The Issues Deserve More Credit

This paper explores the `issue-oriented' perspective on public involvement in politics opened up by recent research in Science and Technology Studies (STS). This research proposes that public controversy around techno-scientific issues is dedicated to the articulation of these issues and their eventual accommodation in society. It does not, however, fully answer the question of why issue formation should be appreciated as a crucial dimension of democratic politics. To address this question, I turn to the work of two early 20th-century American pragmatists: John Dewey and Walter Lippmann. In their work on democracy in industrial society, they conceived of public involvement in politics as being occasioned by,…