Expert advice as source of political conflict? Theorizing the who, how and where in advisory systems Raffael Himmelsbach
Centre for Climate Science and Policy Research, Linköping University
raffael.himmelsbach@liu.se
Abstract
This paper critically examines the assertion that increasing availability of scientific expertise and
testimony leads to publicly visible controversy that is detrimental to the cognitive authority of
science and policy deliberation alike. Addressing this contention not only requires clarifying the
social ontology of policy advice – understood here as a triadic relationship between producers,
principals, and audiences of policy advice –, it also necessitates the identification of factors that
jointly constitute an advisory system. The paper construes of an advisory system as a system of
structural and cultural factors that prescribe who can afford sponsoring expertise, in which
arena it may serve as a resource of legitimation, and according to what rules it has to be engaged
with in order to be credible. On this conceptual foundation the paper argues that dissent among
experts contributes to political polarization only if the number of actors capable of mobilizing
expertise increases within a political system and the legitimacy of policy decisions cannot be
underwritten by elite consensus. Using the Swiss advisory system at two moments in time
(1970s vs early 2000s) as an illustration, the paper demonstrates that while reaching elite
consensus through political inclusion has become more challenging, political polarization is
neither driven by nor leads to an increase in public dissent among experts because access to
expert-based policy advice has remained a virtual monopoly of the civil service.
Introduction
Max Weber once saw the civil service as the locus of expertise in the service of the state
(Weber, 1978). But today civil servants no longer have a monopoly over policy-relevant
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expertise as alternative sources of advice have emerged. For instance, the expansion of the
welfare state after World War II and the complexification of political problems has created a
broad demand for scientific advice (Weingart, 2001). Think tanks, once a phenomenon limited
to a few venerable institutions producing policy analysis in the US and the UK, have spread
during the 1990s to become a global presence (Stone, 2004). At roughly the same time many
governments have also begun to contracting out policy analysis tasks to the private sector, thus
nurturing a growing industry (Migone & Howlett, 2013). Moreover, policy analysis has become
under pressure to become more inclusive and to democratize, with citizen input gaining more
importance (Halligan, 1995).
Undoubtedly, this multiplication of sources of policy advice has complimented the civil service's
analytical capabilities in the face of an ever more complex task environment. But there is also
reason for concern: political principals sometimes force the externalization of policy analysis in
order to weaken the civil service's power by depriving it of its analytical capacity (Halligan,
1995). The chief concern, however, is that the diverse supply of advice may well lead to a
cacophony of competing expert claims in the issue arena that ultimately undermines the
authority of rational analysis in society (Weingart, 1999). Hellström (2000) indeed diagnoses a
tendency of advisory relations becoming more conflictual. But just like others (Jasanoff, 2005;
Renn, 1995), he points to the fact that there are great differences between national contexts to
begin with. The US, for instance, has always had a more adversarial culture where advisory
opinions are routinely contested (Gieryn, 1999; Hilgartner, 2000; Jasanoff, 1990) than the
Netherlands where advice production is concentrated in a small number of planning bureaus
that command exceptional respect in the political system (Bijker, Bal, & Hendriks, 2009;
Butter, 2011).
This article contends that there are limits to self-destructive expert competition because the
actors capable of effectively mobilizing policy advice to their advantage are few in any political
system. Suppliers of expert advice cannot capitalize their intellectual product for a political
project of their own–at least not openly; not so much because of professional ethics (cf. Haas,
1992, p. 3), but because of public expectations that bans them from appearing to take political
decisions (Jasanoff, 1987, p. 199). Instead, expert advice can only unfold its political authority
2
in the hand of a political principal that is recognized as a legitimate stakeholder in the policy
arena.1 However, not all stakeholders are equipped equally for harnessing the informational
advantage and the cultural authority that mobilizing expertise affords. The provision and
management of expert advice requires resources such as money, organizational capacity, and the
cognitive ability to interpret the proffered advice. These resources required to access expertise,
the article argues, are distributed by structural and cultural factors that vary from one political
system to another.
In order to substantiate this argument, the remainder of this article outlines a heuristic
framework that spells out the said structural and cultural factors influencing the distribution of
access to expertise within a political system. The article then proceeds to illustrating this
framework with Switzerland as a case study, demonstrating, amongst others, why advisory
relations have not mirrored the increasing level of conflict in the political system as a whole.
A political economy of policy advice
The ontology of policy advice
Policy advice2 is a resource with several functions in the policy arena (Weiss, 1979). At the
most basic level of abstraction, it is a vehicle transporting facts and concepts from experts to
users, which enable the latter to solve policy problems. Policy advice thereby not only affords
the design of effective policy, but also contributes to just policy because advice is objective and
neutral. But taken on its own, this account of policy advice as a rationalization device is flawed.
1
Experts are neither necessarily value free nor do they completely refrain from pursuing
political preferences of their own. However, societal expectations about the division of labor
between technical expertise and politics impose certain constraints that have to be dealt with
(cf. Jasanoff, 1990).
2
These elaborations concern substantive policy advice, regardless if it is used for policy design
or social coordination. However, it excludes strategy advice, which is undoubtedly important
and readily present in the issue arena (cf. Craft & Howlett, 2013; Ledermann, 2014).
