Expert Advice and Policy Design: Testing Claims about the Role of Institutions and Culture

Over the past decades, a large body of research in fields such as knowledge utilization, evidence-based policy making, advocacy coalitions, or epistemic communities, has been addressing the conditions under which expert advice can play a role in policy design. This research has been successful in exploring the complex role of expertise in the policy process, which may represent a source of short or long term learning, but may also be used as a resource providing legitimacy in political conflicts. It has also produced a number of hypotheses relating to institutional and cultural factors that influence the extent to which expert advice can actually influence policy design. Strongly relying on single case studies and relatively rarely employing comparative or large-N designs, however, this research has been less successful at testing such hypotheses. For example, institutions such as blue ribbon commissions, facilitating dialogue between experts and politicians, have been hypothesized to further experts' role in policy design. There are, however, very few studies systematically comparing countries or policy fields where blue ribbon commissions and similar institutions are an important feature of the policy process, and those, where they are not. The proposed paper presents a research project designed to empirically test claims about the conditions under which expertise plays a role in policy design. In a quantitative study, the influence of expert discourses on minimum wage levels in the OECD countries is analyzed over a period of 30 years, and hypotheses about the mediating role of institutions and culture with regard to this influence are tested. The content of expert discourses is measured by analyzing the content of minimum wage related publications in scientific and professional journals. The proposed paper presents the design of the study, a theoretical model of expert influence on minimum wage policies, as well as early empirical insights.