Expertise und Demokratie

It was not just the corona crisis that showed that scientific expertise is playing a growing role in political decision-making processes. Already in the debate about the climate crisis, the euro crisis, the economic crises of the noughties, academics have become important and at the same time controversial advisers to politics, key sources of movements such as Fridays for Future or declarators and reminders in times of the rampant coronavirus. For democratic reasons, this is not unproblematic insofar as non-political experts are not legitimized by elections and have an exclusive status that contradicts democratic equality. Reason enough to ask about the relationship between expertise and democracy, about economic cycles, persistence and intrinsic logics of this difficult and perhaps necessary interrelationship between the so different and yet interrelated spheres of expertise, politics and democracy.