Political Expertise and Policy Change: The Discursive and Institutional Embeddedness of Epistemic Authority. Findings from an International and Intersectoral Comparison

In times of policy change and regulatory reform policy makers almost routinely refer to political experts and scientific results. In nearly every policy field, from environmental regulation to public health, the appeal to the ‘epistemic authority’ (Zürn 2012) of policy advisors and to the seemingly unquestionable evidence from statistics or simulations has become an indispensable argumentative strategy to rationalize and legitimate the introduction of new policy principles and programs. One might even argue that Meyer’s assumption of the “scientization of world polity” (2005) can no longer be rejected. Comparative studies, however, have shown that countries such as the US, Germany or Great Britain vary significantly in terms of expert styles, cultures of objectivity, deliberative procedures and science-policy interaction (Fischer 2009; Weingart 2009). Jasanoff (2005, 2012) has grounded her influential comparison of “civic epistemologies” in the US, Great Britain and Germany on Renn’s work (1995) and expanded it into a complex, though somewhat static typology using six different dimensions. The paper is based on preliminary results of a comparative project on scientific advisory agencies in food safety and labor market policy in Germany, Great Britain and the US. It aims at explaining both, the differences between policy sectors and national advisory styles and the way in which they have changed in the course of major policy reforms since the mid-1990s. The discursive mechanisms underlying these “knowledge orders” (Straßheim 2012, 2013) are not only a result of the specific rationalities in the science-policy nexus. They are also embedded in different politico-administrative cultures. Rather than coming to the field with idealtype descriptions, it can be shown how they manifest themselves in regulatory documents and interviews. It will be argued that in order to understanding policy change, one has to study the discursive and institutional embeddedness of ‘epistemic authority’.