Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 29th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview WG3: Public Administration Reform in CEE and CA (Physical) Author(s) Gerly Elbrecht Tallinn University Tallinn Estonia Kalev Leif, Title Balancing democratic and technocratic argumentation. The case of Estonian State Reform. File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Gerly Elbrecht Abstract Most of the contemporary democracies that seek to enhance their legitimacy have acknowledged the need to increase political deliberation and participation on the one hand but often struggle with bridging it with more technocratic ways of public management and decision-making that has been also a growing trend in governance. For a while already, many authors have been discussing in both theoretical and empirical publications (Habermas, 1968; Wildawsky, 1979; Fischer, 1990; Fawcett, Flinders, Hay, Wood, 2017) whether and how these approaches could be bridged and it is widely agreed that although the former understanding of discerning politics from administration might be useful for some specific sort of analyses then for the wholesome development and analysis of legitimate democratic governance, political deliberative and technocratic aspects have to be ingrained. Since deliberative democratic and technocratic approach are controversial in many of their premises then for successful integration of both some understanding and examples are needed how these concepts can be connected in theory and practice and which are possible bottlenecks. Such deeper understanding enables, firstly, the conduct of well-thought policies that successfully move towards open and deliberative governance and take use of advancing technological and scientific evidence. Secondly, it enables to strengthen the state-citizen collaboration in the process of legitimate policy design. There is empirical evidence that enabling inclusion for the citizens will improve acceptance of policy outcomes by participants, foster social learning and build trust between different stakeholders (Newig; Fristch, 2009). Therefore, more thorough understanding of how to bridge democratic and technocratic aims in policy design is one of the corner stones for legitimate and sustainable contemporary policy-making. The article focuses on the case of Estonian State Reform that has been a distinct policy course within recent years in Estonia. Estonia isin many ways a typical contemporary democratic European country that deals with many governance struggles such as decreasing trust towards political institutions (Hay, 2007), growing criticism and skepticism among citizens (Norris, 2005; 2011) fluctuating legitimacy (van Haam; Thomassen, Aarts 2017) etc. The aim of the article is to carry out a case study analysing how political deliberative and technocratic approaches are conceptualised in the process of reforming the state. Argumentative analysis is applied on the Estonian State Reform policy proposals and explanatory memoranda as a case study to map the logic of explanations why and how the state should be reformed. The argumentative model of S.Toulmin (1958; 2003), also developed by W.Dunn (1981,…2018) is applied for the argumentative analysis of the policy documents. Analysing how fully the arguments are developed and what is missing provides understanding of how the state perceives and presents the democratic deliberative and technocratic aims and means in policy design. Wider framing of the analysis derives from the notions of politicization and depoliticization with the focus on inclusion and exclusion of policy topics and potential stakeholders. By such a logical-inductive approach the analysis enables us to look into the justifications of reform-making and map the way the state provides its input for framing democratic and technocratic approaches.
