Policy advisory system quality under multilevel governance: the German COVID-19 experience

Johanna Hornung and Philipp Trein

Policy and Society, 2025, vol. 44, issue 3, 335-349

Abstract: Policymakers frequently seek scientific expert advice to navigate new and complex policy challenges, but the decisions that must be taken to address these problems often require the cooperation of different levels of government as well as state and non-state actors. While existing literature has acknowledged that the political context influences the processes of scientific policy advice, it lacks the formulation of specific expectations or mechanisms on how such multilevel structures affect scientific policy advice. This article explores the key challenges that scientific policy advice faces in multilevel settings and specifies how multilevel structures can both support and hinder effective problem-solving. The study highlights that while the inclusion of diverse governance levels can enrich policy debates with scientific evidence, it can also lead to fragmented advisory structures that question the hierarchy of scientific evidence and hinder science-policy transfer processes. We underpin this argument with empirical evidence from COVID-19 crisis management in Germany, a country that is exemplary for multilevel governance structures both within its domestic context (federalism) and beyond (as a member of the European Union). The findings underscore the challenges for scientific policy advice in contexts that span across multiple scales.

Keywords: policy advice; multilevel settings; COVID-19; science-policy relations; evidence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/polsoc/puaf005 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:polsoc:v:44:y:2025:i:3:p:335-349.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Policy and Society is currently edited by Daniel Béland, Giliberto Capano, Michael Howlett and M. Ramesh

More articles in Policy and Society from Darryl S. Jarvis and M. Ramesh Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().