Policy Analysis in 750 words: Deborah Stone (2012) Policy Paradox

Please see the Policy Analysis in 750 words series overview before reading the summary. This post is 750 words plus a bonus 750 words plus some further reading that doesn’t count in the word count even though it does.

Deborah Stone (2012) Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making 3^rd edition (Norton)

‘Whether you are a policy analyst, a policy researcher, a policy advocate, a policy maker, or an engaged citizen, my hope for Policy Paradox is that it helps you to go beyond your job description and the tasks you are given – to think hard about your own core values, to deliberate with others, and to make the world a better place’ (Stone, 2012: 15)

Stone (2012: 379-85) rejects the image of policy analysis as a ‘rationalist’ project, driven by scientific and technical rules, and separable from politics. Rather, every policy analyst’s choice is a political choice – to define a problem and solution, and in doing so choosing how to categorise people and behaviour – backed by strategic persuasion and storytelling.

The Policy Paradox: people entertain multiple, contradictory, beliefs and aims

Stone (2012: 2-3) describes the ways in which policy actors compete to define policy problems and public policy responses. The ‘paradox’ is that it is possible to define the same policies in contradictory ways.

‘Paradoxes are nothing but trouble. They violate the most elementary principle of logic: something can’t be two different things at once. Two contradictory interpretations can’t both be true. A paradox is just such an impossible situation, and political life is full of them’ (Stone, 2012: 2).

This paradox does not refer simply to a competition between different actors to define policy problems and the success or failure of solutions. Rather:

• The same actor can entertain very different ways to understand problems, and can juggle many criteria to decide that a policy outcome was a success and a failure (2012: 3).
• Surveys of the same population can report contradictory views – encouraging a specific policy response and its complete opposite – when asked different questions in the same poll (2012: 4; compare with Riker)

Policy analysts: you don’t solve the Policy Paradox with a ‘rationality project’

Like many posts in this series (Smith, Bacchi, Hindess), Stone (2010: 9-11) rejects the misguided notion of objective scientists using scientific methods to produce one correct answer (compare with Spiegelhalter and Weimer & Vining). A policy paradox cannot be solved by ‘rational, analytical, and scientific methods’ because:

• We can produce scientific evidence to reduce uncertainty, but not ambiguity.
• We can seek order and clarity in analysis and communication, but should not expect it in political systems (2012: 10).
• 5-step policy analysis (identify objectives, identify alternatives, predict their effects, evaluate alternatives, choose) is pervasive, but it ‘ignores our emotional feelings and moral intuitions’ (2012: 11).
• A policy cycle model does not explain why solutions often chase problems, or the continuous struggle over ideas even when a cycle is ostensibly complete (2012: 12-13)

Further, Stone (2012: 10-11) rejects the over-reliance, in policy analysis, on the misleading claim that:

• policymakers are engaging primarily with markets rather than communities (see 2012: 35 on the comparison between a ‘market model’ and ‘polis model’),
• economic models can sum up political life, and
• cost-benefit-analysis can reduce a complex problem into the sum of individual preferences using a single unambiguous measure.

Rather, many factors undermine such simplicity:

1. People do not simply act in their own individual interest. Nor can they rank-order their preferences in a straightforward manner according to their values and self-interest.

• Instead, they maintain a contradictory mix of objectives, which can change according to context and their way of thinking – combining cognition and emotion – when processing information (2012: 12; 30-4).

2. People are social actors. Politics is characterised by ‘a model of community where individuals live in a dense web of relationships, dependencies, and loyalties’ and exercise power with reference to ideas as much as material interests (2012: 10; 20-36; compare with Ostrom, more Ostrom, and Lubell; and see Sousa on contestation).
3. Morals and emotions matter. If people juggle contradictory aims and measures of success, then a story infused with ‘metaphor and analogy’, and appealing to values and emotions, prompts people ‘to see a situation as one thing rather than another’ and therefore draw attention to one aim at the expense of the others (2012: 11; compare with Gigerenzer).

Policy analysis reconsidered: the ambiguity of values and policy goals

Stone (2012: 14) identifies the ambiguity of the criteria for success used in 5-step policy analyses. They do not form part of a solely technical or apolitical process to identify trade-offs between well-defined goals (compare Bardach, Weimer and Vining, and Mintrom). Rather, ‘behind every policy issue lurks a contest over conflicting, though equally plausible, conceptions of the same abstract goal or value’ (2012: 14). Examples of competing interpretations of valence issues include definitions of:

1. Equity, according to: (a) which groups should be included, how to assess merit, how to identify key social groups, if we should rank populations within social groups, how to define need and account for different people placing different values on a good or service, (b) which method of distribution to use (competition, lottery, election), and (c) how to balance individual, communal, and state-based interventions (2012: 39-62).
2. Efficiency, to use the least resources to produce the same objective, according to: (a) who determines the main goal and how to balance multiple objectives, (a) who benefits from such actions, and (c) how to define resources while balancing equity and efficiency – for example, does a public sector job and a social security payment represent a sunk cost to the state or a social investment in people? (2012: 63-84).
3. Welfare or Need, according to factors including (a) the material and symbolic value of goods, (b) short term support versus a long term investment in people, (c) measures of absolute poverty or relative inequality, and (d) debates on ‘moral hazard’ or the effect of social security on individual motivation (2012: 85-106)
4. Liberty, according to (a) a general balancing of freedom from coercion and freedom from the harm caused by others, (b) debates on individual and state responsibilities, and (c) decisions on whose behaviour to change to reduce harm to what populations (2012: 107-28)
5. Security, according to (a) our ability to measure risk scientifically (see Spiegelhalter and Gigerenzer), (b) perceptions of threat and experiences of harm, (c) debates on how much risk to safety to tolerate before intervening, (d) who to target and imprison, and (e) the effect of surveillance on perceptions of democracy (2012: 129-53).

