Experts, Authority, & Political Legitimacy

Imagine a coastal city debating how to manage the increasing risk of flooding. Engineers and climate scientists warn that without immediate investment in flood barriers and drainage infrastructure, the city will face severe flooding within a decade. The scientific consensus is clear, and the costs of inaction are high. But the proposed plan is expensive, and the benefits are largely invisible in the short term. Local politicians, wary of public backlash over higher taxes, hold a referendum. Citizens vote against the proposal. Years later, a major storm devastates the city, causing widespread damage and loss.

This kind of case raises an important question: what should we think when democratically made decisions fail to track what there is most reason to do? Can political legitimacy rest solely on democratic procedures, even when those procedures lead to outcomes that are foreseeably harmful?

Fabienne Peter’s recent book, The Grounds of Political Legitimacy, begins with precisely this concern. While democracy is often treated as the highest standard of political legitimacy, Peter asks what we should do when democratic decisions conflict with expert political judgment. Her answer is that, in certain cases, democratic decision-making should give way to the judgment of what she calls “cognitive political authorities.”

This claim challenges the familiar belief that democratic processes uniquely justify the exercise of political power. But the challenge is grounded in a simple and increasingly hard-to-ignore fact: the track record of democracies meeting major political challenges is, at best, uneven. From the global failure to take timely action on climate change to the mishandling of crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, democracies often fall short. And when they do, the consequences are severe. Bad political decisions—misinformed, shortsighted, ideologically motivated—can put lives at risk, perpetuate injustice, and threaten the conditions for legitimate governance itself.

Peter’s central claim is that in some cases, legitimate political decisions are not those grounded in the will of the people but rather those that reflect the judgment of cognitive political authorities—or experts. When the relevant expertise is sufficiently clear and justified, it is to these experts, not the electorate or their representatives, that legitimacy belongs. In this post, I examine the plausibility of this claim. I will outline Peter’s argument, assess the examples she offers in support, and raise several challenges that, in my view, undermine her case for expert authority as an alternative to democratic legitimacy.

Peter’s core idea is simple. If we care about making good political decisions and avoiding costly mistakes, then we should sometimes defer to those who are more likely to get things right. As she puts it, “legitimate political decisions are [sometimes] those made by someone, or a body of people, with cognitive authority” (5). These are typically not elected officials but rather credentialed experts who possess the ability to “track what there is most reason to do” (6). On her view, there are some situations in political life that require ordinary citizens and even democratic leaders to defer to such authority. If it is possible to establish with sufficient robustness what the right decision is in a given situation, then we should be willing to accept the judgment of those who are best equipped to make it.

Peter does not claim that experts are infallible, of course. She acknowledges that they can and do make mistakes. Still, she believes that their decisions can be legitimate even when they are wrong, so long as those decisions are based on sufficiently justified beliefs. What matters is not whether experts reach the truth, but whether their judgments are grounded in the best available evidence, subject to appropriate standards of reasoning, and formed under favorable epistemic conditions. When such conditions are met, experts may be entitled to make binding political decisions.

Peter’s framework distinguishes three possible grounds of political legitimacy. The first is the political will, where legitimacy stems from democratic procedures and popular participation. The second is cognitive political authority, where legitimacy stems from the superior epistemic position of decision-makers. The third is what she calls the factualist view, which holds that legitimacy depends on whether a decision tracks the normative facts (i.e. what actually ought to be done) regardless of whether anyone recognizes those facts. Peter rejects this last view. She argues that legitimacy cannot depend on truths that are epistemically inaccessible (54-60), which normative truths often are. (For example, a specific tax policy might in fact be the most just option, yet remain impossible to identify as such given the evidence available.) If the correctness of a political decision is unknowable in practice, then it cannot justify coercive power.

The view Peter develops is a hybrid of the first two models. In some cases, political legitimacy depends on the political will. In other cases, it depends on cognitive political authority. Which of these two grounds is operative depends on the epistemic circumstances of a given political decision. In ordinary circumstances, the epistemic situation is messy. Evidence is incomplete or contested. Expertise is diffuse, and reasonable people disagree about who knows what. In such cases, Peter argues that democratic procedures are necessary to settle disagreement, and that legitimacy flows from the political will. But in favorable epistemic circumstances—that is, when the relevant expertise is sufficiently clear, when the body of evidence is robust, and when the experts can be reliably identified—then the locus of legitimacy shifts. In those cases, legitimacy stems not from the will of the people, but from the superior cognitive position of experts.

