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Pragmatics and Society: Online-First Articles

Dealing with the dual demands of expertise and democracy

How experts create proximity to the public without undermining their status as experts

ORCID logo | University of Groningen
ORCID logo | Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
ORCID logo | University of Groningen | University of the Witwatersrand
Credible expertise is no longer a given in our contemporary democracy: for knowledge to be authoritative, experts must take into account a wider audience than just scientific colleagues. This study uses conversation analysis and discursive psychology to investigate how experts deal with this role in practice. We show that experts in a Dutch public hearing on GM food orient to ‘speaking on behalf of the public’ without undermining their status as experts. They do this by (1) animating but not overlapping the voices of the public (2) speaking on behalf of ‘the consumer’ and (3) presenting hypothetical public opinions. In this way, experts reconcile what they treat as the dual requirement of distance to support an expert opinion and the proximity to the public required for good democracy. We further discuss what implications this research has for the role of experts in a modern democracy.
Keywords: ordinary democracy, public participation, expertise, epistemics, reported speech, conversation analysis, discursive psychology
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Materials and methods
    • 2.1The corpus
    • 2.2Analytic procedure
  • 3.Analysis
    • 3.1Animating the public’s voice
    • 3.2Speaking on behalf of ‘the consumer’
    • 3.3Presenting the public’s hypothetical opinions
  • 4.Conclusion and discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 2 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.22071.pad
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