What is Wrong with Politicisation?

This is a lightly edited version of a paper I will be giving this summer at a conference organised by the “Knowledge in Crisis” project. I’m going to talk about politicisation because, in my view, the “crisis of knowledge” is really a crisis of politicisation: knowledge, and the institutions that produce it, are the sites of political battles and conflicts. Take, for example, declining trust in science and scientific institutions, as was evident during the Covid pandemic, or the current political battles around higher education in the US, and much of the rest of the world. These political battles are of course not just about knowledge. The broader problem is that, increasingly, institutions (like universities and institutional science) and scientific issues (like climate change) are at the centre of political battles. They have become politicised.

I want to answer two questions:

1. What is politicisation?

2. What, if anything, is wrong with politicisation?

It is important to not start from the assumption that politicisation is a bad thing. First, whether it is a bad thing depends on your political ideology. On the one hand, some ideologies are suspicious of it, for example, free-market conservatives, who want to leave things to the market. There is also a technocratic kind of liberalism that is suspicious of politicisation, on the grounds that it means handing issues over to the public that might be better answered by the application of specialist knowledge. On the other hand, there is a more democratic kind of liberalism that is in favour of politicisation, providing it takes the right kind of form, and populists, whether left or right, tend to decry depoliticisation—the shifting of important questions out of the political arena and into the arena of technocratic governance.

Second, politicisation is not always a bad thing. Imagine a society where slavery is widely practiced and it is not regarded as a matter for public political debate. In this society, one would want the question of slavery to become politicised. In any society where political arrangements could do with real improvement (any human society that has ever existed), it is important that there are avenues available to shift problematic social arrangements into the domain of political concern.

If we don’t start from the assumption that politicisation is a bad thing, what should we do? We want a minimal definition of politicisation that is not geared towards the context of democratic politics but applies in a wider range of political contexts. But, because I don’t think it is possible—or desirable—to say what is wrong with politicisation without assuming any sort of political ideology, my approach will be to try and make explicit the political ideology underlying different attempts to identify conditions under which politicisation is a problem. Specifically, I will contrast two different ways of thinking about the problem with politicisation, corresponding to two different underlying conceptions of politics and the political.

The first, which is broadly liberal, is represented by Robert Talisse’s recent book Overdoing Democracy, which I have written about previously. The second, which is broadly republican, highlights some things that Talisse misses. I will develop this conception by drawing on Albert Hirschman’s influential discussion of exit and voice in his book Exit, Voice and Loyalty, which, I argue, gives us an account of the conditions under which politicisation might enhance or curtail political agency.

What is Politicisation?

There is a nice paper by Rich Eva where he goes over all the definitions of politicisation in the literature. He finds all these definitions wanting, and provides his own definition. It doesn’t seem to be available open access (there is a paywalled version here) so you’ll have to trust my brief overview of it.

Eva rejects several definitions of politicisation on the grounds that they give the wrong verdicts about cases. He wants a definition that includes cases that lie outside of institutional politics; for example, a football player using a political slogan, or an actor making a political speech at an awards ceremony. He thinks that politicisation is closely connected with partisanship. Thus his initial definition: “to politicize is to use a nonpartisan good as a means to a partisan end.” He expands:

To politicize, one must use a nonpartisan good as a means to a partisan end, where a partisan end is defined as a goal geared toward the exercise, attainment, or maintenance of governing power by a contested political party, candidate, or political ideology.

A nonpartisan good is a good not essentially tied to partisan politics. Examples of nonpartisan goods include sports, religious practices and cultural practices, but can also include state and government agencies. A government agency is not inherently partisan in Eva’s sense because you would still need some government agencies in a state without partisanship, like a one-party authoritarian state.

The problem with this definition is that you can have politicisation outside the sphere of partisan politics—or even without any sort of open conflict or dispute. Some of the most extreme forms of politicisation occur precisely where democracy has been suppressed.

A particularly striking example comes from Václav Havel’s famous essay The Power of the Powerless and his example of a greengrocer, whose everyday actions, like hanging a poster saying, “Workers of the world unite!”, are laden with political meaning and significance despite the absence of any kind of partisan politics. In this context, there is politicisation without any partisanship—or indeed any dispute. The aim is the opposite; it is to produce complete conformity in behaviour.

