fellow panelists, perhaps because respondents’ describe legitimate
panel interactions as being among independent actors who act on a
case-by-case basis. When probed further, however, most panelists re-
veal clear personal, intellectual, or theoretical affinities. For instance,
a historian confesses feeling close to an English professor because
she clearly had a good deal of critical and literary theory in her
background. So that to some extent she and I over the years
would have been reading similar work, and we happen to be sym-
pathetic towards it. [She is] also concerned with social sig-
nificance, concerned with the voices of the other, evaluating pro-
posals on questions of originality...[This is important] because
if you believe in liberal education and you believe that education
has a role in the formation of the citizen, then it seems to me you
have to pay some attention to the plurality of what constitutes cit-
izenship.These elective personal qua intellectual affinities are not con-
ceptualized as corrupting or illegitimate.^19 From panelists’ perspec-
tive, their task requires that they assess proposals using the more
or less diverse intellectual tools they have at their disposal; these
generally converge with those of at least some of their co-panelists.
Thus particularism is to some extent unavoidable: the value assigned
to proposals as cultural products depends largely on their em-
beddedness in the context of evaluation. That is, value is defined in
reference to the other proposals under consideration, and by per-
sonal affinities and differences among reviewers.^20
Strategic voting and horse-trading. Similarly, strategic voting and
horse-trading are, if not unavoidable, at least very common during
deliberations, despite the centrality that panelists accord to univer-
salism in interpreting the group of proposals as a whole. Strategic
Pragmatic Fairness / 121