DEMOCRACY

Democracy poses problems for science and technology because it leads to potential conflicts between two strong sets of ethical values. Democracy prizes the ethics of inclusiveness and political equality. Within a democratic system all citizens have an equal say in collective decisions. The fields of science and technology embrace the ethics of autonomy and respect for scientifically established findings, regardless of how other citizens receive or are affected by those findings. Scholars and practitioners have proposed a variety of processes and institutions in an attempt to resolve these conflicts.

Historical Development

Over the centuries philosophers have developed various conceptions about the nature of democracy. These different versions of democracy pose distinct conflicts among ethical values linked to science and technology, as well as suggest different solutions to those problems.

The classic form of democracy or rule by the people is generally taken from Athens in the fifth century b.c.e., where a form of direct or participatory government was practiced by the free males of the city-state. In Rome from the fifth to the first centuries b.c.e. there developed a classic form of republican or representative democracy, in which individuals are elected by the people to handle governmental decision making. During the Middle Ages democratic forms of government were relegated to the margins of public life where they continued to play important roles in religious institutions such as monasteries; they reemerged into public affairs during the rise of modern nation–states. Indeed modern political philosophy is characterized by diverse and continuing arguments for the primacy and legitimacy of democratic institutions, and struggles with efforts to create appropriate functioning democratic organizations under historically unique conditions.

One common observation is that the development of modern forms of science, technology, and democracy have in fact gone hand in hand. Modern science itself asserted a radical democracy, although only among a scientifically educated elite. The industrial revolution was certainly associated with the extension of political rights—from white property owners to all men to women. Expansions of citizenship have in turn been associated with the expansion of consumer economies, which thereby influenced technological change. And in many instances expansions in democracy have been proposed as solutions to the problems caused by scientific or technological change. Reflecting such associations, many commentators on science-technology-democracy relations have tended to emphasize synergies rather than oppositions. Certainly this was true of Alex de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1835 and 1840), a perspective repeated even more forcefully in Daniel Boorstin's The Republic of Technology (1978).

Especially since the early mid-twentieth century, however, questions and problems have become increasingly prominent. Taking the two basic forms of democracy in reverse order to their historical origins, one may describe these as related to representation and direct democracy.

REPRESENTATION. After World War II scientists gained a great deal of attention and prestige from the government. Due to the scientists' great success in developing technologies for the war, from radar to nuclear weapons, government officials hired them into agencies and national laboratories and put them on important advisory committees. These developments raised the issue of how best to bring scientists and engineers, and their expertise, into the decision-making processes of representative democracy. This political involvement of scientists threatened two important ethical values. First, how could scientists avoid compromising their scientific autonomy and integrity as they became more involved in politics? Would they be able to speak freely, unencumbered by motivations of the government officials for whom they worked? When they advised government about research budgets, which affected them directly, would they succumb to the conflicts of interest that such roles entailed?

Second, how would this new scientific elite affect democracy? Would scientific pronouncements simply trump other forms of advice and political input? If the subject at hand was purely technical, deference to technical advice might be appropriate. However most important scientific and technological policy issues are a complex mixture of technical and political or social considerations, and scholars have shown that, in practice, it is difficult to separate these two features, even if it is desirable in principle. This concern over scientists gaining excessive power was most famously stated in President Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous warnings about a military-industrial complex in his farewell address in 1961.

DIRECT DEMOCRACY. Most theories of democracy state that citizens need to do more than simply vote for officials every few years. A robust democracy requires that citizens be able to participate directly, either as groups or individuals, in political decision making. If the issue at hand involves extensive scientific or technological knowledge, how can nonscientific citizens participate in deciding such an issue, an important democratic value, while still respecting the technical competence of experts, an important scientific value?

Responding to Problems

Late-twentieth-century developments in democratic theory have included a broad spectrum of responses to perceived problems in the science-technology-democracy relationship. These responses have included analyses and criticisms of a number of phenomena related especially to representation and direct democracy centered around such issues as peer review, lobbying, advisory bodies, and deliberation.