This proposal raises two obvious questions. First, who actually has cognitive political authority? Second, who is in a position to determine who has it? Peter’s theory depends not just on the existence of expertise but also on our ability to recognize it. Without that ability, her account risks running into the very accessibility problem she identifies for the factualist view, where legitimacy would rest on truths that may be unknowable in practice. In what follows, I will examine how this problem of identifying legitimate expertise poses a significant challenge for Peter’s view.

Can we tell who the experts are, especially in the contentious realm of politics? On this question, Peter positions herself between two extremes. She is more cautious than optimists, who believe that expertise can routinely guide legitimate political decisions; yet she is more hopeful than skeptics, who doubt that expert authority can ever serve as a reliable foundation for legitimacy. Although Peter concedes that “robust expertise is not usually available” (7), she also maintains that there are circumstances in which cognitive political authority “can be established with sufficient robustness” (98). Her discussion of the early Covid-19 pandemic illustrates this optimism. She describes it as a case in which “there was unusually robust expertise on what needed to be done” (99).

Peter is clear that we are rarely in favorable epistemic circumstances. We ordinarily face fragmented bodies of evidence, a general lack of political competence, and serious difficulties identifying who counts as an expert. In such contexts, we cannot rely on cognitive political authority to justify coercive political decisions. Still, Peter cautions against dismissing cognitive political authority altogether. There are exceptional cases, she thinks, in which the epistemic conditions are good enough to justify deference to experts. These arise when the relevant evidence is unusually clear, when experts demonstrate a high level of political competence, and when it is possible to identify them with confidence.

The key point, then, is that democracy is not intrinsically valuable. It is a second-best solution appropriate in conditions of epistemic uncertainty. The political will suffices for legitimacy when politics is characterized by fragmented bodies of evidence, insufficient political competence, and difficulties with identifying the expert point of view even if it exists (83). When those conditions no longer obtain, democratic will should yield to the judgments of those who know better.

At the heart of Peter’s theory is a concern that she believes plagues all views which ground legitimacy in the will of the people: the worry about arbitrariness. As she puts it,

The problem that all will-based conceptions face, and which current historical developments make vivid, is that they are at risk of supporting undue arbitrariness in political decisions (23).

Peter’s notion of arbitrariness is not about randomness or caprice. Rather, it concerns political decisions that disregard what she calls “valid political claims” (41), that is, claims that are supported by sufficiently justified beliefs about what ought to be done. When democratic decisions ignore these claims, Peter argues, they are not legitimate. Her view is that legitimacy requires more than just following proper democratic procedures; it also depends on the epistemic quality of the beliefs that guide decision-making.

To illustrate this, Peter turns to a series of case studies, each meant to show how the will of the people can lead to outcomes that fail the test of justification. As I’ll argue below, however, each of these examples faces important challenges. Far from supporting Peter’s claim, I think they reveal the difficulties of applying her theory in real political contexts.

Let’s consider the first case study:

Case 1: Vaccine Mandates

“Consider the political claim ‘vaccination should be a personal choice’ in relation to a highly contagious and dangerous infectious disease and a vaccine that meets demanding safety standards. Such a claim might lead citizens and political decision-makers to oppose vaccination requirements or restrictions based on vaccination status. Suppose it’s possible to develop a good sense of the costs on others if vaccination were not required in any circumstances, and suppose they would be extremely significant, resulting in very large numbers of deaths and long-term illness caused by the disease. A small gain in personal choice for a minority of vaccine-sceptics might then be offset by large losses in personal liberty for much greater numbers. In those circumstances, it might be possible to establish, with sufficient robustness, that it’s not correct that vaccination should be a personal choice and that therefore there shouldn’t be a vaccine mandate in any context.” (40)

This example is intended to show that democratic decision-making can produce unjustified and therefore illegitimate outcomes. However, I believe it ultimately exposes more difficulties for Peter’s view than it resolves.

