly do not erase the need for expert agencies to deal with

values in a mode that is structured by some form of public reason; the decisions of

expert agencies must be justifiable in nonpartisan and sufficiently accessible ways,

even though they reach beyond what is acceptable to all reasonable citizens.

As developed here, political literacy is a tripartite capacity that enables expert

agencies (1) to be aware of the intrinsic political contestedness of the concepts they

operate with, (2) to recognize diverging conceptions as belonging to shared para-

digms of value, and (3) to let the specification of political values be guided by the

intentions of the mandate. It is a capacity we would not require of citizens as such,

but rather an expectation of institutions tasked with carrying out public mandates.

The case of expert agencies is particularly important because the political nature

of their work is often obscured by a technical façade.1 As illustrative examples, the

1 A large literature is devoted to explaining how political values are intertwined in subtle ways

with the more scientific features of expertise and how findings are framed to suit agendas. For

a clear overview and critical discussion, see Heazle, Kane, and Patapan (2016, esp. 6).