Policy analysis as storytelling for collective action

Actors use policy-relevant stories to influence the ways in which their audience understands (a) the nature of policy problems and feasibility of solutions, within (b) a wider context of policymaking in which people contest the proper balance between state, community, and market action. Stories can influence key aspects of collective action, including:

1. Defining interests and mobilising actors, by drawing attention to – and framing – issues with reference to an imagined social group and its competition (e.g. the people versus the elite; the strivers versus the skivers) (2012: 229-47)
2. Making decisions, by framing problems and solutions (2012: 248-68). Stone (2012: 260) contrasts the ‘rational-analytic model’ with real-world processes in which actors deliberately frame issues ambiguously, shift goals, keep feasible solutions off the agenda, and manipulate analyses to make their preferred solution seem the most efficient and popular.
3. Defining the role and intended impact of policies, such as when balancing punishments versus incentives to change behaviour, or individual versus collective behaviour (2012: 271-88).
4. Setting and enforcing rules (see institutions), in a complex policymaking system where a multiplicity of rules interact to produce uncertain outcomes, and a powerful narrative can draw attention to the need to enforce some rules at the expense of others (2012: 289-310).
5. Persuasion, drawing on reason, facts, and indoctrination. Stone (2012: 311-30) highlights the context in which actors construct stories to persuade: people engage emotionally with information, people take certain situations for granted even though they produce unequal outcomes, facts are socially constructed, and there is unequal access to resources – held in particular by government and business – to gather and disseminate evidence.
6. Defining human and legal rights, when (a) there are multiple, ambiguous, and intersecting rights (in relation to their source, enforcement, and the populations they serve) (b) actors compete to make sure that theirs are enforced, (c) inevitably at the expense of others, because the enforcement of rights requires a disproportionate share of limited resources (such as policymaker attention and court time) (2012: 331-53)
7. Influencing debate on the powers of each potential policymaking venue – in relation to factors including (a) the legitimate role of the state in market, community, family, and individual life, (b) how to select leaders, (c) the distribution of power between levels and types of government – and who to hold to account for policy outcomes (2012: 354-77).

Key elements of storytelling include:

1. Symbols, which sum up an issue or an action in a single picture or word (2012:157-8)
2. Characters, such as heroes or villain, who symbolise the cause of a problem or source of solution (2012:159)
3. Narrative arcs, such as a battle by your hero to overcome adversity (2012:160-8)
4. Synecdoche, to highlight one example of an alleged problem to sum up its whole (2012: 168-71; compare the ‘welfare queen’ example with SCPD)
5. Metaphor, to create an association between a problem and something relatable, such as a virus or disease, a natural occurrence (e.g. earthquake), something broken, something about to burst if overburdened, or war (2012: 171-78; e.g. is crime a virus or a beast?)
6. Ambiguity, to give people different reasons to support the same thing (2012: 178-82)
7. Using numbers to tell a story, based on political choices about how to: categorise people and practices, select the measures to use, interpret the figures to evaluate or predict the results, project the sense that complex problems can be reduced to numbers, and assign authority to the counters (2012:183-205; compare with Speigelhalter)
8. Assigning Causation, in relation to categories including accidental or natural, ‘mechanical’ or automatic (or in relation to institutions or systems), and human-guided causes that have intended or unintended consequences (such as malicious intent versus recklessness)

• ‘Causal strategies’ include to: emphasise a natural versus human cause, relate it to ‘bad apples’ rather than systemic failure, and suggest that the problem was too complex to anticipate or influence
• Actors use these arguments to influence rules, assign blame, identify ‘fixers’, and generate alliances among victims or potential supporters of change (2012: 206-28).

Wider Context and Further Reading: 1. Policy analysis

This post connects to several other 750 Words posts, which suggest that facts don’t speak for themselves. Rather, effective analysis requires you to ‘tell your story’, in a concise way, tailored to your audience.

For example, consider two ways to establish cause and effect in policy analysis:

One is to conduct and review multiple randomised control trials.

Another is to use a story of a hero or a villain (perhaps to mobilise actors in an advocacy coalition).

2. Evidence-based policymaking

Stone (2012: 10) argues that analysts who try to impose one worldview on policymaking will find that ‘politics looks messy, foolish, erratic, and inexplicable’. For analysts, who are more open-minded, politics opens up possibilities for creativity and cooperation (2012: 10).

This point is directly applicable to the ‘politics of evidence based policymaking’. A common question to arise from this worldview is ‘why don’t policymakers listen to my evidence?’ and one answer is ‘you are asking the wrong question’.

3. Policy theories highlight the value of stories (to policy analysts and academics)

Policy problems and solutions necessarily involve ambiguity:

1. There are many ways to interpret problems, and we resolve such ambiguity by exercising power to attract attention to one way to frame a policy problem at the expense of others (in other words, not with reference to one superior way to establish knowledge).

• Punctuated equilibrium theory shows that policy change is primarily a function of such shifts in policymaker attention.

2. Policy is actually a collection of – often contradictory – policy instruments and institutions, interacting in complex systems or environments, to produce unclear messages and outcomes. As such, what we call ‘public policy’ (for the sake of simplicity) is subject to interpretation and manipulation as it is made and delivered, and we struggle to conceptualise and measure policy change. Indeed, it makes more sense to describe competing narratives of policy change.

4. Policy theories and storytelling

People communicate meaning via stories. Stories help us turn (a) a complex world, which provides a potentially overwhelming amount of information, into (b) something manageable, by identifying its most relevant elements and guiding action (compare with Gigerenzer on heuristics).

The Narrative Policy Framework identifies the storytelling strategies of actors seeking to exploit other actors’ cognitive shortcuts, using a particular format – containing the setting, characters, plot, and moral – to focus on some beliefs over others, and reinforce someone’s beliefs enough to encourage them to act.

