Social Science, Policy and Democracy

This paper argues that there is a neglected democratic challenge for policy-relevant social science that existing accounts of the relationship between science and democracy fail to address. It is widely acknowledged that policy-relevant social science is value-laden in a number of ways. To reconcile this with democracy, it has been proposed that the values that enter social science need to be democratically aligned or legitimated in some way to guard against a democratically problematic technocracy. But where the value judgements that need to be made are especially contentious, and persistent disagreement can be expected, this response may not address the danger of a kind of epistemic inequality that I will argue is also problematic on democratic grounds: the epistemic inequality that arises when social scientific results concerning matters of public interest are more relevant, usable and trustworthy for the subset of the population that shares the value judgements made in the research than for the subset of the population that doesn't. A value pluralist approach, in contrast, can help ensure epistemic equality. I will thus argue that if and where greater value pluralism is feasible in social science without undermining other important values, it is clearly desirable on democratic grounds. The measurement of value-laden social scientific indicators, such as measures of the cost of living or wellbeing, will serve as an example of a domain where greater pluralism is both especially desirable and feasible