This is my third ‘hey, let’s blog’ event, so it finally dawned on me to write a blog post about it. See also Fiona Miller’s account of the Stirling event.
I don’t know much about blogging research, so will focus on my personal experience of its advantages. One frequent academic argument against blogging is that it takes you away from more important parts of the job, such as teaching and research. My argument is that it helps you do both things more effectively.
See also the accounts of the disadvantages, which often relate to the ways in which they make you vulnerable to personal abuse on social media (examples 1, 2, 3).
Advantage 1: Clarity
Writing a blog has improved my academic writing. When you blog, you write for a non-specialist audience. You use less jargon or explain its meaning and value. You assume that people will not read your work unless you front-load the ‘reveal’. You need a catchy and tweetable title, to provide a ‘hook’ in the first sentence, and to show your work in a few hundred words (perhaps to encourage people to read more of your work). When you develop these skills, you can use them while writing journal article titles, abstracts, and introductions.
If you like, you can also write a blog post instead of relying on the paper/ powerpoint combo for workshops and conferences, since a 4-paper panel at conferences is usually an endurance test, and a blog post reminds you to say why people should be interested in the paper (e.g. recent examples on evidence/ policy and Scottish independence).
Advantage 2: Timeliness
It can take years for people to read an article you publish in a top journal. Sometimes the article is worth the wait. In other cases, I think it’s best to see this work as part of a package in which the article is one of the last things to appear. There is a good case to be made for taking your time to get articles right, but a less good case to keep it a secret while you do so.
Advantage 3: Exposure
It’s now common to say that we make better links with practitioners and policymakers by making our writing more accessible (short, punchy, and one click away). In my experience, the biggest payoff has been with other academics. Politics colleagues will mention my blog (and textbook) more than my articles. I can also use introductory blog posts to communicate ideas with colleagues in other disciplines – and/ or in other countries – without expecting them to do weeks of homework on the foundational texts. In each case, it works partly because we struggle to find the time to read, and appreciate a short story. Indeed, my articles are one click away on my website, but very, very, very, very few people read them.
However, you don’t need a personal blog. In fact, my most exposureyish posts have been elsewhere, including two in the Guardian’s political science blog (on evidence-based policymaking, and (with Kathryn Oliver) the dilemmas that arise when we seek it), some on the LSE blog (I tried really hard to compare tobacco and alcohol policy – look! There’s a video!), and many in The Conversation.
Advantage 4: Teaching and Learning
Teaching. The most-used page of my website hosts a series of 1000 Word summaries of policy concepts (the ‘policy cycle’ got 26000 hits in 2016). I use them, like a gateway drug, to teach undergraduate and MPP modules: they can get a feel for the concept quickly then do further reading. They now come with podcasts, which I use instead of lectures (for workshops). Other academics also use the podcasts, particularly when their students are new to policy studies (e.g. David P. Carter).
Learning. I also ask my students to write blog posts as part of their coursework, to help them learn how to write in a concise and punchy way for a non-academic audience. In most cases, students excel at this kind of work, as part of a package of assessment in which they learn how to communicate the same insights in many different ways.
Advantage 5: Unexpected benefits
When I started blogging I didn’t really know what it was for. I used to copy and paste my article abstracts, or complain about David Cameron’s handling of Scottish independence. This was at a time in which colleagues at my former University were reticent about self-publicity, and sending round a link to a new journal article via the departmental email was pushing it a bit. Now, self-promotion seems to be part of the job, and we might expect some benefits without really knowing what they’ll be. For example, my links with some very interesting people in places like the European Commission and Alliance for Useful Evidence have arisen largely from blogging.
We all have different things that tickle us in life. For me, the most tickling part of the unexpected benefit of blogging is that I now (almost!) top the following google searches: policy cycle, multiple streams, advocacy coalition framework, punctuated equilibrium theory, the politics of evidence based policymaking, and the psychology of policymaking. I’m also doing my best to push out the other Paul Cairney from the first page of google, but Wikipedia is getting in the way. The more serious point is that a personal blog might need to generate attention through social media first, before it catches fire and rises up the search engine pages.
Paul Cairney: Politics & Public Policy 
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