Compare with Tuckett and Nicolic on the stories that people tell to themselves.

 

 

Understanding Public Policy 2nd edition

All going well, it will be out in November 2019. We are now at the proofing stage.

I have included below the summaries of the chapters (and each chapter should also have its own entry (or multiple entries) in the 1000 Words and 500 Words series).

 

Evidence-based policymaking and the ‘new policy sciences’

[I wasn’t happy with the first version, so this is version 2, to be enjoyed with the ppt & MP3 ]

In the ‘new policy sciences’, Chris Weible and I advocate:

• a return to Lasswell’s vision of combining policy analysis (to recommend policy change) and policy theory (to explain policy change), but
• focusing on a far larger collection of actors (beyond a small group at the centre),
• recognising new developments in studies of the psychology of policymaker choice, and
• building into policy analysis the recognition that any policy solution is introduced in a complex policymaking environment over which no-one has control.

However, there is a lot of policy theory out there, and we can’t put policy theory together like Lego to produce consistent insights to inform policy analysis.

Rather, each concept in my image of the policy process represents its own literature: see these short explainers on the psychology of policymaking, actors spread across multi-level governance, institutions, networks, ideas, and socioeconomic factors/ events.

What the explainers don’t really project is the sense of debate within the literature about how best to conceptualise each concept. You can pick up their meaning in a few minutes but would need a few years to appreciate the detail and often-fundamental debate.

Ideally, we would put all of the concepts together to help explain policymaker choice within a complex policymaking environment (how else could I put up the image and present is as one source of accumulated wisdom from policy studies?). Peter John describes such accounts as ‘synthetic’. I have also co-authored work with Tanya Heikkila – in 2014 and 2017 to compare the different ways in which ‘synthetic’ theories conceptualise the policy process.

However, note the difficulty of putting together a large collection of separate and diverse literatures into one simple model (e.g. while doing a PhD).

On that basis, I’d encourage you to think of these attempts to synthesise as stories. I tell these stories a lot, but someone else could describe theory very differently (perhaps by relying on fewer male authors or US-derived theories in which there is a very specific reference points and positivism is represented well).

The example of EBPM

I have given a series of talks to explain why we should think of ‘evidence-based policymaking’ as a myth or political slogan, not an ideal scenario or something to expect from policymaking in the real world. They usually involve encouraging framing and storytelling rather than expecting evidence to speak for itself, and rejecting the value of simple models like the policy cycle. I then put up an image of my own and encourage people to think about the implications of each concept:

I describe the advice as simple-sounding and feasible at first glance, but actually a series of Herculean* tasks:

• There are many policymakers and influencers spread across government, so find out where the action is, or the key venues in which people are making authoritative decisions.
• Each venue has its own ‘institutions’ – the formal and written, or informal and unwritten rules of policymaking – so learn the rules of each venue in which you engage.
• Each venue is guided by a fundamental set of ideas – as paradigms, core beliefs, monopolies of understanding – so learn that language.
• Each venue has its own networks – the relationships between policy makers and influencers – so build trust and form alliances within networks.
• Policymaking attention is often driven by changes in socioeconomic factors, or routine/ non-routine events, so be prepared to exploit the ‘windows of opportunity’ to present your solution during heightened attention to a policy problem.

Further, policy theories/ studies help us understand the context in which people make such choices. For example, consider the story that Kathryn Oliver and I tell about the role of evidence in policymaking environments:

If there are so many potential authoritative venues, devote considerable energy to finding where the ‘action’ is (and someone specific to talk to). Even if you find the right venue, you will not know the unwritten rules unless you study them intensely. Some networks are close-knit and difficult to access because bureaucracies have operating procedures that favour some sources of evidence. Research advocates can be privileged insiders in some venues and excluded completely in others. If your evidence challenges an existing paradigm, you need a persuasion strategy good enough to prompt a shift of attention to a policy problem and a willingness to understand that problem in a new way. You can try to find the right time to use evidence to exploit a crisis leading to major policy change, but the opportunities are few and chances of success low.  In that context, policy studies recommend investing your time over the long term – to build up alliances, trust in the messenger, knowledge of the system, and to seek ‘windows of opportunity’ for policy change – but offer no assurances that any of this investment will ever pay off

As described, this focus on the new policy sciences and synthesising insights helps explain why ‘the politics of evidence-based policymaking’ is equally important to civil servants (my occasional audience) as researchers (my usual audience).

To engage in skilled policy analysis, and give good advice, is to recognise the ways in which policymakers combine cognition/emotion to engage with evidence, and must navigate a complex policymaking environment when designing or selecting technically and politically feasible solutions. To give good advice is to recognise what you want policymakers to do, but also that they are not in control of the consequences.

From one story to many?

However, I tell these stories without my audience having the time to look further into each theory and its individual insights. If they do have a little more time, I go into the possible contribution of individual insights to debate.

For example, they adapt insights from psychology in different ways …

• PET shows the overall effect of policymaker psychology on policy change: they combine cognition and emotion to pay disproportionate attention to a small number of issues (contributing to major change) and ignore the rest (contributing to ‘hyperincremental’ change).
• The IAD focuses partly on the rules and practices that actors develop to build up trust in each other.
• The ACF describes actors going into politics to turn their beliefs into policy, forming coalitions with people who share their beliefs, then often romanticising their own cause and demonising their opponents.
• The NPF describes the relative impact of stories on audiences who use cognitive shortcuts to (for example) identify with a hero and draw a simple moral.
• SCPD describes policymakers drawing on gut feeling to identify good and bad target populations.
• Policy learning involves using cognition and emotion to acquire new knowledge and skills.

… even though the pace of change in psychological research often seems faster than the ways in which policy studies can incorporate new and reliable insights.

They also present different conceptions of the policymaking environment in which actors make choices. See this post for more on this discussion in relation to EBPM.

