Gjeninnsending av søknad til ERC StG - Andreas Eriksen

Planlagt ERC-søknad: Expertise and political values in inter-institutional reasoning - EXPOINT Modern societies are increasingly governed by unelected expert bodies, such as independent regulatory agencies. On paper, they are mere technical bodies. In reality, they have to make political value judgments. What, if anything, can make the political role of expert bodies democratically legitimate? Standard democratic theory has not yet identified expert bodies as political actors in their own right. This leaves a central field of institutional reality off the radar. In response, EXPOINT introduces an original way to conceptualize the conditions under which the political role of expert bodies is justified. Building on the idea of joint institutional commitments, the central claim is that appeals to political values in expert bodies are legitimate when they are forged through inter-institutional reasoning with democratically representative bodies. EXPOINT develops this claim as a theory robust interactionism. This theory aims to be robust in the sense of being both normatively justified and empirically corroborated. The project will establish original conceptual tools for assessing the legitimacy of political values in expert bodies. This will be developed in tandem with an extensive case study of the actual interaction between the independent agencies of the European Union and the European Parliament. The case study is divided into a quantitative experimental part and a qualitative part. The experimental part is a factorial survey study based on carefully designed vignettes. The qualitative part is a form of process tracing based on document analysis. In addition, the project will be supported by semi-structured interviews.