3
Policy advice may certainly enhance the problem-solving capacity of its users, but not in such a
straight-forward way.
At fault is the assumption that the delivery and use of policy advice are underpinned by a dyadic
relationship structure between an emitter and receiver of information, omitting a vital third
party. This third actor is not a broker managing evidence aggregation and communication;
rather, it is the audience that witnesses transactions between the sender and recipient of policy
advice. Witnessing publics, or audiences, play a key role in the establishment of a scientific
truth claim's credibility (Ezrahi, 1990; Shapin & Schaffer, 1985). The same may also be argued
for policy advice, except that it is not a scientist or adviser seeking credibility, but a political
entrepreneur on a mission to persuade.
Policy-making, the context of policy advice, involves actors who mobilize around an issue of
common concern. An issue arena thus emerges, populated by actors who cluster around
common interests and identities (Sabatier & Weible, 2007). A policy maker wishing to pass a
law needs to build a winning coalition, regardless of whether or not her policy proposal has
been informed by sound advice. Since majorities can seldom be enforced, persuasion and the
production of shared meaning become important tools for coalition building. And that's how
the notion of policy advice becomes complex: in addition to its informational content, policy
advice symbolizes competence, rational action, and a commitment to the common good rather
than particular interests (Albaek, 1995; Boswell, 2009; Feldman & March, 1981; Weible,
2008). It thus lends itself as an instrument of persuasion because the demonstration that a policy
proposal has the backing of a recognized expert authority lends credibility to the proposal's
author. Credibility, however, is not innate to the expert; it stems from the reputation of
credibility the audience bestows on the expert. Hence, policy advice builds on a triadic
constellation between producers of expert advice, its users, and the audiences at which users
direct expert claims.
The relationships between these three groups of actors are power-laden. Not every actor in the
issue arena has the equal capacity to wield power through the informational advantage and
symbolic authority policy advice affords. Moreover, those who can afford to mandate policy
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advice are in a position of power vis-à-vis the producers of advice (i.e. civil servants, NGOs,
consulting firms, think tanks, and scientists), because they control the funding that sustains
advisory production. Moreover, they act as gatekeepers who can either invite or keep producers
out of the issue arena. Producers depend on such an invitation because they draw legitimacy
from their reputation of being disinterested and objective (Yearley, 2005, p. 160) and not from
representing a human constituency. Hence, users are actually principals of policy advice, because
they actively solicit and authorize production. But principals do not fully control the
mobilization of policy advice, as the audience's norms and expectations dictates due process of
principal/producer interaction in the issue arena. Since policy advice derives its value from the
cognitive authority its producer enjoys in front of the audience. A principal can therefore only
instrumentalize this authority successfully if, at least on the face of it, its provision and
mobilization obey societal norms (Jasanoff, 1987).
Expertise competition
Within this complex set of interactions between producer, principal, and audience, the paper
argues that three sets of factors shape different configurations of expertise competition. They
are the power distribution within the political system, the distribution of the resources required
to become a principal of policy advice, as well as the cultural norms regulating what counts as
credible and legitimate policy advice.
Arenas
Power distribution in a political system matters for policy formulation and deliberation, and
thus also for the provision of policy advice. The veto player concept (Tsebelis, 2010) offers a
simple formulation of power distribution, in that it counts the number of actors who may veto a
policy decision. Veto players are the product of vertical as well as horizontal aspects power
dispersion (e.g. federalism and multiparty government, respectively their nemeses (Lijphart,
1999)). The more power is dispersed, the less control a single political party has over
government and the policy process. Thus, in political systems with few veto players (e.g.
Britain or France), decisions may be taken swiftly, whereas prolonged deliberation and
negotiation are necessary when many actors have the ability to say no (e.g. Switzerland,
Germany).
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Experts and their arguments are valuable assets when building majorities requires persuasion.
For political systems with strong power concentration there is less need for coalition-building,
which also reduces the appeal of policy advice as a symbolic resource. This is not to say that
governments in such regimes rely less on expertise. Instead, recourse to expertise, should it
occur, takes on a dyadic relationship between principal (government) and agent (expert), rather
than a triadic one where a government aims at persuading a third party with reference to
expertise, for the third party does not exist to the same extent that it does in systems with more
diffuse power. The latter renders the issue arena more penetrable, because inclusive decisionmaking is an imperative for majority building. Hence, advisory transactions, if they occur, take
place in front of an audience, at which they are likely directed at. While such a permeable issue
arena does not necessarily translate into the presence of more (and possibly competing) advisory
opinions, it enhances the opportunity of other actors than the government to weigh in on policy
deliberation with analytical arguments.
But democracy doesn't stop when a decision is taken. Because politicians need to be reelected,
they need to reach out and secure their constituencies' support. Such reaching out to the general
public, Schmidt (2000; 2008) argues, is especially important in systems with few veto players,
because politicians cannot legitimate a decisions with reference to a consensus reached among
veto players. This input legitimacy deficit may be compensated through output legitimacy,
entailing the production of authoritative and celebratory accounts of policy performance.
Politicians may readily make use of the power of numbers (Porter, 2006) and the credibility of
expert testimony in staging their performance claims in front the electorate (Topf, 1993). More
generally, evoking science in political discourse, and therefore portraying one's programs and
actions as rationally grounded, functions as a rhetorical device to assert that political action is
non-arbitrary and serves the common good (e.g. the evidence-based policy movement initiated
by the UK Blair labour government (Boswell, 2009, p. 248)).