My not-brilliant conclusion is that:

1. Policy theory/ policy studies has a lot to offer other disciplines and professions, particularly in field like EBPM in which we need to account for politics and, more importantly, policymaking systems, but
2. Beware any policy theory story that presents the source literature as coherent and consistent.
3. Rather, any story of the field involves a series of choices about what counts as a good theory and good insight.
4. In other words, the exhortation to think more about what counts as ‘good evidence’ applies just as much to political science as any other.

Postscript: well, that is the last of the posts for my ANZOG talks. If I’ve done this properly, there should now be a loop of talks. It should be possible to go back to the first one and see it as a sequel to this one!

Or, for more on theory-informed policy analysis – in other words, where the ‘new policy sciences’ article is taking us – here is how I describe it to students doing a policy analysis paper (often for the first time).

Or, have a look at the earlier discussion of images of the policy process. You may have noticed that there is a different image in this post (knocked up in my shed at the weekend). It’s because I am experimenting with shapes. Does the image with circles look more relaxing? Does the hexagonal structure look complicated even though it is designed to simplify? Does it matter? I think so. People engage emotionally with images. They share them. They remember them. So, I need an image more memorable than the policy cycle.

Paul Cairney Brisbane EBPM New Policy Sciences 25.10.18

*I welcome suggestions on another word to describe almost-impossibly-hard

Evidence-based policymaking and the ‘new policy sciences’

I have given a series of talks to explain why we should think of ‘evidence-based policymaking’ as a myth or political slogan, not an ideal scenario or something to expect from policymaking in the real world. They usually involve encouraging framing and storytelling rather than expecting evidence to speak for itself, and rejecting the value of simple models like the policy cycle. I then put up an image of my own and encourage people to think about the implications of each concept:

I describe the advice as simple-sounding and feasible at first glance, but actually a series of Herculean* tasks:

• There are many policymakers and influencers spread across government, so find out where the action is, or the key venues in which people are making authoritative decisions.
• Each venue has its own ‘institutions’ – the formal and written, or informal and unwritten rules of policymaking – so learn the rules of each venue in which you engage.
• Each venue is guided by a fundamental set of ideas – as paradigms, core beliefs, monopolies of understanding – so learn that language.
• Each venue has its own networks – the relationships between policy makers and influencers – so build trust and form alliances within networks.
• Policymaking attention is often driven by changes in socioeconomic factors, or routine/ non-routine events, so be prepared to exploit the ‘windows of opportunity’ to present your solution during heightened attention to a policy problem.

In most cases, we don’t have time to discuss a more fundamental issue (at least for researchers using policy theory and political science concepts):

From where did these concepts come, and how well do we know them?

To cut a long story short, each concept represents its own literature: see these short explainers on the psychology of policymaking, actors spread across multi-level governance, institutions, networks, ideas, and socioeconomic factors/ events. What the explainers don’t really project is the sense of debate within the literature about how best to conceptualise each concept. You can pick up their meaning in a few minutes but would need a few years to appreciate the detail and often-fundamental debate.

Ideally, we would put all of the concepts together to help explain policymaker choice within a complex policymaking environment (how else could I put up the image and present is as one source of accumulated wisdom from policy studies?). Peter John describes such accounts as ‘synthetic’. I have also co-authored work with Tanya Heikkila – in 2014 and 2017 to compare the different ways in which ‘synthetic’ theories conceptualise the policy process. However, note the difficulty of putting together a large collection of separate and diverse literatures into one simple model (e.g. while doing a PhD).

The new policy sciences

More recently, in the ‘new policy sciences’, Chris Weible and I present a more provocative story of these efforts, in which we advocate:

• a return to Lasswell’s vision of combining policy analysis (to recommend policy change) and policy theory (to explain policy change), but
• focusing on a far larger collection of actors (beyond a small group at the centre),
• recognising new developments in studies of the psychology of policymaker choice, and
• building into policy analysis the recognition that any policy solution is introduced in a complex policymaking environment over which no-one has control.

This focus on psychology is not new …

• PET shows the overall effect of policymaker psychology on policy change: they combine cognition and emotion to pay disproportionate attention to a small number of issues (contributing to major change) and ignore the rest (contributing to ‘hyperincremental’ change).
• The IAD focuses partly on the rules and practices that actors develop to build up trust in each other.
• The ACF describes actors going into politics to turn their beliefs into policy, forming coalitions with people who share their beliefs, then often romanticising their own cause and demonising their opponents.
• The NPF describes the relative impact of stories on audiences who use cognitive shortcuts to (for example) identify with a hero and draw a simple moral.
• SCPD describes policymakers drawing on gut feeling to identify good and bad target populations.
• Policy learning involves using cognition and emotion to acquire new knowledge and skills.

… but the pace of change in psychological research often seems faster than the ways in which policy studies can incorporate new and reliable insights.

Perhaps more importantly, policy studies help us understand the context in which people make such choices. For example, consider the story that Kathryn Oliver and I tell about the role of evidence in policymaking environments:

If there are so many potential authoritative venues, devote considerable energy to finding where the ‘action’ is (and someone specific to talk to). Even if you find the right venue, you will not know the unwritten rules unless you study them intensely. Some networks are close-knit and difficult to access because bureaucracies have operating procedures that favour some sources of evidence. Research advocates can be privileged insiders in some venues and excluded completely in others. If your evidence challenges an existing paradigm, you need a persuasion strategy good enough to prompt a shift of attention to a policy problem and a willingness to understand that problem in a new way. You can try to find the right time to use evidence to exploit a crisis leading to major policy change, but the opportunities are few and chances of success low.  In that context, policy studies recommend investing your time over the long term – to build up alliances, trust in the messenger, knowledge of the system, and to seek ‘windows of opportunity’ for policy change – but offer no assurances that any of this investment will ever pay off

Then, have a look at this discussion of ‘synthetic’ policy theories, designed to prompt people to consider how far they would go to get their evidence into policy.

