Abstract
Many government responses to the coronavirus-pandemic have been marked
by attempts at expertization and scientization. Particularly,
politico-epistemological authority is being given to the behavioural
science community consulting government. This article critically
scrutinizes this most recent wave of behavioural expertization. Taking
developments in the UK and the Netherlands as our case-studies, we shed
light on the disparate ways in which behavioural expertise is being
(re)shaped during COVID-19. Some of these ways point at processes of
behavioural expertise ‘drift’, in which the applicability and robustness
of this knowledge source gets overstated. Other ways instead point at
processes of behavioural expertise ‘thrift’ or ‘shift’, where the
knowledge is used only minimally or taken in wholly new and
norm-breaking directions. Doing so, we seek to demonstrate the
importance of institutional context in understanding how behavioural
expertise is currently shaping public policy: underpinning institutional
configurations determine whether the expertise is gauged and applied
effectively.