The new separation of powers in context

Modern democratic practice offers a very confusing kaleidoscope of impressions. A court decides one US presidential election and moral values swing another; an international commission dealing with human rights abuses is presided over by the representative of a country where human rights are barely recognised; heads of agencies resign in response to public criticism even though they are not elected to their positions; a political union is created in Europe to deal with those large issues that flow across national boundaries and ends up intrusively quibbling about technical details and national particularities; central bankers speak and international financial markets sit up and listen, while, when finance ministers speak, markets pay no attention. This book has therefore attempted to sort out these different impressions and try to discern an underlying pattern.

That underlying pattern involves a basic distinction between the ways in which democratic systems of government now try to mobilise information and the latest state of empirical knowledge for public policy-making, untainted by political judgements, and the different ways in which democratic societies draw upon values to pass political judgement on that information and knowledge. It involves an institutional distinction between those bodies, outside elective politics, that have a special role in gathering and analysing information, bringing to bear relevant empirical knowledge, including navigating through contested areas, and those bodies, belonging to elective politics, that bring ethical and political values to bear in the judgemental processes of democratic societies.