Theory-driven policy analysis

As described, this focus on the new policy sciences helps explain why ‘the politics of evidence-based policymaking’ is equally important to civil servants (my occasional audience) as researchers (my usual audience).

To engage in skilled policy analysis, and give good advice, is to recognise the ways in which policymakers combine cognition/emotion to engage with evidence, and must navigate a complex policymaking environment when designing or selecting technically and politically feasible solutions. To give good advice is to recognise what you want policymakers to do, but also that they are not in control of the consequences.

Epilogue

Well, that is the last of the posts for my ANZOG talks. If I’ve done this properly, there should now be a loop of talks. It should be possible to go back to the first one in Auckland and see it as a sequel to this one in Brisbane!

Or, for more on theory-informed policy analysis – in other words, where the ‘new policy sciences’ article is taking us – here is how I describe it to students doing a policy analysis paper (often for the first time).

Or, have a look at the earlier discussion of images of the policy process. You may have noticed that there is a different image in this post (knocked up in my shed at the weekend). It’s because I am experimenting with shapes. Does the image with circles look more relaxing? Does the hexagonal structure look complicated even though it is designed to simplify? Does it matter? I think so. People engage emotionally with images. They share them. They remember them. So, I need an image more memorable than the policy cycle.

 

Paul Cairney Brisbane EBPM New Policy Sciences 25.10.18

 

 

*I welcome suggestions on another word to describe almost-impossibly-hard

Telling Stories that Shape Public Policy

This is a guest post by Michael D. Jones (left) and Deserai Anderson Crow (right), discussing how to use insights from the Narrative Policy Framework to think about how to tell effective stories to achieve policy goals. The full paper has been submitted to the series for Policy and Politics called Practical Lessons from Policy Theories.

Imagine. You are an ecologist. You recently discovered that a chemical that is discharged from a local manufacturing plant is threatening a bird that locals love to watch every spring. Now, imagine that you desperately want your research to be relevant and make a difference to help save these birds. All of your training gives you depth of expertise that few others possess. Your training also gives you the ability to communicate and navigate things such as probabilities, uncertainty, and p-values with ease.

But as NPR’s Robert Krulwich argues, focusing on this very specialized training when you communicate policy problems could lead you in the wrong direction. While being true to the science and best practices of your training, one must also be able to tell a compelling story.  Perhaps combine your scientific findings with the story about the little old ladies who feed the birds in their backyards on spring mornings, emphasizing the beauty and majesty of these avian creatures, their role in the community, and how the toxic chemicals are not just a threat to the birds, but are also a threat to the community’s understanding of itself and its sense of place.  The latest social science is showing that if you tell a good story, your policy communications are likely to be more effective.

Why focus on stories?

The world is complex. We are bombarded with information as we move through our lives and we seek patterns within that information to simplify complexity and reduce ambiguity, so that we can make sense of the world and act within it.

The primary means by which human beings render complexity understandable and reduce ambiguity is through the telling of stories. We “fit” the world around us and the myriad of objects and people therein, into story patterns. We are by nature storytelling creatures. And if it is true of us as individuals, then we can also safely assume that storytelling matters for public policy where complexity and ambiguity abound.

Based on our (hopefully) forthcoming article (which has a heavy debt to Jones and Peterson, 2017 and Catherine Smith’s popular textbook) here we offer some abridged advice synthesizing some of the most current social science findings about how best to engage public policy storytelling. We break it down into five easy steps and offer a short discussion of likely intervention points within the policy process.

The 5 Steps of Good Policy Narrating

1. Tell a Story: Remember, facts never speak for themselves. If you are presenting best practices, relaying scientific information, or detailing cost/benefit analyses, you are telling or contributing to a story.  Engage your storytelling deliberately.
2. Set the Stage: Policy narratives have a setting and in this setting you will find specific evidence, geography, legal parameters, and other policy consequential items and information.  Think of these setting items as props.  Not all stages can hold every relevant prop.  Be true to science; be true to your craft, but set your stage with props that maximize the potency of your story, which always includes making your setting amenable to your audience.
3. Establish the Plot: In public policy plots usually define the problem (and polices do not exist without at least a potential problem). Define your problem. Doing so determines the causes, which establishes blame.
4. Cast the Characters:  Having established a plot and defined your problem, the roles you will need your characters to play become apparent. Determine who the victim is (who is harmed by the problem), who is responsible (the villain) and who can bring relief (the hero). Cast characters your audience will appreciate in their roles.
5. Clearly Specify the Moral: Postmodern films might get away without having a point.  Policy narratives usually do not. Let your audience know what the solution is.

Public Policy Intervention Points

There are crucial points in the policy process where actors can use narratives to achieve their goals. We call these “intervention points” and all intervention points should be viewed as opportunities to tell a good policy story, although each will have its own constraints.

These intervention points include the most formal types of policy communication such as crafting of legislation or regulation, expert testimony or statements, and evaluation of policies. They also include less formal communications through the media and by citizens to government.

Each of these interventions can frequently be dry and jargon-laden, but it’s important to remember that by employing effective narratives within any of them, you are much more likely to see your policy goals met.

When considering how to construct your story within one or more of the various intervention points, we urge you to first consider several aspects of your role as a narrator.

1. Who are you and what are your goals? Are you an outsider trying to affect change to solve a problem or push an agency to do something it might not be inclined to do?  Are you an insider trying to evaluate and improve policy making and implementation? Understanding your role and your goals is essential to both selecting an appropriate intervention point and optimizing your narrative therein.
2. Carefully consider your audience. Who are they and what is their posture towards your overall goal? Understanding your audience’s values and beliefs is essential for avoiding invoking defensiveness.
3. There is the intervention point itself – what is the best way to reach your audience? What are the rules for the type of communication you plan to use? For example, media communications can be done with lengthy press releases, interviews with the press, or in the confines of a simple tweet.  All of these methods have both formal and informal constraints that will determine what you can and can’t do.

