Experts and Decision-Making in Time of Health and Political Crisis. A Study of the Political Discourse on the Role of Experts during COVID-19 in Belgium

Rondiat, Coline
(2021) Knowledge and Power: Epistemic Conflicts in Democracy — Location: Colchester (29.July.2021)

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The COVID-19 crisis has led to the growing intervention of scientific experts in the decision-making process of most democratic states. Given the number of uncertainties the pandemic involves, they are asked to guide political decisions by delimiting the range of possible answers to the spread of the virus (Lavazza & Farina, 2020). While the first months of dealing with the crisis showed a relative convergence of experts and politicians, their collaboration has become increasingly more contentious as the pandemic lingers on (Flinders, 2020). This seems to have led to a reconfiguration of the public discourse about the experts’ role in the decision-making process. First, political discourse justified these experts’ intervention by presenting them as legitimate protagonists in the crisis management due to their scientific knowledge. Later, it restated the weight of traditional political legitimacy to restore politicians as the authentic decision-makers. Out of this dialectic arises a question: in times of health crisis who gets to decide? This question is particularly relevant in Belgium, since, besides the epidemiological context, the country’s political situation gave it a specific form. Indeed, from March to September 2020, the Belgian government could make decisions only because of the special powers it was granted by the Parliament in relation to the pandemic’s handling (Bouhon et al., 2020), as it was a “caretaker” government constituted by a minority coalition. Even after the formation of a full-fledged government, doubt has been cast on the legitimacy of its decisions since the crisis management has consistently been described as unconstitutional —and was recently condemned as such by a tribunal of first instance for implementing restrictive measures without consulting the Parliament. In this context, discourse about the expert’s legitimacy had to accommodate those political elements. The aim of this contribution is to study the evolution of the construction of the experts’ legitimacy in political discourse during the pandemic, i.e., in a situation of potential political illegitimacy. More precisely, this paper will analyze what political discourse says about: (i) the authority of experts (May their expertise be challenged? Do experts necessarily communicate unquestionable knowledge? Are conflicts between experts put forward or let behind the scenes?); (ii) the role of experts in democratic decision-making procedures. To do so, our corpus will gather the declarations of politicians about the specific issue of the experts’ politic involvement published in the Belgian French-speaking media during the first year of virus circulation in Belgium. This analysis will rely on all the discursive features that express, explicitly or not, the way politicians view expertise and the experts’ implication in the decision-making process during the current health crisis.
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Rondiat, C. (2021). Experts and Decision-Making in Time of Health and Political Crisis. A Study of the Political Discourse on the Role of Experts during COVID-19 in Belgium. Knowledge and Power: Epistemic Conflicts in Democracy, Colchester. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/275427