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Introduction: War on expertise – war on culture: understanding the expert-culture boundary in current socio-political landscapes

Anna Durnova and Karel Čada
p. 241-246

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1We live in times when being in rage with expertise has become a legitimate political stance for many citizens. At first sight, the rage seemed like one of those commonly known civil protests: citizens took it to the streets; they signed petitions and used all the usual means of democratic protests. Nevertheless, this time, the target of their rage has neither been politicians nor legal actions but experts. What such a change of target means and what it reveals about the production and acceptance of expertise in current socio-political landscapes worldwide is thus at the heart of this special issue. Across different empirical terrains ranging from ethnic conflicts to environmental disputes and through case studies from all continents around the globe, this special issue invites us to understand the current conflicts around expertise as something deeply entangled with culture, history, and institutional landscapes in which modern government propose their policies.

2Discussing this context of expertise requires, to begin with, some conceptual clarification. Expertise, commonly defined as a specific ‘evidence-based’ knowledge of a field produced by experts, has been valued as the core of modern democratic governments. Democracy requires knowledge, and experts can deliver it. The path of expertise production from scientific ivory towers toward policy advisory institutions and ministries (Fischer, 2009; Weible, 2008) has been traced by policy studies many times to reveal the multiple engagements of different actors around what expertise is, who should deliver it, and how it should be communicated to the public. In these discussions, the coproduction of expertise has been especially highlighted, alerting both scholars and politicians to various mixing of scientific evidence with sociocultural interpretations of that evidence (Jasanoff, 2005; Durnová, 2019). Such mixing is inevitable, so the argument goes and does not mean that expertise would be compromised. Instead, it means openly discussing the various frameworks in which expertise is produced and acknowledged by both the political institutions and the public.

3However, as the policy studies have shown many times, the coproduction of expertise has given rise to distrust in expertise, sometimes by politicians, sometimes by the public, more and more often by both. While distrust in expertise and the critique of its complicity with capitalist order or the criticism of science’s rent-seeking behavior at the expense of public good date back to political debates of the end of the 20th century, the recent forms of distrust in expertise require a deeper analysis. These new forms of doubt started to emerge back in 2016 when the Brexit referendum changed not only the politics of Britain but impacted the way citizens and media discuss the role of expertise in politics (Higgins, 2016). The 2016 Brexit vote was repeatedly cited as an illustration of the dichotomy between 'the people' versus 'experts .'The underlying argument of that dichotomy was that knowledge is placed in the hand of experts who should or need to persuade the public. Other political events, such as Donald Trump’s victory or the Hungarian election that succeeded Brexit from 2016 onward, have been evaluated through this dichotomy. They have marked a momentum of what is now called the post-truth era and have been assessed because of the growing popularity of social media (Sunstein 2017; Nichols, 2017), along with rising economic insecurity and social deprivation, political polarization, and increasing ressentiment toward progressive cultural change (Norris & Inglehart, 2019).

4These developments, as we know, were just a beginning of a much larger trend of distrust in expertise that found its historical peak during the global pandemics in 2020 and 2021. During the pandemic, experts have been given direct voices in consultations, and government bodies have been involved in press conferences more actively than ever before. As a result, the rage against them grew larger and became more intensively linked with the critique of politics and political institutions representing measures proposed or advised by experts. Political institutions fueled this linkage because they used expertise as the uncontestable narrative or as an ultimate argument of why to proceed to another lockdown or continue with testing strategies. Since governments have increasingly performed their actions as based on expertise, the rage against expertise became indistinguishable from the rage against politics. In many countries, such as the US, France, and Austria, people took it to the street to protest the government restrictions while using anti-science narratives. The dichotomy of people against experts received radical forms (Bratich, 2021) and became a usual marker of discussing the polarization of societies.

5This stunning omnipresence of such a critique of expertise in many different countries with different historical developments and political landscapes invites us to step back. While the pandemic might have exposed the critique of expertise at the forefront of political struggles, it is worth looking at the production of expertise as it was designed around the political institutions of modern democratic government. Such a look allows us to analyze the meanings of expertise inside specific social and political environments that such governments have created.