Without deliberate consideration of your role, audience, the intervention point, and how your narrative links all of these pieces together, you are relying on chance to tell a compelling policy story.

On the other hand, thoughtful and purposeful storytelling that remains true to you, your values, your craft, and your best understanding of the facts, can allow you to be both the ecologist and the bird lover.

 

Writing for Impact: what you need to know, and 5 ways to know it

This is a post for my talk at the ‘Politheor: European Policy Network’ event Write For Impact: Training In Op-Ed Writing For Policy Advocacy. There are other speakers with more experience of, and advice on, ‘op-ed’ writing. My aim is to describe key aspects of politics and policymaking to help the audience learn why they should write op-eds in a particular way for particular audiences.

A key rule in writing is to ‘know your audience’, but it’s easier said than done if you seek many sympathetic audiences in many parts of a complex policy process. Two simple rules should help make this process somewhat clearer:

1. Learn how policymakers simplify their world, and
2. Learn how policy environments influence their attention and choices.

We can use the same broad concepts to help explain both processes, in which many policymakers and influencers interact across many levels and types of government to produce what we call ‘policy’:

1. Policymaker psychology: tell an evidence-informed story

Policymakers receive too much information, and seek ways to ignore most of it while making decisions. To do so, they use ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ means: selecting a limited number of regular sources of information, and relying on emotion, gut instinct, habit, and familiarity with information. In other words, your audience combines cognition and emotion to deal with information, and they can ignore information for long periods then quickly shift their attention towards it, even if that information has not really changed.

Consequently, an op-ed focusing solely ‘the facts’ can be relatively ineffective compared to an evidence-informed story, perhaps with a notional setting, plot, hero, and moral. Your aim shifts from providing more and more evidence to reduce uncertainty about a problem, to providing a persuasive reason to reduce ambiguity. Ambiguity relates to the fact that policymakers can understand a policy problem in many different ways – such as tobacco as an economic good, issue of civil liberties, or public health epidemic – but often pay exclusive attention to one.

So, your aim may be to influence the simple ways in which people understand the world, to influence their demand for more information. An emotional appeal can transform a factual case, but only if you know how people engage emotionally with information. Sometimes, the same story can succeed with one audience but fail with another.

2. Institutions: learn the ‘rules of the game’

Institutions are the rules people use in policymaking, including the formal, written down, and well understood rules setting out who is responsible for certain issues, and the informal, unwritten, and unclear rules informing action. The rules used by policymakers can help define the nature of a policy problem, who is best placed to solve it, who should be consulted routinely, and who can safely be ignored. These rules can endure for long periods and become like habits, particularly if policymakers pay little attention to a problem or why they define it in a particular way.

3. Networks and coalitions: build coalitions and establish trust

Such informal rules, about how to understand a problem and who to speak with about it, can be reinforced in networks of policymakers and influencers.

‘Policy community’ partly describes a sense that most policymaking is processed out of the public spotlight, often despite minimal high level policymaker interest. Senior policymakers delegate responsibility for policymaking to bureaucrats, who seek information and advice from groups. Groups exchange information for access to, and potential influence within, government, and policymakers have ‘standard operating procedures’ that favour particular sources of evidence and some participants over others

‘Policy community’ also describes a sense that the network seems fairly stable, built on high levels of trust between participants, based on factors such as reliability (the participant was a good source of information, and did not complain too much in public about decisions), a common aim or shared understanding of the problem, or the sense that influencers represent important groups.

So, the same policy case can have a greater impact if told by a well trusted actor in a policy community. Or, that community member may use networks to build key coalitions behind a case, use information from the network to understand which cases will have most impact, or know which audiences to seek.

4. Ideas: learn the ‘currency’ of policy argument

This use of networks relates partly to learning the language of policy debate in particular ‘venues’, to learn what makes a convincing case. This language partly reflects a well-established ‘world view’ or the ‘core beliefs’ shared by participants. For example, a very specific ‘evidence-based’ language is used frequently in public health, while treasury departments look for some recognition of ‘value for money’ (according to a particular understanding of how you determine VFM). So, knowing your audience is knowing the terms of debate that are often so central to their worldview that they take them for granted and, in contrast, the forms of argument that are more difficult to pursue because they are challenging or unfamiliar to some audiences. Imagine a case that challenges completely someone’s world view, or one which is entirely consistent with it.

5. Socioeconomic factors and events: influence how policymakers see the outside world

Some worldviews can be shattered by external events or crises, but this is a rare occurrence. It may be possible to generate a sense of crisis with reference to socioeconomic changes or events, but people will interpret these developments through the ‘lens’ of their own beliefs. In some cases, events seem impossible to ignore but we may not agree on their implications for action. In others, an external event only matters if policymakers pay attention to them. Indeed, we began this discussion with the insight that policymakers have to ignore almost all such information available to them.

Know your audience revisited: practical lessons from policy theories

To take into account all of these factors, while trying to make a very short and persuasive case, may seem impossible. Instead, we might pick up some basic rules of thumb from particular theories or approaches. We can discuss a few examples from ongoing work on ‘practical lessons from policy theories’.

Storytelling for policy impact

If you are telling a story with a setting, plot, hero, and moral, it may be more effective to focus on a hero than villain. More importantly, imagine two contrasting audiences: one is moved by your personal and story told to highlight some structural barriers to the wellbeing of key populations; another is unmoved, judges that person harshly, and thinks they would have done better in their shoes (perhaps they prefer to build policy on stereotypes of target populations). ‘Knowing your audience’ may involve some trial-and-error to determine which stories work under which circumstances.

