Economic Experts on Mute: The Politics of Expertise in Norway’s COVID-19 Economic Response

The political influence of economic experts is widely debated, yet most research focuses on when and how expertise shapes policy rather than when it fails to do so. Norway is often cited as a setting where economic reasoning and state economists exert substantial influence. However, despite their traditionally strong position, economists in key state institutions had less influence on the economic crisis measures adopted in the spring of 2020. This paper investigates why expert authority faltered in a political system where it is normally high, and what this reveals about the relationship between knowledge and governance under conditions of acute uncertainty. Building on established theories of expert influence, we analyse four dimensions of expert intervention: (1) the experts and their institutional position, (2) their substantive policy preferences, (3) the decision arena they sought to influence, and (4) the presence (or absence) of strategic framing to advance their recommendations. To trace how these factors shaped Norway’s economic support measures and industry subsidies during the COVID-19 crisis, we apply process tracing and draw on an unusually rich empirical foundation, including elite interviews with key actors, such as the prime minister, the finance minister, state economists, and major interest organizations, complemented by official documents and a substantial set of access-to-information materials. We find that although economists voiced clear preferences for targeted and temporary interventions, their influence was limited because the crisis fundamentally altered the conditions that usually grant experts authority. Institutional instability, high uncertainty, public demand for rapid action, and intense time pressure reduced the political space for technocratic reasoning and weakened the institutional channels through which experts typically exert influence. Meanwhile, interest organizations engaged in proactive strategic framing, linking their proposals to broader narratives of employment, national responsibility, and economic security. This enabled them to shape both the policy design and implementation of crisis measures, despite lacking the epistemic authority that experts hold in more stable periods. Comparing the communicative strategies, alliances, and timing of experts and organized interests, the analysis shows how expert knowledge can be overshadowed during crises, not because expertise is absent, but because framing power, coalition-building, and temporal dynamics become decisive, even in political systems typically characterised as institutionally stable and resilient. The Norwegian case underscores how crises reconfigure the balance between expertise and politics, offering broader insights into the fragility of expert authority under conditions of urgency and uncertainty.