Information and deliberation in the Covid-19 crisis and in the climate crisis: Why expertocratic practices undermine self-government and compliance

In the Covid-19 pandemic, democracy’s promise to enable well-informed, epistemically “correct” decisions has gained almost unprecedented appeal. In the face of what is effectively a natural disaster, the criteria for success – limiting infections and fatalities while keeping economic damages low – seemed uncontroversial, und the challenge merely one of selecting the right strategies to achieve these ends. Struggling to demonstrate liberal democracy’s superiority over authoritarian regimes like China and populist governments like Donald Trump’s in the US, many European leaders vouched to defer to expert judgment in their decision-making. For example, the Swedish government followed Anders Tegnell’s advice to pursue a strategy of herd immunity, whereas the German chancellor Merkel declared that decisions would follow recommendations from the Leopoldina, a somewhat obscure body of eminent senior scholars. In deferring to experts, what these governments have done in the Covid-19 crisis is what activists and experts alike have called for in the case of another global crisis facing contemporary societies: the climate crisis. While the threat of climate change may be less acutely felt by most people, it remains just as imminent as that of the new coronavirus. In both cases, the apparent need for immediate and resolute decisions seems to leave no time for lengthy discussions and inclusive decision-making processes. In what seems to constitute a state of emergency, calls for “evidence-based” expertocratic decision-making are voiced not only by activists, but also within academia. In this paper, we review and discuss arguments for expertocratic decision-making in times of crisis. Following Cristina Lafont, we argue that the idea that political decision-making can, in the quest for truth, legitimately bypass processes of public opinion and will-formation is normatively problematic from the point of view of a democratic theory that understands democratic government as self-government of citizens. Where governments ask citizens to follow their lead in deferring more or less blindly to expert judgments, they try to take Lafont calls an “expertocratic shortcut”. In the second part of the paper, we show how and why such shortcuts are sociologically likely to cause alienation and reactance, as accountability is lost and the rationale for decisions cannot be retraced. Drawing on experiences in the Covid-19 crisis, the paper shows how expertocratic justifications and shortcuts to decision-making can validate reliance on individual opinion leaders and the purely instrumental use of evidence. In this sense, expertocratic practices can involuntarily create conditions in which conspiracy theories and fake news gain traction and in which compliance with laws and regulations is risked. We thus conclude that if a deliberative democratic system is to live up to its epistemic promises, political decision-making has to be understood and organised as an inclusive, participatory and interactive learning process and must avoid non-democratic shortcuts. While there is room and need for experts and expertise in a deliberative system, their authority and mandate must result from inclusive meta-deliberative processes and remain contestable.