Challenges to Political Decision-making

Dealing with Information Overload, Ignorance and Contested Knowledge

Hubert Heinelt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367027520
• eBook ISBN: 9780429674808
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book analyses the ability of individuals to create meaning through communicative interaction and of what seems to constrain and enable actors in taking collectively binding political decisions.

The book examines why, in some contexts, individuals consider something as evident and relevant for their action while others perceive them as nonsense or simply as 'fake news'. As such, the book follows a research perspective based on a concept emphasizing that the core function of knowledge is related to the selection and integration of data and other information which give them substance. Taking an interpretive political science perspective to knowledge, the book overcomes particular deficiencies of policy learning concepts where the development of an understanding of 'reality' is thematized in a way that supposedly decrypts everyday processes through which individuals understand 'reality' and (re)orient their actions to intersubjective processes. To better understand these intersubjective processes, communicative mechanisms are worked through where knowledge claims are selected and integrated.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of political science and policy analysis and more broadly, to sociology and social theory, geography, planning, philosophy, communication studies, and governance studies.

1 Introduction

Current positivist approaches to governance […] stress topics such as power-dependence, the independence of networks, the relationships of the size of networks to policy outcomes and the strategies by which the centre might steer networks. To decentre governance is, in contrast, to focus on the social construction of policy networks through the ability of individuals to create meaning.

(Bevir and Rhodes 2006: 75)

In this book, an attempt is made to comprehend the ability of individuals to create meaning through communicative interaction – or in other words: to make sense of what seems to constrain and enable them in taking collectively binding decisions. This research perspective refers to a concept of knowledge emphasizing that the core function of knowledge is related to the selection and integration of data and other information which give them particular relevance. Knowledge in this sense is (with reference to Berger and Luckmann 1966 as well as Schütz 1976) always connected with processes of creating meaning and a resulting capacity to act. Therefore, the book addresses the effective intersubjective treatment of the question on which knowledge collectively binding decisions should be based (Saretzki 2007: 119–120). This question arises inevitably whenever these decisions have to be taken. From this perspective knowledge is from the outset ‘a matter for politics […] because it is itself produced in highly political processes that instantiate particular versions of what is to be governed, how and by whom in different policy domains’ (Carmel 2017: 772).

This concept of knowledge has been taken up and further developed by a German political science approach to knowledge (Wissenspolitologie).¹ The book aims to connect this approach to international discussions – and thereby make it accessible to a broader audience.

According to this school of thought, communicative interactions in policy making can neither be reduced to conflicts of interest and power nor to struggles over particular knowledge claims and assumptions of appropriateness without considering these conflicts. Instead, for the development of interests, it is necessary to comprehend what is perceived in a given context as achievable and desirable – which points to the necessity of developing causal assumptions and normative orientations. Moreover, the exercise of power is subjected to a double test, at least in democratic political systems (Rüb 2006b: 347). On the one hand, it must be demonstrated that the exercise of power is actually effective on the basis of the causal assumptions which have been made, and, on the other hand, the legitimacy of the exercise of power must be demonstrated with reference to the normative aims that are to be reached by the exercise of power. However, interests and power developed in this way have effects on communicative interaction in political conflicts – which means that these do not take place in a sphere free of interests and power.

After this brief outline of this approach to knowledge it should be clear that the proponents of it are part of the broad spectrum of ideational scholars. However, instead of stating that ‘ideas matter’, its proponents argue that ‘knowledge matters’. Nevertheless, the latter would agree that knowledge matters because it gives:

meaning to actors’ experience of the world (Wendt 1999), enable[s] actors to handle informational complexity or even situations of outright uncertainty by offering interpretations of what is wrong and how to move forward (Blyth 2002), as well as inspire discourses that may justify policy programmes in both cognitive and normative terms.

(Schmidt 2002)

Carstensen and Schmidt (2016: 318) summarized the basic assumption of ideational scholars. However, proponents of the mentioned approach to knowledge are not only part of the broad spectrum of ideational scholars but particularly of those scholars supporting interpretive approaches. It will be shown later (in Chapter 2) what proponents of this approach do have in common with these other scholars – and what makes their approach distinct.

The reflections on the effective treatment of knowledge problems do not look for something which can be considered as rational or objective. Instead, the reflections are concerned with the question, why actors in some contexts consider something as evident and relevant for their action which is perceived by others as nonsense. Or, as Bevir and Phillips (2017: 695) put it:

Social facts cannot explain political activity because humans are agents that act on beliefs and desires that are their own. Because humans are agents, social facts do not contain a social logic that explains some outcome. Rather, it is actors’ ideas that do the explanatory work, including beliefs about interdependence.

