The politics of policy inquiry commissions: Denmark and Norway, 1971-2017

Abstract

Policy inquiry commissions are widely used in policy-preparation processes across Europe and beyond. While previous research has primarily focussed on commissions as expert bodies and corporatist arrangements, this study investigates whether political factors affect a political incumbent's decision to establish commissions. The hypothesis is that incumbent parties are more likely to appoint commissions under certain political conditions – i.e. depending on parliamentary strength, government colour and government composition – and when certain policy issues are salient on the policy agenda of the government and the opposition. The study uses a novel dataset that combines more than 2000 commission appointments in Norway and Denmark between 1971 and 2017 with party manifesto and electoral study data to test the expectations. The agenda perspective is partly sustained, and the study shows that minority governments, left-leaning governments, and coalition governments appoint commissions more extensively than their counterparts, although the results differ slightly in the two countries.

Keywords:

• Policy inquiry
• policy advice
• commissions
• Denmark
• Norway
• policy agendas

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the participants at the EUREX ‘Expertise and policy-making – comparative perspectives’ Workshop in the Hague in May 2019, participants at the PAPP Seminar in February 2020 at the Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, and the staff at the Political Behaviour and Institutions group at the Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, for comments and input on earlier versions of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 A government’s term ends/starts when i) the prime minister changes, ii) a new party enters or leaves the government, and iii) after an election. See online appendix Tables A4 and A5 for an overview of Norwegian and Danish government terms.

2 In a few periods, the Norwegian Conservatives and the Progress Party was the main oppositional party. See online appendix Table A5 for details.

3 Danish election survey: ‘What do you think is the most important issue that the politicians should handle in the years to come?’ The Norwegian study asks respondents to name ‘the most important issues for your vote in this election’.

4 To account for governments’ propensity to appoint commissions to issues salient in the period in which they hold office, we tested the effect of lead variables. Results are not significant and can be reviewed upon request.

5 We have considered the possibility that the DV could be biased due to variation in policy activity over different government terms in a way that made our analyses capture the associations between the independent variables and policy activity in general rather than the propensity to appoint commissions. W assessed the correlation between the total number of laws approved by the two parliaments in the period studied and the number of appointed commissions each parliamentary year. In Denmark, the correlation is very low (-.05), and the Norwegian correlation is low to moderate (0.25). We conclude that policy activity and commission appointment are not associated in Denmark and only moderately so in Norway.

6 With no prior research on the relationship between policy agendas and commission appointment, we cannot deduce a well-founded effect size from previous work as would be the standard procedure when executing an equivalence test. We thus follow guidelines from Weber and Popova (2012) and conduct a two-tailed test of whether we can reject a correlation between voter saliency and commission appointments that is equal to or above r = 0.10 (i.e. a small effect size), r = 0.30 (moderate effect size) and r = 0.50 (large effect size).

7 As post-estimation analyses revealed that the Norwegian Nordli government and the Danish Jørgensen II government may be regarded as outliers.

8 The coefficient fails to reach a significance level of 10 percent when we exclude the Nordli government.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a project grant from the Norwegian Research Council (project number 254767).

Notes on contributors

Stine Hesstvedt

Stine Hesstvedt is a PhD Fellow at the ARENA Centre for European Studies at the University of Oslo. Her interests include expertise and policy making, public policy and comparative politics. [[email protected]]

Peter Munk Christiansen

Peter Munk Christiansen is Professor and Department Head at the Department of Political Science, Aarhus University. He is co-editor on The Oxford Handbook of Danish Politics (2020), and he has recently published in journals such as Journal of Public Policy, Journal of European Public Policy, Public Administration, Governance, and Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory. [[email protected]]