Liberal Democracy 3.0 by Stephen Turner

Liberal Democracy 3.0 by Stephen Turner

Author:Stephen Turner [Turner, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Political Ideologies, Democracy, History & Theory, Social Science, Sociology, General, Essays
ISBN: 9780761954699
Google: g4SZZYGx0TwC
Publisher: SAGE
Published: 2003-06-16T03:35:34+00:00


Commissions and ‘Knowledge Associations’

Of course, one of the striking features of the fact of expertise has been the creation of novel political or quasi-political collective institutions. Advocates of democratic control of science and technological innovation and development implicitly acknowledge the difficulty faced by ordinary citizens in understanding technological issues. Sometimes they have responded to this by scare tactics and simplifications. But other times they have proposed novel institutional devices, such as committees with strong citizen representation, or alternatively, constituency representation structured in such a way that a process of mutual education and persuasion replaces top-down expert pronouncements. The models include councils that might be composed of experts of various kinds as well as representatives of particular interests (such as utility companies or manufacturers whose operations are likely to be subject to regulation) together with ‘ordinary’ citizens. These are forms of representation. Individuals either are taken in some sense to represent simply the category of the ordinary citizen or sometimes specially defined user categories. (For example, in the case of health care advisory committees, senior citizens or recipients of particular kinds of aid.) Sometimes the appointees are citizen activists who are taken to be representatives of larger movements and are paid or unpaid participants in organizations that have as their agenda particular policy stances, such as opposition to genetically engineered food or the unethical treatment of animals (Sclove 1997).

Focusing on these novel forms, however, produces something of an illusion – the illusion that there is something fundamentally novel here. In fact there is not. Delegating powers to a body that claims to represent, or is constituted to represent, is a familiar governmental device. Indeed it is a form of rule: in Rome, as Carl Schmitt pointed out, the institution of the dictator was a legal form, in which an individual was delegated dictatorial powers for a limited period to deal with a particular crisis. In this case the dictator’s commission was a means of preserving the form of state that gave the commission - itself a useful model to keep in mind in what follows. The institutions I will consider here can be understood, loosely, on the model of commissions as well. Three basic types can be distinguished very simply on the basis of their legal status.



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