One reason why Eva can’t accommodate this sort of case is that he is primarily interested in how individual agents can act so as to politicise things (issues, institutions, practices). Havel’s greengrocer is not responsible for the fact that his hanging the poster is laden with political significance; you are to assume that, if he gives the matter any thought, he resents it. The point is rather that he inhabits an environment where actions like this are already imbued with political meaning—putting up the poster signals that you are a compliant citizen, whereas not putting it up singles you out as a dissenter. This suggests that what we need is something broader, not so focused on individual acts.

My own account of politicisation is modelled on Oliver Traldi’s account of the politicisation of beliefs in his book Political Beliefs. He tells us that:

A belief that is disputed can be politicized by gaining the right kind of connection to politics; a belief that has the right kind of connection to politics can be politicized by becoming a matter of dispute; and a belief that meets neither of these conditions can be politicized by gaining both.

Where saying that:

a belief is political requires that it be in dispute and that it have the right kind of connection to politics; two ways of having the right kind of connection to politics include figuring in the right way in practical reasoning about specifically political action and being an important factor in an agent’s inclusion or exclusion from at least one political aggregate or group (p. 19).

This is a disjunctive account: for a belief to be politicised, it must both have become a matter of dispute and have the “right kind of connection to politics”. It is not obvious why we need the first disjunct. Take the belief that immigration needs to be reduced. So long as this figures in practical reasoning about political action (e.g. it leads people to vote for a party that promises to do this) or functions as a badge of inclusion or exclusion in a political group (e.g. you need to profess this belief to be included), it doesn’t seem to matter how much dispute there is about immigration.

Amending Traldi’s definition, so that a belief is politicised so long as it has the right kind of connection to politics, whether or not it is currently in dispute, has the additional benefit that it can then be extended to the politicisation of things that are not easily understood as potential matters of dispute. This includes things like activities (e.g. the activity of hanging a poster in a shop window). While activities cannot in any straightforward sense be matters of dispute, and are the upshots of rather than premises in practical reasoning, they can be important factors in group inclusion and exclusion—you can be excluded from a political group for not performing the activity, and your inclusion can be conditional on performing it.

I therefore propose these definitions:

Politicisation is the process by which something (e.g. an activity, belief, issue, institution) acquires the right kind of connection to politics (or reacquires it after having lost it).

Something (e.g. an activity, belief, institution, issue) is politicised when it stands in the right kind of connection to politics.

The first is a definition of the process of politicisation—something is politicised through acquiring the right kind of connection to politics. The second is a definition of the state of being politicised. These definitions seem to accommodate all the examples of politicisation we have discussed. Most importantly, on these definitions the greengrocer’s act of hanging the poster in his shop window is politicised because it has the right kind of connection to politics—it is vital to the greengrocer not being marked out as some sort of dissenter.

The obvious problem, though, is that these definitions verge on the trivial; it is not surprising to learn that there is a close connection between politicisation and having the “right kind of connection to politics”. But, as I said at the beginning, we want this kind of triviality. We want to avoid defining politicisation in such a way that it assumes any particular conception of the political.

Talisse on Political Saturation

This issue—implicitly assuming a particular conception of politics—also arises when it comes to thinking about what might be wrong with politicisation. This point is exemplified by Robert Talisse’s recent book, Overdoing Democracy, which illustrates how an underlying political ideology can shape an account of the problem with politicisation. (For a longer version of this argument, see my earlier post).

In Overdoing Democracy Talisse tries to explain the political crisis that many think we (in much of the Global North) are experiencing. The nature of this crisis isn’t clearly specified, but the crisis of knowledge, along with the broader politicisation of institutions, is an important part of it, as are familiar phenomena like polarisation and rising distrust, even revulsion, in politicians and our political opponents. Talisse thinks the cause of these problems is that we are overdoing democratic politics. Rather than viewing politics as something we must do to create the necessary background conditions for living meaningful lives, politics has become the focus.

