Scientists as Policy Advisers: the Context of Influence

Abstract

Ap ARTICIPATION by scientists in government decision making has grown in the postwar period to the point that one is confident in treating it as an integral, routine part of the public policy-making process.1 Whereas once one was justified in saying that such participation was limited in institutional locus, policy arena, and duration of activity, the scientific establishment is now firmly entrenched in the structure of the federal government, with widespread institutional footholds and broad policy responsibilities. Most important, however, scientists who advise government may be usefully viewed as the harbingers of the increased use of professional elites by society suggested recently by Eulau and Apter.2 To the extent that science adviceparticularly in the form of advisory boards, committees, and panels is now more a part of government rather than an essentially ad hoc activity to be mobilized when the need is acute, it has become a kind of bureaucracy in the sense of being a stable, interrelated set of ongoing institutions. There are, to be sure, differences between a system of advisory bodies with a relatively high turnover rate and a bureaucracy of classical Weberian dimensions. Most important of these differences are three: scientists do not ordinarily devote their careers to the service of one or even several such boards; their service is not typically continuous over a long period of time; and their