Experts and democratic deliberation: Insights from An Enemy of the People

Deliberative democracy is a prominent political approach that is increasingly attracting the interest of management scholars. While many deliberative democracy scholars acknowledge that expertise improves the epistemic quality of deliberation, some have recognized that experts can become “problematic participants” in deliberations. Through an analysis of Henrik Ibsen’s ([1882] 2007) play An Enemy of the People, I discuss four difficulties of including expertise in public deliberation: manipulations in the deliberative setting, exploitation of the vulnerability of experts, disregard for the limitations of expertise, and inability to translate and enroll. I also argue that the play’s ending leads readers to question the practicality of expert withdrawal. Furthermore, characters in the play suggest two other possibilities for overcoming the obstacles associated with expertise: “epistocracy,” and finding new ways to increase deliberation and participation. To advance this latter option, I call for a bidirectional view of translation, following scholars in both deliberative democracy and science and technology studies, and underscore the complexities of building trust when boundary crossing between expertise and non-expertise. These insights enrich the stream of management studies using deliberative democracy, and reinforce recent claims that management scholars should be more involved in the public sphere.