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Democratic Epistemology and Accountability*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Russell Hardin
Affiliation:
Politics, New York University

Extract

Most of the knowledge of an ordinary person has a very messy structure and cannot meet standard epistemological criteria for its justification. Rather, a street-level epistemology makes sense of ordinary knowledge. Street-level epistemology is a subjective account of knowledge, not a public account. It is not about what counts as knowledge in, say, physics, but deals rather, with your knowledge, my knowledge, the ordinary person's knowledge. I wish not to elaborate this view here, but to apply it to the problems of representative democracy. I will briefly lay out the central implications of a street-level epistemology and then bring it to bear on democratic citizenship, especially on the problem of the citizen's holding elected officials accountable for their actions.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2000

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References

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7 Rostenkowski, a powerful Democratic member of Congress from Illinois who was chair man of the House Ways and Means Committee, was accused of misuse of public funds and defeated for reelection from a normally safe Democratic district in 1994. Hence, he was actually held accountable by the electorate for his abuse of office rather than for his policy positions. He was later convicted and served a brief time in jail. Clinton was held account able by Republicans in the House of Representatives much more than by the electorate for his sexual indiscretions and his deceitful misstatements about them in court depositions.

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13 It is not impossible for someone to establish credible commitments to well-defined positions. For example, sometimes it is possible to appoint judges with fairly sure expectations of how they will behave in office, because they might have extensive records of performance on lower courts when there is little reason to think that this performance was opportunistically guided. Nevertheless, there are famous betrayals by judges who have gone on to change their positions after appointment to a higher court, as President Dwight David Eisenhower reputedly thought Chief Justice Earl Warren betrayed his expectations.

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