The role of expert knowledge in minimum wage policy making: a long-term comparison of Germany, Great Britain, and the United States

From the Advocacy Coalition Framework to work on Research Utilization, scholarship in public policy has dealt extensively with the role that scientific knowledge plays in the policy process. While single case studies have thrown light on the mechanisms of expert influence on policy, there is a shortage of comparative research exploring how different scope conditions determine the form of this influence. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing the role of social scientific knowledge in minimum wage policy making in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. Testing claims from a theoretical model based on the Advocacy Coalition Framework, the paper looks at the different ways in which expert knowledge enters the public discourse in the three countries and influences what subsystem actors such as elected politicians or interest groups publicly say about minimum wages. The paper builds on two original datasets. Coming from a content analysis of hundreds of articles published in scholarly journals over the past 40 years, the first dataset maps the social scientific evaluation of minimum wages, describing how scholars characterize the impact of minimum wages on variables such as unemployment and poverty. The second dataset comes from a content analysis of newspaper articles published in the three countries between 1975 and 2015, and contains information on the subsystem actors described or quoted in these articles and their expressed positions towards minimum wages, as well as on the way in which the articles refer to expert knowledge on minimum wages. Combining both datasets, the paper addresses questions relevant to the role of expertise in the policy process: When do public (newspaper) discourses refer to scientific knowledge? To what extent and under what conditions does the representation of expert knowledge in the public discourse match the findings that researchers publish in scholarly journals? And do research findings influence subsystem members’ expressed beliefs towards the minimum wage? Analyzing how expert knowledge enters public discourses and influences the beliefs and positions of actors in minimum wage policy subsystems contributes to a better understanding of the role of expertise in the policy process. Most importantly, the long-term comparative approach of the paper opens up the possibility to explore how variables relating to the age of a policy, the institutions in a policy subsystem, and properties of the expert discourse mediate the importance of scientific knowledge for policy.