Special issue blog series on Policy Expertise in Times of Crisis

Peter Aagaard, Sevasti Chatzopoulou, and Birgitte Poulsen

Crisis seems to be everywhere these days. Where there is crisis, there is crisis management. And where there is crisis management, there are experts that advise politicians in decision-making. However, how does this sustained pressure from crises affect relationships between experts and politicians? Has expertise increasingly become politicised? Or do we see more scientisation of politics? And do relationships between experts and politicians vary across different political systems? These are all central questions addressed in our recently published article on Analysing expert advice on political decisions in times of crisis. They are important questions, because they deal with the legitimacy of decision-making and public sense-making in the era of recurring crises.  

In our article, we study how a crisis, like COVID-19, affected expert–politician relationships in Denmark, Greece, and the United States. Despite their differences, there were traces of the politicisation of expertise in all three cases. However, experts did not hold sway over elected politicians in any of the countries. In all three countries politicians relied on science selectively (also as partisan expertise) to publicly legitimise their strategies and decisions. The frontstage influence of experts played a minor but significant part across all three cases. Experts were aware of their role in the media during the crisis, often feeling a need to defend their science, perhaps even in opposition to their own government. (Perhaps you remember Fauci?) 

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