Trym Nohr Fjørtoft

• Fjørtoft, Trym Nohr & Michailidou, Asimina (2021). Beyond expertise: the public construction of legitimacy for EU agencies. Political Research Exchange (PRX). 3(1), p. 1–27. doi: 10.1080/2474736X.2021.2018266. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  How is the power of independent agencies legitimized? This is a central question in modern democratic societies. Earlier research has privileged technical expertise as the predominant source of legitimacy for such agencies. While recent contributions have challenged this assumption, we have seen few attempts to systematically analyze the conditions under which different sources of legitimacy are established in public discourse. We address this gap by proposing a conceptual framework of four legitimation arguments and test their prevalence through an empirical analysis of the public legitimation of EU agencies. We hypothesize that the prevalence of each argument depends on characteristics of the agency, especially its scientific ‘hardness’ and its public salience. We test our hypotheses in three steps. We first combine automated text classification and qualitative content analysis to analyze Swedish news media coverage of three EU agencies, 2005–2019. In a third step, we quantitatively analyze aggregated data on the Swedish news coverage of all EU agencies 2005–2019. We find more technical-expertise discourse in coverage of hard-science agencies, and more political-control discourse where agencies are ‘softer’ or more salient. Our findings are therefore relevant for ongoing normative and empirical discussions on the legitimacy of independent agencies.

• Fjørtoft, Trym Nohr (2020). More power, more control: The legitimizing role of expertise in Frontex after the refugee crisis. Regulation & Governance. ISSN 1748-5983. doi: 10.1111/rego.12373. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This article explores how the appeal to depoliticized expertise worked to legitimize increased supervisory and executive power to the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex, after the 2015 refugee crisis. Frontex is an EU agency operating in a highly salient field, removed from hard‐science “gold standards” of evidence, where member states have been reluctant to delegate power and sovereignty. Through a process‐tracing case study, this article finds that appeals to technical neutrality, quantification, and objective indicators nevertheless were central when a new mandate for the agency was negotiated, giving Frontex unprecedented supervisory and executive power. They were also important resources for member states concerned about Frontex's increased powers. By focusing on an agency at a remove from the natural‐science archetype, this article contributes to the literature on knowledge use in independent agencies. It suggests that technical expertise can be a powerful source of legitimacy even in a field removed from “hard” science.

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• Fjørtoft, Trym Nohr (2020). Teknisk ekspertise kan være en politisk ressurs. Stat og styring. ISSN 0803-0103. 30(3), p. 12–15.
• Fjørtoft, Trym Nohr (2019). Frontex, Expertise and the Refugee Crisis.
• Fjørtoft, Trym Nohr (2018). The Role of Expertise in Frontex.
• Fjørtoft, Trym Nohr (2016). Coping or Hoping Mechanisms: Evaluating the Effectiveness of National Human Rights Institutions. Universitetet i Oslo.

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