The Expert Cure? Exploring the Restorative Potential of Expertise for Public Satisfaction With Parties
| Date | 01 May 2020 |
| Author | Luke Temple,Katharine Dommett |
| Published date | 01 May 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321719844122 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321719844122
Political Studies
2020, Vol. 68(2) 332 –349
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321719844122
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The Expert Cure? Exploring
the Restorative Potential of
Expertise for Public
Satisfaction With Parties
Katharine Dommett and Luke Temple
Abstract
The declining legitimacy of political parties has become something of a truism in political science
discourse. Less often reflected upon is how these legitimacy problems could potentially be resolved.
This article contributes to this underexplored issue by examining the restorative potential of
expertise as a supplement to intra-party democracy. Building on an established literature on Stealth
Democracy, we explore the potential for expert-inspired reforms to boost citizens’ satisfaction
with parties. Using original survey questions, we provide evidence that a perceived lack of expert
engagement in parties predicts citizen dissatisfaction, before using deliberative workshop data to
distil traits that define the appeal of experts and expertise. This mixed-methods approach allows
us to demonstrate some common desires of which parties should be aware, but also traits that
make these ideas difficult to realise. Combining these insights, we argue that while expertise has
appeal, parties face considerable challenges in satisfying citizens’ desires.
Keywords
experts, technocracy, parties, public perceptions
Accepted: 24 March 2019
Across new and advanced democracies, it has been widely reported that political parties
‘could scarcely be less liked or respected’ (van Biezen, 2008: 263) and that ‘contempo-
rary publics seem increasingly sceptical about partisan politics’ (Dalton and Wattenberg,
2000: 3). Citing data on party membership, electoral turnout, public satisfaction and trust,
successive scholars have argued that ‘we now live in an age characterized by increasing
popular disenchantment with political parties … the evidence points increasingly and
unequivocally to the decline of parties as representative agencies’ (Bartolini and Mair,
2001: 334). While there have been recent fluctuations in party membership in the UK
(Audickas et al., 2018), there remain many indicators that parties are held in low regard.
The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
Corresponding author:
Luke Temple, The University of Sheffield, Winter Street, Sheffield S10 2TU, UK.
Email: l.temple@sheffield.ac.uk
844122PSX0010.1177/0032321719844122Political StudiesDommett and Temple
research-article2019
Article
Dommett and Temple 333
Results from seven rounds of the European Social Survey from between 2004 and 2016
demonstrate that average party trust in the UK has constantly hovered around a very weak
3.6 out of 10. Most recently, Ignazi (2017: 172) has documented how issues of party
legitimacy remain deeply problematic across Europe. The challenge facing political par-
ties therefore appears considerable.
A common response to charges that party legitimacy is decreasing in the eyes of the
public has been to explore ways of stimulating wider citizen participation (Faucher, 2014;
Gauja, 2016) with the hope that this will help improve public perceptions. In contrast, in
this article we bring together scholarship on declining party democracy with the finding
that the notion of ‘expertise’ has public appeal. This might seem counterintuitive during
a time in which populist discourse frames experts as elites and therefore not to be trusted
(Clarke and Newman, 2017). Presenting original survey data, we show that in fact there
is a broadly positive link between satisfaction and perceptions of expertise in parties.
However, our mixed-methods approach allows us to rigorously examine this finding –
using deliberative workshop data to unpack this idea, we outline the considerable chal-
lenges that parties face in realising citizens desires for expertise. These findings suggest
that expertise is, as Newman and Clarke (2018) have argued, ‘conjunctural’ as it is con-
tingent, contested and shaped by context. Rather than unanimously embracing experts, or
rejecting them in favour of populists, the public therefore has complex views of these
actors and their potential contribution to democratic governance. Exploring these ideas,
this article moves forward the debate surrounding party legitimacy and public opinion
while also laying out the implications of citizens’ views for practitioners seeking to capi-
talise on the public appeal of expertise.
Models of Governance
Despite current travails, since the collapse of the Soviet Union multi-party democracy has
provided perhaps the dominant model of state governance. In the ideal model, parties act
as intermediaries between citizens and the state (Lawson, 1980). Serving as both repre-
sentative and governing organisations, parties provide ‘democratic linkage’ between peo-
ple and government, bridging the gap between rulers and the ruled by taking up and
realising citizens’ demands (Pastorella, 2016: 958). As Koole (1996: 512) has argued,
parties act as ‘devices to structure the masses and to integrate them into the political sys-
tem’. In principal-agent terms, parties act as the agents for members, electors or the wider
public (dependent on your conception of party organisation), channelling the interests of
these groups into governing outcomes. The legitimacy of parties to exercise such govern-
ing power is bound up with procedures of representative democracy. Operating within
voting systems, parties are authorised and held to account through competitive elections
that give citizens equal opportunity to grant and withdraw a political mandate (Lipset,
1959). It is on this basis that parties claim that their exercise of power is rightful and why,
as Beetham (2004: 107) argues, those subject to it have a corresponding duty to obey.
While the nature of party representation is seen to have changed over time – moving from
a system of mass participation to cartelised competition (Katz and Mair, 1995) – parties’
governing legitimacy remains founded upon the idea that they are able to secure ‘popular
consent and compliance with [their] political authority’ (Keman, 2014: 311).
In contrast to a system of party democracy, the technocratic approach is somewhat less
defined (Centeno, 1993: 309) and often, as Hanley (2018) points out, is simply described
as the ‘reverse mirror image’ of Richard Katz’s classic definition of party government. As
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