Why did Chile’s think tank sector become more concentrated even as supply and demand for expert opinion expanded? This article examines nine organizations between 2011 and 2022, tracking 18,948 public interventions and conducting sixty-six interviews with think tank members and stakeholders to understand this apparent paradox. While political crises, from student movements to the 2019 social “outbreak” offered opportunities for new voices to emerge, established think tanks systematically consolidated their advantages. This article develops the concept of intellectual infrastructure—the material, institutional, technological, and network conditions enabling expert interventions—to explain how advantages in funding and media access become self-reinforcing. In a middle-income country where international funding dried up without the emergence of domestic philanthropy, organizations with larger, more flexibly allocated resources could effectively crowd out competitors. This challenges assumptions about expertise democratization, revealing how intellectual authority becomes concentrated even during periods of apparent openness.

This article examines the conditions under which policy learning occurs, distinguishing between instrumental learning (evidence-based, problem-solving oriented) and political learning (strategic, shaped by institutional position and incentives). Drawing on three cases presented by Claudio Radaelli – examining bureaucrats, politicians, and experts – the paper shows that much of what occurs in policy practice is best understood as political learning: actors acquire and deploy knowledge strategically, filtered through professional hierarchies, electoral pressures, and reputational concerns. While the literature has long recognised these dynamics, the paper argues that existing accounts of political learning understate its relational and contextual character. Political learning emerges through positioned interactions within institutional and epistemic communities, rather than from individual strategic calculation alone, and from alignment with shifting background political conditions that determine what knowledge becomes actionable. Recognising this relational dimension has implications for institutional design aimed at fostering democratic accountability and integrating expertise more effectively into policy making.

This article examines the evolving role of expertise in democratic policy making amid growing political contestation and institutional strain. Drawing on insights from the annual roundtable convened by European Political Science, it explores how the legitimacy of expert knowledge is being challenged through crises of trust and rising populism. The article analyses how evidence is shaped and contested through challenges of literacy, capacity, and politics. It argues that democratising expertise requires greater inclusion alongside structural safeguards for academic independence. By reframing the use of evidence as fundamentally political rather than purely technical, the article calls for a more reflexive and accountable knowledge-policy interface.

This article examines the debate about what non-experts can assess when determining who qualifies as an expert. We focus in particular on the debate about metacriteria for expertise that non-experts can rely on. We make three central claims about what non-experts can actually infer about experts: (1) metacriteria are not indicators of expertise; (2) instead, they are indicators of experience and lack of epistemic integrity, with the latter marking whether the preconditions for any meaningful assessment of expertise or experience are even given; (3) by reframing the discussion about metacriteria of expertise in this way, we situate the debate about the identification of experts within the broader debate on trust in science. We argue that indicators of experience and lack of epistemic integrity are best understood as indicators of epistemic trustworthiness. We also connect our analysis of these indicators of epistemic trustworthiness to questions raised in the context of epistemic trespassing. In particular, we argue that what distinguishes problematic epistemic trespassing from fruitful boundary crossing is that trespassing experts lack the required experience (i.e., specialist tacit knowledge).

In light of progressive criticism of the managerial ‘expert’ logic dominant in the development field, the article analyses how international organizations (IOs) increasingly seek to pluralize their knowledge by adding to their toolkit certain territory-based elements of participatory approaches to data, especially from the Global South. It examines how such attempts to pluralize IOs’ expertise translate in practice, by focusing on the localization processes of the UN 2030 Agenda in six peripheral communities in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, that is, their development of territory-based targets and indicators for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. The article contrasts these local practices with UN expert agencies’ approaches to data disaggregation. This comparison shows how datafying tools and processes may vary considerably, indicating important epistemological differences in how knowledge gets validated, with impacts regarding visibility and accountability. The territory-based practices analysed defy authorized forms of knowledge by making data not only for monitoring or for action but also for caring and for making live. The article concludes that localization gives the impression that IOs’ knowledge is becoming more plural, yet these changes remain at the surface only, with other knowledges becoming parts of standardized templates and merely complementing official data.

International Relations scholarship has shown that persisting epistemic hierarchies rooted in colonial domination continue to exclude, silence, or sideline alternative knowledges in global governance, even as International Organizations increasingly open up to formally marginalized groups and attempt to pluralize their expertise. While building on such accounts, this article argues that epistemic hierarchies are deeply entangled with political-economic logics, which permeate global epistemic politics in multiple ways. These intersecting epistemic and political-economic logics produce complex forms of ‘political-epistemic disciplining’, which do not simply exclude alternative knowledges, but rearticulate them. I identify three intertwined modalities of this process: de-epistemization, whereby alternative knowledge claims are recoded as social or identity concerns rather than treated as competing epistemologies. This operation recognizes the subjects of the critique but not the epistemic critique itself. Conditional recognition occurs when prevailing criteria of validity regulate the acknowledgement of such claims. Finally, transposition constitutes or reformulates alternative knowledge claims through the lenses of dominant epistemic frameworks and categories. These processes rearticulate alternative knowledges and transform them a new into ‘globalized alternative knowledges’. The argument is developed through an in-depth analysis of engagements with Indigenous knowledges in Global Mental Health governance.

