Beware the well-intentioned advice of unusually successful academics

This post – by Dr Kathryn Oliver and me – originally appeared on the LSE Impact Blog. I have replaced the picture of a thumb up with a cat hanging in there. 

Many academics want to see their research have an impact on policy and practice, and there is a lot of advice on how to seek it. It can be helpful to take advice from experienced and successful people. However, is this always the best advice? Guidance based on best practice and success stories in particular, often reflect unequal access to policymakers, institutional support, and credibility attached to certain personal characteristics.

To take stock of the vast amount of advice being offered to academics, we decided to compare it with the more systematic analyses available in the peer-reviewed literature, on the ‘barriers’ between evidence and policy, and policy studies. This allowed us to situate this advice in a wider context, see whether it was generalisable across settings and career stages, and to think through the inconsistencies and dilemmas which underlie these suggestions.

The advice: Top tips on influencing policy

The key themes and individual recommendations we identified from the 86 most-relevant publications are:

1. Do high quality research: Use well-established research designs, methods, or metrics.
2. Make your research relevant and readable: Provide easily-understandable, clear, relevant and high-quality research. Aim for the general reader. Produce good stories based on emotional appeals or humour.
3. Understand the policymaking context. Note the busy and constrained lives of policy actors. Maximise established ways to engage, such as in advisory committees. Be pragmatic, accepting that research rarely translates directly into policy.
4. Be ‘accessible’ to policymakers. This may involve discussing topics beyond your narrow expertise. Be humble, courteous, professional, and recognise the limits to your skills.
5. Decide if you want to be an ‘issue advocate’. Decide whether to simply explain the evidence, remain an ‘honest broker, or recommend specific policy options. Negative consequences may include peer criticism, being seen as an academic lightweight, being used to add legitimacy to a policy position, and burnout.
6. Build relationships (and ground rules) with policymakers: Relationship-building requires investment and skills, but working collaboratively is often necessary. Academics could identify policy actors to provide insights into policy problems, act as champions for their research, and identify the most helpful policy actors.
7. Be ‘entrepreneurial’ or find someone who is. Be a daring, persuasive scientist, comfortable in policy environments and available when needed. Or, seek brokers to act on your behalf.
8. Reflect continuously: should you engage, do you want to, and is it working? Academics may enjoy the work or are passionate about the issue. Even so, keep track of when and how you have had impact, and revise your practices continuously.

Inconsistencies and dilemmas

This advice tends not to address wider issues. For example, there is no consensus over what counts as good evidence for policy, or therefore how best to communicate good evidence. We know little about how to gain the wide range of skills that researchers and policymakers need to act collectively, including to: produce evidence syntheses, manage expert communities, ‘co-produce’ research and policy with a wide range of stakeholders, and be prepared to offer policy recommendations as well as scientific advice. Further, a one-size fits-all model won’t help researchers navigate a policymaking environment where different venues have different cultures and networks. Researchers therefore need to decide what policy engagement is for—to frame problems or simply measure them according to an existing frame—and how far researchers should go to be useful and influential. If academics need to go ‘all in’ to secure meaningful impact, we need to reflect on the extent to which they have the resources and support to do so. This means navigating profound dilemmas:

Source: The dos and don’ts of influencing policy: a systematic review of advice to academics

 

Can academics try to influence policy? The financial costs of seeking impact are prohibitive for junior or untenured researchers, while women and people of colour may be more subject to personal abuse. Such factors undermine the diversity of voices available.

How should academics influence policy? Many of these new required skills – such as storytelling – are not a routine part of academic training, and may be looked down on by our colleagues.  

What is the purpose of academics engagement in policymaking? To go beyond tokenistic and instrumental engagement is to build genuine rapport with policymakers, which may require us to co-produce knowledge and cede some control over the research process. It involves a fundamentally different way of doing public engagement: one with no clear aim in mind other than to listen and learn, with the potential to transform research practices and outputs.

Where is the evidence that this advice helps us improve impact?

The existing advice offered to academics on how to create impact is – although often well-meaning – not based on systematic research or comprehensive analysis of empirical evidence. Few advice-givers draw clearly on key literatures on policymaking or evidence use. This leads to significant misunderstandings, which can have potentially costly repercussions for research, researchers and policy.  These limitations matter, as they lead to advice which fails to address core dilemmas for academics—whether to engage, how to engage, and why—which have profound implications for how scientists and universities should respond to the calls for increased impact.