In conclusion, while systems with dispersed and concentrated power do not necessarily differ in
their substantive reliance on expert advice, the instrumentalization of analysis’ symbolic power
for persuasion takes on different forms as the audiences to be swayed – the élite and the
6
electorate, respective – differ. Because policy deliberation in the subsystem create other
conditions of public visibility than campaigning, these two systems also afford different
conditions of visibility for the public performance of science and policy analysis.
Resources
Principals of policy advice are actors with sufficient resources to mandate their own policy
advice. Not every actor contending for influence may become a principal as it takes money to
obtain data and information, as well as for organizing academic experts into committees and pay
for their operational expenses as they engage in identifying, aggregating, adjudicating, and
communicating available evidence (Knoepfel, Larrue, Varone, & Hill, 2007, p. 71). It also takes
cognitive skills to identify who the competent and authoritative experts are, to articulate
meaningful questions for the experts to answer, and to make sense of their analysis and results
(Weingart & Lentsch, 2008, p. 35). Lastly, it takes the ability to provide immaterial rewards,
such as prestige, for services rendered (Patzwaldt, 2008, p. 17). Not only does the busy
professor require such a symbolic inducement to be dedicating attention to policy analysis
rather than publishing in peer-reviewed journals; a consulting firm is also likely to consider a
prospective client's reputation, as it may enhance or tarnish future business prospects with other
clients. Thus, only those participants who can accumulate these resources become principals.
The Weberian scenario evoked in the introduction presumes that the civil service is the only
policy advice principal in the issue arena, which suggests that the resources required to mandate
expertise are heavily concentrated. Such a monopoly on access to policy advice results in
minimal competition among experts, even if multiple sources of policy advice are solicited,
because they are bound to the same principal in order to acquire agency in the issue arena. But
when resource distribution is less concentrated, the demand structure for policy advice may
become oligopolistic, or even competitive. With more principals contending with policy advice
in the issue arena, chances are high that experts fight proxy wars for their political principals.
Not only would the government contend with policy advice, but also the oppositional political
party, the business association, and the environmental interest group. Whether or not a national
political system affords a few or many principals depends on the power distribution within the
7
system, population size, and the existence of subsidies for civil society organizations as well as
legal prerogatives granting independence for advice producers.
Analytical monopoly. Halligan (1995) draws attention to the relationship between the civil
service, the ideal-typical monopoly of analysis and advice, and its political principal in
government. Writing in the 1990s, Halligan observed that governments in Anglo-saxon
countries have started an assault on their civil services' analytical monopoly in order to extend
political control. On one hand they have forced the contracting out of analysis in conjunction
with the introduction of political appointees instead of career civil servants. On the other hand
they created a competing advisory offer through embedding analytical units within ministerial
cabinets. At its most extreme, the politicization of the civil service would create another
monopoly over policy advice, albeit under a different principal. However, a competitive
situation is more likely, in which both the government and the civil service are principals of
policy advice in their own right.
Population size. In wealthy Western countries with a large population, private means to support
particular interests may be aggregated in order to enable economies of scale. This establishes a
capacity for privately funded policy advice and research institutions like think tanks. In the US
(population 322 mil.), a national political party, just like an interest group, has a larger
constituency from which to recruit members than in France (64.1 mil.), or in Denmark (5.63
mil.). All things being equal, this should translate into radically different fund-raising
opportunities and budgetary means for civil society organizations. The propensity for non-state
actors to become a principal of policy advice is thus higher in populous countries than it is in
small ones, setting the stage for more competition.
Political finance. But membership dues are not necessarily the only income of civil society
organizations. Most countries, for instance, provide public funding for political parties (CasasZamora, 2005). Such funds are not only spent on electoral campaigns, but also on partyaffiliated think tanks and partisan caucuses in parliament. Especially in small countries, this
might dramatically impact the analytical capacity of political parties. However, the same legal
frameworks of political finance may also restrict private donations, thereby effectively canceling
8
population size effects. Public subsidies, then, help to level the playing field and, primarily in
small countries, increase the number of principals of policy advice.
Legal prerogatives. Thus far the discussion assumed policy advice to be the product of issuespecific mandates, which grants producers little autonomy. Yet there are also advisory bodies
that have issue-independent mandates; this is typically the case for commissions engaged in
foresight and critical commentary. These commissions are actual institutions whose mandates
are codified in laws rather than contracts. They consequently enjoy a much higher degree of
independence and freedom to voice their opinions without an explicit invitation (Weingart &
Lentsch, 2008). Some of these committees may become so influential that they may be
construed as principals in their own right. These legal and organizational aspects of policy advice
organization are subject to cross-national variations. For instance, the Dutch planning bureaus
are endowed with constitutional prerogatives that grant them broad political influence
(Halffman, 2009). German advisory bodies, however, are a mix of more or less independent
organizations (Weingart & Lentsch, 2008).
