What does it mean to be an “expert?” Expertise is a squishy concept and one that is not well-defined, but that nonetheless we rely on in order to make decisions. After all, everyone can’t know everything. We rely on experts in order to help us understand the world so we don’t have to do all that work on our own.
Ultimately, expertise is an economic proposition. If I had to go out and prove to myself that every car was safe, I’d spend all my life doing it. I economize my time by trusting regulators (experts in car safety) to recall dangerous cars and only allow cars at a certain safety threshold or higher on the road.
In an individualistic, democratic society like our own, we don’t always turn to experts to help us make decisions. This is as true in our everyday life as it is in the policymaking world. Because we elect our representatives, our representatives are usually reasonably educated generalists, often people who have careers of their own separate from policymaking with no special expertise on how policy works.
So how do policymakers assess expertise? As a firm that lends its expertise to policymakers, we spend a lot of time trying to understand the needs of policymakers and the type of expertise they seek. Below are some examples of how policymakers assess expertise when trying to get good policy information.
Possibly the most important source of expertise is recommendation. Policymakers assign expertise to those who others they know have assigned expertise to. This is likely the reason that, for instance, ALEC has gained so much credibility as an organization for legislative expertise. By having legislators recommend other legislators, ALEC was able to use networks of trust to build their reputation. Unfortunately, in this case many legislators end up feeling duped as they found the organization did not offer the sort of expertise they originally wished it had.
Another source of information about expertise is credentialing. This often means academic degrees, but can also mean affiliation with major universities or respected organizations. For example, someone with a degree as a doctor is signaled to have expertise on medical issues. Sometimes these credentials are good signals and sometimes they are faulty ones, but credentials that confer dispassionate expertise are likely to get more attention from policymakers than people who come in without these credentials.
A third source of conferral of expertise is experience. You all have seen people list how many years of experience they have in a field. Time can be a signal for experience, but also breadth of depth of work such as working with people in a certain community for a number of years or working with a range of clients across a wide geographical area. Policymakers are more likely to confer expertise on people who have been doing something for a long time in a certain area or across a number of different client groups.
Finally, there is the “x-factor.” These can be more subtle hints at expertise, and may often be the most faulty signals for good information. Does this person dress like an expert? Does she speak like an expert? Does she fit my mental model of what an expert looks like? Is she old enough to be an expert? All of these, fair or unfair, are factored in when a policy makes a decision whether to trust someone as an expert.
Expertise is, to say the least, an imperfect concept. But it is necessary. It’s a tool we use to economize our paths towards good information, but because of that we often create a lot of mental shortcuts that don’t always make sense. At its best, expertise saves gobs of time and gives people better information they can use to make better decisions. At its worst, the shortcuts lead people astray. In a healthy democracy that favors citizen leadership, our task is to make these signals as helpful as possible for policymakers to gain good information about policy decisions rather than information tainted by special interests.