First, we should ask: who, exactly, is in a position to “develop a good sense” of the relevant costs and benefits? Peter leaves this unclear. All she says is, “Suppose it’s possible to develop a good sense of the costs on others.” But this can be interpreted in multiple ways. On one reading, the answer is abstract and purely theoretical: the relevant evidence exists, and someone could, in principle, arrive at the correct conclusion if they reasoned properly, even if nobody actually does. However, this does not appear to be the interpretation Peter intends, since her concern is not simply with the metaphysical availability of truth, but with identifying who ought to exercise decision-making authority in real political contexts.

On a more plausible interpretation, the authority rests with experts. But then we must ask who these experts are. While epidemiologists know about transmission risk and vaccine efficacy, they are not authorities on trade-offs involving autonomy, fairness, or the political risks of coercive public health policies. These moral and political judgments require evaluating competing values, weighing the acceptability of restricting individual freedoms, and anticipating the broader institutional consequences of coercive measures—tasks that fall outside the scope of epidemiology. Without clarity on which domain of expertise is relevant, it is unclear whether these individuals qualify as the appropriate cognitive political authorities.

Here, Russell and Patterson’s The Weaponization of Expertise offers a pointed challenge. Drawing on the pandemic itself as a case study, they argue that elite actors frequently invoked “follow the science” not to present neutral facts but to advance policy choices freighted with value judgments. In their view, this technocratic framing blurred the distinction between empirical consensus and political preference, and in doing so, stifled legitimate debate about trade-offs in public health, education, and economic policy. From their perspective, the early COVID-19 response is less a paradigm of “unusually robust expertise” than an example of how such claims can mask contestable priorities, erode trust, and fuel populist skepticism. If they are right, Peter’s pandemic case may illustrate not the success of cognitive political authority, but the dangers of overestimating its clarity and legitimacy in real political contexts.

A third possibility is that the relevant facts and justifications are accessible to the general public. But if that were the case, then deference would not be necessary. The electorate would recognize the justification for the policy and support it directly through democratic means. That interpretation, however, seems to undercut Peter’s broader concern. Her argument begins from the observation that democratic processes often fail to produce justified outcomes, and that we need to look beyond the political will to protect against serious political error. If citizens really are in a position to “develop a good sense” of what should be done, then the central problem Peter sets out to address loses its force. Rather than justifying a shift away from democratic decision-making, this interpretation suggests that the democratic public is itself capable of arriving at the right conclusions.

To futher illustrate this worry about identifying who has relevant expertise, let’s turn to another example from Peter:

Case 2: Brexit

“Consider the influential political claim made by the leave campaign in the run-up to the Brexit referendum that ‘Brexit would increase the government’s ability to invest in the NHS.’ That empirical claim was argued to be obviously and demonstrably false by the opposing campaign. The leave campaign, it appears, was aware of the falsehood of this claim and used it deliberately to influence the political will in support of Brexit. Their strategy worked in the sense that the claim appears to have greatly influenced leave voters.” (40)

I agree with Peter that the claim about NHS funding was false. Yet even if citizens ought to have deferred to experts on this narrow empirical question, it does not follow that they should also have deferred to such experts on the broader issue of whether to leave the EU. The decision to support Brexit could have been motivated by a range of considerations, only one of which was the disputed NHS claim. Political motivations are often complex, and a single falsehood does not exhaust the possible justifications voters may have had. Moreover, the economists or fiscal analysts best placed to assess the funding implications of Brexit are not necessarily experts on other reasons for leaving, such as concerns about sovereignty or migration. The Brexit example therefore illustrates the difficulty of treating one factual error as sufficient grounds for questioning the legitimacy of a far more wide-ranging democratic decision.