6In this context, Katherine Cramer (2016) points out that people’s distrust of experts is embedded in broader contours of a clash between proponents of liberal cosmopolitanism and defenders of socially conservative values and that we can understand these trends as “a broader reaction against rapid cultural changes that seem to be eroding the basic values and customs of Western societies” (as argue Inglehart & Norris, 2019, p. 47). Liberal democratic political order has been criticized for inducing divides and political controversies in modern societies (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005; Brown, 2015; Hochschild, 2016; Seymour, 2014). For some, the liberal values realize a long-held dream: they can determine the course of their lives, live their sexual identity freely, and alter political decisions through protest. For others, these values are the twilight of civilization because they can no longer understand its social structure: they want clear identities restored, with distinct hierarchies enabling them to follow socially and culturally prescribed patterns.

7Furthermore, as Cramer (2016) clearly showed, many people feel a sense of disconnection from liberal institutions of science, which were perceived as members of another out-group – inefficient and guilty by association with the government. It has been closely connected with changing society’s perception of science. While post-war critics, as Eyal (2019) argues, emphasized the risks of technocratic rule by experts, they missed other effects of this peculiar friendship between science and politics. For many people, science has become polluted and infected by politics. “The “scientization of politics” inadvertently causes the “politicization of science,” and the two processes reinforce and entangle one another in an unstable, crisis-prone mixture.” (Eyal, 2019, .p 97)

8While we see, on the one hand, the arrogant experts, detached from the world of ordinary people and collaborating with political power, we observe the image of an ignorant public that can get itself misinformed through carefully tailored misinformation campaigns on the other. Both images are deeply emotional, and both recall dominant cultural representations that are mobilized as argumentations of justification structures for a specific socio-political issue.

9In public policy scholarship, there have been, in general, two ways of approaching expertise that have marked the development of this special issue. The dominant void in policy sciences has been identifying and measuring deficiency of policy knowledge and proposing models and tools to evacuate that deficiency (Perl, Howlett, & Ramesh, 2018). Another strand, represented mainly by critical policy studies and creating the intellectual frame for this special issue, has been investigating what is constituted as policy knowledge and for what reasons. These works have highlighted that expertise is, in modern democracies, perceived as the legitimate vehicle of social change (Hawkesworth, 2012). For that reason, analyzing expertise implies investigating its social robustness (Nowotny, 2003), which implies that expertise is coproduced along with societal and political contexts through which knowledge is asked for as expertise (Jasanoff, 2004). Such understanding of expertise has spurred interest in analyzing knowledge in policy advice (Voß & Freeman, 2016). It has inspired analyses on how expertise is framed (Braun & Kropp, 2010). In these works, at the same time, expertise has been understood through the legitimacy accorded by the public (Fischer, 2009), involving different types of knowledge (Newman, 2016).

10Such critical perspective brings forward 'culture' and 'cultural context' as the analytic lens that can bring us nearer to the roots of the conflicts around expertise. Expertise has permanently been embedded in culture, and policy debates have involved cultural bargaining over values and ideas (Stone, 2002). To explore links between culture and policy expertise means to reframe the traditional approach to culture in public policy (see also Douglas & Wildavsky, 1983, Fischer, 2009, Schram, 2012) and to offer a more dynamic notion of culture.

11In this issue, culture is understood as a system of narration and meanings that can be retrieved and explained through interpretive analysis. Culture is subsequently conceived here as an interdependent sociopolitical structure that gives sense to our everyday practices (Alexander & Smith, 2001) and makes the assigned responsibilities, duties, and regulations legitimate. To problematize culture in this way means to focus on the way actors are given a voice in a debate. This perspective feeds into the question of how the traditional power of professional elites is being challenged through the use of lay knowledge or citizen knowledge (Braun et al., 2010; Feindt & Oels, 2005; Griggs & Howarth, 2004, 2017) and how values and moral dilemmas necessarily enter the debate on expertise.

12All the papers presented in this issue thus advance an interpretive understanding of ‘culture’; as a dynamic site of meanings, narratives, and discursive practices that are negotiated to legitimize or abandon values and beliefs in a society. Such analysis aims to develop a deeper understanding of narratives, meanings, and discursive practices, through that citizens articulate the various contestations in diverse policy fields. At the same time, the discussion provided in this special issue goes beyond the specificities of the case studies inviting us to conceptualize understanding of the culture-expertise boundary further.

