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Fairly Balanced: The Politics of Representation on Government Advisory Committees

California State University, Sacramento

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: mark.brown{at}csus.edu.

	Abstract

The United States Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) requires advisory committees to be "fairly balanced." By examining legislative, judicial, and administrative interpretations of FACA’s balance requirement, this article identifies a prevailing double standard: public officials assess committee members classified as experts in terms of their professional competence, while they assess those classified as representatives in terms of their political interests. Although the prevailing approach seeks to prevent the politicization of expert advice, it actually promotes it. Advisory committee balance is better understood, this article suggests, in terms of social and professional perspectives. This approach avoids both naively apolitical and destructively partisan conceptions of advisory committee balance. It also suggests a promising way to think about the role of technical expertise in public deliberation.

First published on June 3, 2008, doi:10.1177/1065912907313076

Political Research Quarterly 2008;61:547.

A more recent version of this article appeared on December 1, 2008


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