At the risk of feeding a fed horse, let’s consider a third example from Peter:

Case 3: Immigration

“Consider the decision of the Trump administration to enforce a US immigration policy that separates small children from their families. Is it permissible to separate small children from their families? Whatever else we should believe about immigration policies, I think it is sufficiently clear that small children need the protection of their families and should not be separated from their families unless it’s for their own benefit. It thus appears that the political claim that it is permissible to separate small children from their families to achieve some other goal, not related to their own welfare, is unlikely to be correct.” (40)

I share Peter’s moral judgment here. The question, however, is whether there was a clear cognitive political authority to which the Trump administration should have deferred. Immigration scholars might be able to assess the likely consequences or legal parameters of the policy, but that does not make them authorities on its moral permissibility. Indeed, the very idea of moral expertise is highly contested in philosophy. Assuming such experts do exist, identifying them is extremely difficult, maybe impossible. And even if they can be identified, it is not clear that we should outsource our moral reasoning to others. A large literature in moral philosophy has raised precisely these concerns, arguing that deference in moral matters is both epistemically and ethically problematic. (For my own take on this issue, read this.)

Peter, however, draws a strong conclusion. She writes,

It looks like the decision had all the required credentials of democratic due process. Yet I want to claim that the decision was illegitimate, and what made it illegitimate was that it went against established cognitive political authority, in this case in relation to the needs of small children. (99-100, emphasis mine)

This assumes the existence of a moral authority capable of settling the issue, and that this authority was clearly identifiable at the time. Neither claim is obviously true. Even if we accept that separating small children from their families for political purposes is morally wrong—as I do—it does not follow that there was an identifiable moral authority to ground that judgment. Who was the authority in question? Was it anyone who happened to believe the moral truth? And how is deference even supposed to work in a case like this, where the issue is moral rather than empirical? These questions point toward a broader concern with Peter’s hybrid theory of political legitimacy, one that I will develop in the next section.

A well-known objection to theories that give primacy to expert judgment in politics is what David Estlund calls the expert-boss fallacy. It is the fallacy of assuming that just because someone has epistemic authority, they also have political authority. For example, just because my dentist knows best how to maintain healthy teeth does not mean they have the right to dictate my flossing habits. As Estlund memorably asks, “You may be correct, but what makes you boss?” While expertise may justify offering advice, it does not by itself confer the right to make coercive decisions.

Peter anticipates this challenge and offers a reply. She argues that there are cases where epistemic authority gives rise to political authority. To illustrate this, she presents the following example:

The Fire

“Suppose you’re at a large gathering and you have just accidentally discovered that a fire has started behind a heavy curtain. Having previously been involved in health and safety, you have considerable knowledge about fires, in general, and quickly realize that this fire will, if unattended, spread very quickly and engulf everything. Nobody else appears to be aware, but they do know about your background. Because of your superior epistemic position, and given the threat, you should now act quickly and do everything you can to help evacuate people to safety. It gives you permission to ask attending staff to help you evacuate. It also gives you permission to ask some guests to leave the premises and to insist that they do so quickly, even if they don’t fully grasp what’s going on, and to ask other guests to hold back, to avoid bottlenecks. And because they are aware of your qualification, everyone should do as they’ve been told. If they ignore your directives and people get injured or die as a result, they will be accountable for this, and it would be appropriate for them to blame themselves for their failure to act as instructed by you.” (79)

Peter uses this case to illustrate her claim that epistemic authority can, in some situations, give rise to political authority. However, I do not think the fire example succeeds in making that point. There are several important features of the case that do not map onto real political contexts.

First, the people you are instructing in the fire scenario already recognize your expertise. As Peter puts it, they “know about your background” and are “aware of your qualification” (79). They understand that you have “considerable knowledge about fires” and, on that basis, treat your instructions as credible. This is unlike politics, where those subject to political decisions often disagree about who has relevant expertise. As Estlund puts it, “No knower is so knowable as to be known by all reasonable people.”

Second, it is unclear whether the fire case even involves coercion in the political sense. As Peter describes it, you “ask attending staff to help you evacuate” and “ask some guests to leave the premises and to insist that they do so quickly.” These are strong requests, but they fall short of the kind of enforced compliance characteristic of political authority. Political decisions are typically backed by the threat of legal sanctions; in Peter’s fire case, there is no suggestion that those who refuse would be physically compelled to obey.

