Partisan science and the democratic legitimacy ideal

Abstract The democratic legitimacy ideal requires value judgments in science to be legitimised by democratic procedures in order for them to reflect the public interest or democratic aims. Such a view has been explicitly defended by Intemann (2015) and Schroeder (2021), amongst others, and reflects a more widely shared commitment to a democratisation of science and integration of public participation procedures. This paper suggests that the democratic legitimacy ideal in its current form does not leave space for partisan science – science that is politically or societally engaged. This is problematic because partisan research can contribute substantially to science and society, a point that I will illustrate with a recent case study from the Netherlands. To resolve this problem, I scrutinise the notion of democratic legitimacy and consider its use in the values in science discourse. Current discussions focus on democratic decision-making procedures to legitimise specific value judgements. I show that this focus does not adequately represent sound procedures of legitimisation at the hand of political theories of representation. Consequently, I develop a different approach: I propose to consider scientists as a special case of representatives who are authorised to make independent value judgements while nevertheless being constrained by the demands of their constituencies. Based on this approach, I argue that values in science do not need to be based on democratically agreed upon aims or the public interest in every instance. Instead, I advocate for a pluralist system of scientific mandates, which differs from both value pluralism and the democratic legitimacy ideal.