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A key aspect of the classic doctor-patient relationship is the idea that doctors exert a professional authority through medical expertise while also taking care of the patient. Some professional organizations have held that "no third parties" should come between doctor and patient, be it governments or corporations. The sanctity of medical authority has also met resistance, and doctors are often said to face more demanding patients today with their own information about diagnoses. This article concerns how the medical profession reacts faced with challenged authority. Do they seek to reestablish a classic authority position or develop an alternative relationship with citizens? The analysis compares approximately 1.000 editorials in American, British and Danish medical journals from 1950 to the present. The analysis shows that all medical professions see their authority challenged by third parties, but some react defensively while others try to rethink the authority relation between professionals and citizens.

The literature on policy learning has focused our attention on how governments 'puzzle' over society's great problems and foster solutions based on the experience of previous policy as well as new knowledge and ideas. While policy learning is often seen as a linear process, this article aims to show how the learning process can also be circular in the sense that the previous policy from which a given new policy departs is constructed over and over again, which should not be confused with actual past policy. The argument is backed by a comparative policy analysis of lifestyle-focused public health policy in Denmark and the United States over the past three decades. While downplaying their belief in traditional medical treatment technology, most Western nations shifted their health policy objectives in the mid-1970s in order to get into what one report termed 'the business of modifying behaviour', i.e. to counter lifestyle diseases by getting citizens to exercise more, but eat, drink, and smoke less. Based on a study of three decades of Danish and American public health programs, the article shows how two very different health care systems experienced a similar pattern of policy failure. While both systems continually experience that citizens fail to live by what they know is healthy, public health policies always seem to able to generate strong optimism for each new policy program, because the values responsible for policy failure are associated with the medical treatment paradigm that the policies depart from, but never with prevention itself.

It is widely debated how ordinary citizens understand and use different types of knowledge and whether the authority of professional expertise is challenged by the spread of information. These debates underline that we know too little about how professional expertise is understood from the citizens' point of view and how citizens decide whether or not to accept various types of expertise as authoritative. This article investigates professional authority understood as lay citizens' willingness to follow certain types of professional advice. We argue that variation in professional authority can be explained by citizens' evaluations of professional expertise and whether they perceive the tasks and problems addressed by professionals as having 'legitimate complexity'. The analysis uses survey data from two countries, including vignettes on following advice in concrete everyday situations. We find legitimate complexity to be a strong predictor of professional authority although social status also plays a role.

Citizens are embedded in legal systems in which the authority of different experts is normally given preference over citizens' opinions about medical marijuana and other medical issues. Yet, citizens may reject expert authority if they consider themselves to be competent based on their knowledge or social position. Thus, we are led to ask: In the context of direct democracy, what forms of expert authority—if any—does a historically privileged subset of citizens recognize when reasoning about medical marijuana? Our analysis is based on rich‐qualitative data that analyzes how white male citizens reason about a medical marijuana ballot initiative in Arizona. By using a comprehensive content coding of citizens' arguments about the ballot initiative, we analyze how this privileged subset of citizens reasons about following or ignoring various authorities on the issue of medical marijuana. The article uses an exploratory abductive analysis of secondary semi‐structured interview data to understand citizens' reasoning on this issue and to expand theories of expert authority in direct democratic settings. We find a variety of different ways in which white male citizens accept or reject expert medical authority on medical marijuana in the context of Arizona Proposition 203 (2010).