One of Talisse’s central concepts is “political saturation”. Political saturation is “the saturation of social life with activities and projects that are overtly organized around the categories and divisions of current politics.” Social spaces (dinner tables, coffee shops, lecture theatres) and the institutions and organisations that provide these spaces (like universities) have become venues in which we perform our political identities. Talisse thinks that this is a problem because, in these politically saturated spaces, we are either just performing to like-minded partisans or antagonising rather than engaging our political opponents. The result is that our political activities are either pointless (when we’re preaching to the choir) or actively destructive (when we’re antagonising our opponents) of the social fabric that holds democracy together.

Talisse’s conclusion is that, if we want to improve things, we need to do something else—something that isn’t politics: “More and better politics cannot be the solution to the problem … because politics is the problem“ (Talisse 2019, 7). Talisse recommends that we look for things to do together that have nothing to do with politics, though he admits it is hard to say what these things are, because political saturation tends to colonise all aspects of our lives.

While I agree that political saturation is a serious problem, I am sceptical that this is due to us “overdoing politics”. Talisse’s argument for this claim is based on his underlying conception of democratic politics, which is deliberative:

The central deliberativist thought is that, in a democracy, collective decisions derive their authority from the fact that, prior to voting, each citizen was able to engage in processes whereby he or she could rationally persuade others to adopt his or her favored view by defending it with reasons and offering reasons opposing competing views. According to the deliberativist, then, the democratic ideal has as its core an idea of collective reasoning.

This is a conception of democratic politics that, at least in principle, doesn’t recognise many limits. Any collective decision requires deliberation, which, because it is rare to achieve genuine consensus, will often take a long time and get quite heated. The result is that the entire social sphere is within the reach of democratic politics and we end up “doing politics”—having deliberations, often to no real effect—all the time. Given this conception of democratic politics, Talisse’s suggestion that we do less of it makes sense.

There are however some problems with this way of understanding politicisation, political saturation and the problems with democratic politics that are driving it. The first is just a version of the point made earlier: political saturation, like politicisation in general, is possible outside the context of democratic politics and deliberation. Indeed, we can have extreme forms of political saturation under conditions where there is little or no public political deliberation.

Consider again Havel’s greengrocer. Havel’s argument, in brief, is that what he calls a post-totalitarian state (like Czechoslovakia at the time he was writing) represents an extreme form of political saturation, where mundane activities and decisions are imbued with political meaning. For Havel, this is how a post-totalitarian society maintains itself: it produces conformity in behaviour and practice that suppresses dissent and creates the illusion of widespread public support for the regime. Political saturation here has nothing to do with an excess of deliberation or politics. If anything, it is a consequence of the complete absence of political activity as it would be understood in a “healthier” society. The only way in which someone can “contribute” to politics in this context is by performing the role (compliant citizen of a communist state) required for survival in this context, with the result that their compliance is far from freely chosen.

This suggests that the connection between politicisation, political saturation and democratic deliberation may be weaker than Talisse seems to imply.

Second, Talisse’s conception of democratic politics—on which, put crudely, it involves talking about politics—contrasts with conceptions that foreground more direct forms of political action, like voting and canvassing for political candidates/parties, standing for elected office, participating in local government, community organising, participating in trade unions or other forms of collective bargaining, participating in protests or other forms of civil disobedience, and lobbying, petitioning or otherwise exerting direct pressure on decision-makers. This is essentially the difference between participating in politics as a spectator and participating in politics as an actor.¹

If we focus instead on participating as an actor, this gives us a different way of thinking about political saturation, on which it is the result of a deficit of political action. Specifically, it is the result of two factors. The first is a lack of avenues for genuine political action. There is an American version of this story, on which the story of American democracy is—with a few interludes—a story of elite capture and managed democracy, and a more global version, which highlights globalisation, neoliberalism, and the resulting democratic deficits at a national level.² The second factor is a technological and social landscape that provides plentiful opportunities for pale surrogates for genuine political action, like arguing with strangers online about politics. The result is that the performance of political identity comes to substitute for genuine political agency, and that substitution occurs because avenues for genuine political agency have been closed off and replaced with surrogates that have the “look” of politics without any of the substance.

