Expertization of Policy Advice: A Cross-Sectoral Analysis

It is often argued that politics and policy-making are increasingly reliant on academic research and evidence, due to the complexity of modern society and the salience of ideas about rational and evidence-based policies. At the same time, there is good reason to believe that this ‘expertization’ will vary greatly across policy areas. Policy areas vary in how technical they are, in what expert disciplines are central, and in the configuration of political, social and bureaucratic interests – all features that we would expect to condition the reliance on academic expertise in policy-making. However, there is little systematic empirical evidence on the changing reliance on academic knowledge in policy-making in general, and across policy areas in particular. The paper addresses this issue by investigating the changing position of academics over time within official advisory commissions in Norway. These commissions are temporary bodies set up by government to examine a policy issue and provide decision-makers with recommendations about policy solutions. In Norway, commissions are appointed to examine most major policy questions and thus play an important role in the policy-formulation process. The paper poses the following question: How do the changes in the participation of academic experts in Norwegian advisory commission vary across policy areas, and how can we account for this variation? The paper relies on a quantitative analysis of a large dataset of Norwegian commissions covering the period 1972-2016 (N=1500). The paper traces changes in the commission participation of academics over time and across policy areas, and discusses a set of potential explanations for the observed variation.