Examining state reform in Estonia: bridging democracy and technocracy in policy argumentation

One of the important domains of knowledge in governance is related to rationalising and legitimating policy proposals and reforms. In the following paper we will investigate the State Reform initiatives in Estonia, i.e. an overhaul of national politics and governance arrangements as proposed by various political initiatives during the last decade. This provides an opportunity to analyze how the contemporary state is constructed in terms of governing, democracy, and the state-citizen relations. Contemporary democratic ideas about more open and participatory governing practices that could create wider understanding and public interest in policy making often clash with managerial expectations and practices. There is a growing distrust towards political institutions and decreasing political participation witnessed in many democratic countries (Hay, 2007; Norris, 2011; Papadopoulos, 2013 etc.). Therefore, the approaches that would help to engage citizens are timely. The understandable strategy would be to synthesise the democratic and technocratic approaches and it could be argued that these do not directly contradict each other. But there is an implicit danger in undermining legitimacy in case these two sides are brought together in a way that argumentation loses its inner logic. Reconciling democratic legitimacy and efficiency remains a manifold challenge (e.g. Blühdorn 2009, 2013). Since the argumentative turn (Dryzek, 1990; Fischer; Forester 1993) there has been a widespread understanding that more than by instrumental rationalities, policy-making is affected and shaped by the complex preferences, motives, actors, internal and external influences in the processes of dialogic exchange. Argumentation can be seen as the central element to policy-making with its structured logic of reasoning and explanations (Stone 2002; Fischer, Gottweis, 2012). This is understandably a subject to empirical examination in combination with interpretative exploration. In the paper we examine the Estonian state reform proposals broadly based on Toulmin (1958; 2003) model. We will analyse the explanatory notes of the Estonian state reform proposals identifying how the deliberative and technocratic approaches are conceptualised and articulated and map the logic of explanation for the proposed policy alternative. The notions of politicization and depoliticization help to interpret the wider framing of the policy. By this logical-inductive approach we attempt to map different rationalities behind such governance innovation as a state reform and find pathways to bring different aspirations, democratic and technocratic, together in policy argumentation.