Finally, the case leaves unexplored a more difficult question: what authority do you have if your expertise is not recognized and you nevertheless try to force compliance? Imagine someone responds to your instructions as follows: “No, don’t listen to him! If we stay back any longer, we’ll all suffocate from the smoke.” In this case, does your unacknowledged expertise give you the right to physically restrain this person from leaving? It is far from clear that it does. Once we remove the element of recognized expertise and introduce the element of coercion, the legitimacy of your authority becomes more doubtful.

Peter claims that this fire example can be “adapted to the political context to show that epistemic authority as a ground of political legitimacy functions in an analogous way” (80). She introduces a more “stylized political case,” borrowed from earlier work:

Town Bridge

“Suppose a town needs to replace a main bridge, which spans over a major river. And suppose that all other aspects of the decision have been dealt with, such that the only remaining issue is: is the planned bridge stable? And suppose there is a town engineer with a faultless track-record on decisions of this kind. Their verdict is that the planned bridge suffers from stability issues and should thus not be built. In a scenario like this, the verdict of the town engineer appears to be sufficient to render a decision to go ahead with the planned bridge illegitimate—because it’s known that this would avoidably put people’s lives at risk. Neither the town executive nor a democratic town hall meeting could have permission to decide to go ahead.” (80)

In this case, unlike the fire example, it is much clearer that the person with epistemic authority—the engineer—ought also to have practical authority over the decision. If the sole remaining question is whether the bridge is stable, then the individual with the best technical knowledge of bridge stability should have the decisive say. But precisely because of these stipulations, this example is of limited value for Peter’s purposes. By design, it’s not really a political case at all. As Michael Waltzer suggests, “opposition and conflict, disagreement and struggle where the stakes are high—that’s what politics is” (2004: 117-8). Peter explicitly removes all the political dimensions from the decision, leaving only a narrow technical question about the bridge’s structural integrity.

A genuinely political decision would involve trade-offs of the kind that technical expertise alone cannot resolve: for instance, whether to build the bridge instead of investing the funds in improving the local school, or whether to name the bridge after a controversial historical figure. Questions like these implicate competing values, priorities, and interpretations of the common good. They are precisely the kinds of issues where it is unclear who, if anyone, counts as the relevant expert, and where reasonable disagreement about authority is inevitable.

By contrast, in Peter’s bridge case there is no such disagreement. She stipulates that “there is a town engineer with a faultless track-record on decisions of this kind” (80), which makes the expert’s qualification obvious and uncontested. In these highly simplified circumstances, the move from epistemic authority to practical authority is innocuous and uncontroversial. It is telling, then, that Peter presents this as her “political” case. Despite her claim to the contrary, the scenario is not political in the ordinary sense, and so it does little to illuminate how cognitive political authority would function in the far messier contexts where political legitimacy is actually at stake.

In sum, Peter’s attempt to counter the expert-boss fallacy works only by relying on cases that remove the very features that make politics challenging: persistent disagreement, value pluralism, and contested claims to expertise. In both the fire and bridge examples, the relevant authority is obvious, uncontested, and operating in a context where the decision is stripped of its political dimensions. Once these simplifying assumptions are set aside and the realities of politics are reintroduced, the inference from epistemic authority to political authority becomes far less compelling.

Peter’s framework turns on a distinction between two kinds of epistemic circumstances. In the normal epistemic circumstances of politics, evidence is fragmented, expertise is contested, and reasonable people disagree about who knows what. In these cases, legitimacy must rest with the political will. In favourable epistemic circumstances, by contrast, the relevant expertise is sufficiently robust, the experts are competent on the political question at hand, and their authority can be reliably identified. In such cases, Peter argues, legitimacy shifts to the judgment of these “cognitive political authorities.”

This distinction is central to her account, but it raises an immediate tension. Would there be cases where the epistemic conditions are genuinely favourable—where the evidence is robust, the experts are identifiable, and their recommendations are clear—yet the political will fails to align with expert judgment? If so, Peter’s theory requires overriding the democratic will. But if the conditions are as favourable as she claims, why expect such misalignment in the first place? In a well-functioning democracy, citizens and their representatives should be able to see the merits of the expert view and converge upon it. Conversely, if there is persistent disagreement, Peter herself concedes that this “undermines cognitive political authority as a ground of legitimate political decision-making” (196). In that case, legitimacy defaults to the political will. Either way, the role for cognitive political authority appears vanishingly small.