Thus, structural factors condition which actors in the political system may gain access to analysis
and advice. In purely quantitative terms, a single principal of policy advice would spell the
absence of advisory competition while the presence of many principals would lead to ruinous
politicization of advice. Yet as the Canadian case shows, when the government forced the
contracting out of advice, advice did not become partisan; instead, contracting out led to a
substitution of substantive with procedural policy advice (Migone & Howlett, 2013). Similarly,
a complete monopoly of access to analysis doesn’t prevent evidentiary disputes. Unlike within
academia, in politics one can always call for a study where a perfectly good one already exists or
question the validity of an evidence-based argument without having to justify these claims
rationally. I would argue, however, that such rhetorical strategies are less potent in
undermining an analytical claim than doing so with a competing study.
Norms
The resource perspective outlined thus far is incomplete without the consideration of cultural
norms that regulate advisory transactions in the policy arena. Norms stipulate rules actors must
9
follow in order for their actions to be considered as legitimate. The production of policy advice,
too, must respect cultural norms, if it is to be an effective instrument for furthering its
principal's interests. Concretely, policy advice must achieve credibility and legitimacy (cf. Haas,
2004) in front of the audience at which it is directed. The audience must think that a producer
of policy advice is both objective and neutral and has to trust that the producer's engagement
with the principal does not bias the advice delivered (Gieryn, 1999; Jasanoff, 1990).
Producers and commentators of policy advice, especially in environmental governance, often
maintain that achieving scientific consensus is the key to earning the public’s trust (Haas, 2004;
Renn, 2001). STS research, however, offers a more nuanced assessment: it is the trust in the
people and institutions that produce and adjudicate factual claims that underpins the credibility
of their intellectual product (Shapin, 1995). As Jasanoff (2005) argues, such trust is mediated by
political culture – civic epistemology, that is – and is thus subject to cross-national variation.
She shows, for instance, that the American, British, and German political cultures differ in
regards to the basis on which somebody comes to be recognized as an expert, how competing
claims of expertise are settled, and how transparent advisory processes are.3 Taking this
intercultural variation into account, the number of principals of advice in and of itself hardly
provides a sufficient explanation for authority-undermining expert conflicts. The basis of trust
in advice and modes of settlement therefore require consideration as part of the advisory
system.
Two models of conflict resolution may be construed on the basis of civil epistemologies. In the
evidence model, arguably the American case, clashes between contending expert views are
3
In the US context the recognition as expert is tied to professional qualification and merit, that
advisory processes are subjected to transparency rules, and that settlement of competing claims
of expertise works through litigation. In Britain, however, personal experience is highly valued
as attribute of expertise, transparency requirements are less pronounced, and trust is based on
the expert's persona as a servant in the public's interest. In Germany, the expert status stems
from membership in a particular intellectual community, transparency is low, and trust is
mediated through institutional affiliation rather than personal virtue (Jasanoff, 2005).
10
publicly visible due to the transparency of advisory processes (Brown, 2009, p. 93), and it is not
uncommon that settlement involves litigation. Importantly, though, for the public faith in the
value of rational analysis, the basis of trust in expertise is depersonalized: experts are
interchangeable as long as they possess merit and qualifications. Adjudication therefore focuses
on a notion of evidence – ‘just the facts, ma’am’ – that is purified from its social context of
production (Jasanoff, 1990). Such an adversarial culture affords a great amount of conflict
without diminishing the symbolic standing of rationality as a cultural value. This conflict
resilience has a perverse side as it enables groups like climate skeptics to perpetuate their views
with the argument that climate policy advice isn’t strictly grounded in evidence (Demeritt,
2006).
In what might be termed the expert model – the case of many European countries – conflict
resolution is not a question of adjudicating evidence, but of selecting trustworthy experts. The
combination of trust being placed in specific individuals or advisory bodies, and of less stringent
transparency requirements of expert deliberation (i.e. the cases of Germany and Britain)
reduces adversity because conflicts, if they happen, can be more easily contained from spilling
into the open. This likely engenders pressure to only select producers of policy advice with a
wide-ranging reputation, thus limiting conflict through selection at the beginning.
Change and conflict
The preceding sections elaborated how the distribution of power in the political system, the
allocation of resources necessary to access expertise, and the cultural foundations of trust in
policy advice contribute to fashion different advisory systems. Table X provides a summary of
these factors.
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Table X: Components of an advisory system
Dimension Factor
Arenas
Resources
Persuasion of stakeholders
persuasion of voters
Indicators
vs. Number of veto players
Analytic monopoly of the civil
Contracting out; political control.
service
Economies of scale in fund-raising
Population size
for civil society organizations
Norms
Political finance
Regulation and/or public funding for
political organizations
Legal prerogatives
Legally guaranteed independence and
access for advisory bodies.
Foundation of epistemic credibility
Trust in experts vs. trust in evidence.
While bearing resemblance to the operationalization of a statistical indicator, the table should
not be read as such. Firstly, the conceptualized factors are interdependent. A country’s small
size, for instance, may explain inclusive decision-making (e.g. Katzenstein, 1985), create
conditions favorable to idiosyncratic trust relations, and condition a particular political culture.
But assuming that all small countries share similar advisory systems would be tantamount to
structural determinism. Still, advisory systems are not the exclusive product of idiosyncratic
historical trajectories, as structural conditions do impose limits. It is ultimately through
empirical analysis that interrelations and causal pathways may be made sense of.
