Data drives the movement: embedded experts in home lending advocacy

Abstract

Technical rhetoric has become a central feature of political debates in recent decades. As such advocacy organizations have needed to develop facility with quantitative data to signal their competence to participate in political discussions. Since they often lack the resources to engage in research directly, they must use existing research and interact with already-established research communities. Less examined have been cases where advocacy groups themselves have brought technical discourse into political discussions. This article studies how advocates in one field combined local and technical knowledge to press their claims. I contrast debates in the 1970s aimed at confronting ‘redlining’ in the home lending market to more recent and less successful efforts to limit ‘predatory’ home lending. I argue that advocates in this policy community became embedded experts: embedded because they linked local knowledge to quantitative data, and because their use of data remained embedded within and constrained by the dominant political rhetoric of that community.