The difficulty is compounded by a problem that mirrors Peter’s own objection to factualism (which holds that political legitimacy depends on whether a decision tracks the normative facts). She rejects factualism because legitimacy cannot depend on normative facts that are inaccessible to political agents in judgment. Yet her own view depends on our ability to recognize when the conditions for cognitive political authority obtain—and this is often just as inaccessible. Peter identifies three necessary conditions for such authority: there must be a unified and robust body of evidence, the relevant expertise must extend to the political question at stake, and it must be possible to establish that the expertise exists and applies (83). These are demanding criteria, and in real politics it is rarely obvious whether they are met. Without a reliable way to judge when favourable epistemic conditions obtain, her account risks the same flaw she attributes to factualism: legitimacy would rest on facts that may be unknowable in practice.

Before concluding, I want to draw out what I see as a deeper problem with Peter’s account—one that runs throughout the book. It concerns what might be called a perspectiveless perspective: an evaluative stance that hovers above political life as if from nowhere, detached from any clearly identifiable standpoint.

Peter frequently describes legitimacy in terms of what it is “possible to establish, with sufficient robustness” (63, 103). But possible for whom? To be established by whom? In her example of vaccine mandates, she writes, “Suppose it’s possible to develop a good sense of the costs on others” (40). Elsewhere she says, “It might be possible to establish which claims are correct and which are incorrect” (41), and in the town bridge case, “it’s possible to identify that epistemic authority” (80). These are pivotal claims in her argument, but the standpoint from which these judgments are made is left unspecified. Are we meant to imagine domain experts, an informed democratic public, or some hypothetical neutral observer? The answer matters: each implies different procedures, standards of evidence, and susceptibility to disagreement.

The ambiguity is especially pressing when Peter says democratic outcomes risk illegitimacy when they fail to reflect “what should be believed” about relevant empirical and normative facts (41). Should be believed by whom? If by all citizens, the standard is unrealistically idealized given the epistemic fragmentation of modern democracies. If by those with access to the relevant evidence, the theory inherits all the difficulties of identifying such people and securing public recognition of their authority.

This lack of anchoring is also visible in her talk of “decisive epistemic authority.” In the bridge case, Peter stipulates that “there is epistemic authority on what the right decision is in response, and it’s possible to identify that epistemic authority” (80). But again, possible for whom—in principle, or in practice? In politics, the very question at stake is often who counts as having decisive authority, and there is rarely universal agreement. Philosophical examples can stipulate away this disagreement; real-world politics cannot. Without clearer guidance on whose perspective determines decisiveness, her standard risks floating above the fray—appearing clear from a distance, but offering little help in the messy work of settling disputes on the ground.

Ultimately, Peter’s position seems to amount to this: if there is decisive epistemic authority, in the sense that it is both sufficiently justified and publicly identifiable, then that authority should ground legitimate political decisions. But it is unclear whether this ever happens. Indeed, as John Rawls argued in his account of the “burdens of judgment,” the epistemic circumstances of political life are inherently fraught. Even under ideal deliberative conditions, reasonable and well-intentioned citizens are likely to disagree, due to the complexity of the evidence, the indeterminacy of normative reasoning, and the diversity of evaluative perspectives. As Rawls sees it, persistent disagreement is not an unfortunate aberration but a predictable feature of political life.

Peter concedes this point in part, noting that “if there are such reasonable disagreements about what should be done… there is no decisive epistemic authority and, as a result, no cognitive political authority.” In response to these concerns, she offers a statement of confidence: “I’m more optimistic about cognitive political authority” (112). But I have suggested that such optimism is unwarranted. The burden remains on Peter to show that the conditions she identifies are not only theoretically coherent but empirically plausible. As it stands, her examples fail to meet her own standards. And if the epistemic circumstances of politics are as fraught as they appear, cognitive political authority is not just rare—it may be, in practice, out of reach.