Window Dressing for Legitimacy? Structure of and Participation in Expertise-Seeking Arrangements

Scientific expertise has become an integral part of modern politics. Today’s governments have various expertise-seeking arrangements in which they gather and synthesize relevant knowledge during the policymaking process to formulate or legitimatize public policies. These expertise-seeking arrangements often invite individuals and representatives from organizations who are perceived to be credible and trustworthy as experts on a policy issue. Nevertheless, the recursive coupling of science and politics has resulted in the legitimacy crisis of expertise. The public has witnessed many contested debates among scientists representing different political sides and learned that science is neither value-free, certain, nor objective. Ironically, despite the legitimacy crisis of expertise, the need for expertise utilization in policymaking has become greater than ever in the era of evidence policymaking. This study looks closely at the structure of and participation in the institutionalized expertise-seeking arrangements in policymaking and explores which strategies experts adopt to legitimize their ideas and claims in the policy process. Specifically, it focuses on the expertise-seeking arrangements used for the most recent school reforms in Norway and the US of which political models are commonly characterized as corporatist and pluralist, respectively. It analyzed the government documents produced by expert witnesses and advisory commissions as well as the interviews with 30 experts who had participated in the production of such documents. This study reveals that the expertise-seeking arrangements in Norway and the US reflect the characteristics of corporatist and pluralist models, respectively, regarding the approaches in expertise-seeking (e.g., competition vs. consensus), expert participation, and the role of government. Furthermore, it shows how the experts take the mixture of different strategies (e.g., inclusion, exclusion) to enhance the legitimacy of their expertise-seeking arrangements, and ultimately their knowledge and claims. The comparison of the two expertise-seeking arrangements suggests that these arrangements may not play any instrumental role in policymaking but only function as a formality or show for legitimacy. It also points to the inherent inequality embedded in both systems that experts with greater power and resources are more likely to be invited to, and have a greater influence within, these arrangements.