Value judgments and economic expertise: revisiting the division of labor model

In the ‘division of labor model’, experts are supposed to base their recommendations on value judgments provided by the political sphere, taken as ‘given’, so as not to override the values of citizens and their representatives. In this paper, we argue that experts, when issuing their recommendations, have to make many methodological choices that imply value judgments, beyond – and potentially inconsistent with – those provided by the citizens’ representatives. This value-ladenness stems from two features: underdetermination and policy-orientedness, and applies to a vast range of choices made by the experts. We suggest practical ways of mitigating this problem, such as promoting reflexivity about the value judgments implied by methodological choices, and fostering better communication between experts and policymakers, but argue that these improvements probably cannot fully salvage the division of labor model and raise the question of whether more fundamental revisions might be required.