LIST OF PANELS

Contemporary policy-making relies considerably on policy advice, contributed by a variety of actors and sources that compose the policy advisory system in a political system. Empirically, the configurations of policy advisory systems vary across political systems. As shown by earlier research, the configuration of the advisory system, i.e. its structure and design, affects and pre-structures both the type of advice provided and the content of the advice. Hence, if transferred to policy-making the configuration of a given advisory system also affects policy-making and ultimately policy output.   Research on policy advice however typically focuses on how advice or knowledge is transferred to policy-making by analyzing single advisory actors, e.g. councils or advisory commission, and not by analyzing the whole advisory system. Hence, little is known so far on the causes and consequences of the configuration of policy advisory systems, their implications for policy-making, and – as Craft (2014) has pointed out – even less is known on the complex interdependencies of advisory systems and policy (sub)systems. The panel addresses these research gaps. The panel invites both theoretical and empirical papers on the configuration of policy advisory systems in different political systems (both comparative papers as well as in-depth studies of specific national or regional systems) as well as papers that address the interdependencies of policy advisory systems and policy (sub)systems by e.g. studying particular advisory processes. The panel is open for a wide range of theoretical and methodological perspectives and particularly welcomes papers with original empirical data. We encourage cross-country and within-country comparisons across policy fields.

It is by now almost a truism in political science and public administration that policy-making depends upon knowledge and expertise. By transferring ‘objective’ knowledge, i.e. scientific evidence, to policy-making, both rationalization and legitimacy of policies supposedly increase. Hence, policy advisory systems – understood as the system of multiple sources of policy advice used by governments (Halligan, 1995) – do play a key role in the policy-making process. The advice can be located in the public service, internal and external to government. Each country has its own advisory system that consists of e.g. councils, (ad-hoc) commissions, research institutes, think tanks, universities and (private) consulting organizations. Advisory organizations can give solicited and unsolicited advice to the government, think along with government or choose a highly critical approach and almost act as voice of external interests. Over the last decades, research investigating the promises and pitfalls of transferring knowledge to policy-making has vastly intensified, and the notion of the policy advisory system has become one of the most prominent concepts to analyze the interaction between science and policy-making. Empirical research shows that policy advisory systems differ in many respects across political systems. Either the result of intentional reform or the product of long-term path-dependent developments, policy advisory systems vary greatly in a number of respects such as the formal organization, location and in particular regarding their inner working mechanisms through which policy advice flows into the policy cycle – or not. So far, research on policy advice mainly focuses on single advisory organizations such as single councils, while the configuration of advisory systems and its relationship with and implications for policy-making and the structures and procedures of government are widely neglected. While the influence of policy advice on policy-making is highly researched by scholars (see e.g. Howlett & Newman, 2010; Eichbaum & Shaw, 2003; Prince, 1979), the relation between advisory systems and policy-making is not. Moreover, especially the non-governmental components of advisory systems remain under-researched (Hird, 2005), a problem that is even more pressing for the role of the consultancy industry or the so-called ‘invisible public sector’ (Craft & Howlett, 1995, Migone, 2013). This panel intends to combine different strands of research – namely policy analysis and public administration research on internal or civil service policy advice (e.g. Fleischer, 2012; Hustedt, 2013; Korinek & Veit, 2014) – by focusing on the relation between policy, governance and advice. The panel pursues two goals. Firstly, it aims to generate a systematic comparison of the configuration of advisory systems as e.g. put forward by Schulz et al (2014), Van Damme et al. (2011) or the European Commission (Glynn et al., 2003). Secondly, the panel seeks to understand the interdependencies of policy advisory systems and policy systems, or advisory subsystems and policy subsystems such as suggested by Craft (2014).  The panel is open for a wide range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. We particularly welcome papers with original empirical data.