The difference between these two ways of thinking about political saturation—as an excess of politics or as a deficit of genuine political agency—maps directly onto two different conceptions of politics and politicisation. On Talisse’s deliberative conception, the central political value is legitimacy, and politics is fundamentally about reason-giving and public justification; political systems, and the decisions they produce, are legitimate and have authority over us only insofar as they can be justified through public reason. On this conception, to politicise something—to give it the right kind of connection to politics—is to bring it into the space of public deliberation and make it subject to demands for public justification. What this means depends on what is being politicised. To politicise an issue is to make the various positions one might take on it subject to this demand for public justification. To politicise something like an institution or a practice will mean something else; it might, for example, mean public deliberation about the role of the institution or practice, or about the need for it. Either way, politicisation always means bringing public deliberation to bear on whatever it is that is being politicised.

On our alternative conception, which can aptly be described as republican, the central political value is non-domination—the absence of arbitrary power over others—and politics is fundamentally about the ways in which power can be checked, contested, and held to account. What matters on this view is not so much the ways in which decisions and institutions are justified as that those who are affected are able to contest and challenge them. On this conception, to politicise something is to contest it through organised action. Again, what this means depends on what is being politicised. It is perhaps easier here to see what it might mean to politicise something like an institution—it would be to contest and challenge the power it holds over us, or the decisions it makes and enforces. To politicise an issue will mean something else; for example, it might mean contesting the terms in which the issue is discussed, or drawing attention to who benefits from it being the subject of public deliberation. Either way, politicisation is always tied to some form of direct political action.

To clarify the differences between these conceptions, we can return to Talisse’s discussion of political saturation. On the deliberative conception, political saturation is a process of increasing politicisation; as social spaces become arenas for political discussion and debate, they become politicised. As more social spaces become arenas for political discussion, the more politicised a society becomes. At an extreme, we can imagine a society where every social space—including social spaces within the private sphere, like a dinner table at a holiday celebration—is an arena for political discussion. Such a society would be maximally politicised.

Things look a little different on the republican conception. Whether these social spaces are politicised depends not so much on whether they are arenas for discussing politics as on whether these spaces facilitate direct forms of political action. A space that has no connection with direct political action is not in any real sense politicised. Political saturation is therefore only a process of increasing politicisation if it is accompanied by an increase in the possibilities for direct political action. These two things may go together, as, for example, in a situation where a workplace becomes heavily politicised and this leads to a strike or some other form of direct action. But they may not, as in a situation where someone spends their evenings arguing about politics online, but those arguments achieve nothing other than a general increase in anger and aggravation.

These differences matter because they are reflected in different stances on the question of what, if anything, is wrong with politicisation. While both the deliberative and republican conceptions provide ways of understanding why politicisation might be necessary, beneficial, or counter-productive, they do so in very different ways. On the deliberative conception, politicisation is required for collective decision making, and it is necessary because in politics we need to make a lot of collective decisions. Problems arise when public deliberation begins to degrade our capacity for collective decision making, as Talisse thinks happens under conditions of political saturation. Talisse is worried that, when we take it too far, public deliberation ends up eroding and threatening the social trust required for deliberation to be productive. His solution to this problem is the natural one, given his underlying understanding of politics: we need less deliberation, or at least we need to restrict deliberation to contexts and situations where it can be productive.

On the republican conception, on the other hand, politicisation is required for holding power to account, and it is necessary because—at least if we want to avoid various forms of domination—citizens need means of holding power to account. Views on when politicisation becomes a problem will depend on how much sympathy one has for the underlying republican conception of politics. Presumably everyone is concerned with some forms of domination, so will agree that, for example, when a practice or institution has become completely unresponsive to any public concerns and is regularly interfering in the lives of citizens, there is a need to politicise it—to subject it to some sort of challenge (consider our earlier example of slavery). Someone who is not particularly sympathetic to republicanism will however hold that politicisation often goes “too far”: sometimes, it is good that ordinary citizens have no means of contesting political decisions (this is the perspective of the free-market conservative or technocratic liberal).