Appealing to coalitions

Or, you may decide that it is impossible to write anything to appeal to all relevant audiences. Instead, you might tailor it to one, to reinforce its beliefs and encourage people to act. The ‘advocacy coalition framework’ describes such activities as routine: people go into politics to translate their beliefs into policy, they interpret the world through those beliefs, and they romanticise their own cause while demonising their opponents. If so, would a bland op-ed have much effect on any audience?

Learning from entrepreneurs

‘Policy entrepreneurs’ draw on three rules, two of which seem counterintuitive:

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.

On the day, we can use such concepts to help us think through the factors that you might think about while writing op-eds, even though it is very unlikely that you would mention them in your written work.

The Psychology of Evidence Based Policymaking: Who Will Speak For the Evidence if it Doesn’t Speak for Itself?

Let’s begin with a simple – and deliberately naïve – prescription for evidence based policymaking (EBPM): there should be a much closer link between (a) the process in which scientists and knowledge brokers identify major policy problems, and (b) the process in which politicians make policy decisions. We should seek to close the ‘evidence-policy gap’. The evidence should come first and we should bemoan the inability of policymakers to act accordingly. I discuss why that argument is naïve here and here, but in terms of the complexity of policy processes and the competing claims for knowledge-based policy. This post is about the link between EBPM and psychology.

Let’s consider the role of two types of thought process common to all people, policymakers included: (a) the intuitive, gut, emotional or other heuristics we use to process and act on information quickly; and (b) goal-oriented and reasoned, thoughtful behaviour. As Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (p 20) puts it: ‘System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations … often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice and concentration’

The naïve description of EBPM requires System 2 (‘slow’) thinking, but what happens if most policymaking is characterised by System 1 (‘fast’)? The answer is ‘a whole bunch of cognitive shortcuts’, including:

• the ‘availability heuristic’, when people relate the size, frequency or probability of a problem to how easy it is to remember or imagine
• the ‘representativeness heuristic’, when people overestimate the probability of vivid events
• ‘prospect theory’, when people value losses more than equivalent gains
• ‘framing effects’, based on emotional and moral judgements
• confirmation bias
• optimism bias, or unrealistic expectations about our aims working out well when we commit to them
• status quo bias
• a tendency to use exemplars of social groups to represent general experience; and
• a ‘need for coherence’ and to establish patterns and causal relationships when they may not exist (see Paul Lewis, p 7).

The ‘availability heuristic’ may also be linked to more recent studies of ‘processing fluency’ – which suggests that people’s decisions are influenced by their familiarity with things; with the ease in which they process information (see Alter and Oppenheimer, 2009). Fluency can take several forms, including conceptual, perceptual, and linguistic. For example, people may pay more attention to an issue or statement if they already possess some knowledge of it and find it easy to understand or recall. They may pay attention to people when their faces seem familiar and find fewer faults with systems they comprehend. They may place more value on things they find familiar, such as their domestic currency, items that they own compared to items they would have to buy, or the stocks of companies with more pronounceable names – even if they are otherwise identical. Or, their ability to imagine things in an abstract or concrete form may relate to their psychological ‘distance’ from it.

Is fast thinking bad thinking? Views from psychology

Alter and Oppenheimer use these insights to warn policymakers against taking the wrong attitude to regulation or spending based on flawed assessments of risk – for example, they might spend disproportionate amounts of money on projects designed to address risks with which they are most familiar (Slovic suggests that feelings towards risk may even be influenced by the way in which it is described, for example as a percentage versus a 1 in X probability). Alter and Oppenheimer also worry about medical and legal judgements swayed by fluid diagnoses and stories. Haidt argues that the identification of the ‘intuitive basis of moral judgment’ can be used to help policymakers ‘avoid mistakes’ or allow people to develop ‘programs’ or an ‘environment’ to ‘improve the quality of moral judgment and behavior’. These studies compare with arguments focusing on the positive role of emotions of decision-making, either individually (Frank) or as part of social groups, with emotional responses providing useful information in the form of social cues (Van Kleef et al).

Is fast thinking bad thinking? Views from the political and policy sciences

Social Construction Theory suggests that policymakers make quick, biased, emotional judgements, then back up their actions with selective facts to ‘institutionalize’ their understanding of a policy problem and its solution. They ‘socially construct’ their target populations to argue that they are deserving either of governmental benefits or punishments. Schneider and Ingram (forthcoming) argue that the outcomes of social construction are often dysfunctional and not based on a well-reasoned, goal-oriented strategy: ‘Studies have shown that rules, tools, rationales and implementation structures inspired by social constructions send dysfunctional messages and poor choices may hamper the effectiveness of policy’.

However, not all policy scholars make such normative pronouncements. Indeed, the value of policy theory is often to show that policy results from the interaction between large numbers of people and institutions. So, the actions of a small number of policymakers would not be the issue; we need to know more about the cumulative effect of individual emotional decision making in a collective decision-making environment – in organisations, networks and systems. For example:

• The Advocacy Coalition Framework suggests that people engage in coordinated activity to cooperate with each other and compete with other coalitions, based on their shared beliefs and a tendency to demonise their opponents. In some cases, there are commonly accepted ways to interpret the evidence. In others, it is a battle of ideas.
• Multiple Streams Analysis and Punctuated Equilibrium Theory focus on uncertainty and ambiguity, exploring the potential for policymaker attention to lurch dramatically from one problem or ‘image’ (the way the problem is viewed or understood). They identify the framing strategies – of actors such as ‘entrepreneurs’, ‘venue shoppers’ and ‘monopolists’ – based on a mixture of empirical facts and ‘emotional appeals’.
• The Narrative Policy Framework combines a discussion of emotion with the identification of narrative strategies. Each narrative has a setting, characters, plot and moral. They can be compared to marketing, as persuasion based more on appealing to an audience’s beliefs (or exploiting their thought processes) than the evidence. People will pay attention to certain narratives because they are boundedly rational, seeking shortcuts to gather sufficient information – and prone to accept simple stories that seem plausible, confirm their biases, exploit their emotions, and/ or come from a source they trust.

