Democratic Professionalism: Citizen Participation and the Reconstruction of Professional Ethics, Identity, and Practice

4. Task Sharing for Democracy: Themes from Political Theory

4    :     The possibility that professionals can serve as facilitators in a more active and engaged democracy is the central focus of the model of democratic professionalism . Just as task monopolists take away civic competencies, task sharers can help citizens gain competence or, equally important, help citizens understand when and why to hand over a job with public purposes to those with professional training and experience. Reformers can open spaces for public contribution within previously remote structures—the journalists of Chapter  share some of the authority for determining the news by taking cues from their communities rather than officials, the health care workers of Chapter  defer to laypeople over issues of clinical ethics policy, and the criminal justice administrators of Chapter  have devolved the task of sentencing some classes of offenses to citizen panels meeting in public-friendly places. Only a third model of professionalism, one that builds on the insights of both social trusteeism and the radical critique, will help us understand why reformminded professionals who have grown uncomfortable with the antidemocratic tendencies of their domains would seek to open up sites of authority that currently give them a good deal of power, status, and economic security.This model should comport with what reformers themselves think, but it will also put their actions in a broader web of meaning. Reforms will ebb and flow, perhaps mostly ebb, but theorizing the significance of these reforms may bolster such efforts and provide support for the next round of reforms over the long term. In this chapter I draw on a sparse but important literature in political theory to construct a model of democratic professionalism that emphasizes the value of professionals sharing some of their space and competencies with members of the lay public. Following the lead of radical critics, I ask what the value of task sharing within the specific sites of professional authority is for the professions themselves, the laypeople involved, and the active participation in public deliberation and collective decision making that is definitive of a more deliberative democracy. Two canonical political theorists, Alexis de Tocqueville and John Dewey, are useful guides in thinking about task-sharing professionals as important actors in American democracy. Like radical critics and unlike social trustee thinkers, Tocqueville and Dewey take seriously the democratic consequences of professional action. They emphasize the professions’ intermediary role between individual and state, a role that is misunderstood but critical to properly functioning democratic institutions. Though aware of the political dimensions of professional power, Tocqueville and Dewey show professions as intermediaries in democracy that can express healthy forms of power and authority. Democratic professionals can facilitate and enable civic engagement and public deliberation while also expecting lay citizens to learn from professionals with greater training and experience in particular areas. Tocqueville’s and Dewey’s characterization of a mutually deferential relationship between professional and citizen transcends the one-sided accounts of these relations expressed by the social trustee and radical critique models of professionalism . While Tocqueville and Dewey share the social trustee view that professionals protect and exercise forms of knowledge and skill that are good for the public even if they are not fully comprehended by the public, they share radical critics’ view that professional domains are to be porous to lay involvement. Turning from the canonical, this chapter considers two theorists who have brought Tocqueville’s and Dewey’s thinking into contemporary times. William Sullivan and Frank Fischer stress the continuing importance of professionals to a public culture of democracy, though both are wary of current commercial and technocratic trends. These contemporary theorists affirm central insights of Tocqueville and Dewey, but they also raise concerns about the viability of the democratic professional model put forward in this chapter and its potential for abuse. Tocqueville: Task Sharing in American Democracy Alexis de Tocqueville was no participatory democrat. He believed in natural differences among people that marked special competencies for governing, and he believed that the Americans of the s wound up shortchanging themselves because of their resistance to elites.1 He saw the egalitarian currents in 
  1. Elites are not necessarily aristocrats. Tocqueville was under no illusion about aristocracy; in his American politics, such as an expanded electorate compared to the France or Britain of ; in American society, such as an assumption of moral equality regardless of family background; and in American economy, such as the operative principle of...