Secondly, adding or subtracting different factors does not produce a quantitative measurement
of advisory conflict intensity. Conflict intensity is but one element that is mediated by the
location where conflictual relations become manifest, as well as by the strategies of settling
them. It is precisely this consideration of advisory conflict in context that this advisory system
concept affords.
The following will now illustrate this concept by drawing on Switzerland as a case study, before
concluding refections on how changing political circumstances may affect the delivery of sound
advice.
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Policy advice in Switzerland
The following empirical illustration serves to add contour and plasticity to the theoretical
argument, but should not be mistaken for a test of the theory's validity. The latter would not
only require the comparison of multiple contrasting cases, it would also presuppose a more
explicit conceptualization of publicly visible expert dissent than this paper offers. Nonetheless,
the introduction of a diachronic dimension sheds light on the theory's operating mechanisms
beyond the contextualization of its constitutive parts. This is particularly valuable for
demonstrating that the dynamics of decision-making and policy advising, while closely
interconnected, do not respond in kind to wider political and societal transformations.
In the light of the illustrative nature of the following case study, the choice of focusing on the
Swiss federal advisory system does not require a theoretical justification. It does, however,
make a novel contribution to the understanding of policy advice in Switzerland. Academic
publications, policy reports, and previous research by the author constitute the empirical
material. The paper considers material from the mid-1970s throughout today, which affords
tracing changes and their effects over time. But the conceptual lenses rather than chronology
will guide the case narrative.
Arenas of legitimation
The Swiss federal policy process is notorious for its many veto players. Constitutional design in
the wake of the short civil war of 1848 aimed for accommodating and pacify the country’s
territorial, linguistic, and religious diversity. This produced federalism (26 cantons),
symmetrical bicameralism, a collegial executive composed of seven equal federal councillors (that
is, ministers), and – gradually – proportional representation as well as several instruments of
bottom-up direct democracy (the referendum in 1874 and the popular initiative in 1891).
Conspicuously absent from that list is a constitutional court, though, an institution some regard
as incompatible with direct democracy.
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Within this institutional setting, a federal policy project has to negotiate the threat of defeat in a
ballot vote, in addition to the two houses of parliament. Moreover, the strong position of the
cantons as policy implementers and responsible polities for any policy issue that the constitution
has not explicitly assigned to the federal government create multilevel interdependencies
(Linder & Vatter, 2001; Vatter, 2005). The political system has adapted to the complexity and
uncertainty these many veto players entail by developing elaborate procedures of consultation
and inclusion (Papadopoulos, 2001). The power-sharing arrangement in government (Linder,
2007, p. 26), the inclusion of powerful stakeholder into advisory commissions (Germann,
1981; Rebmann & Mach, 2013), and formalized consultations (Blaser, 2003) reflect this.
Importantly, the multi-party representation in the federal council is the product of a stable
division of power in parliament, which elects the executive, and not of a coalition agreement.
While this has resulted in a predictable composition of the federal council, the latter has to
constantly engage in majority building in parliament as allegiances are not given due to the strict
separation of power and the absence of a coalition treaty. As some have argued (Bussmann,
1989, pp. 28-30; Freiburghaus & Zimmermann, 1985, p. 84; Koller, 1989, p. 225; Sager &
Rissi, 2011, pp. 158-160), such a system is conducive neither to expertise production
organizations (i.e. think tanks) serving as platforms for 'governments in waiting', nor to experts
adjudicating between partisan platforms and coalition treaties.
Advisory commissions are at the heart of crafting suitable compromises capable of securing a
parliamentary majority while simultaneously preempting a referendum through the cooptation
of powerful stakeholders. The so-called extra-parliamentary commissions are supposed to
complement the civil service where the latter lacks in competency or capacity. They are
composed of federal administrators, representatives of the cantons and communes, academics,
and interest group representatives. Membership in advisory commissions is a form of civic
engagement, which Bussmann (1989, p. 29) likened to a public school teacher assuming
responsibilities in a community's associational life after work hours.4 These commissions
4
The republican tradition of civil engagement is a fundamental organizational principle of public
life in Switzerland as many public and civil society institutions (e.g. municipal executives,
14
perform tasks as varied as foresight, drafting of legislative proposals, or regulatory oversight
(Germann, 1981; Rebmann & Mach, 2013). Since the 1980s, however, the political importance
of commissions has been in decline. Their numbers have plummeted (down from 300 in 1980
to 224 in 2010, (Rebmann & Mach, 2013, p. 175)), their policy influence shrank (involvement
in about a third of all policy projects during the 1970s, (Papadopoulos, 1997, pp. 75-78) vs. ten
percent during the period 1995-97, (Biedermann, 2002, p. 23)), and their capacity to mitigate
political conflict diminished.
The declining importance of extra-parliamentary commissions reflects wider transformations in
the political system. The density of elite networks has declined since the 1980s, taking away the
social foundation of cooperative decision-making in venues like the extra-parliamentary
commissions (Rebmann & Mach, 2013). Moreover, the adjustment of domestic politics to
international developments has reduced the scope of domestic actors in policy-making,
especially of the once mighty interest groups (Papadopoulos, 2008). The requirements to act
swiftly amid international pressures has empowered the executive at the expense of the timeconsuming procedures of maximal inclusion (Papadopoulos, 1997, p. 78; Sciarini, 2007, p.
