Consensus-based or Partisan? Expertization of Public Advisory Committees in Norway 1972-2016

A growing social science literature emphasizes the “scientification” or “expertization” of political life: governments and policy-makers increasingly rely on the policy advice of scientific experts and legitimize decisions with reference to scientific knowledge. To what degree there is political consensus about such a trend is the topic of this paper. One way of organizing the relationship between politics and science – particularly evident in consensus democracies such as the Scandinavian countries and Germany – is the appointment of hybrid policy advisory commissions. Usually composed of state representatives, societal stakeholders and academics, the committees deliver policy advice in the early stages of the policy-making process. Moreover, as committees are set up on an ad-hoc basis with few formal requirements guiding the appointment in terms of e.g. composition, incumbent parties can have profound power to decide who participates in policy planning. In Norway, recent research suggests that these committees, Norske offentlige utredninger (NOU), are marked by a historical shift from dominant interest group representation – an important corporatist feature of the Norwegian governance model – to an increased share of academics. As a strong consensus-oriented political system, one could expect that such a potentially substantial change is driven by all parties in power and thus cuts across shifting Norwegian governments of different political colors. However, little scholarly attention has been paid to whether there really exists such a consensus, that is, whether trends of expertization is affected by shifting incumbent parties. Is a shift in government of no significance to the appointment of academics to public committees? Are some parties in favor of expert dominance in certain policy areas? What characterizes the governments that diverges from a pattern of expertization? The paper attempts to answer these questions by applying a new dataset comprising all NOU committees from 1972-2016. The effects of political conditions at the time of appointment, such as the incumbent party’s color and government constellations (minority vs. majority, single-party vs. coalition governments), are systematically assessed in order to shed new light on how governments and political parties affect processes of expertization.