Rather than arguing for one of these conceptions over the other I want to suggest something more pluralistic. A pluralistic approach to the question of politicisation—that is, one not tightly wedded to either a deliberative or republican conception of politics—should focus on what is valuable in these different conceptions. The deliberative conception highlights the need for politicisation in contexts where the basic question is one of legitimacy. But this conception is not suited to thinking about some of the problems that arise in deliberations that are nominally supposed to secure that legitimacy but have no prospect of doing so. When there is a clear democratic deficit and public deliberations—like political discussions on social media—lack any connection to political decision-making the problem is not “too much” deliberation but rather that the deliberation doesn’t do anything. It certainly isn’t an effective means of contesting or challenging power; it is a side show. This suggests that the republican conception of politicisation might be particularly useful in contexts of dysfunction, where it is clear to many that existing arrangements are not working and that powerful actors are not being held to account.

Politicisation, Exit, Voice

On the republican conception, politicisation may be required to challenge and contest power. By, for example, politicising an institution like a central bank, you can open it up to challenge and contestation. But simply contesting things doesn’t necessarily achieve anything. The key question is: when will a means of contestation be effective, and when might it become counter-productive?

To discuss these issues I want to use some ideas from Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Hirschman’s central idea is that we can understand responses to decline in businesses, institutions, organisations and states in terms of the differential costs and benefits of two kinds of response: exit (not using a company’s products, quitting an organisation) and voice (making dissatisfaction known, protesting, speaking out). While you can have exit in politics, and voice in business, Hirschman sees exit as closely tied to consumer behaviour and voice as closely tied to political behaviour. It is perhaps better to say that the paradigmatic way for a consumer to express dissatisfaction with a product (not buying it) is a form of exit, whereas some paradigmatic forms of political behaviour (like arguing for a different policy, or advocating for a change in leader) are forms of voice. But it isn’t hard to think of political behaviours that qualify as a form of exit: leaving a political organisation, protest, not voting, spoiling a ballot paper, striking, or not using services provided by the state (e.g. opting out of a state education or healthcare system).

A virtue of Hirschman’s analysis is that he details the complicated dynamics between exit and voice. I want to highlight two of these dynamics. The first is that, even if a lot of people take the exit option, this need not produce any change or improvement. For example, if a lot of people leave an organisation because they are dissatisfied, then the organisation may end up staffed by those who were still relatively satisfied (so they won’t exercise voice), or those left behind may not have a meaningful exit option, with the result that the organisation will not be responsive to their exercise of voice. Either way, this means that the organisation will not change. Whether this is a problem, of course, depends on the organisation, the nature of the dissatisfactions that led people to leave it, and whether it serves a valuable function. If the dynamic plays out at the level of a whole country, as when many opponents of a regime emigrate, the results can be disastrous, at least for those left behind.

The second dynamic concerns the impact of voice. Hirschman says that voice only effects change in an organisation under two conditions: the organisation must be sufficiently responsive that voice can produce change, and exit must be a meaningful alternative to give voice leverage. When an institution is unresponsive, or exit is unavailable, voice has little effect. Imagine, for example, an organisation that simply does not want to listen to the concerns of its members, in part because those members have nowhere else to go (perhaps this is the only organisation that could represent their interests). No matter how vocally the members give voice to their dissatisfaction, it is unlikely that much will change. Things would be very different if there were a rival organisation that also had a claim to represent the interests of the group members. This would give them an exit opportunity, and therefore more leverage.

We can apply this framework to politicisation in two ways. The first is as a way of thinking about when politicisation is beneficial—when it reverses decline within an organisation or institution. On the republican conception, politicisation is the process of bringing something into the sphere of contestation. When contestation is beneficial, exit and voice combine to produce improvements. Consider the thinking behind strikes and other forms of withdrawal of labour. The idea is that the threat of (temporary) exit in the form of a strike will make the employer more responsive to workers’ concerns. Whether this works in practice depends on the situation; some strikes are hopeless because the employer won’t, or simply can’t, respond to the workers’ concerns. Or, to use an example with a different political valence, consider a political campaign against tax increases that leverages the ability of wealthy taxpayers to leave the tax jurisdiction. The idea again is that the threat of exit will make the government more inclined to listen to campaigners’ arguments against tax increases. In both cases, politicisation produces change because of the combination of exit and voice. Of course, whether that result is viewed as an improvement depends on your political ideology—this goes back to the point that it is hard to think about politicisation without assuming a background ideology.

