The role of expert discourses in policy design

Over the past decades, a large body of research in fields such as knowledge utilization, evidencebased policy making, or epistemic communities, has been addressing the conditions under which expert advice can play a role in policy design. This research has been successful in exploring the complex role of expertise in the policy process and has produced a number of hypotheses relating to institutional and cultural factors that influence the extent to which expert advice can actually influence policy design. However the findings of this research have not yet been integrated into a coherent model of the policy process. This paper develops such a model based on the Advocacy Coalition Framework. It also presents the design of a research project testing this model for the case of minimum wage policy in the OECD countries.