Most tips focus on individual experience, whereas engagement between research and policy is driven by systemic factors. Many of the tips may be sensible and effective, but often only within particular settings. The advice is likely to be useful mostly to a relatively similar group of people who are confident and comfortable in policy environments, and have access and credibility within policy arenas. Thus, the current advice and structures may help reproduce and reinforce existing power dynamics and an underrepresentation of people who do not fit a very narrow mould.

The overall result may be that each generation of scientists has to fight the same battles, and learn the same lessons over again. Our best response as a profession is to interrogate current advice, shape and frame it, and to help us all to find ways to navigate the complex practical, political, moral and ethical challenges associated with being researchers today. The ‘how to’ literature can help, but only if authors are cognisant of their wider role in society and complex policymaking systems.

This blog post is based on the authors’ co-written articles, The dos and don’ts of influencing policy: a systematic review of advice to academics, published in Palgrave Communications, and ‘How should academics engage in policymaking to achieve impact?’  published in Political Studies Review ​

About the authors

Kathryn Oliver is Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (@oliver_kathryn ). Her interest is in how knowledge is produced, mobilized and used in policy and practice, and how this affects the practice of research. She co-runs the research collaborative Transforming Evidence with Annette Boaz. https://transformure.wordpress.com and her writings can be found here: https://kathrynoliver.wordpress.com

Paul Cairney is Professor of Politics and Public Policy, University of Stirling, UK (@Cairneypaul).  His research interests are in comparative public policy and policy theories, which he uses to explain the use of evidence in policy and policymaking, in one book (The Politics of Evidence-Based Policy Making, 2016), several articles, and many, many blog posts: https://paulcairney.wordpress.com/ebpm/

See also:

1. Adam Wellstead, Paul Cairney, and Kathryn Oliver (2018) ‘Reducing ambiguity to close the science-policy gap’, Policy Design and Practice, 1, 2, 115-25 PDF
2. Paul Cairney and Kathryn Oliver (2017) ‘Evidence-based policymaking is not like evidence-based medicine, so how far should you go to bridge the divide between evidence and policy?’ Health Research Policy and Systems (HARPS), DOI: 10.1186/s12961-017-0192-x PDF AM
3. Paul Cairney, Kathryn Oliver, and Adam Wellstead (2016) ‘To Bridge the Divide between Evidence and Policy: Reduce Ambiguity as Much as Uncertainty’, Public Administration Review, 76, 3, 399–402 DOI:10.1111/puar.12555 PDF

Three habits of successful policy entrepreneurs

This post is one part of a series – called Practical Lessons from Policy Theories and it summarizes this article (PDF).

‘Policy entrepreneurs’ invest their time wisely for future reward, and possess key skills that help them adapt particularly well to their environments. They are the agents for policy change who possess the knowledge, power, tenacity, and luck to be able to exploit key opportunities. They draw on three strategies:

1. Don’t focus on bombarding policymakers with evidence.

Scientists focus on making more evidence to reduce uncertainty, but put people off with too much information. Entrepreneurs tell a good story, grab the audience’s interest, and the audience demands information.

2. By the time people pay attention to a problem it’s too late to produce a solution.

So, you produce your solution then chase problems.

3. When your environment changes, your strategy changes.

For example, in the US federal level, you’re in the sea, and you’re a surfer waiting for the big wave. In the smaller subnational level, on a low attention and low budget issue, you can be Poseidon moving the ‘streams’. In the US federal level, you need to ‘soften’ up solutions over a long time to generate support. In subnational or other countries, you have more opportunity to import and adapt ready-made solutions.

It all adds up to one simple piece of advice – timing and luck matters when making a policy case – but policy entrepreneurs know how to influence timing and help create their own luck.

Full paper: Three habits of successful policy entrepreneurs

(Note: the previous version was friendlier and more focused on entrepreneurs)

For more on ‘multiple streams’ see:

Paul Cairney and Michael Jones (2016) ‘Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Approach: What Is the Empirical Impact of this Universal Theory?’ Policy Studies Journal, 44, 1, 37-58 PDF (Annex to Cairney Jones 2016) (special issue of PSJ)

Paul Cairney and Nikos Zahariadis (2016) ‘Multiple streams analysis: A flexible metaphor presents an opportunity to operationalize agenda setting processes’ in Zahariadis, N. (eds) Handbook of Public Policy Agenda-Setting (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar) PDF see also

