Interdisciplinary roundtable by ACES' thematic group The Future of European Democracy
In Citizen Knowledge: Markets, Experts, and the Infrastructure of Democracy (OUP 2024), Lisa Herzog argues that democratic self-government relies on a deliberately built epistemic infrastructure – schools, media, expert communities and civil-society arenas that equip citizens with trustworthy knowledge and the ability to act on it. When too many of these functions are “handed over to markets,” democratic–capitalist societies slide into manipulation, inequality and declining public trust. Herzog’s framework of democratic institutionalism therefore calls for recalibrating the relationship between markets, expertise and public deliberation, insisting on the epistemic primacy of politics to set the rules that keep knowledge both reliable and accessible.