The modified issue: Turning around parliaments, politics as usual and how to extend issue-politics with a little help from Max Weber

Abstract

Ordinary political institutions such as parliaments remain under-explored in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the conceptual resources for studying politics are far less developed than for science. But sites like parliaments are far more interesting than are their received images. This article argues that novel re-combinations of the issue-literature in STS and the works on parliament and objectivity by the German scholar Max Weber can provide us with analytical resources for grasping parliamentary politics with new lenses. In fact, reading Weber in light of the issue-literature provides for a better understanding of his work, and points towards how Weber’s accounts are crucially about parliamentary politics as work – on and with issues and the matters at hand. In addition, Weber may improve STS’s accounts of politics by his way of including the ordered and procedural side to issue-politics: Issue-politics is both about ‘opening up’ an issue as well as coming to decisions and take action. The article underlines this by discussing an often-misread part of Weber’s work, namely his work on objectivity and points to how political procedure was a key inspiration to his understanding and developing of this notion.

Changing climate change: The carbon budget and the modifying-work of the IPCC

“…At the same time, understanding issues as always arising from the shortcomings of existing institutions can easily be taken to imply a specific view of their trajectory: from a situation of institutional failure, which renders the issue problematic and mobilizes a public around it, towards its eventual stabilization and closing-down, as new political agencies are constructed and the issue becomes ‘absorbed by the normal traditions of deliberative democracy’ ( Latour, 2007 : 817). The danger of this understanding is that issue-politics almost by definition end up being located outside of political institutions ( Asdal and Hobæk, 2020 ), and that the formation of issues is given priority over analysing how they change over time.…”

“…Second, I follow Asdal’s suggestion to study the ‘little tools’ by which issues are enacted and modified in practice ( Asdal, 2008 ; Asdal and Hobæk, 2020 ). She proposes the term ‘modifying-work’ ( Asdal, 2015 ) to draw attention to the concrete practices through which issues are shaped and transformed – including the work of material objects, like reports and other paperwork.…”

Materializations through political work

“…In Latour’s opinion, political thinking lacks the resources to conceive of politics as the productive activity it is. Or, political thinking lacks the concepts to understand politics as a form of work (Asdal and Hobæk, 2020).…”

Afterword: ‘I will play my part!’, or parliamentary politics in action

“…Rather, Crick insisted, as Weber had previously, that parliamentary and party politics have their own specificity as historical practices: ‘politics is politics, to be valued as itself, not because it is like or “really is” something more respectable or peculiar’ ( Crick, 2000 : 16). Politics, as Asdal and Hobæk (2020) remind us, ‘is a particular form of work’. An STS approach has value for the study of parliamentary politics, then, not because parliamentary politics is ‘like science’, but because many of the concerns of STS researchers serve to illuminate aspects of politics that are systematically ignored by political scientists.…”

“…Moreover, the events that come to animate parliamentary deliberations are also drawn from historical elements. These include the history of bureaucratic cases ( Asdal and Hobæk, 2020 ), and much more besides. Elsewhere I have argued that studies of knowledge controversies need to attend to the ways in which controversies may draw together and reactivate multiple historical vectors of contention ( Barry, 2013 ).…”