Reference-Based Policy Production? The Growing Use of Citations in Norwegian Commission Reports

An important element of the trend towards the `expertization` of politics and policy-making is the growing role of academic experts and expertise within policy advice bodies. In the Nordic countries, some recent studies suggest an increasing expertization of ad hoc inquiry commissions (utredningsutvalg), bodies which traditionally have played a central role in defining policy problems and providing political leaders with appropriate policy solutions. However, existing quantitative analyses of the role of experts in these bodies are based almost exclusively on data on commission membership. Another expression of the use of expertise that has not been explored is the use of citations in commission reports. Citations not only indicate the extent to which reports adopt an academic style with explicit referencing of sources; they also provide clues to whether policy arguments are based on scientific knowledge and what kind of scientific knowledge that is. The paper will examine the changing role of expertise within Norwegian inquiry commissions (Norges offentlige utredninger – NOU) by looking at the use of citations in the reports of NOU commissions in the economic area from 1972 to the present. How has the use of citations in general and citations to scientific literature in particular changed over time? The paper will show that there has been an exponential growth in the total number of citations in reports, suggesting an increasingly academic style. The number of references to international academic literature has also increased dramatically, yet the share of citations to academic literature has remained relatively stable. The paper contributes to broader debates about expertization and how to measure it.