REPRESENTATION. A number of government agencies, in contrast to the direct mission driven distribution of funds by a program director on the basis of personal assessment have adopted peer review as a means to distribute funds. After World War II the federal government dramatically increased its funding of scientific and technological research. Following the model that it had developed during the war, much of that research was performed outside of the government itself. Instead of becoming the dominant employer of scientists, the government decided to fund scientists who were employed by universities or businesses.

In peer-reviewed funding, scientists submit proposals to the government requesting funding for particular research projects. Peer review is a method for evaluating and ranking those proposals and deciding which ones to fund. The funding agency, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) or the National Institutes of Health (NIH), identifies scientists outside of government who are experts in the field relevant to the proposed research, who are the peers of the scientist submitting the proposal. Those scientists then review and evaluate the proposal, providing an expert opinion of its technical merits. The government keeps the names of the reviewers confidential so that they feel free to be objective in evaluating the proposal without having to worry about reprisals from the people they are reviewing. These reviews powerfully influence who the government funds.

Peer review is not perfect and has engendered numerous controversies and studies. Scientists also try to influence the total size of the government research budget, often through individual or group lobbying of Congress or the executive branch. In addition, many scientists may adapt their research agendas to be responsive to growing parts of the budget, which means that they are not as autonomous as peer review may make them appear. However it is still a reasonable attempt to balance scientific and democratic values. Scientists independent of the government provide evaluations of the merit of the proposed scientific research, emphasizing the ethics of scientific independence and autonomy. However, in many cases government officials make the final decisions on funding and in all cases governmental institutions determine the total amount of money that the government gives out for research, which lets representative institutions influence the research as well, emphasizing the value of democratic accountability.

Second, the federal government has created a host of science and technology advisory bodies. These groups attempt to bring technical expertise into making and executing government policy in a manner that respects both scientific integrity and democratic accountability. Some of these bodies are part of the government itself, and its scientists are government employees, as in the congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) (disbanded by Congress in 1995) or the Office of Science and Technology Policy, an advisory group to the president. In addition, the government employs numerous technical specialists in various agencies and national laboratories.

In addition, the federal government utilizes many advisory committees made up of scientists and engineers from outside the government. Numerous agencies have such advisory committees and the White House has the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) also has an elaborate system for providing technical advice to the government. NAS, a private, though congressionally chartered, organization, possesses a research arm, the National Research Council (NRC). NRC assembles experts in particular fields to prepare reports that summarize the state of the science related to some particular topic. These groups have no formal authority, but they give the agencies access to expertise that is outside of government agencies and so hopefully is independent of such agencies' agendas. Of course the effectiveness of these advisory groups depends on the quality of the people appointed to them. In addition, these advisory groups lack any democratic accountability.

SOLVING PROBLEMS OF DIRECT PARTICIPATION. Citizens participate in policy making in two ways, either as groups or as individuals. The process of participating in groups is often called interest group liberalism, or pluralism. The justification for pluralism assumes that citizens recognize their interests and how government policy affects those interests. To further their interests they organize themselves into private groups and those groups pool their resources so that they may influence government policy. Different groups have different resources, from large numbers of voters to large sums of money to social status to charismatic leaders.

Such groups often center around scientific and technological issues and are a major part of the policy process. They include environmental groups, organizations representing different scientific disciplines, groups that lobby for research on certain diseases, industry groups that seek support for particular technologies, and so on. Many scholars have written about such groups and the ways they try to influence policy. In terms of ethical values, interest group involvement in scientific issues reflects the values that underlie pluralist democracy more generally. Pluralism requires only that all groups have equal opportunities to participate in politics. Groups are only supposed to represent their interests, as they perceive them. While outright lying about relevant science violates a general ethic of honesty, this form of democracy has no process to resolve more subtle scientific and technological disagreements. In most public disputes over scientific and technological issues, experts will disagree about some of the scientific questions. Within interest group pluralism, the groups have no obligation to find ways to resolve those disagreements; the theory assumes that honest competition among the groups will lead to satisfactory resolution of the issues, scientific and otherwise.

