Based on in-depth studies of the relationship between expertise and democracy in Europe, this book presents a new approach to how the un-elected can be made safe for democracy. It addresses the challenge of reconciling modern governments’ need for knowledge with the demand for democratic legitimacy. Knowledge-based decision-making is indispensable to modern democracies. This book establishes a public reason model of legitimacy and clarifies the conditions under which unelected bodies can be deemed legitimate as they are called upon to handle pandemics, financial crises, climate change and migration flows. Expert bodies are seeking neither re-election nor popularity, they can speak truth to power as well as to the citizenry at large. They are unelected, yet they wield power. How could they possibly be legitimate? This book is of key interest to scholars and students of democracy, governance, and more broadly to political and administrative science as well as the Science Technology Studies (STS).

Technocratic law and governance is under fire. Not only populist movements have challenged experts. NGOs, public intellectuals and some academics have also criticized the too close relation between experts and power. While the amount of power gained by experts may be contested, it is unlikely and arguably undesirable that experts will cease to play an influential role in contemporary regulatory regimes. This book focuses on whether and how experts involved in policymaking can and should be held accountable. The book, divided into four parts, combines theoretical analysis with a wide variety of case studies expounding the challenges of holding experts accountable in a multilevel setting. Part I offers new perspectives on accountability of experts, including a critical comparison between accountability and a virtue-ethical framework for experts, a reconceptualization of accountability through the rule of law prism and a discussion of different ways to operationalize expert accountability. Parts I–IV, organized around in-depth case studies, shed light on the accountability of experts in three high-profile areas for technocratic governance in a European and global context: economic and financial governance, environmental/health and safety governance, and the governance of digitization and data protection. By offering fresh insights into the manifold aspects of technocratic decisionmaking and suggesting new avenues for rethinking expert accountability within multilevel governance, this book will be of great value not only to students and scholars in international and EU law, political science, public administration, science and technology studies but also to professionals working within EU institutions and international organizations.

Sean Gailmard is the Judith E. Gruber Associate Professor in the Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. John W. Patty is associate professor of political science at Washington University.

"In the early 1990s, a small group of "AIDS denialists," including a University of California professor named Peter Duesberg, argued against virtually the entire medical establishment's consensus that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was the cause of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Science thrives on such counterintuitive challenges, but there was no evidence for Duesberg's beliefs, which turned out to be baseless. Once researchers found HIV, doctors and public health officials were able to save countless lives through measures aimed at preventing its transmission"--

‘Scientific advice to politics’, the ‘nature of expertise’, and the ‘relation between experts, policy makers, and the public’ are variations of a topic that currently attracts the attention of social scientists, philosophers of science as well as practitioners in the public sphere and the media. This renewed interest in a persistent theme is initiated by the call for a democratization of expertise that has become the order of the day in the legitimation of research funding. The new significance of ‘participation’ and ‘accountability’ has motivated scholars to take a new look at the science – politics interface and to probe questions such as "What is new in the arrangement of scientific expertise and political decision-making?", "How can reliable knowledge be made useful for politics and society at large, and how can epistemically and ethically sound decisions be achieved without losing democratic legitimacy?", "How can the objective of democratization of expertise be achieved without compromising the quality and reliability of knowledge?" Scientific knowledge and the ‘experts’ that represent it no longer command the unquestioned authority and public trust that was once bestowed upon them, and yet, policy makers are more dependent on them than ever before. This collection of essays explores the relations between science and politics with the instruments of the social studies of science, thereby providing new insights into their re-alignment under a new régime of governance.

Experts and Democratic Legitimacy challenges the technocratic reading of expert bodies, such as central banks, advisory committees and regulatory agencies. Expert contributors ask in what way expert bodies are subject to some of the key pressures in contemporary governance, such as democratisation, politicisation and expertisation. Based on empirical studies, the book traces the multiple social ties of expert bodies and refines the common perception of expert bodies as ‘de-politicised’ institutions that are detached from political interference and societal input. It further theorises the tension and reconcilability between reliable, independent expert knowledge on the one hand and the need for accountability and legitimacy in modern policy-making on the other hand. Refining the detached, de-politicised image of non-majoritarian institutions, Experts and Democratic Legitimacy will be of great interest to scholars of European studies, political and social theory, modern governance and policy-making. This book was originally published as a special issue of European Politics and Society.

This book re-imagines expert authority for an age of critical citizens, and shows how expertise can contribute in a deliberative system.