Episode 156: Oliver Traldi discusses political expertise

For this episode, Matt Teichman and Joseph Diller sit down with Oliver Traldi (University of Toledo, Mercatus Center) to talk about political expertise.

What does it mean to be an expert in something? Our guest opens by noting that we use the term expert in two different ways: in the normal sense, a person is an expert in something if they know a lot about it, but in the social sense, a person is an expert in something if they have the social status of knowing a lot about it—like maybe they have a lot of degrees and credentials. Although those two things can go together, they don’t necessarily in every case: there are autodidacts who build up a deep understanding of a topic on their own, and there are people who squeak through the educational system without really learning anything.

What about a political expert? One way to get to what a political expert would be is to think about what it means to be political. There are lots of different ways that people have tried to define the world political, but Traldi thinks a topic is generally considered political when there is disagreement or controversy associated with it. Particularly if the disagreement is in some way emotionally charged.

So a political expert would be someone who knows a lot about areas that there is some broad disagreement about. And now, if you think of political expertise in that way, assuming we are talking about real expertise and not just the social kind, it seems there are factors that conspire to make it unlikely. For example, most of the people who are in a position to have inside information about how a political system works are themselves political actors, which means that everything they say is going to either have ulterior motives or seem like it does. This makes genuine political expertise rare to obtain, and elusive to identify when it does.

This was a partcularly fun conversation to have, and I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed having it.

Matt Teichman

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