474). At the same time political alliances have become more volatile, driven by increased
political polarization and amplified by media scrutiny. This has empowered political parties,
and, with it, parliament as a venue of decision-making, at the expense of interest groups
(Papadopoulos, 2008; Sciarini, 2013). This reinforcement of parliament as a venue of policymaking does not mean that the political system has changed completely; after all, the
administration still controls substantially more decision-making processes than parliament. But
because Parliament as a venue is more accessible to media scrutiny than the executive, policymaking has moved further into the public arena when compared to the 1970s and early 1980s.
In conclusion, the Swiss federal policy process creates strong incentives for inclusive decisionmaking and the public legitimation of policies through élite consensus. But this arrangement is
in motion, as the social foundation of such inclusion weakens, polarization between political
parliaments at all levels, the military, advisory commissions etc.) heavily rely on volunteer
work by people with other primary employment (Kley, 2009).
15
forces increases, and internationalization favors executive decision-making. Extra-parliamentary
commissions are not only key institutions of the advisory system, they are also a firm part of
inclusive decision-making. With the latter in decline, they, too, face diminishing policy
influence. These development suggest that it has become harder to legitimate policy decisions
through élite consensus. However, the lack of alternating political forces in government and the
slowness of the legislative process works against a political discourse seeking justification
through output legitimacy in public.
Resource distribution
How the necessary financial and organizational resources are distributed that are required to
become a principal of policy advice constitutes the second tire of investigation into the Swiss
federal advisory system. This section outlines the distribution of such resources within the state,
followed by the consideration of civil society and the independence of advisory institutions.
The federal government’s civil service sports a highly educated staff of generalists, but is largely
deprived of in-house specialists (cf. Ledermann, 2014). It therefore significantly relies on
external sources of analysis. But unlike the case of anglo-saxon countries (Halligan, 1995;
Howlett & Migone, 2013), the external provision of advice and analysis constitutes the baseline,
and not a recent, conspicuous phenomenon. This lack of analytical capacity may be explained
with the cantons’ strong autonomy and a tradition of civil society self-regulation that hampered
the formation of a strong central government. Referenda, for instance, have repeatedly blocked
projects to modernize government and the civil service (Varone, 2006). As the example of the
extra-parliamentary commissions has shown, the civil service traditionally relied on expertise
form civil-society actors to complement its capabilities (Rebmann & Mach, 2013, p. 170). Two
more examples illustrate the cooperation between the civil service and private actors for the
provision of analysis, which is a form of social organization also common for policy
implementation. Firstly, the government subsidizes the four academies of science and their
umbrella organization to support their roles as producers of foresight policy advice and as
enablers of self-regulation within the scientific community. The academies are civil society
organizations that have not been established by the state, but closely cooperate with the latter.
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In the case of the Swiss Academy of Natural Sciences, the oldest among them, this cooperative
relationship goes all the way back to the establishment of the modern Swiss state in the mid1800s (Kissling-Näf, 2009). Secondly, the civil service also relies on similar arrangements for
strategic policy research in domains as varied as energy, health and transportation. In 2010,
64.5 percent of such research was outsourced to academia and the private sector, a figure which
declined to 57.9 percent in 2013. Virtually the only domain of in-house research is agriculture,
where the civil service maintains an in-house research facility.5
While the external production of analysis remains a constant, cooperative relations with
producers are becoming increasingly formalized and there is a push to consider the acquisition
of analysis as just another item of public procurement. There are also changes on the supply
side, as consulting firms have entered the playing field and established themselves as the main
provider for short-term analytical reports concerning specific policy issues.6 Three reasons may
explain the rise of consultancy firms, which were virtually insignificant before the 1990s.
Firstly, the previously declining importance of inclusive decision-making and the associated loss
of influence of extra-parliamentary commissions paved the way for procurement of analysis
through contracting. Secondly, as civil servants in the energy and environmental policy domains
interviewed by Himmelsbach (2014) contend, university institutes began withdrawing from
policy research as changes in the science system increased time constraints and diminished
incentives for professors to engage in policy-oriented research and consulting. Thirdly, and
more recently, the constitutional revision of 1999 introduced an article mandating parliament
to evaluate the effectiveness of policies. This contributed to a growing demand for policy
analysis, benefiting the growth of a consultancy industry (Balthasar, 2009; Bussmann, 1997; K.
Frey, 2010a; 2010b; Sager & Rissi, 2011; Widmer & Neuschwander, 2004). Hence, while the
5
Cf.
Agency
research
http://www.ressortforschung.admin.ch/html/dokumentation/zahlen_de.html
statistics
(Accessed
June 2, 2015).
6
Consultancy firms received about 56 percent of all short term federal advisory mandates in
2004 (Bättig, Weyermann, Morard, Frey, & Heinis, 2006). They have little traction in the
market for longer-term research, though, where academic institutes still dominate.
17
provision of policy advice has remained externalized, there have been changes in its supply
structure.
