Resistance to Expertise: Understanding Citizens' Emotional and Epistemic Challenges to Authority

Across Western democracies, there is great concern among elites about misinformation and the perception that large groups of citizens have turned against science and expertise. Much of this debate is framed as a question of being either for or against science, but often with little insight into why some people dissent from expert-driven messages on issues like health, vaccines, climate or economics. This paper uses a large body of qualitative interview data to develop a better and more nuanced understanding of why some citizens resist, reject or dissent. We use a Foucault-inspired conceptual framework to understand the different types and emotional expressions of resistance that citizens may use. These range all the way from public protests and rejections to more subtle forms of ambivalence, but as it comes across in our rich interview data, resistance or dissent is also very much a way for people to legitimize and explain their views on following science. Our motivation for connecting these empirical cases to this more general framework is to demonstrate that there are more general issues of power and knowledge at stake in these very specific situations rather than just the specifics of issues like vaccine uptake. People may base their motivations on very specific previous experiences, but they nevertheless always seem to understand that there is also a more generic authority struggle involved. The paper present four aspects of resistance to expertise. The first is how citizens measure how and when they can 'safely' choose to ignore expert-driven advice and when they feel less competent to do so. The second is citizens' work to establish a zone of epistemological autonomy, a widespread motivation that we found in our data leading some citizens to do their own research in order to control their own dependence on experts. The third emphasizes a sense of control as a crucial mechanism for navigating the world and is closely tied to engaging with specific media and expert advice, which helps individuals maintain a feeling of confidence but can also lead to resisting authorities because “I know my stuff”. Finally, in the fourth subsection, we look more closely at the forms of 'informed refusal' among some of the most skeptic respondents we talked to. Our paper contributes to understandings of resistance and dissent in modern democracies from a citizens' point of view, shedding light on lay citizens' emotional distancing from experts and elites, while also addressing the methodological challenges involved in capturing and interpreting these complex dynamics.