Antoine Levie speaks to Zeynep Pamuk, Associate Professor in Contemporary Political Theory at Oxford University and Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College, about her recent book ‘Politics and Expertise’.
By predicting 500,000 deaths for the UK under a scenario of no government intervention or change in social behaviour, Imperial College London’s model of the potential impact of Covid-19 played a significant role in pushing the UK government to lockdown. Yet, the model had to make ad hoc guesses for key assumptions such as excluding the potential efficiency of quick testing, contact tracing and isolation. In focusing on deaths rather than more granular measures such as quality adjusted life years (QALYs), it was also, as Pamuk explains in our interview, ‘not taking into account any broader health effects like depression rates, missed surgeries, [… and] domestic violence.’ Although the scientific enterprise involved value-laden decisions, large uncertainties, and potential disagreements at many stages, these factors were largely kept from public media and debate prior to the decision to lockdown. Effectively, then, non-elected experts limited the scope of democratic decision-making when responding to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Politics and Expertise, published in 2021, grew out of Pamuk’s DPhil work at Harvard and postdoc research at St John’s College, Oxford, on the tension between science and democracy. The book, Pamuk tells me in our interview, starts from the vantage point that ‘we need a general framework for improving the debate around [scientifically complex] issues [such as climate change], because they increasingly keep cropping up. Politics is very expert-driven and expert-dependent in the modern world.’ Increasing the number of institutions that sit at the nexus of civil society and expert-led government process is critical, Pamuk told me, because they can clarify the process of making scientific decisions, as well as elucidate the process of science, thereby helping the lagging trust in science.
In this vein, the two main policy proposals Pamuk lays out in Politics and Expertise are minority opinions on advisory committees and the science court. The former entails changing the format of scientific advisory committees from a unanimous recommendation to the possibility of including a minority opinion. The goal is to bring greater transparency to the inevitable uncertainties, dissent, and value-laden judgments, as well as to prevent a false impression of consensus. The latter proposes a science court formed by a citizen jury to give non-binding advice on a policy recommendation involving significant science, on issues such as whether wolves should be reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park.
Pamuk believes that there is a tension within the current division of labour in a democracy between politicians, who make the value-laden decisions, and scientists, who provide the evidence and facts. She argues that scientists reach conclusions based on a wide range of methodological and nominative frameworks that have implications for how politicians make decisions. Pamuk gives the example of public health epidemiology versus clinical epidemiology in her book. While the former accepts a broad array of data and methodological tools, the latter maintains the high standard of randomised experiments.
Underneath this difference in standards of evidence lurk normative judgments: in public health epidemiology, there is an inclination to accept greater risks of false positives (results falsely indicating infection), in the hopes of intervening before a disease becomes dangerous. Whereas in clinical epidemiology, there is more wariness of misguided intervention. The Imperial College London model predicting 500,000 deaths is a quintessential example of public health epidemiology, and based on their standards of evidence, could serve as evidence supporting a lockdown. From the standards of evidence of clinical health epidemiology, the model did not warrant a lockdown recommendation, because of the ad hoc assumptions.
Compounding these underlying value judgments are the decisions that scientific advisory bodies have to make when giving recommendations based on unanimous agreement. For advice to be useful, it must be actionable and tailored to specific political goals. Yet, scientists are supposed to be purely neutral. Pamuk’s ingenious solution to this problem is to have public majority and minority opinions from scientific advisory bodies, akin to the U.S. Supreme Court. This allows for the inevitable uncertainties, dissent, and value-laden judgments to be made clear, and to prevent a false impression of consensus. This is useful not only for expert advice to the government, but also for watchdogs, advocacy bodies, and journalists. To defend this idea, Pamuk gives the historical example of a council of engineers in Napoleon’s time who were asked to give a unanimous recommendation but could not seem to decide between two designs for given canal, with many hesitating for the riskier option. This example serves to highlight that a search for consensus in science may at times present more challenges than solutions.
While minority opinions in advisory bodies highlight the inherent uncertainty and disagreement in the scientific process, their presence does not address the lack of citizen empowerment and input. Members of advisory bodies are not elected and, thus, do not represent the general population. Similarly, politicians’ decisions on science-based policy need to be held more accountable by the general public, argues Pamuk. For this problem, she resurrects an idea from the 1960s: the science court. Her flagship idea is that citizens can request to have a court provide advice on a specific policy issue (that will usually have a yes/no answer available).
Historically, the idea received broad support in the 1970s, with President Ford creating a task force to evaluate its feasibility. In 1976, the state of Minnesota implemented a science court for the decision of the installation of a high transmission line across farmers’ lands. However, the court was designed to separate facts and values, focusing on the facts by having only scientists as judges. The farmers rejected the court, seeing it as a ploy to give power to non-elected experts. Pamuk’s conception of a science court would preserve the adversarial proceedings but explicitly not separate facts and values. To do so, she prefers using a citizen jury that gives non-binding advice on policy questions.