The civil service’s resources to acquire analysis and advice is no match for other actors within
government. Given the lack of a prime minister and a purely ceremonial presidency that rotates
every year among the seven federal councillor, there is no executive political structure to
compete against the civil service in terms of analysis. Similarly, parliament’s analytical resources
are meager, both in international comparison (Kriesi & Trechsel, 2008, p. 70) and relative to
the civil service. Public resistance against the professionalization of parliament have not only
deprived members of parliament of staff to conduct analysis, it has also prevented the
parliamentary services from developing a strong research service (Kriesi, 2001). The notable
exception is the division on governmental oversight that has a small budget – roughly an order
of magnitude less than what the administration spends on policy advice – to commission
external evaluations (Bättig, 2007). Policy deliberation in parliament effectively relies on
expertise provided by the civil service. External experts might testify in hearings but are seldom
part of committee deliberations (Himmelsbach, 2014). Finally, while the instrument of ad hoc
parliamentary inquiry commissions exists to investigate exceptional events, this is not the case
for policy-oriented study commissions comparable to the German enquete-commission (Weingart
& Lentsch, 2008).
There are, however, efforts in parliament to exert political control over the administration’s
analytical capabilities. Parliament’s governmental oversight has been the main impetus for
creating a governance regime for policy advice. Until the 1970s, there was no clear record
keeping about the number of extra-parliamentary commissions. The civil service had substantial
leeway in setting up and staffing a new commission at will. Several reforms since have curbed
this discretionary power by postulating that a commission may only be kept in place or created
when it complements the capabilities of the civil service; by providing membership selection
criteria and reducing tenure; and by empowering exclusively the federal council to authorize
the creation of a commission and elect its members (Rebmann & Mach, 2013, pp. 179-181).
Similarly, the control over agency research has been taken away from the fiefdoms of individual
agencies by introducing a central information system and an administration-wide central
18
steering committee (Farago & Brunner, 2006). Finally, how much the administration spends on
short-term advisory mandates is subject to ongoing polemic (Schmid, 2014). Here, too,
parliament pushed for full financial disclosure, following a 2004 motion by the Swiss People’s
Party (No. 04.3755), resulting in a decree mandating the civil service to maintain a publicly
accessible database of advisory mandates it contracts.7 Ultimately, this is a struggle over the
political control of the administration and parliament has not gained any additional analytical
resources as a result of it. It therefore fits well that what drives members of parliament to
advance or contest evidentiary claims is the conflictual nature of an issue, and not the quality of
the evidence at hand (K. Frey, 2010b; Himmelsbach, 2014).
The federal government’s civil service commands an analytical monopoly within government. It
is a control monopoly, however, as most advice is produced extramurally. Civil society actors
represent no significant challenge. The potential for economies of scale for resource aggregation
is limited by the country’s population size (1970 ca. 6 mil., 2013 ca. 8 mil.), as well as by the
cultural, linguistic and territorial divides. Political parties, for instance, have strong local roots,
with their national organizations being more of an umbrella organization. Further, proportional
representation affords horizontal fragmentation with over a dozen parties active at the national
level (Ladner, 2007, p. 310). And there is a complete lack of legislation on political finance in
Switzerland (van Biezen, 2004), which means that political parties live off donations for they are
not supported by the state. This hampers the development of analytical capabilities due to
lacking professionalization and the missing means to finance partisan think tanks or purchase
analysis on the consultancy market (Freiburghaus & Zimmermann, 1985, p. 84; Ladner, 2007).
Interest groups, however, exceed political parties in their analytical resources. While also
highly decentralized constructs, they managed to build stronger national organizations. In the
domains of social and economic policy, trade unions and employers' associations have
traditionally provided policy advice that was well-regarded despite its advocacy character. But
7
The adoption of the WTO public procurement guidelines, as well as the enactment of a
freedom of information act in 2006 further strengthen transparency in advisory governance, but
are not the specific product of reigning in the administration’s analytical monopoly.
19
with the diminishing importance of inclusive decision-making ahead of the parliamentary
process, the platform for such advice is on the decline. Within that context of waning influence,
the business community established the neo-liberal think tank Avenir Suisse in 1999 (Kriesi &
Trechsel, 2008, p. 104), which remains the most influential among the very small numbers of
such organizations in Switzerland (Steffen & Linder, 2006).
By all accounts, the Swiss federal advisory system substantially limits the numbers of principals
of policy advice because resource allocation for the acquisition of policy advice is strongly
concentrated in the hands of the civil service. This advantage is further compounded by the
weak position of producers of policy advice. There are no legal prerogatives preventing the
federal government from ignoring commissioned or unsolicited advice. Even extraparliamentary commissions, which receive their mandate form the federal council but enjoy
operational independence, have no privileged access to government. This was unproblematic as
long as these commissions were a firm part of the policy process. Now that they lost this place,
however, extra-parliamentary commissions have to basically engage in lobbying through
generating a media presence and hosting information luncheons for members of parliament, just
like interest groups (Himmelsbach, 2014).8 A public exchange between parliament and the
academies of science aptly illustrates this lack of access, the latter accusing parliament in an
open letter of ignoring the findings of a research program on the risks of GMOs in agriculture,
which the government had commissioned (Courvoisier, Gutscher, & Meier-Abt, 2013).9
Hence, the system by no means grants producers of policy advice the status of principal and
contrasts markedly with, for instance, the UK system of a chief scientific adviser within
government or the Dutch system of planning bureaus as governmental agencies.