I use a space launch metaphor in the paper. If you prefer different images, have a look at 5 images of the policy process. If you prefer a watery metaphor (it’s your life, I suppose), click Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: Multiple Streams Analysis

For more on entrepreneurs:

So you want to be a policy entrepreneur? https://t.co/y8RG7MOSKV by @MikeMintrom

— Professor Paul Cairney (@CairneyPaul) October 29, 2019

Racism and Stories in Scottish Politics

Brexit boosts the case for Scottish independence because it can now be framed more easily as the cosmopolitan choice: vote Yes to get away from a ‘little England’ mentality. This possibility was perhaps in Labour’s mind when it described Scottish nationalism as anything but cosmopolitan. For example, Sadiq Khan seemed to link Scottish nationalism strongly with the divisiveness of Trump and Leave campaigns, prompting some debate about how far he went to equate it with bigotry and racism, while former Labour minister Douglas Alexander left less room for doubt.

These claims prompted a small number of commentary pieces supporting or rejecting the idea that Scottish nationalism fosters racism, bigotry, and/ or social division:

• Claire Heuchan welcomed Khan’s intervention cautiously, highlighting a tendency of Scottish actors to assert their superiority over their English counterparts, and using the opportunity to expand the debate, to highlight important issues that we often ignore, from personal stories of racist abuse and examples of more limited education and employment opportunities for people of colour, to the role of Scotland in the British empire’s colonial past built on slavery and exploitation.
• In contrast, Robert Somynne identified a civic Scottish nationalism far apart from a ‘western trend towards populism based on tribal and ethnic divisions’, arguing that Khan’s description ‘doesn’t bear out the experience of so many people of colour in Scotland who campaigned in the grassroots’.
• Kevin McKenna ridiculed Khan’s argument, rejecting the idea of nationalism underpinned by anti-Englishness, identifying a more divisive UK politics of which Labour is a key part, and dismissing Khan and others as part of ‘the leftwing intelligentsia’. John McKee argued that current Scottish nationalism is more about rejecting the British state than British people, while Eric Joyce links it more to rejecting more worrying forms of nationalism pursued by parties like UKIP.

The debate rages on in twitter, but the discussion has not been driven primarily by a willingness to listen, engage constructively, or talk about issues that challenge our beliefs. I don’t suppose you need me to explain why, but it’s worth highlighting three analytically-separate explanations that will likely be present throughout all debates like this:

1. The devil shift undermines debate

People form coalitions with the people who share their beliefs, and they compete with people who don’t. The ‘devil shift’ describes a form of ‘groupthink’; a tendency of actors in those coalitions to romanticise their own cause and demonise the cause of their opponents: ‘anyone who disagrees with them must be mistaken about the facts, operating from the wrong value premises, or acting from evil motive’ (Sabatier, Hunter and McLaughlin). They question the motives of their opponents but not their allies, subject only their opponent’s arguments to criticism, and think their opponents are more powerful than they are.

If all debates are interpreted through this lens of Scottish independence, you can predict the results: Yes groups will see Khan’s intervention as threatening to their beliefs and aims, No groups will embrace it because it supports their beliefs and aims, and there is little scope for conflict resolution. Indeed, during such debates, we’ll put up with some sketchy characters if they support our cause while denouncing their equivalents in the other coalition.

This dynamic will be apparent each time we interpret each issue. For example, imagine a semi-honest and open discussion about Scotland and the colonial empire. One side might combine two points – Scotland ‘punches above its weight’ in every endeavour, and Scotland was part of the empire – to argue that Scotland played a disproportionate role in colonialism and slavery. The other will remind us of the unequal and coerced alliance of 1707 and/ or blame an unelected elite in Scotland for the Union and empire, to argue that Scottish independence is the best way to reject the colonial past. The same history has a very different villain and moral.

2. There are two colliding roles of storytelling

We can identify two main roles of personal storytelling: (1) to empower an individual, when they share their experiences of life and feel listened to, and (2) to take forward a political agenda, when they identify a hero/ villain and moral that suits one coalition’s beliefs and aims.

In our case, it is difficult to separate the two, and most people are not willing or able to do so. This may be understandable with Khan’s recent intervention since, although he generally has an important story to tell from his perspective, this specific speech seemed designed to bolster the position of Scottish Labour at its party conference. Heuchan’s experience is more worrying, her motives seemed far less instrumental and her personal story was worth listening to, but almost no-one has simply said ‘thank you for your story’ without adding conditions or objections. There are very few spaces in which people will listen rather than judge.

