Studying expert influence: a conceptual and methodological agenda

Expert communities, advisory bodies and expert bureaucracies are ubiquitous in national and international governance. Yet, we have surprisingly little systematic empirical knowledge about how much influence these experts actually have on public policies. This gap can be ascribed both to theoretical issues and to a lack of methodological guidance. The paper presents a novel conceptual and methodological agenda for studying expert influence. It argues that the concept of expert influence offers a more robust basis for systematic research on experts and policy-making than existing notions such as knowledge utilization or evidence-informed policy-making. It then presents five methodological strategies for studying expert influence empirically: two existing approaches – process-tracing and surveys of attributed influence – and three novel strategies – analysis of preference attainment, text reuse analysis and citation analysis. The agenda is aimed at students of expert influence across a wide range of phenomena, including the influence of scientific experts on policy-making, the policy impact of expert advisory bodies, and the sway of national and international expert bureaucracies.