The Shape of Public Engagement - Participatory Mapping: New Data, New Cartography - page 127

must instead leave this task to experts who have the time
and resources to do it.

For Dewey, elitism is not a solution. He advocates instead
the idea that citizens should create their own channels to
participate in public debates rather than delegating that role
to experts. He claims that citizens should “re-make the
State” 1 to be acknowledged as interlocutor during public

debates.

Noortje Marres attempts to sidestep an easy distinction
between the “good guy” on one side and “the bad guy” on the
other. She does this by emphasizing a common point between
these two scholars, namely that they both, in their own way,
highlight the central role of controversies in democracies.
Scientific and technical controversies are indeed important
stages in public life as they enable the public to enter the
political sphere. On the contrary, social issues need to go
through a process of “issuefication” [MAR 05c], to allow the
public to participate in democratic life, which Noortje Marres
summarizes as: no issue, no public [MAR 05a].

For Lippmann, the public has to mobilize when the public
authorities are unable to handle a controversy. In his words:

Where the facts are most obscure, where
precedents are lacking, where novelty and
confusion pervade everything, the public in all its
unfitness is compelled to make its most important
decisions. The hardest problems are those which
institutions cannot handle. They are the public's
problems. [LIP 27, p.131]

1 [DEW 27, p.32].