The relevance of such reflections becomes clear by looking for example at the EU which stands currently at a crossroads. According to many observers, Europe has been reeling for a couple of years now: the financial crisis, the sovereign debt crisis in some member states of the eurozone and following austerity measures, the rise of Eurosceptic parties in member states’ parliaments and the European Parliament, growing populism, the Brexit referendum as well as the unsolved burden-sharing in the face of the arrival of refugees. All these issues are related to struggles over ideas and the question of what is seen as meaningful and a ‘good reason’ in some contexts – and perceived in others as ‘post-truth’ (d’Ancona 2017; Fuller 2018; MacInytre 2018) or reasoning based on ‘fake news’ (see Heinelt and Münch, forthcoming).

Knowledge problems in political processes have been addressed already in my previous work (Heinelt 2008, in English Heinelt 2010; Heinelt 2016a). I considered this issue together with what is widely understood as the ‘shift from government to governance’ and how governance arrangements could be structured in a participatory way so that these arrangements would meet democratic standards (for recent work on this topic, see Heinelt 2018). It has been assumed that, in the case of a treatment of the question on which knowledge collectively binding decisions should be based, it is a matter of fact that, by means of communicative processes, action options and their respective consequences must be developed in such a way that collectively binding decisions are made possible and – essential for democratic political systems – justifiable and thereby legitimized (see Heinelt 2010: 40–48). The interpretation and selection of information is deemed to be relevant to every action because these processes (i.e. interpreting and selecting information) are related to what is meant by the development of knowledge. Consequently, it is assumed that knowledge about options and consequences of actions plays a role in any form of political decision-making.

However, at the time of the decision, this knowledge does not have to be shared by all. It can also involve lack of knowledge or non-knowledge, on the part of the actors involved as well as by non-involved third parties, and thus be characterized by ignorance (see also Section 7.2) – and can also be revealed as this afterward. Furthermore, it can be argued that any decision can be characterized – at least partly – as ignorant because in the face of a multitude of information, every decision must selectively ignore some of the available knowledge. This phenomenon constitutes the core of any political discussion about how to deal adequately with challenges. Such political struggles can last for years, and the political strategies and measures decided in the meantime may remain controversial. This is clearly reflected, for example, in the political disputes over the measures taken in the eurozone since 2008, which were seen by some (but not by all) as necessary to address effectively and adequately the ‘financial crisis’. These disputes concerned particularly the grants paid to individual countries of the eurozone (and especially to Greece) and the terms attached to them. The same applies to the dispute in the European Union about how to ‘solve’ the ‘refugee crisis’ which became apparent no later than September 2015. However, concerning the multitude of less spectacular political challenges, it remains to be clarified how in political processes contingency and ambiguity can be removed, and political capacity for action can be established. This book should develop understanding of how contingency and ambiguity are replaced by certainty – at least by ‘certainty until further notice’ (Schütz 1976: 288).

The connection between knowledge and any form of political decision, which was also a central subject of my publications mentioned above, is recapitulated in Chapter 3 of this book. The types of political decision-making in question range from majority decisions and hierarchical interventions legitimated by the former to those involving horizontal coordination of action. They have been understood since the early 1990s as the core of what constitutes ‘governance’. At the same time, it was assumed in the above-mentioned publications that every form of political decision-making, as well as their combination with particular problem definition, action orientations, and problem-solving strategies, are dependent on a certain ‘choice of interpretation’ (Deutungswahl) and ‘choice of knowledge’ (Wissenswahl) – as they were called by the main proponent of the German political science approach to knowledge, namely Nullmeier (1993: 186). These choices of interpretation and of knowledge imply ‘discursive selectivity’ (Vadrot 2016) because based on the choice of interpretation only particular knowledge from a range of available knowledge will be chosen. Furthermore, these choices are not individual but collective acts, because they express what is considered to be factually and normatively appropriate in specific contexts. And the communicative interactions within the framework of these choices of interpretation and knowledge can be regarded as the core of what constitutes deliberative democracy (which will be elaborated in detail in Section 3.2; see also Heinelt 2010: 24–27).² This applies to the specific context of a city as well as to that of a (national) policy area, the political system of a country or the institutional structures of the EU as a whole, as well as its policy fields. The specific combination of knowledge in such contexts in contrast to others can then be regarded as the main cause for the variance of political decisions and resulting policies. A knowledge gap (whether desired or unintentional) or the dominance of certain knowledge has an immediate impact on political decisions, i.e. the ‘choice of action’ (Handlungswahl; Nullmeier 1993: 186).