3. Some topics are unusually personal

In part, this is because few people like to think that they are racist or bigoted. Some won’t think about the ways in which they benefit from the systematic effects of racism – in which some groups benefit disproportionately from education/ employment opportunities and face a smaller risk of personal abuse – partly because they don’t have to, and it’s generally not an enjoyable experience. Others will flinch at the idea that they are privileged because they are white, often because they have vivid memories of personal experiences of abuse or disadvantage linked to another part of their background, such as their gender, class, religion, or disability.

So, we often want to tell our stories without listing to those of others. If there is no such space in which to exchange the details of such stories, we soon end up with heated, futile debates based on the sense that you don’t understand my experience or perspective before you criticise it. We can’t solve this problem, but we should at least be aware of it, and perhaps be aware that, although the Scottish debate has some unusual features, it is one of many examples of routine divisive politics.

 

Five advantages of blogging

Reminder of our Academic Blogging event tomorrow morning https://t.co/k07z8oWueJ w/ @CairneyPaul @ThomsonPat @janetinkler #uwsblogging

— David McGillivray (@dgmcgillivray) March 6, 2017

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).

Blogging is good practice at writing in an accessible way – because academic publications should be accessible too. @CairneyPaul #rbah15

— Diljeet Bhachu (@DiljeetB_Flute) August 20, 2015

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.

Why the pollsters got it wrong

We have a new tradition in politics in which some people glory in the fact that the polls got it wrong. It might begin with ‘all these handsome experts with all their fancy laptops and they can’t even tell us exactly how an election will turn out’, and sometimes it ends with, ‘yet, I knew it all along’. I think that the people who say it most are the ones that are pleased with the result and want to stick it to the people who didn’t predict it: ‘if, like me, they’d looked up from their laptops and spoken to real people, they’d have seen what would happen’.

To my mind, it’s always surprising when so many polls seem to do so well. Think for a second about what ‘pollsters’ do: they know they can’t ask everyone how they will vote (and why), so they take a small sample and use it as a proxy for the real world. To make sure the sample isn’t biased by selection, they develop methods to generate respondents randomly. To try to make the most of their resources, and make sure that their knowledge is cumulative, they use what they think they know about the population to make sure that they get enough responses from a ‘representative’ sample of the population. In many cases, that knowledge comes from things like focus groups or one-to-one interviews to get richer (qualitative) information than we can achieve from asking everyone the same question, often super-quickly, in a larger survey.

This process involves all sorts of compromises and unintended consequences when we have a huge population but limited resources: we’d like to ask everyone in person, but it’s cheaper to (say) get a 4-figure response online or on the phone; and, if we need to do it quickly, our sample will be biased towards people willing to talk to us.* So, on top of a profound problem – the possibility of people not telling the truth in polls – we have a potentially less profound but more important problem: the people we need to talk to us aren’t talking to us. So, we get a misleading read because we’re asking an unrepresentative sample (although it is nothing like as unrepresentative as proxy polls from social media, the word ‘on the doorstep’, or asking your half-drunk mates how they’ll vote).

Sensible ‘pollsters’ deal with such problems by admitting that they might be a bit off: highlighting their estimated ‘margin of error’ from the size of their sample, then maybe crossing their fingers behind their backs if asked about the likelihood of more errors based on non-random sampling. So, ignore this possibility for error at your peril. Yet, people do ignore it despite the peril! Here are two reasons why.

1. Being sensible is boring.

In a really tight-looking two-horse race, the margin of error alone might suggest that either horse might win. So, a sensible interpretation of a poll might be (say), ‘either Clinton or Trump will get the most votes’. Who wants to hear or talk about that?! You can’t fill a 24-hour news cycle and keep up shite Twitter conversations by saying ‘who knows?’ and then being quiet. Nor will anyone pay much attention to a quietly sensible ‘pollster’ or academic telling them about the importance of embracing uncertainty. You’re in the studio to tell us what will happen, pal. Otherwise, get lost.

2. Recognising complexity and uncertainty is boring.

You can heroically/ stupidly break down the social scientific project into two competing ideas: (1) the world contains general and predictable patterns of behaviour that we can identify with the right tools; or (2) the world is too complex and unpredictable to produce general laws of behaviour, and maybe your best hope is to try to make sense of how other people try to make sense of it. Then, maybe (1) sounds quite exciting and comforting while (2) sounds like it is the mantra of a sandal-wearing beansprout-munching hippy academic. People seem to want a short, confidently stated, message that is easy to understand. You can stick your caveats.