This article introduces the heuristic of epistemic inertia to complicate narratives of radical rupture in global sites of expertise. In 2006, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), widely celebrated as a radical break from the medical model, which had long framed disability as an individual impairment to be treated by medical doctors. Through the heuristic of epistemic inertia, we examine how, despite adopting a more pluralised expert repertoire, the CRPD Committee retains some deep-seated (neo)liberal assumptions of the medical model. Through an analysis of General Comment No. 8, we identify three main manifestations of this persistence across both models: first, an understanding of dignity as tied to productivity and autonomy; second, the idea that individuals must ‘adapt’ to existing societal arrangements through merit; and third, the portrayal of market participation as the privileged moral horizon. What falls out of view are alternative imaginaries grounded in interdependence or collective forms of care, which exist outside prevailing economic logics. In this configuration, the figure of the rights-bearer is not a radical alternative to the medical patient, insofar as rights are still articulated through expectations of optimisation and self-reliance within prevailing market logics.

When it comes to making political decisions about religion, decision-makers often rely on the testimonies of two kinds of religious experts: religious leaders and academic experts of religion. While such religious experts have epistemic authority for questions of religious identification and religious orthodoxy, their expertise is the wrong kind in a religiously neutral state. Questions of religious identification unfairly treat religion as being uniquely special and questions of religious orthodoxy give priority to religious traditions over individuals. Instead, only the subjective importance of commitments matters for cases of religious freedom, and only the objective interpretation of religious establishment matters in cases of religious establishment. Religious experts having no epistemic advantage here, they should not be playing any special role in making decisions about religion.

Experts step into global governance most prominently in times of crisis. But if crisis governance at international organizations (IOs) involves the construction of specific temporal horizons, how do these horizons affect the constitution of expert authority? This article argues that expertise produced under such conditions – to meet a demand for ‘timely’ knowledge – differs substantively from other kinds of expertise. Crisis governance thus contributes in notable ways to the pluralization of expertise. The article examines this phenomenon in the case of the relatively recent proliferation of rapid response mechanisms (RRMs). By examining the making and implementation of RRMs at two major IOs – the World Health Organization and the World Food Programme – the article offers a new understanding for how RRMs have become part of institutional repertoires of expertise. Based on this, it contends that RRM-based timeliness claims a shift in expert knowledge production from credentialed individuals to infrastructures and standardized procedures; second, they prioritize large homogenous datasets over consultation and contestation among different experts; and third, they streamline expert selection such that experts are recruited from existing intra-institutional pools rather than third parties. Jointly, these shifts speed up monitoring and reaction capabilities, but also risk eroding important checks on expert overconfidence.

States are measured and ranked on an ever-expanding array of country performance indicators (CPIs). Such indicators are seductive because they provide actionable, accessible, and ostensibly objective information on complex phenomena to time-pressed officials and enable citizens to hold governments to account. At the same time, a sizeable body of research has explored how CPIs entail ‘black boxing’ and depoliticisation of political phenomena. This article advances our understanding of the consequences of governance by indicators by examining how CPIs generate specific forms of politicization that can undermine a given CPI’s authority over time. We contend that CPIs rely upon two different claims to authority that operate in tension with one another: i) the claim to provide expert, objective knowledge and ii) the claim to render the world more transparent and to secure democratic accountability. Analysing CPIs in the field of education, economic governance, and health and development, we theorize and empirically document how this tension leads to three distinct forms of politicisation: scrutiny from experts that politicises the value judgements embodied in a CPI; competition whereby rival CPIs contest the objectivity of knowledge of leading CPIs; and corruption, where gaming of CPIs challenges its claim to securing transparent access to social reality. While the analysis identifies multiple paths to the politicization and undermining of specific CPIs’ authority, the article elaborates why these processes tend to leave intact and even reproduce the legitimacy of CPIs as a governance technology.

Many voters support the inclusion of technocrats in government. Yet we know very little about why technocrats are considered more appealing than traditional party representatives. In particular, it is unclear which advantages and disadvantages voters attach to the defining traits of technocratic ministers: party independence and expertise. We engage with this question drawing on a pre-registered survey experiment in Austria. We examine how manipulating ministers' party affiliation and expertise affects voters' perceptions of their issue competence and bargaining competence. Findings indicate that voters ascribe lower levels of issue competence to partisan ministers than to non-partisan ministers, notwithstanding their actual expertise, and that ministers' partisanship shrinks the positive effect of expertise on perceived issue competence. However, this ‘partisanship penalty’ disappears for supporters of the minister's party. Moreover, voters perceive partisanship as an advantageous trait with regard to a minister's bargaining competence. While voters like technocrats for their expertise and independence from party politics, our findings reveal nuanced perceptions, with voters still recognizing distinct advantages in being represented by party politicians.

Based on a qualitative and quantitative research design, this article examines the implementation of a morality policy – the medical cannabis policy in Switzerland – to investigate three understudied aspects of bureaucratic entrepreneurship. First, moving away from mono‐professional studies, the focus is on a policy characterized by a dispute between two groups of bureaucrats: physicians and jurists. Second, key conditions triggering bureaucratic policy entrepreneurship are identified, with a focus on mid‐level administrative entrepreneurs. Third, vertical alliances between bureaucrats and politicians of the executive and legislative branches are examined and these processes are reflected in the wider perspective of the politics‐administration dichotomy. Results show that law obsolescence, disputes between groups of bureaucrats and the need for political arbitration are favourable conditions for bureaucratic policy entrepreneurship. The study also shows that within the traditional separation of powers, bureaucratic entrepreneurship reinforces the executive power and creates dividing lines within the different branches of government.