Representation and Expertise: the Social Dimensions of Expert Advice in the Swedish Parliament

Recent research has shown that the information providers that policy-makers rely on are highly unrepresentative of the general population and the academic community at large in terms of demographic composition. A lack of diversity in knowledge production can limit new discoveries and disregard problems and solutions in topics related to certain lived experiences, meaning that eliminating some social groups from the provision of expert advice could entail omitting some knowledge paradigms. Such an omission constitutes a form of epistemic injustice, where a wrong is inflicted upon individuals specifically in their roles as knowers and as epistemic subjects (Fricker 2007). In this paper, I study the relationship between parliamentarians and expert advice. Using the SWERIK data corpus (which includes Swedish parliamentary records, government bills, private members’ motions, and committee reports) alonside a data set of about 2,087 commissions of inquiry appointed between 1990 and 2016 and their members, I explore how Swedish parliamentarians have utilized expert advice over time. This includes analysing the issues that are raised, the framing of these issues, and the proposed solutions. The data includes the full names of the parliamentarians and the members of the commissions, information on their gender, as well as political or organisational affiliation; there is also information on the appointing ministry. This comprehensive dataset enables a detailed study of how demographic inequalities varies over time, across committees and issues which will provide further insights into the inequalities in the supply and demand of expert advice in policy-making. I conclude the paper with a discussion on the normative implications of these inequalities in expert practices, addressing both participatory and distributive epistemic injustices.