Leveraging the Authority of Policy Advisory Systems: Cross-National Evidence from Legislative Speech

When legislators make the case for policy change or status-quo, they reasonably mount their argument with references to benefits, consequences, costs, and implications. The arguments deployed may reference a variety of sources which enhance the authority of elite argument. Students of policy advisory systems, note that elites may turn to any number of different entities when crafting policy: contract lobbyists, scientists, interest groups, think tanks, corporations or even celebrities (Craft and Howlett 2012). The literature anticipates that the choice by elites over whom to seek advice from will be guided by whether the problem they face amounts to, queries over facts, addressing opposition from affected constituencies, meeting expectations of partisan alignment or satisfying value conflicts. In the context of legislative speech, and building on this insight, we reason that legislators’ persuasion hinges on the credibility of their arguments, and that legislators will select sources and entities to the extent that they believe they bolster their arguments. In this paper we present preliminary findings from a multi-country study exploring the deployment of policy actors in the legislative speech of elected elites.