Cultures of Expertise and Policy-Making in Germany and Poland: Narratives of Formal and Informal Access Channels of Expert Advisers to Policy-Makers.

Starting from the discussion of the concepts of formality and informality, the paper first examines and analyzes empirical findings from a survey of German and Polish experts and political advisors on their narratives of the access channels of experts to politics and of politics to experts in Germany and Poland. Which access channels are chosen and why, how open are they, and what imbalances exist in access to experts and experts' access to politics? A second section looks at the degree of formalization of expert advisory processes and access channels in both countries. In a third section, the focus is on interpretations of narratives of access channels and degrees of formalization and their implications for policy advice Germany and Poland and narratives of the legitimacy of expert policy advice. The Polish sub-study finds a considerable gap between the perceptions of „scientific“ policy experts and policy experts, who are perceived as engaging in advocacy and lobbyism. While the former group enjoys a relatively high reputation in Poland, the reputation of the latter group is much worse according to the respondents. In the German sample, the sharpness of the distinction between the reputation of interest-based experts on the one hand and „scientific“ expert advisers on the other is less visible than in the Polish survey. The chapter concludes that political expert cultures in Poland and Germany are not congruent regarding the perception of access channels and the play with formality and informality, but nevertheless show fundamental similarities - above all the fundamentally positive assessment of access channels to expertise. But below some very general similarities, the different perceptions of expert cultures begin to emerge. In both countries, a technocratic culture of expert advice is held in high esteem, but in Germany the assessment of interest-driven expert advice is perceived less negative than in Poland. This paper originates as a spin-off from the second part of the research project "Knowledge is Power": Boundaries of Political Consulting and Lobbying in the Political Decision-Making Processes of Poland and Germany”, (2019-2024) which was funded by the German-Polish Science Foundation and Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation and directed by members of the Chair for Comparative Political Science of the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder) (Germany), especially Artur Kopka in cooperation with the Faculty of Political Science and Journalism of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan (Poland), especially Dorota Piontek, with a large number of principal investigators, to which the author and supporting author Dorota Stasiak belong.