Commenting on the 2017 General Election campaign, conflict analysis specialist Professor Feargal Cochrane says it’s time for the return of experts.
‘When former justice secretary Michael Gove commented that “people have had enough of experts” he was tapping into a popular motif of the EU referendum campaign. It seemed to place more emphasis on how people felt about issues, as opposed to what they actually knew.
‘To be fair to Gove, he was aiming his fire at economic experts, whose predictions were consistently wrong – rather than at expertise per se. But if you live by the catch-phrase, as many politicians now do (Brexit means Brexit, anyone?), you can die by it too. Thus experts – such as Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England – were derided by Gove as being devoid of humility and exhibiting an arrogance that must be curbed.
‘But the move to equate expertise with arrogance is worrying. Decisions taken on a hunch, or without sufficient evidence, are often subsequently regretted by those who make them.
‘The EU referendum campaign exemplified this. We were told not to confuse the electorate with facts, evidence, data or relevant experience. Indeed those that did were considered detail-freaks, jargon-peddlers or simply nerds who missed the bigger picture. This has recently been referred to as ‘populism‘.
‘It’s linked to President Trump’s attempts to cow the US media by suggesting experts were out of touch with the popular mood of the country. At a more sinister level, the supposed fake news peddlers from CNN and other media sources have been cast as being a dangerous impediment to Trump’s attempt to Make America Great Again. In other societies, past and present, such official declarations of an enemy within would be swiftly followed by the arrival of the police at the homes of the offending journalists, the closure of their offices, and worse.
‘Public pronouncements by Trump and Gove go beyond the short term headlines and speak to a much longer term and corrosive dynamic within public discourse. They represent a sustained attempt to degrade the capacity of society to make informed decisions on the basis of the evidence available. This has been aided and abetted by the popular media, which has lazily adopted a banal and superficial approach to the coverage of political issues in the US and increasingly in the UK too.
‘This is heavily personality based. Policy issues are framed without much careful analysis of the evidence base to sustain them. Put bluntly, if Fox News becomes your most popular source of news content, President Trump is what you get at the end of it. Opinion is everything – the more trenchantly expressed the better. Evidence for the assertions made is of secondary value.
‘This is where the experts can and should be put centre-stage. The Political Studies Association (PSA) has close to 2,000 experts, and over 50 specialist groups, researching, teaching, and unpacking politics within and beyond the UK. The PSA is immensely proud of the contribution our members are making, not only to the field of political studies – but to public life more broadly.
‘This expertise is vital for the health of democratic society so that their expertise filters into public discourse and helps to shape the political choices that the electorate is confronted with today and in the years ahead.
‘Here is the heart of the matter. Not all opinion is equally valid. Some opinions are drawn from solid methodology, critical engagement with a canon of other work in the field, a robust dataset or generation of new empirical evidence, from which informed conclusions can be reached and a conceptual framework established to interpret the results. This is expertise, and it is desperately needed in today’s political climate to make a contribution to an informed society.
‘In the run-up to the general election, the PSA will be striving to champion the research expertise of its members across key policy debates within the UK and beyond. Michael Gove and President Trump’s comments will not be the end of the story. Society needs experts more than ever in today’s complex times.’
A version of this comment is available here. Feargal Cochrane is vice chair of the Political Studies Association and professor of International Conflict Analysis at the University of Kent. He is director of the Conflict Analysis Research Centre and deputy head of the School of Politics and International Relations at Kent. His current research is examining the impact of Brexit on the peace process in Northern Ireland and its devolved institutions.