Written evidence submitted by Alfred Moore, Lecturer, Department of Politics, University of York, UK and Michael K. MacKenzie, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh, USA (CLL0035)
Dear Chair,
We study political institutions and decision procedures, and have a particular research focus on science policy and the relation between politics and expertise.
We are submitting evidence because we believe that there has been too little focus on the institutional structuring of expert advice, and that the COVID crisis is an appropriate moment to consider a wide range of potential institutional reforms.
1. Our main contribution is to suggest that expert advisory bodies should do more to openly and publicly articulate reasonable disagreement.
There are two grounds for this recommendation. Expert advice often involves value judgments that are hard to avoid and sometimes hard to identify (Steele 2012). Openly articulating disagreement is an important way of bringing such judgments to the surface. Aiming to identify a plurality of credible (and possibly conflicting) positions would also help diverse groups of experts do a better job of evaluating arguments both for and against given propositions. That is, it would forestall the risk of settling on a premature consensus. This argument goes back at least to John Stuart Mill, but it finds support in recent research in behavioural science (Mercier and Sperber 2011).
The other, and equally important, reason to promote openness about disagreements is that it can limit the political misuse of expert advice. Political leaders considering, say, whether to mandate the wearing of face masks, will find it harder to use experts as a shield for unpopular decisions when the rationales and justifications behind expert disagreements—about, for instance, the assumptions used in modelling the effects of face masks on rates of transmission—are made public.
Being open about disagreements among experts, and the levels of uncertainty that their judgments entail, can also help political leaders to reverse course when necessary without seeming like they are being inconsistent or capitulating to political and thus unscientific demands. When political leaders openly discuss counterarguments and acknowledge the legitimacy of minority judgments, it helps keep alive reasons both for and against particular decisions, and this can make it easier for political leaders—and the public they serve—to justify revising or reversing previous policy decisions.
We do not propose being open about disagreements where there simply are none. We are not advocating the invention of disagreements, or the sustaining of obsolete disagreements. We are arguing, instead, that policy making processes can made more credible and legitimate when the reasonable disagreements that experts — and in particular diverse groups of experts who come from different disciplinary fields and life experiences — are likely to have are made public and the rationales behind those disagreements are clearly and openly explained to political leaders and to the publics they serve.
2. How might institutions for expert advice be organised so as to promote reasonable disagreement?
One approach would be to reform procedures for forming and reporting collective judgments in expert advisory bodies. Expert committees might be required, for instance, to publish carefully crafted statements from different minority perspectives, when there are disagreements between experts. This approach would be similar to the dissenting judgments published by justices on appellate courts. In this way, reasons both for and against particular pieces of policy advice could be made public but the risks of misinterpretation and misrepresentation would be minimised. This is importantly different from recent calls for ‘transparency,’ for instance, in the form of publishing the minutes of SAGE committee meetings and the documents and evidence on which they based their judgments (The Spectator 2020), which would not in itself constitute credible information relevant to public judgment. What we propose, rather, is the proactive organisation of a plurality of expert-informed assessments of evidence that highlight areas of uncertainty, legitimate disagreement, and value judgments.
A related reform to procedures within committees could involve formulating propositions and voting on them, and making those votes public. Expert committees of the US National Institutes of Health, for instance, have held votes on whether a substance can be reasonably considered to be a carcinogen, and these processes have revealed disciplinary differences in judgments about risk (Guston 2005). Public debates and voting among experts would help communicate disagreements where they exist, reveal disciplinary tendencies (or biases), and keep potentially credible counterarguments alive in policy processes, all while helping to filter out less credible or extreme claims or considerations.
Another approach could focus on the selection of experts. Political leaders are typically free to choose to listen to whichever experts they wish, and this often limits the diversity of the expertise they seek and receive. During the COVID crisis ministers have relied heavily on evidence from SAGE to the exclusion of other sources and formed strong relationships with key scientific advisors (Cairney 2020). While tendency to rely on small groups of familiar experts is understandable, it raises the question of how to open up the selection of relevant experts from diverse disciplinary and experiential backgrounds. One way to do this would be to adopt standing committees of experts, using legislative assemblies as a model. Such committees would comprise experts from many different disciplines, and their deliberations and voting processes would be public. A standing committee of experts would respond to the problem of expert selection by empowering diverse and independent experts to speak and influence political leaders and the public before any situations arise where their expertise may be needed.
A third approach, perhaps most radical, would encourage structured competition among expert groups seeking to contribute to policy debates. Many experts have provided advice during the covid-19 pandemic, but we have little idea of their influence or how different (often competing) pieces of advice should be weighed against each other. A tribunal model could make these processes more cohesive. Rival experts could be empowered to question each other directly before an audience of experts from both within and outside their own specialties (see Turner 2013). The emergence of ‘Independent Sage’ can be seen as a partial move in this direction in so far as it responds to a desire for the pluralisation of credible expert advice. Yet by framing itself as ‘independent’ (and thereby implying that SAGE is not independent), it reinforces the expectation of univocal expert advice.
Conclusion
We think that establishing norms and expectations of disagreement in the formation and the communication of expert advice would (i) make it easier for experts to stay true to their expertise, by reducing the pressure to suppress their disagreements in the service of producing and publicly maintaining a consensus position, and (ii) make it harder for politicians to claim that their hands have been forced by the advice of their experts or that they are simply following ‘the science.’
When institutions are structured around the implicit goal of producing a univocal assessment of ‘the science’, they reinforce the expectation that political decision-makers should ‘follow the science.’ We have outlined a range of possible institutional reforms that would be structured around the goal of pluralising credible expert assessments and advice, with the aim of fostering expectations of legitimate evidence-based policy disagreement and clarifying accountability for political decisions.
Yours sincerely,
Alfred Moore
Michael K. MacKenzie
References
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Guston D. 2005. On consensus and voting in science: From asilomar to the national toxicology program. In: Frickel S, Moore K, eds. The new political sociology of science.University of Wisconsin Press, 2005:378-404.
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