Citizens may also participate in scientific and technological policy issues as individuals. Scholars have concluded that this sort of participation works best when it involves extensive deliberation. In other words, citizens do not simply give their off-the-cuff opinion on some issue, either through voting or responding to an opinion poll. Instead they become involved in a process that requires them to learn about the issue and discuss it with others.

Theories of deliberative democracy have stated that such a process not only informs citizens about the substance of an issue, but also gives them a broader outlook, making them think about the public interest as well as their narrow private interests. It is the process of learning about and debating an issue, in an environment that is conducive to friendly give-and-take, which not only lets citizens state their interests but also makes them better citizens in how they think about their interests. This development satisfies a democratic ethic important to this theory of democracy, that citizens learn to deliberate over the public interest instead of merely advocating private interests.

The Cambridge Experimental Review Board is a classic example of such deliberation. In 1976 two universities in Cambridge, Massachusetts wanted to build biotechnology laboratories in the city. People in and out of the biology discipline worried that genetically modified organisms might escape from the labs and harm people. Cambridge is a very densely populated city and the building of these labs, and the risks that might accompany them, became a highly charged political issue. The mayor decided to appoint a special review board, consisting of ordinary citizens, to decide whether and under what circumstances the universities should be allowed to build the labs. The board heard testimony from all concerned parties, including university scientists who wanted to build the labs and people who opposed them. In the end the board decided to let the labs be built, with certain safety procedures for their operation. Those procedures were very similar to the ones later adopted by NIH, the principal federal funding agency for such research. NIH could impose regulatory conditions on the universities that it funded. Almost all sides to the controversy praised the work that the board had done.

This process encountered all the ethical issues related to science and democracy. Citizens had to learn about the technical issues. They did not have to become scientists, but had to understand the issues well enough to make sensible policy decisions about them. In educating citizens, the process demonstrated respect for scientific integrity. The process also satisfied the norms of deliberative democracy, in that it involved citizens deeply in an issue that potentially affected their lives, gave them the means to learn about it, and gave them the power to actually decide about it. The downside to this process, and all deliberative processes, is that it involved directly only a few citizens out of the many that lived in the city and required that they spend a great deal of time on the issue. Deliberative processes always involve this tradeoff: In exchange for deep participation, one sacrifices broad participation.

Since the 1970s organizations have sponsored a host of experiments using different forms of deliberative participation. For example, deliberative polling combines traditional opinion polling with a deliberative process. The process begins with a representative sample of citizens taking an opinion poll on the issue at hand. After the poll, the same group then assembles for a weekend of deliberation on the issue, guided by facilitators and with experts available to answer questions. At the end of the deliberations they are polled again. In most cases, their opinions change, often significantly, as a result of the deliberation.

A deliberative form of participation closer to the Cambridge example is the consensus conference. Initially developed in Denmark, this process brings together a small number of citizens to deliberate and see if they can reach a consensus on some issue, usually related to science and technology. The group then reports their results. In Denmark consensus conferences provide important input to parliament. In the United States they have not yet attained any official status. The not-for-profit organization The Loka Institute and a few academic groups have sponsored consensus conferences.

Contemporary Issues

Previous discussion of the practical issues of representation and participation are complemented by general theoretical discussions of technology and democracy. Among these discussions, one of the more salient arguments has been that of Langdon Winner and Richard Sclove that technological design itself constitutes a kind of political constitution writing that can be more or less democratic. These scholars point out that particular configurations of technological systems can favor some groups and discourage others, politically and socially, as well as economically. These social effects may be designed into technologies or may be unintended consequences, but either way, the "artifacts have politics," as Langdon Winner put it. This scholarly work means that those who are concerned with the science-technology-democracy relationship have to focus on the actual designs of the technologies themselves, as well as the institutions that govern them.

