Expert-citizen Relationships in Deliberative Systems

The epistemic dimension of deliberative democracy emphasizes the truth-tracking property of democratic deliberation (Min and Wong 2018). Through deliberation among a diverse group of people, the good arguments, interpretations, and information can be singled out from the bad ones, producing synergies for problem-solving and unanimous consensus for decisions. It is also possible that, upon hearing the perspectives of others, a person is convinced to take up new preferences and opinions that he/she has never thought about (Estlund and Landemore 2018). From this perspective, deliberative democracy is justified because democratic deliberation tends to generate outcomes that “track the truth.” In the real world, there are challenges in the epistemic process that preclude a deliberative system from properly fulfilling its epistemic function, which in turn compromises the normative desirability of deliberative democracy. One challenge in the epistemic process of deliberative systems is the expert-citizen relationship. One of the paradoxes of democracy is that self-government requires that citizens make consequential decisions on many candidates and issues; yet, research in political behavior shows that citizens are irrational, apathetic, and incompetent. How should the relationships between experts and citizens be arranged from the perspective of deliberative democracy? This question has attracted some attention with the proposal of several models of expert-citizen relationships (Christiano 2012; Moore 2016; Chambers 2017). However, the debate is still largely unsettled. In this paper, we suggest a normative condition for adjudicating between models of expert-citizen relationships in a deliberative system. Drawing on the recent discussions on Cristina Lafont’s Democracy without Shortcuts, we argue that expertise in a deliberative system is acceptable only if citizens are not required to blindly defer to the recommendations of experts. Our argument consists of five steps. First, we situate the paper in the broader context of the literature in democracy and expertise by outlining normative and descriptive justifications of expertise. Second, we consider a dilemma for epistemic democracy and explain how its three desiderata – (i) truth-tracking; (ii) democratic inclusion; and (iii) non-deference – are in tension with each other. Third, we argue that the best way for escaping the dilemma from the perspective of deliberative democracy is to reformulate the condition of non-deference. Fourth, we develop a normative standard for adjudicating expert-citizen relationships in a deliberative system, and demonstrate how the standard can be used to comparatively assess the desirability of three such models, i.e., Thomas Christiano’s “specialized deliberation,” Alfred Moore’s “distributed deliberation,” and Simone Chambers’ “feedback loop.” Fifth, we outline some lessons learnt and a way moving forward. The upshot of this paper is that the division of deliberative labor between citizens and experts is constitutive of a healthy deliberative system.