In ‘Citizen Knowledge: Markets, Experts, and the Infrastructure of Democracy’ (OUP 2024), Lisa Herzog argues that democratic self-government relies on a deliberately built epistemic infrastructure – schools, media, expert communities and civil-society arenas that equip citizens with trustworthy knowledge and the ability to act on it. When too many of these functions are ‘handed over to markets,’ democratic-capitalist societies slide into manipulation, inequality and declining public trust.

Herzog’s framework of democratic institutionalism therefore calls for recalibrating the relationship between markets, expertise and public deliberation, insisting on the epistemic primacy of politics to set the rules that keep knowledge both reliable and accessible. 

This ACES roundtable convenes scholars of European Union law, regulation and governance, history and politics for a critical conversation with the author. The aim is to interrogate: How can European democracies rebuild the institutional and regulatory arrangements that secure citizen knowledge in an era of digital platforms and marketized governance?