By Sara Harrison
Tension between experts and non-experts is an inevitable part of modern organizations and societies. Highly trained experts are necessary to keep things functioning smoothly – but accountability matters. We need specialists to solve hard problems, but they need to be accountable to non-experts.
Jonathan Bendor doesn’t kowtow to experts. He respects their specialized knowledge but doesn’t forget that they’re amateurs at most things – just like most people. He hopes citizens and policymakers keep that in mind, particularly as democracies turn to experts to manage complex technologies and solve problems like climate change. “We must hold everyone accountable,” he says.
In a recent paper published in the American Political Science Review, Bendor, a professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, argues that to maintain democracy in a modern society, we must reckon with a deep tension at its core: expertise, hierarchy, and meritocracy are critical, but they cannot operate without appropriate oversight by people who are not experts – who are, in fact, amateurs. Along with his coauthor, Piotr Swistak of the University of Maryland at College Park, Bendor details the dangers of blindly deferring to experts. “Some people mistakenly think that what is most consistent with meritocracy is to have a hierarchy, and the person at the top isn’t accountable to anybody,” he says. “We think this is a huge error.”
However, tension between experts and non-experts is an inevitable part of modern organizations and societies, Bendor says. Highly trained experts are necessary to keep things functioning smoothly. On the other hand, accountability matters. “The combination of these two processes – knowledge-intensive [decision-making] and everyone being accountable to somebody – creates an important tension or problem of its own: nonspecialists need to hold people accountable,” Bendor says. “Otherwise, you get little groups that aren’t accountable to anybody.”
This tension is seen in the everyday workings of many nations, including in infrastructure, economics, and foreign policy, where officials and citizens with no technical expertise oversee the professionals behind the scenes. Accepting this tension, Bendor argues, is particularly important as we engage with complicated issues like climate change, whose solution will require huge amounts of expertise.
This dynamic isn’t unique to democracies. Take, for example, Imperial Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II. The empire was a bureaucratic meritocracy with many levels of accountability built in. But authority ultimately rested with the Kaiser, who wasn’t answerable to elected officials or the public. He was woefully unprepared to lead his military through World War I and was, ultimately, forced to relinquish the throne.
- Originally published 23 July 2024, Homeland Security News Wire
