A Relationship of Resource Dependencies

Abstract

The nature of the relationship between policy makers and their advisors is a recurring issue in public and academic debate. Numerous conceptual approaches have been adopted in order to examine this relationship, of which two traditions, in particular, stand out most prominently. On the one hand, ideational approaches have brought attention to the gap between the provision of information and its actual use by policy makers: while voluminous expertise is generated, only a small part actually finds its way into the final policy decisions. This phenomenon has been explained in part by the perspective of the ‘two communities’, which suggests that cultural and communicative boundaries between the political and the scientific spheres hinder an exclusively rational, linear use of scientific expertise by policy makers (e.g., Habermas, 1969; Caplan, 1979). Knowledge-utilization approaches emphasize the multiple uses of expert knowledge in the policy process, implying that advice does not always influence policy content in an observable manner. Rather, advice may also influence the policy process more incrementally, for instance, by ‘enlightening’ policy makers (Weiss, 1979). Other, closely related research has emphasized learning processes as the central mechanism of knowledge transfer between experts and policy makers (e.g., Heclo, 1974; Sabatier, 1988; Haas, 1992; Hall, 1993).