The ‘three-level model’ of a choice of interpretation, of knowledge and of action can be connected (as will be explained in more detail in Section 3.3) to Kooiman’s (2000: 143ff., 2002: 86–87, 2003: 133ff.) distinction between three ‘governing orders’. And particularly what Kooiman calls ‘meta governing’ (and Jessop [2002: 49] ‘meta-governance’) implies what can be understood as a choice of interpretation and of knowledge – namely a (re-)articulation of the advantages and disadvantages of different modes of coordination (i.e. governance modes) as well as the form of political decisions and their calibration in certain governance arrangements. Instead of explaining governance or the supposedly new forms of it in terms of ‘some inexorable logic of modernization or changing institutional challenges’ (Wagenaar 2011: 95) governance is understood from this perspective as ‘a product of diverse practices that are themselves composed of multiple individuals acting on all sorts of conflicting beliefs’ (Bevir and Rhodes 2006: 76).

Before discussing the connection between knowledge and forms of political decision-making or governance modes, as well as the levels of governance at which these modes play a specific role, the concepts of knowledge and knowledge orders are briefly explained in Chapter 2. Although knowledge and knowledge order played a role in my earlier publications (see Heinelt 2008: 89–109, 2010: 40–48), they had not yet been developed in the way that is necessary for the reflections which will be presented in this book. The publications mentioned earlier had already been influenced by the ‘cognitive turn in political science’ (Nullmeier et al. 2011) as well as the ‘argumentative turn’ and ‘interpretive turn’ in policy analysis (Fischer and Forester 1993; Yanow 2015) and can be read as an attempt to explore perspectives of post-positivism. In these publications, however, a conscious interpretative policy analysis had not yet been carried out. This will be done in Chapter 2.

Since this book deals with the importance of knowledge in the process of reaching and implementing socially binding decisions, the focus is on the formation and reproduction as well as the questioning and transformation of what is termed a knowledge order. A brief overview of this debate and the concept of knowledge order used in this book will be given in Section 2.1.2. This section on the conceptual clarification of knowledge orders is relatively short because it is more important in the context of the book to identify the mechanisms that are involved in the process of developing knowledge orders. And since these processes revolve around collective, communication-based interpretation and selection of information deemed to be relevant to the coordination of collective action, the main issues are the social mechanisms in these communicative interactions. Such mechanisms are set out in Section 4.5.2, in the context of exploration (in Section 4.5.1) of the scholarly debate on social mechanisms that have attracted increasing attention in recent years.

By identifying these social mechanisms in communicative interactions, an attempt is made to overcome deficiencies in concepts of (policy) learning. These mechanisms are worked out to understand better intersubjective processes of creating meaning through which knowledge claims are selected and integrated into particular knowledge orders relevant in specific contexts (a city, a policy field or even a whole country or international organization) for guiding collective actions.

The elaboration of these mechanisms draws on an own study of local climate policies, and empirical material from this study will be used as anchor examples to illustrate how the model of knowledge orders and the mechanisms which shape them work in practice.³ Local climate policies are of interest as an object of the investigation because the relevance of climate change, as well as urban strategies and measures for counteracting or dealing with its consequences, is scarcely negated (see, among others, Bulkeley and Kern 2006). However, local actors are confronted with a fundamental knowledge problem when it comes to deciding whether and how they should act: what is their appropriate local contribution to solving this global problem? How could this global problem impact on the city and how can it be dealt with most effectively and efficiently in the city? This ultimately leads to the question of why specific available knowledge is taken into account or developed in political decision-making processes – and not others.

As will be explained in the discussion of these mechanisms (in Section 4.5.2), that the levels of (a) their general, abstract effects and (b) their realization in specific contexts have to be conceptually differentiated. The enactment of the mechanisms under certain conditions must be differentiated according to whether it is based on largely unreflected practices or intentionally based on what can be called knowledge politics.

Practices can be defined with Reckwitz (2004: 321) as routinized and competently developed ‘accomplishment’, which is based on implicit know-how knowledge. They are

a routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge. A practice […] forms ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Political decisions and knowledge
• 3 Governance and knowledge
• 4 Reflections on knowledge orders
• 5 Using communicative mechanisms for the formation of knowledge orders through discursive practices
• 6 Knowledge politics
• 7 How to govern democratically in the (non-)knowledge society: problems and perspectives
• References
• Index