When Bureaucratic Expertise Comes Under Attack

Worldwide, populist parties are rejecting expert knowledge about vaccines, climate change and economic policy and want to ‘take back control’ from unelected bureaucrats. This is only the latest episode in the tug-of-war between politicians and bureaucrats over expert knowledge in government. Politicians need expertise to make policies, and civil servants are main providers of knowledge. Yet, what constitutes relevant knowledge, competences and skills for bureaucrats is regularly contested by politicians. What happens when existing bureaucratic expert knowledge comes under attack? The paper argues that the understandings between politicians and bureaucrats about the competences and skills of civil servants can be conceptualized as ‘expertise bargains’. Expertise bargains rest on politicians seeing the particular competences offered by bureaucrats as useful for achieving salient political goals. These bargains can become destabilized if exogenous changes undermine the legitimacy of existing expertise and lead politicians to pursue strategies to alter expertise bargains. Changes in expertise in bureaucracies thus reflect a bargaining process between politicians and bureaucrats. This argument is examined empirically through a comparative-historical analysis of processes of political contestation of bureaucratic expertise in the field of economic policy. The analysis zooms in on two periods in which the competences of bureaucrats came under political attack – the economic crises in the 1930s and 1970s – and examines the varying consequences of these attacks for expert knowledge in the bureaucracy across four countries.