13Policy expertise on topics such as environment, gender, sexuality, or health steps in the terrain of everyday moralities, frustrations, desires, and emotions. It prompts us to reconsider the position of policy expertise within the current democratic governments (see Parkinson & Mansbridge, 2012). Furthermore, how policy expertise is communicated and the epistemic authority of policy expertise itself. We are thus interested in papers putting policy controversies in their cultural context, examining roles of moral values and expertise, and studying lessons that can be drawn from these controversies for policy studies. The contributions in this issue thus aim at advancing and furthering the understanding of culture, expertise, and their interaction in policymaking.

14Paterson and Scala (in this issue), for example, use the post-truth era as a contextual factor in how gender expertise is constituted, challenged, and defended in Canadian policy discourse in the Canadian context. Using post-structural policy analysis, the authors show how gender expertise is often represented in mainstream media as either a "political intervention" or as a "technical tool," both of which reinforce the image of policy expertise as politically neutral, which, in the past, have been used to justify the exclusion of “other” forms of knowledge. The analysis helps them to show that gender expertise and feminism have been distanced from each other in policy expertise, contributing to the erasure of feminist knowledge in policy contexts.

15Skilling, Barett, and Kurian (in this issue) analyze a case set in a small coastal town in New Zealand where the local community expressed concern over the degradation of a river-mouth estuary caused by catchment management works in the 1950s to support the farming sector. Their analysis shows that the dispute between "the people" and "the experts" reveals a moment when competing blocs drew on specific grammars of justification to align their claims with the collective good.

16Oman (in this issue) proposes an innovative re-performance methodology to understand expertise as cultural production. The author brings forward the contestation over data and everyday knowledge and suggests re-performance as a methodology that recognizes complexity in incorporating the social practices of everyday knowledge and expertise in a framework for policy studies. The focus on data-in-research as performative reveals the effects in and on the cultures they describe.

17Mohammadi and Durnova (in this issue) propose "civil sexuality" as a conceptual lens to discuss how expertise uses culture to frame a policy and support its legitimacy. In the analysis of the Iranian policy debate, the authors show that despite a progressive view on sexual health – demonstrated through sexual education, unprecedented acknowledgment of women's sexual desire, and encouragement of an active sexual role the Islamic Republic is implementing an illiberal family program that serves its recent pronatalist and nationalist agenda.

18Manga Edimo (in this issue) uses the Anglophone crisis in Cameroon as a showcase to discuss the cultural boundaries of policy expertise. With the help of the postcolonial perspective, the authors discuss the role of historical context in creating ‘hybrid’ cultural contexts, ‘hybrid’ institutional designs, and ‘virtual’ discursive spaces which interact in both the production and the acceptance of the policy expertise.

19Čada and Honová ((in this issue) identify the discursive and rhetorical resources used by policy actors to maintain their credibility and legitimacy. They show how different realms of expertise produce different ways of corroboration and factual accounts – from data evidence to impartiality and reputation to biographical experience and reflection. The authors opt for a more nuanced approach to how involved actors argue and what rhetorical strategies are relevant in different contexts.

20We argue that expertise needs to be seen as part of these multiple meanings of culture and invite thus to see current conflicts as a form of a culture war. The papers in this issue thus address policy controversies in their cultural context, examine the roles of morality and values in expertise, or uncover how political conflicts over moral values of society are being portrayed as conflicts over expertise. We believe that extending the analysis of expertise with a clear focus on culture helps us at the same time to trace better current conflict over expertise.

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References

Bibliographical reference

Anna Durnova and Karel Čada, Introduction: War on expertise – war on culture: understanding the expert-culture boundary in current socio-political landscapesInternational Review of Public Policy, 3.3 | 2021, 241-246.

Electronic reference

Anna Durnova and Karel Čada, Introduction: War on expertise – war on culture: understanding the expert-culture boundary in current socio-political landscapesInternational Review of Public Policy [Online], 3.3 | 2021, Online since 30 December 2021, connection on 16 April 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/irpp/2548; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/irpp.2548

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About the authors

Anna Durnova

Department of Sociology, University of Vienna, Austria

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Karel Čada

Charles University, Czech Republic

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