This analysis of who exercises control in the Swiss advisory system leads to a single actor: the
civil service. The relative distribution of resources between actors has not changed much,
8
The only legal obligation for the federal council to respond to advisory reports concerns those
produced by the parliamentary government oversight commission.
9
Science policy lobbying has become more organized with the establishment of the Future
Network in 2001. http://www.netzwerk-future.ch (Accessed June 12, 2015).
20
despite the larger changes within Swiss politics that the preceding section elaborated on. It
might be argued that these changes – i.e. strengthening of executive decision-making –, and the
highlighted professionalization of advisory production, have actually further contributed to the
civil service’s dominance in controlling policy advice.
Trust in analysis
There is a manifest connection between how policy decisions are legitimated in public and how
expert advice comes to be trusted. As argued thus far, input more than output legitimacy
matters in Switzerland, which attributes greater importance for policy advice in persuading the
élite than the general public.
Science in the abstract does not constitute a cultural authority in Switzerland that may be
publicly drawn on for legitimating political institutions and their policies. National conservative
mythology celebrates the peasant William Tell as a founding father and not, as is the case in the
US, a figure like the natural philosopher Benjamin Franklin. The scientific enterprise is firmly
located within the realm of civil society, as the histories of key scientific institutions show
(Benninghoff, 2004; Kissling-Näf, 2009). And trust in science and trust in political institutions
are quite separate things.10
Within this institutional and cultural context, the persona, much more than formal
qualifications or affiliations, matter for credibility in Switzerland. (This is quite different from
Germany (Jasanoff, 2005) or Austria (Bussjäger, 2012).) To illustrate the point, when a
parliamentary committee organizes hearings, which is routine for most new legislative projects,
10
The Swiss public’s generally high trust in science and trust in political institutions seem
unrelated. Direct democracy, while boosting scientific literacy on topics such as genetic
engineering, does not affect the level of public trust in science (Bonfadelli, Dahinden, &
Leonarz, 2002), neither does trust in political institutions like the federal council (they are
unrelated). Instead, trust or distrust in science are a function of trust in industry or the church,
respectively (Crettaz von Rotten, Hof, & Leresche, 2003).
21
its participant recruitment strategy aims at covering the entire opinion spectrum. This is an
informal but duly observed principle. Committees do not treat academics any different than
stakeholders with manifest interests for it is understood that experts, too, are interested in
some regard. In that setting congruence of worldviews and charisma matter for persuasion, not
academic credentials. This indifference to academic credentials is also visible in governmental
reports summarizing the findings from public consultations, which do not weight a statement by
the academies any different from one by the catholic women’s association (Himmelsbach,
2014).
The Swiss system of interpersonal trust relations has a limited capacity to deal with conflict,
fore there are no formalized routines for dispute resolution. Experiences with extraparliamentary commissions on energy futures during the late 1980s made this abundantly clear.
Either one stacked committee membership so as to avoiding conflict (and knowing in advance
what the commission will propose), or one risked a commission falling apart (Mironesco,
1993). As the previously discussed developments of the élite’s functional differentiation and
increasing political polarization undermine the system of interpersonal trust relations, such
conflicts could become an issue for the advisory system. However, one might argue that the
professionalization of advisory relations, combined with the civil service’s strong control over
advisory supply, prevent the exacerbation of conflict in the advisory arena. The increasing
transparency requirements will certainly put the system to a test. But even if the administration
is now required to publish the reports it commissions, the exact timing of publication remains a
discretionary choice.
Discussion
In order to investigate the implications of competing expert claims in the advisory arena, this
paper proposed a notion of the advisory system that builds on institutional, economic, and
cultural factors. The analysis of the Swiss political system at the federal level of government
revealed an advisory system that, for institutional and cultural reasons, is oriented toward an
élite audience and not the general public, and that displays a strong concentration of advisory
demand by the civil service.
22
The theoretical and empirical discussion have shown that the propensity of conflict in the
advisory arena is both a question of the demand structure and of a political system’s adaptive
capacity to deal with conflict. We can therefore not simply maintain that the presence of
conflicting advisory opinions undermines evidence-based policy-making. Instead we have to ask
what drives conflict, where does it play out, and what mitigation strategies exist. In that
perspective, an adversarial advisory system doesn’t necessarily spell doom for the credibility of
policy advice. Nor is the absence of any conflict necessarily a good sign of a healthy and critical
engagement with advice. Conflict is at the heart of politics and some of it will necessarily spill
over into the advisory system. We should therefore not be concerned so much with conflict as
such as we should with shifts within systems that upset historically grown equilibria between
advisory practices and strategies of conflict accommodation (Weingart, 1999). Likewise, we
shouldn’t be concerned so much about the politicization of advice as we should be about lacking
access to policy deliberation and the growing importance of strategic advice at the expense of
substantive policy analysis (Migone & Howlett, 2013). Yet we shouldn’t draw too wide a
conclusion from the advisory arena about the social and political influence of science. After all,
science shapes our lives infinitely more as a cultural force and as a driver of technological
innovation than through its contribution to policy advice.
If anything, the merit of this paper is to demonstrate conceptually and empirically that advisory
processes are inherently shaped by their political context, thus echoing Shapin and Schaffer
(1985, p. 344) assertion that “[t]he form of life in which we make our scientific knowledge will
stand or fall with the way we order our affairs in the state.”
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