The second, and for our purposes more important, application is as a way of thinking about when politicisation becomes problematic. Even if we set aside the ways in which, depending on your underlying political ideology, particular kinds of politicisation will be problematic, we can identify some ways in which politicisation can be destructive of institutions. Put briefly, the politicisation of an institution becomes destructive when it reduces the possibilities of using exit and voice to remedy problems with the institution.

The basic idea is that, once an institution becomes politicised, and acquires some sort of political agenda, this has implications for the use of exit and voice to remedy any of the problems with it. To see how this works, consider someone who is unhappy with the institution in its current politicised state. On the one hand, if they are within the institution they will recognise that there are many costs to using the exit option. Exiting the institution—or staying with it and reverting to a kind of apathy that is functionally equivalent to exit—would likely have the result that the institution is increasingly captured by the new political agenda, as those who oppose it are far more likely to leave than those who support it or are neutral. It may be that those outside the institution can use the exit option to greater effect; if the continuation of the institution requires it providing some services to the public, then the public can make their dissatisfaction known by refraining from using those services. This though depends on the broader context, and in particular how reliant the institution is on the consumers of whatever services it provides. On the other hand, someone who is happy with the way in which the institution has become politicised is unlikely to use the exit option, whether they are inside the organisation or make use of some service it provides. This is not just because they are aligned with the political agenda now driving the institution; exit would weaken the very agenda they are trying to advance.

The result is that once politicisation gets going, it is hard to stop because it creates a spiralling dynamic. This can happen in a few different ways. The main one is that, despite the costs, enough of the critics of the institution leave, with the result that the members of the institution are, as a whole, more supportive of the political agenda than they were before. This is politicisation as homogeneity. It may however happen that the critics decide to stay within the institution and fight, with the result that they end up pursuing their own, different, political agenda. This is politicisation as polarisation. Either way, the result is more politicisation, whether of the homogenous or polarised variety.

This spiralling dynamic is driven by the fact that politicisation tends to structure the discursive environment in ways that reduce the effectiveness of voice. One way in which this happens—the way just outlined—is indirect: voice is most effective when there is a meaningful possibility of exit so, by increasing the costs of exit, politicisation reduces the effectiveness of voice. Another way in which it can happen is more direct: politicisation undermines the effectiveness of voice via self-censorship and selective uptake. In a politicised institutional environment, the costs of exercising dissenting voice can be extremely high; there is a risk of dissent being viewed as running counter to the political agenda of the institution, and so dissent can lead to reputational damage, or even exclusion. The result is that internal critics start to self-censor, and the institution becomes less responsive to criticism, even criticism that it would benefit the institution to take seriously (for a development of similar ideas see this excellent book). This is exacerbated by the fact that, when voice is exercised in a politicised institutional environment, it tends only to be heard by those who already agree with it, and it is often misinterpreted to fit with prior perceptions, with the result that the institution only hears the criticisms it wants to hear.

These two pathologies—the increase in cost of exit and the hollowing out of voice—give us a precise diagnosis of a way in which politicisation can become problematic. Politicisation is a problem when it simultaneously raises exit costs and undermines the effectiveness of voice. The result is that institutions become less responsive, even to legitimate criticism, and the people who interact with those institutions lack effective means of contesting or changing them.

The Crisis of Knowledge

The obvious place to apply this analysis is where we started — the crisis of knowledge and trust in scientific institutions. Any attempt to apply this analysis to an example is liable to prove controversial. I do however think that the analysis can be usefully applied to the politicisation of knowledge and knowledge institutions.

In a recent paper Hrishikesh Joshi argues that, while the university system exerts enormous power over public discourse, it is democratically unaccountable and in that sense democratically illegitimate. Joshi’s argument is based on the political homogeneity of the academy. I want to suggest that we think of the issue differently: the university system has too few mechanisms for translating public dissatisfaction into political action.

