Zeynep Pamuk's "Politics and Expertise"

Zeynep Pamuk is assistant professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Politics and Expertise: How to Use Science in a Democratic Society, and reported the following:

Page 99 of the book describes a proposal for a science court, which was put forward in the 1960s and 1970s by physicist Arthur Kantrowitz. The court was intended to examine controversial scientific issues in policy making and resolve disputes. It had an adversarial structure, with scientists defending rival positions and cross-examining each other in front of a panel of scientist judges. The proposal was highly popular and enjoyed the support of President Ford as well as twenty-eight prominent scientific organizations. An opportunity to test the court came up during a controversy over the construction of a new power line in Minnesota, which I go on to describe in the next pages.

This page is a crucial one for the book because it tells the origin story of an institution that I revive and reimagine in order to improve our use of scientific advice in policy making today. While earlier chapters of the book diagnose the sources of tension in the relationship between science and democracy — focusing on how the uncertainty, incompleteness and biases in scientific research shape political debate, and how scientific advisers face a nearly impossible challenge of trying to be useful without making overtly political judgments — page 99 is the beginning of my own solution to these issues. It gives a good sense of the institutional upshot of the theoretical discussions in earlier chapters.

The key aspect of my proposal, which I take from Kantrowitz, is the adversarial setup, which is designed to examine the uncertainty and weaknesses of each view in front of a public audience. One of the main arguments of the book is the need for democratic scrutiny of the limits of science and an understanding of how scientific findings are shaped by the values of scientists. The science court is one way to realize this. But I also change some key features of the original proposal. The original science court was an elitist and technocratic institution, whose participants were professional scientists and whose aim was to settle factual disputes for policy purposes. It was based on a strict fact-value distinction. I argue against these and suggest that the facts and values involved in a policy issue should be taken up together and the court should involve a citizen jury rather scientist judges. These modifications are intended to make it a more democratic and participatory institution.

Learn more about Politics and Expertise at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue