The Role of Scientific Expertise in Minimum Wage Policy Making

This book examines the role of scientific expertise in minimum wage policy making in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It finds that scientific research is an important part of the public discourse on minimum wages in all three countries. Newspapers frequently cite scholars and research institutions, providing their readers with a good sense of how scientific research evaluates the effects of minimum wages. How often this happens depends on the context. Most importantly, newspapers from the United States cite researchers more frequently than newspapers from the two European countries. The book also shows that scientific research influences the policy preferences of political actors such as trade unions, political parties, and government agencies. The influence is based on policy-oriented learning. It is strong in Germany and the United Kingdom, and weaker in the United States. In both cases, cross-country differences are found to be related to different styles of using scientific expertise in the three countries.

Auteur
Fabian Klein holds a PhD in political science from Freie Universität Berlin. He works as a data scientist in Berlin.

Contenu
Introduction.- A theoretical model.- Methods and research design.- Minimum wage policy subsystems in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States.- Scientific expertise in the newspaper discourse.- The influence of the expert discourse on political actors.- Evaluating the validity of the quantitative analysis.- Conclusion.