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Abstract In this paper, we ask what it means that regulatory expertise is ‘political’. To address this question, we retrace the formation of two regulatory agencies in the United States, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). We study the formation of these two agencies as a contentious political process of making expert bodies. In this process, epistemological questions of assembling expertise are systematically bound to questions of political structure formation. We ground a relational concept of expertise in a differentiation-theoretical concept of politics. This perspective sharpens our view for the dynamic interplay between politics and its societal environment that defines the making of regulatory expertise. We identify three ‘boundary moments’ that structure the making of expert bodies across both cases: a moment of boundary transgression (1), in which the politicization of environmental problems questioned established decision-making structures; a moment of boundary reflection (2), in which a concrete demand for expertise was articulated and organized structures to address it were created; and finally, a moment of boundary negotiation (3), in which the newly assembled expert bodies were anchored in the federal infrastructure. By scrutinizing the concept of expertise through the lens of a theory of the political, we hope to contribute to theoretical efforts in the sociology of expertise.
Moser et al. (Thu,) studied this question.