Science, democracy, and the terms of engagement
Many political debates today repeatedly call for us to rely more on scientific evidence. But people tend to forget that political decisions in a democracy are subject to negotiation and can’t simply rely on research. Science can explain the world, but it can’t tell us how we should live in it.
Everything’s healthier and more efficient when the IT geek takes charge in the kitchen. Or perhaps not? | Illustration: Simon Landrein
Few phrases have strained the relationship between science and democracy over the past decade as much as ‘follow the science’. Its appeal is obvious. Where the evidence is clear, reasonable politicians and citizens should defer.
A cost, however, is also becoming evident. From contested Covid-19 directives to citizen backlash against net-zero climate policies and political pressure on research funding, the strain on the relationship between science and democracy has become visible across Europe and beyond.
The problem is twofold. ‘The’ science hardly ever exists, and one cannot simply ‘follow it’. ‘Science’ is best understood as the practice of the scientific method, a disciplined way of testing hypotheses against evidence and revising them when new evidence demands it.
It is precisely by refuting earlier theories that scientific knowledge advances. Treating science as monolithic misrepresents how it works and invites disillusionment with societal progress and advancement.
Politics makes for winners and losers
‘Follow the science’ also collapses a distinction that modern democracies would be well served to preserve. Science can help us understand the world and how it works: how fast the planet is warming, how a virus spreads, how monetary policy moves through an economy. It can describe how groups behave and which trade-offs they may be willing to accept.
But no kind of scientific inquiry can tell us how a society ought to live and which policies to choose. Choice is the realm of politics. Political choices, by their nature, create winners and losers. Treating them as scientific questions does not give science more authority. On the contrary, it can seriously undermine public trust in science.
When scientific authority is invoked to invalidate opposing perspectives in debates surrounding policy choices, to narrow the circle of legitimate voices, or to recast political goals as objective truths, it can hollow out the deliberation and pluralism upon which a healthy democracy depends. Citizens will begin to challenge this state of affairs and the institutions that perpetuate it.
My research with colleagues across European democracies shows that, although citizens value the independence and credentials of experts, they disapprove of their involvement in policy when it does not align with their own interests and values. This is not a citizen deficit to be corrected through better communication; it is a predictable response to a difficult relationship between science and politics.
Science can also confer legitimacy
And yet none of this is an argument against science in democracy. The opposite is true: scientific knowledge is part of the democratic promise itself. It confers what might be called ‘epistemic legitimacy’: the legitimacy that comes from a political system’s pursuit of sound policy, capable of producing good outcomes for its citizens. Democracies that cannot draw on scientific knowledge, or that reject it on principle, forfeit part of what makes them work.
This is why the opposite reflex – that scientists should “stick to the facts” and leave politics alone – does not solve the problem either. In fact, citizens are not rejecting scientific expert advice in policy matters. A recent 68-country study found that large majorities across the world trust scientists and want them to be more engaged with policy, not less. The problem is not so much that citizens cannot tolerate scientific voices in political debate and more about whether political institutions are able to integrate them well in the process of policy-making.
The international signals of the past few years from the US make this urgent. Attacks on the independence of central banks, national science agencies, and international advisory bodies are not merely attacks on particular positions. What is at stake in these attacks is not the prestige of science but the capacity of democracies to govern well. They are attacks on the institutional infrastructure that allows expert judgment to inform democratic decision-making without being captured by the electoral cycle. Democracies need that infrastructure.
The democratic promise is twofold: ‘government by the people, and government for the people’. Scientific expertise is part of how modern democracies honour the second half of that promise and how it can thus serve the people. The question has never been whether science belongs in democratic politics, but on what terms. Those terms require independence protected from political capture and, in return, inclusivity and transparency about the values behind scientific advice in contested policy debates. Neither half works without the other.
