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Paper short abstract

Populist contestation of science is not ignorance but a political symptom. Using the SVC framework and Latour's five political modes, this paper reframes climate skepticism as a political response to the production of expert knowledge.

Paper long abstract

The rise of populism is frequently narrated as a story of science denial — publics rejecting expert consensus in favor of misinformation or tribal identity. This paper argues that this framing misses something more structurally significant: the contestation of scientific authority is not a failure of public reason but a legible political response to the conditions under which expert knowledge has been produced, circulated, and trusted.

To make this argument, the paper develops a dialogue between the stakes–visibility–contestability (SVC) framework and Bruno Latour's (2007) five successive meanings of "political," using climate change science as its central case. The SVC framework holds that a science's political status can be understood through three interacting dimensions: the stakes involved in scientific knowledge; the degree of public and political visibility of scientific findings; and the extent to which scientific authority is perceived as contestable. Crucially, contestability does not require genuine scientific uncertainty — it can be manufactured and institutionalized, and it is precisely this manufactured contestability that populist movements often inherit, rather than originate.

Latour's typology gives this argument its processual depth. The current populist moment is best understood as a Political-2 eruption: publics rendered problematic by decades of unresolved science-policy entanglements that deliberative institutions have failed to adequately represent. Populist skepticism of climate science is thus not ignorance; it is a symptom of the failure of expert institutions to adequately represent the publics whose knowledge they affect. This paper explains how the conditions of science politicization create the trust deficits that populism exploits.