How Ideas Shape Politics: Scientific Advising and Public Health in Taiwan

• In Event: Public Opinion and Policy Formation in Taiwan

Abstract

Around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the complicated relationship between science and politics. Taiwan’s leaders promoted the scientific nature of their approach to controlling the virus, yet many of the public health and political communications challenges that Taiwan faced in the latter stages of the pandemic revealed the limits of claims to scientific governance. Using the case of scientific advising during COVID-19, this paper asks: how does the politics of expertise work in Taiwan, and what can that tell us about how science and politics shape each other in comparative perspective?

Based on extensive in-depth interviews with public health experts and government advisers in Taiwan, I argue that differing ideas about science among experts concretely shape how policy is made and legitimated to the public. Throughout multiple episodes of Taiwan’s COVID-19 response, scientific disagreements on the proper way to assess “good science” led experts to change how they engaged with political decision makers, which in turn shaped the nature of the scientific advice policymakers received. Differing views of the scientific standards underlying vaccine approvals, for example, shaped whether experts participated in government committees during the pandemic, which increased policy consensus but aroused distrust among the public. Using theories from political science, economics, and science, technology, and society (STS), this paper provides new empirical evidence about the politics of public health expertise in Taiwan and offers a new theory of how ideas can shape the practice of politics.

Author

• Joshua Brent Freedman, University of Pennsylvania