Based on the literature of citizen conventions, Pamuk proposes that citizens should have greater agenda-setting power in order to prevent experts from framing the debate too much. Rather than reinforcing science sceptics, Pamuk contends that the science court could be the chance to challenge them in a fair context. The overall advantage of the science court is that it democratises expert input, all the while avoiding the disadvantages of uninformed public opinion.
For Pamuk, having a purely advisory scientific court is a trade-off between empowering a few citizens but not giving them too much power as some sortition democracy proposals do, where a lottery decides on a random group of citizens receiving decision-making power. ‘I was hesitant, because I felt that the mass public shouldn’t be disempowered in this way, by giving a randomly selected body a lot of power’, Pamuk told me. She thus took the risk that her proposals may not be as influential, especially as the science court is non-binding.
While democratic conventions like the French convention on climate can be seen as less effective, as many of their proposed measures did not get adopted, Pamuk holds a more optimistic view. In our interview, she explains that ‘the [the French convention of climate] actually had a lot of impact, [and that] it was more radical than people expected. They had proposals that went beyond what the trajectories seem to be in the political moment.’ Yet, she does admit that, as Macron’s broken promise to bring all proposals to the legislature highlights, ‘we can definitely think of institutions that will make the commitment of politicians more serious to a body like this so it’s not window dressing.’
My main objection to Pamuk’s proposals is that they do not sufficiently take the post-truth world into account. Her policies seem miss the mark in addressing what in my view is the central problem: a lack of trust in scientific consensus. Large, successful misinformation campaigns have misled the public about problems where there is scientific consensus, such as climate change. Pamuk’s policies primarily focus instead on the problem that current scientific communication does not empower the reader enough or communicate the uncertainty of the science.
One element of Pamuk’s solution to the misinformation problem is for scientific organisations to have online platforms to flag misinformation and organise rebuttal campaigns. Her policy proposals of the science court and the majority and minority opinions in scientific committees could increase trust in science, but at the same time could also lend legitimacy to extreme views. Her proposals are laudable initiatives that do not address the core issues of the tension between science and democracy today.
Though Pamuk understands that there are large issues with misinformation, exacerbated by social media algorithms, she argued in our interview that the narrative of this criticism is too simple: misinformation and lack of empowerment in communication are not completely unrelated. It’s not just a matter of ‘[fixing] the communication and [educating] the people’. It is too optimistic to think that the solution is simply to convince people that scientists want to help and have good intentions. She argues for greater scrutiny as to whether scientists are really helping people because there are instances when scientists get the science wrong or have contested values. Furthermore, ‘we have to ask why is the public believing these people writing op-eds in The Wall Street Journal [doubting climate science] instead of the messages coming from the mainstream scientific institutions.’
Pamuk explains that ‘there’s something about reaching people through their values and understanding how science is shaped by values that may be alien to them. This unfamiliarity is very important to getting the correct message across.’ She adds that misinformation campaigns exploit this tension by understanding people better: getting to their fears and values, as exemplified by Trump successfully speaking the language of ordinary people. Yet, while misinformation is an issue, there’s a deeper problem with trust in science. She thinks this can be traced to the role of values and uncertainty in the way science is done, and how science arrives at the political stage already seemingly objective: scientists give a specific policy advice based on ‘the facts’. It’s too late by then to draw people in through communication to persuade them how science is addressing their concerns, such as their worries about the potential side effects of vaccines.
All in all, Pamuk gives a compelling philosophical argument for increasing the institutions that are at the nexus of citizen civil society and the expert-led decision-making processes of government. She bridges the gap between the growing literature on values in science and the assumption of neutrality inherent in the division of labour between politicians making value judgments and (neutral) scientists making factual judgments. It’s convincingly argued with analytic precision, all while being readable.
It is too rare to find such a systemic view on the issues, that both deals with the complexity of science relatively fairly, and makes a strong political theory argument. She also looks both at science for policy and policy for science interdependently, by for instance looking at the impact that research findings have in framing future policy debates. One gap in her analysis is a lack of focus on how to respond to the growing share of privately funded research, such as through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The open question is whether her ideas will work. Only time will tell. Promisingly, she highlights in our interview that ‘I wanted to stay close to practice, stay close to real politics, to real institutions. It’s a bit difficult to bridge this gap between the abstract philosophy, the political philosophy and the real world, but that has always been what I strove to do in the book.’ She has discussed her work with, among others, the Danish National Ethics Council and the EU scientific advisory body.