Between Reason and Will: Can Regulation Be Responsive?

Presentation for Workshop ‘Socializing Economic Relationships - New Perspectives and Methods for Analysing Transnational Risk Regulation’, Oxford, CSLS, April, 2010.

The proposed paper offers a novel understanding of the oft-discussed accountability problem in regulation and self-regulation. While the literature usually focuses on the institutional details of the various regulatory institutions, I (following the work of Philip Pettit) demonstrate that collectivising reason leads to systematic frustration of popular will, i.e. rationality is always achieved at the expense of democracy. This problem I term rationality gap. I suggest that there are two ways by which contemporary polities mitigate this structural problem – first, by responsibility/thrust in the decision-maker, and second, by rational discourse in the public sphere which eventually aligns (partially) the expert reason and popular passion. However, in increasing number of areas and loci of contemporary decision-making neither of the two happens. I argue that whenever the policy choices are made at a level lower than that of the responsible politicians, and on issues, which are not sufficiently salient to be discussed beyond the specialised circles of ‘stakeholders’, an insurmountable rationality gap arises. Paradoxically, the more technical and the less politicised the issue is, the bigger the frustration of popular will is likely to be.

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