Can we take life advice from this process?

These days I’m using almost every topic as a poorly-constructed segue into a discussion about the role of evidence in politics and policy. This time, the lesson is about using evidence correctly for the correct purpose. In our example, we can use polls effectively for their entertainment value. Or, campaigners can use them as the best-possible proxies during their campaigns: if their polls tell them they are lagging in one area, give it more attention; if they seem to have a big lead in another area; give it less attention. The evidence won’t be totally accurate, but it gives you enough to generate a simple campaigning strategy. Academics can also use the evidence before and after a campaign to talk about how it’s all going. Really, the only thing you don’t expect poll evidence to do is predict the result. For that, you need the Observers from Fringe.

The same goes for evidence in policymaking: people use rough and ready evidence because they need to act on what they think is going on. There will never be enough evidence to make the decision for you, or let you know exactly what will happen next. Instead, you combine good judgement with your values, sprinkle in some evidence, and off you go. It would be silly to expect a small sample of evidence – a snapshot of one part of the world – to tell you exactly what will happen in the much larger world. So, let’s not kid ourselves about the ability of science to tell us what’s what and what to do. It’s better, I think, to recognise life’s uncertainties and act accordingly. It’s better than blaming other people for not knowing what will happen next.

 

*I say ‘we’ and ‘us’ but I’ve never conducted a poll in my life. I interview elites in secret and promise them anonymity.

Writing a policy paper and blog post #POLU9UK

It can be quite daunting to produce a policy analysis paper or blog post for the first time. You learn about the constraints of political communication by being obliged to explain your ideas in an unusually small number of words. The short word length seems good at first, but then you realise that it makes your life harder: how can you fit all your evidence and key points in? The answer is that you can’t. You have to choose what to say and what to leave out.

You also have to make this presentation ‘not about you’. In a long essay or research report you have time to show how great you are, to a captive audience. In a policy paper, imagine that you are trying to get the attention and support from someone that may not know or care about the issue you raise. In a blog post, your audience might stop reading at any point, so every sentence counts.

There are many guides out there to help you with the practical side, including the broad guidance I give you in the module guide, and Bardach’s 8-steps. In each case, the basic advice is to (a) identify a policy problem and at least one feasible solution, and (b) tailor the analysis to your audience.

Be concise, be smart

So, for example, I ask you to keep your analysis and presentations super-short on the assumption that you have to make your case quickly to people with 99 other things to do. What can you tell someone in a half-page (to get them to read all 2 pages)? Could you explain and solve a problem if you suddenly bumped into a government minister in a lift/ elevator?

It is tempting to try to tell someone everything you know, because everything is connected and to simplify is to describe a problem simplistically. Instead, be smart enough to know that such self-indulgence won’t impress your audience. They might smile politely, but their eyes are looking at the elevator lights.

Your aim is not to give a full account of a problem – it’s to get someone important to care about it.

Your aim is not to give a painstaking account of all possible solutions – it’s to give a sense that at least one solution is feasible and worth pursuing.

Your guiding statement should be: policymakers will only pay attention to your problem if they think they can solve it, and without that solution being too costly.

Be creative

I don’t like to give you too much advice because I want you to be creative about your presentation; to be confident enough to take chances and feel that I’ll reward you for making the leap. At the very least, you have three key choices to make about how far you’ll go to make a point:

1. Who is your audience? Our discussion of the limits to centralised policymaking suggest that your most influential audience will not necessarily be a UK government minister – but who else would it be?
2. How manipulative should you be? Our discussions of ‘bounded rationality’ and ‘evidence-based policymaking’ suggest that policymakers combine ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ shortcuts to gather information and make choices. So, do you appeal to their desire to set goals and gather a lot of scientific information and/or make an emotional and manipulative appeal?
3. Are you an advocate or an ‘honest broker’? Contemporary discussions of science advice to government highlight unresolved debates about the role of unelected advisors: should you simply lay out some possible solutions or advocate one solution strongly?

Be reflective

For our purposes, there are no wrong answers to these questions. Instead, I want you to make and defend your decisions. That is the aim of your policy paper ‘reflection’: to ‘show your work’.

