Every reader a peer reviewer? DA-RT, democracy, and deskilling

Over the course of the unfolding of the DART initiative and the debates that have ensued, one of the most curious silences has been an absence of explicit discussion of how DA-RT relates to the practice that has historiwcally differentiated social scientific claims from other sorts: peer review. If DA-RT is intended to enforce quality standards, it is taking on a role that peer review has played for quite some time.1 As Dvora Yanow and I asked in an examination of the origins of DA-RT (2016, 11): [W]hat, precisely, is wrong with continuing to rely on peer review for policing epistemiccommunity standards? While the peer review process is not without problems or critics, when it functions well, it draws on [reviewers’] expertise. Informing this expertise are evaluative standards that are to some extent codified in methods texts, but practitioners also draw on expert knowledge that is often known tacitly (Polanyi 1966; Flyvbjerg 2001; Yanow 2015, 277–85; cf. Yashar 2016).