The Geopolitics of Expertise: Three Decades of Economics in Parliamentary Debates in Australia, Germany, Poland, South Africa and the UK

The ever-increasing importance of economic expertise in the political process during the last decades has been remarked upon with a mixture of admiration, envy and critique by other social scientists. An underappreciated facet in these discussions is how these changes relate to the internal structure of economics, especially with regard to the increasing internationalization of the discipline. This study leverages named entity recognition to identify the names of economists as well as institutions producing economic knowledge mentioned in a corpus of parliamentary debates from Australia, Germany, Poland, South Africa and the UK spanning from 1990 to 2024. Rather than trying to quantify the importance of economic expertise in general, this paper instead focuses on the question what kind of economics expertise is important in a particular time and place. Three aspects are the focus of analysis: the globalization of economics, the professional authority of economists (Hirschman and Berman 2014), and the diversification of organizations producing economic knowledge. Since the 90s, economists are facing increasing pressures to orient their research towards international standards and publish in internationally renowned journals. Like other aspects of globalization, the internationalization of economics is heavily shaped by U.S. hegemony, where most of the high prestige journals (Heckman and Moktan 2020) and universities are concentrated. Combined with the well-established correlation between a country’s GDP and the amount of economic research published on it (Das et al. 2013) this has led to an effective Americanization of many aspects of the discipline. The countries chosen in this study capture a geopolitical dimension that is missing in the existing literature (e.g. Fourcade 2006) by including a country from the global south, as well as the global east (Müller 2020) and allow us to compare how this globalization of expertise plays out in the centre, the semi-periphery and the periphery of the world economy. Tracking mentions of institutions that produce economic knowledge doesn’t only offer insight the changing importance between local and non-local expertise but also gives insight into how different counties have institutionalized economic the provision of economic advice. Another interesting facet is the emergence of new types of arms-length bodies like the UK Office for Budget Responsibility as well as the changing importance of think-tanks. References Das, Jishnu, Do Quy-Toan, Karen Shaines, and Sowmya Srikant. 2013. “U.S. And Them: The Geography of Academic Research.” Journal of Development Economics, 19. https://doi.org/10/ggzn9b. Fourcade, Marion. 2006. “The Construction of a Global Profession: The Transnationalization of Economics.” American Journal of Sociology 112 (1): 145–94. https://doi.org/10.1086/502693. Heckman, James J., and Sidharth Moktan. 2020. “Publishing and Promotion in Economics: The Tyranny of the Top Five.” Journal of Economic Literature 58 (2): 419–70. https://doi.org/10/ggznwd. Hirschman, Daniel, and Elizabeth Popp Berman. 2014. “Do Economists Make Policies? On the Political Effects of Economics.” Socio-Economic Review 12 (4): 779–811. https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwu017. Müller, Martin. 2020. “In Search of the Global East: Thinking Between North and South.” Geopolitics 25 (3): 734–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2018.1477757.