You still have some room to be creative: tell me what you know about policy theory and British politics and how it informed your decisions. Here are some examples, but it is up to you to decide what to highlight:

• Show how your understanding of policymaker psychology helped you decide how to present information on problems and solutions.
• Extract insights from policy theories, such as from punctuated equilibrium theory on policymaker attention, multiple streams analysis on timing and feasibility, or the NPF on how to tell persuasive stories.
• Explore the implications of the lack of ‘comprehensive rationality’ and absence of a ‘policy cycle’: feasibility is partly about identifying the extent to which a solution is ‘doable’ when central governments have limited powers. What ‘policy style’ or policy instruments would be appropriate for the solution you favour?

Be a blogger

With a blog post, your audience is wider. You are trying to make an argument that will capture the attention of a more general audience (interested in politics and policy, but not a specialist) that might access your post from Twitter/ Facebook or via a search engine. This produces a new requirement, to: present a ‘punchy’ title which sums up the whole argument in under 140 characters (a statement is often better than a vague question); to summarise the whole argument in (say) 100 words in the first paragraph (what is the problem and solution?); and, to provide more information up to a maximum of 500 words. The reader can then be invited to read the whole policy analysis.

The style of blog posts varies markedly, so you should consult many examples before attempting your own (compare the LSE with The Conversation and newspaper columns to get a sense of variations in style). When you read other posts, take note of their strengths and weaknesses. For example, many posts associated with newspapers introduce a personal or case study element to ground the discussion in an emotional appeal. Sometimes this works, but sometimes it causes the reader to scroll down quickly to find the main argument. Consider if it is as, or more, effective to make your argument more direct and easy to find as soon as someone clicks the link on their phone. Many academic posts are too long (well beyond your 500 limit), take too long to get to the point, and do not make explicit recommendations, so you should not merely emulate them. You should also not just chop down your policy paper – this is about a new kind of communication.

Be reflective once again

Hopefully, by the end, you will appreciate the transferable life skills. I have generated some uncertainty about your task to reflect the sense among many actors that they don’t really know how to make a persuasive case and who to make it to. We can follow some basic Bardach-style guidance, but a lot of this kind of work relies on trial-and-error. I maintain a short word count to encourage you to get to the point, and I bang on about ‘stories’ in our module to encourage you to make a short and persuasive story to policymakers.

This process seems weird at first, but isn’t it also intuitive? For example, next time you’re in my seminar, measure how long it takes you to get bored and look forward to the weekend. Then imagine that policymakers have the same attention span as you. That’s how long you have to make your case!

See also: Professionalism online with social media

Tweeting this just so I remember to show it to students when advising them how to tackle policy paper assignments https://t.co/NrOyxUEHgX

— Sean Kippin (@se_kip) July 4, 2022

Here is the advice that my former lecturer, Professor Brian Hogwood, gave in 1992. Has the advice changed much since then?

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The Gerry Adams Novelty Mugs on Twitter Test

How far ahead can we make accurate and detailed political predictions? I propose the Gerry Adams Novelty Mugs on Twitter Test. We ask: how many years ago could you have predicted that Gerry Adams would be tweeting about novelty mugs?

https://twitter.com/GerryAdamsSF/status/430801541373915137

We could probably have made that prediction, say, a year ago based on his whimsical twitter style. However, think about the difficulties in going further back, say 5-10 years, to consider the role of the rise of social media and its confluence with Adams’ new position in the political landscape. Then, consider that Adams’ case is relatively simple, compared to the interaction between a wide range of actors, institutions, socioeconomic conditions and events which produce political changes. In short, the test is there to remind us to be wary of people claiming to have the political equivalent of clairvoyance.

See also:

Predicting the future

McBusted has been to the Year 3000 and it predicts a higher income tax in Scotland relative to the rest of the UK

In 50 years, we won’t care about North Sea Oil because we’ll be on solar jet packs

A Concise Response to Any Question

Sometimes you need to give a quick response to a media inquiry. Often journalists spread their net a bit, looking for something quick from the first responder (to add to an almost-finished audio piece). There’s no need to be bitter about this – better to be prepared. And concise. And you don’t want to say something too specific or controversial – particularly if you are responding to questions on a sensitive topic. You also want to give the sense that the question might be simple but, by gosh, the answer is complex. It’s hard to give that impression in a sound-bite response. Until now. If said properly, this is a maximum of one word in under one second.

 

A brief guide to people