Chapter 8. “The job requires considerable expertise”

Abstract

While clearly important in decision-making in democratic societies, the authority of science and expertise in public forums is nowadays increasingly challenged by different advocacy groups and crowd-based politics. Using the Hansard Corpus, this chapter explores how experts and expert knowledge are referred to in the British parliamentary record from 1800 to 2005, focusing on how frequently members of parliament (MPs) refer to different kinds of experts and their expertise in parliamentary debates, and whether diachronic changes can be linked to historical events and cultural and intellectual changes. The quantitative analysis is complemented with a qualitative investigation of how experts and expert knowledge are framed in parliamentary debates. The analysis shows that overall the references to experts have increased in the twentieth century and especially after the 1950s. Yet variation among individual terms and discourse contexts is evident, indicating that cultural explanations of corpus data should be approached with caution.