In each case, we might see our aim as going beyond the simple phrase: ‘the evidence doesn’t speak for itself’. If ‘fast thinking’ is pervasive in policymaking, then ‘the evidence’ may only be influential if it can be provided in ways that are consistent with the thought processes of certain policymakers – such as by provoking a strong emotional reaction (to confirm or challenge biases), or framing messages in terms that are familiar to (and can be easily processed by) policymakers.

These issues are discussed further in these posts:

Is Evidence-Based Policymaking the same as good policymaking?

Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: The Psychology of Policymaking

And at more length in these papers:

PSA 2014 Cairney Psychology Policymaking 7.4.14

Cairney PSA 2014 EBPM 5.3.14

See also: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Evidence alone won’t bring about social change

Discover Society (Delaney and Henderson) Risk and Choice in the Scottish Independence debate

Policy Concepts in 1000 Words: The Psychology of Policymaking

(podcast download)

Psychology is at the heart of policymaking, but the literature on psychology is not always at the heart of policy theory. Most theories identify ‘bounded rationality’ which, on its own, is little more than a truism: people do not have the time, resources and cognitive ability to consider all information, all possibilities, all solutions, or anticipate all consequences of their actions. Consequently, they use informational shortcuts or heuristics – perhaps to produce ‘good-enough’ decisions. This is where psychology comes in, to:

1. Describe the thought processes that people use to turn a complex world into something simple enough to understand and/ or respond to; and
2. To compare types of thought process, such as (a) goal-oriented and reasoned, thoughtful behaviour and (b) the intuitive, gut, emotional or other heuristics we use to process and act on information quickly.

Where does policy theory come in? It seeks to situate these processes within a wider examination of policymaking systems and their environments, identifying the role of:

• A wide range of actors making choices.
• Institutions, as the rules, norms, and practices that influence behaviour.
• Policy networks, as the relationships between policymakers and the ‘pressure participants’ with which they consult and negotiate.
• Ideas – a broad term to describe beliefs, and the extent to which they are shared within groups, organisations, networks and political systems.
• Context and events, to describe the extent to which a policymaker’s environment is in her control or how it influences her decisions.

Putting these approaches together is not easy. It presents us with an important choice regarding how to treat the role of psychology within explanations of complex policymaking systems – or, at least, on which aspect to focus.

Our first choice is to focus specifically on micro-level psychological processes, to produce hypotheses to test propositions regarding individual thought and action. There are many from which to choose, although from Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (p 20), we can identify a basic distinction between two kinds ‘System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations … often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice and concentration’. Further, system 1 can be related to a series of cognitive shortcuts which develop over time as people learn from experience, including:

• the ‘availability heuristic’, when people relate the size, frequency or probability of a problem to how easy it is to remember or imagine
• the ‘representativeness heuristic’, when people overestimate the probability of vivid events
• ‘prospect theory’, when people value losses more than equivalent gains
• ‘framing effects’, based on emotional and moral judgements
• confirmation bias
• optimism bias, or unrealistic expectations about our aims working out well when we commit to them
• status quo bias
• a tendency to use exemplars of social groups to represent general experience; and
• a ‘need for coherence’ and to establish patterns and causal relationships when they may not exist (see Paul Lewis, p 7).

The ‘availability heuristic’ may also be linked to more recent studies of ‘processing fluency’ – which suggests that people’s decisions are influenced by their familiarity with things; with the ease in which they process information (see Alter and Oppenheimer, 2009). Fluency can take several forms, including conceptual, perceptual, and linguistic. For example, people may pay more attention to an issue or statement if they already possess some knowledge of it and find it easy to understand or recall. They may pay attention to people when their faces seem familiar and find fewer faults with systems they comprehend. They may place more value on things they find familiar, such as their domestic currency, items that they own compared to items they would have to buy, or the stocks of companies with more pronounceable names – even if they are otherwise identical. Or, their ability to imagine things in an abstract or concrete form may relate to their psychological ‘distance’ from it.

Our second choice is to treat these propositions as assumptions, allowing us to build larger (‘meso’ or ‘macro’ level) models that produce other hypotheses. We ask what would happen if these assumptions were true, to allow us to theorise a social system containing huge numbers of people, and/ or focus on the influence of the system or environment in which people make decisions.

These choices are made in different ways in the policy theory literature:

• The Advocacy Coalition Framework has tested the idea of ‘devil shift’ (coalitions romanticize their own cause and demonise their opponents, misperceiving their power, beliefs and/ or motives) but also makes assumptions about belief systems and prospect theory to build models and test other assumptions.
• Multiple Streams Analysis and Punctuated Equilibrium Theory focus on uncertainty and ambiguity, exploring the potential for policymaker attention to lurch dramatically from one problem or ‘image’ (the way the problem is viewed or understood). They identify the framing strategies of actors such as ‘entrepreneurs’, ‘venue shoppers’ and ‘monopolists’.
• Social Construction Theory argues that policymakers make quick, biased, emotional judgements, then back up their actions with selective facts to ‘institutionalize’ their understanding of a policy problem and its solution.
• The Narrative Policy Framework combines a discussion of emotion with the identification of ‘homo narrans’ (humans as storytellers – in stated contrast to ‘homo economicus’, or humans as rational beings). Narratives are used strategically to reinforce or oppose policy measures. Each narrative has a setting, characters, plot and moral. They can be compared to marketing, as persuasion based more on appealing to an audience’s beliefs (or exploiting their thought processes) than the evidence. People will pay attention to certain narratives because they are boundedly rational, seeking shortcuts to gather sufficient information – and prone to accept simple stories that seem plausible, confirm their biases, exploit their emotions, and/ or come from a source they trust.

These issues are discussed at more length in this paper: PSA 2014 Cairney Psychology Policymaking 7.4.14