In the early twenty-first century forms of direct participation like consensus conferences are limited in the United States and do not enjoy the formal authority that they do in places like Denmark. However they are growing in number and their advocates hope they will have effects on policy making by local or state governments by force of moral suasion if not by law. All forms of participation, via groups or individuals, are growing in the United States and elsewhere. Legislation mandates some form of participation in many policy areas and some private firms are taking public participation seriously. So large is this activity that the government and business officials who run such programs have started their own professional association, the International Association for Public Participation, an organization that now has more than 1,000 members from twenty-two countries. Many of the issues in which such participation occurs involves science and technology.

One of the most difficult issues to deal with at the intersection of democracy and science and technology is the problem of boundaries between science and politics. As indicated above, one important aspect of democratizing science and technology is respecting the scientific value of the autonomy and integrity of science. But what parts of issues belong to the realm of science and what parts to the realm of politics? At first glance, this seems like an obvious question. The scientific parts of an issue are technical details about the issue, things that one would clearly ask of a technical expert, such as the existing reserves of oil, the toxicity of some pollutant, or the risks to patients of some new medical treatment. The political parts of an issue would seem to be questions like how much should oil be taxed and under what circumstances, or at what level is injury from pollution is politically acceptable. However these questions are not so neatly technical or political. Existing reserves of oil are uncertain, so for policy purposes should there be a high, low, or intermediate estimate? The toxicity of a pollutant may depend on whether the people exposed are healthy or more susceptible to it, as someone with asthma may be to air pollutants. Are we talking about toxicity for the average population or the most vulnerable members of the population? Answering these questions requires a complex mixture of technical and political decisions, which means that the boundaries between the technical and political parts of the issue are negotiated and often changing, not fixed and prompted by nature. An important part of participation is enabling participants to recognize and debate these boundaries. Only then can such participation satisfy both the scientific and democratic values involved in the process.

FRANK N. LAIRD

SEE ALSO Conservatism;Direct Democracy;Discourse Ethics;Expertise;Liberalism;Libertarianism;Participation;Strauss, Leo;Tocqueville, Alexis de.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boorstin, Daniel. (1978). The Republic of Technology: Reflections on Our Future Community. New York: Harper & Row.

Hill, Stuart. (1992). Democratic Values and Technological Choices. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. An in-depth case study that critiques the conventional notion of citizen participation examines citizens' values toward a controversial technology.

Laird, Frank N. (1993). "Participatory Analysis, Democracy, and Technological Decision Making." Science, Technology, and Human Values 18 (Summer): 341–361. A review and analysis of normative arguments for including citizens in technological policy making.

Renn, Ortwin; Thomas Webler; and Peter Wiedemann, eds. (1995). Fairness and Competence in Citizen Participation. Dordrecth, Boston, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. This edited volume provides both descriptions and analysis of numerous forms of citizen participation.

Sclove, Richard E. (1995). Democracy and Technology. New York: The Guilford Press. Develops an extensive normative theory of democracy and technology and spells out is implications for democratic practice, with numerous short cases.

Sclove, Richard E.; Madeleine L. Scammlee; and Brenna Holland. (1998). Community-Based Research in the United States. Amherst, MA: The Loka Institute. Available from the Loka Institute, www.loka.org. Contains twelve case studies of such participatory research, as well as comparisons with the Netherlands.

Von Schomberg, René, ed. (1999). Democratising Technology: Theory and Practice of a Deliberative Technology Policy. Hengelo, The Netherlands: International Centre for Human and Public Affairs. A series of essays by some of the leading American and European scholars on the subject.

Vig, Norman J., and Herbert Paschen, eds. (2000). Parliaments and Technology: Tthe Development of Technology Assessment in Europe. Albany: State University of New York Press. Provides cases of participatory technology assessment in different European countries.

Winner, Langdon, ed. (1992). Democracy in a Technological Society. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Contains essays by the major scholars of the time on democracy and technology.

Winner, Langdon. (1986). The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Develops some of the core ideas relevant to the justification for democracy in technology policy, including the notion that artifacts have politics and technologies as forms of life.