ABSTRACT
Although a prominent question in Ancient Greek political philosophy, the question of political expertise or political skill is one that has received little recent philosophical discussion. This is unfortunate, as the idea of political expertise or skill relevant to politics continues to be prominent in popular discussions of political candidates, in empirical research relating to voter and political official competence, and, implicitly, in discussions of what have come to be called technocratic or epistocratic political systems. In this chapter, I argue that although we can countenance many different notions of skill or expertise that are, in some sense, “political” or related to politics, we should distinguish between two importantly different categories of “political expert”: (1) expert political analysts and exceptionally effective political actors, on the one hand, and (2) normative political experts and expert political actors, on the other. It is the latter group who we should think of as possessing political expertise such that they might plausibly merit possessing political power. I argue that possessing normative political expertise and being an expert political actor are a matter of knowing what ought to be done to achieve the legitimating purposes of political institutions, and acting skillfully so as to achieve those aims. The view of political expertise that I defend in the chapter is, importantly, both contextualist and functionalist. Before saying what is required for political expertise, what an agent must be like to be a political expert, one must fix the institutional context and corresponding institutional roles, identify the legitimating purposes of action in that role, and then ask: what is required of an agent to be successful in acting to achieve those purposes?