Exiting the university system is costly for a student, who is deprived of the opportunity to enhance their future earning potential, not to mention to enrich their life. While the ordinary citizen cannot exit the university system in this sense, they can refuse to recognise the authority of scientific knowledge and scientific institutions, which deprives them of valuable knowledge and understanding that they could otherwise gain. Because there are few good exit options, and few mechanisms for giving voice to dissatisfaction, the result is that the public is often unable to translate any dissatisfaction with the university system into political action. Indeed, the forms in which public dissatisfaction with the university system is often expressed—online vitriol, for example, or the embrace of “alternative experts”—are exactly what one would expect when there are few mechanisms by which ordinary citizens can turn their dissatisfactions into productive political action. In this respect, the situation is like that I highlighted in my discussion of political saturation; in the absence of channels for political action, there is a tendency to turn to antagonistic behaviours that serve to inflame rather than resolve tensions.

This analysis suggests what a “solution” to the crisis of knowledge and trust in knowledge institutions would need to do: it would need to create conditions for exit and voice to function effectively.

Citizen science has been proposed as one way to give ordinary citizens more of a role in the production of scientific knowledge. But, as Chloé de Canson has argued in an important recent paper, citizen science is often understood in a way that means the involvement of ordinary citizens is relatively limited. In what de Canson terms “participatory science”, laypeople are invited to participate in research projects that are directed by scientific institutions and the scientists who staff them. This means that citizen science often proceeds entirely under the purview of institutional science; participatory “citizen scientists” can offer their opinions but have no real decision-making power. This is, essentially, voice without leverage, which produces a situation where the impact of voice is minimal, as there are no mechanisms for forcing uptake.

What de Canson calls “extitutional science” is more promising because it goes beyond invited participation. De Canson gives an account of communities of HIV/AIDS and ME/long Covid patients who formed what I have called “research collectives”—communities outside mainstream scientific institutions with their own internal structures for assessing and producing knowledge (I now have an academic paper developing these ideas). Extitutional science differs from participatory science in that these research collectives set their own research agenda, which may involve contesting and challenging the methods and background assumptions of institutional science. These research collectives seek to force institutional uptake through what de Canson, following Sarah Schulman, calls the “inside/outside strategy”: one arm of the movement collaborates with institutional scientists, while the other exerts political pressure to force a response. That this sort of strategy is liable to be more effective than a more confrontational “outside strategy” follows from Hirschman’s analysis: the combination of collective voice and external pressure provides more leverage than collective voice alone.

My suggestion then is that extitutional science provides one mechanism by which ordinary citizens can contest the findings and methods of knowledge institutions. The challenge is to apply this suggestion consistently. It is not hard to see the value in the activities of HIV/AIDS patients in the 1980/90s, who made valuable contributions to medical understanding in a political climate that was, to say the least, hostile. But what are we to say about cases of extitutional science during the Covid pandemic that challenged the then-standard views about the efficacy of measures such as masks and school closures? It is important not to dismiss these cases simply on the grounds of disagreement with the claims made by these communities, or with the political agenda one might presume to lie behind those claims. Extitutional science is often driven by a political agenda. What we need to avoid is picking and choosing the “good” cases of extitutional science in a way that simply affirms and reinforces our existing views and political sympathies.

1. On the deliberative democratic picture, citizens’ deliberations are meant to connect to actual political decision-making in such a way that decisions are legitimated by being the product of that deliberative process, meaning that deliberators are actors rather than spectators. The problem is that a lot of the kinds of deliberations that Talisse focuses on, like counterproductive political debates online, in the home, or at work, don’t connect to actual decision-making at all. More generally, in actually existing democracies, whatever deliberations ordinary citizens engage in rarely connect to actual decision-making in any meaningful sense. Deliberative democrats are in the slightly odd position of defending democracy by appeal to a form of political practice that, by their own admission, we do not yet have but should adopt.

2. It might sound like accepting this point requires adopting a specific political perspective viz. one that is critical of free-market capitalism and is somewhere to the left of mainstream American liberalism. While it certainly requires a political perspective, it is one that is, for example, common to populists on both the left and right of the political spectrum. It is also possible to accept that neoliberalism and globalisation threaten democracy at the national level and conclude that we need less democracy at the national level. This trilemma is what Dani Rodrik calls the “globalisation paradox”.