Politics, Policy and Expertise

Abstract

Policy advice in a general sense has been debated intensely by political scientists, sociologists and historians. Some (e.g. Beck, 1999 and 1992) have argued that the authority of (social) scientific knowledge has been eroded in the past 30 years and that the competition of different ‘truths’ has created global uncertainty. Concomitantly, the fear of ‘technocracy’, which dominated the discussion of the relationship between politics and the sciences (especially the social sciences) in the 1960s (e.g. Bell, 1973 and 1960; Meynaud, 1968; Schelsky, 1965), has largely disappeared. The ‘expert’ in the 1990s has lost unassailability (Nowotny, 1999). Somewhat paradoxically, today experts seem more ubiquitous than ever before. One explanation is that there are now more academically trained experts than both the state and the university sector can absorb. As Eva Kreisky says, this has allowed the emergence of a new ‘class of advisors’, all highly educated, flexible, mobile - and struggling to find even precarious employment. This new class has found employment in the growing and professionalising private advice industry since the 1980s and 1990s (Kreisky, 2007). Such expertise, now available in abundance, has become a necessary element of the legitimisation of political decisions. Expertise has become a political resource for decision makers (Mitchell, 2002; Stehr, 1994), and so has the ‘counter expert’ (Rucht, 1988). Therefore, expertise cannot be regarded as distinct from politics but is rather a result of the highly complex negotiation processes among experts and between experts and those who base their decisions on experts’ opinions (Fisch & Rudloff, 2004).