policymaking

Entrepreneurship research makes a difference to policy, despite appearances to the contrary

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Steve Johnson

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘The policy impact of entrepreneurship research: challenging received wisdom’.

Conventional wisdom across the entrepreneurship research community is that policymakers take little notice of our research findings, preferring to follow the ideological inclinations and electoral ambitions of politicians and to take most notice of those who shout loudest. Policies are therefore not always evidence-based and as a result may not achieve their stated objectives.

This argument has some validity. There are many examples of research that questions the rationale for and impact of existing policies or makes policy recommendations that are subsequently rejected or ignored by policymakers. My recently published article in Evidence and Policy explores entrepreneurship research and policy in the UK over 30 years and finds that, despite appearances to the contrary, there are however grounds for optimism among those of us who believe that research can, does and should have some impact on policy.

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Meeting in brackets – how policy travels through meetings

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Sophie Thunus

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Meeting in brackets: how mental health policy travels through meetings’.

Meetings matter. They produce the policies for which they are organised. Yet meetings are taken for granted. We organise them, we participate in them, and we complain about them, especially when they do not achieve their purpose. However, we rarely question them: we continue to go to meetings that seem ineffective without asking why, and without wondering what these meetings might do to the policy process to which they relate, and to their participants.

The concept of meeting in brackets helps us to understand how meetings make policy. It has four implications, which have been derived from a multi-year sociological study of the implementation of a Belgian mental health policy.

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‘Non-knowledge’ in crisis policymaking: amnesia, ignorance and misinformation

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Adam Hannah, Jordan Tchilingirian, Linda Botterill and Katie Attwell

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘The role of ‘non-knowledge’ in crisis policymaking: a proposal and agenda for future research’.

The ability to locate, comprehend, and discriminate between competing sources of knowledge is a major challenge for policymakers, particularly in times of crisis.

In our recent Evidence & Policy article, we argue that to better understand these ‘knowledge challenges’, policy scholarship should also consider ‘non-knowledge’. Examining non-knowledge involves investigating the strategies, practices and cultures that surround what is not known. Non-knowledge can result from genuine lack of knowledge or strategic avoidance.

Three forms of non-knowledge are most relevant for studies of public policy: amnesia, ignorance and misinformation.

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Increasing the reach of science using tailored and targeted messages

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Taylor Scott and Jessica Pugel

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Cutting through the noise during crisis by enhancing the relevance of research to policymakers’.

We know that policymakers are most likely to use research evidence when the evidence fits what they need at that time, and that email is a cost-effective way of sharing such research. But researchers aren’t the only ones in legislators’ inboxes – constituents and special interest groups also seek out legislators’ attention and their inboxes. Thus, we need to understand how to better reach legislators with science so that we can cut through the noise and provide trustworthy research evidence at the right time. This is especially true during moments of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, when our study occurred, ‘Cutting through the noise during crisis by enhancing the relevance of research to policymakers’.

Although the literature theorises that policymakers use research they deem as timely and personally relevant, there has been a lack of practical strategies for improving perceived relevance. Through four experimental trials with US legislators across four issue areas (COVID-19, violence, exploitation and policing), we found support for one such strategy: including the legislators’ name or state/district name in the subject line. In three of the four trials, tailored emails were engaged with more often.

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Employer involvement in post-Brexit migration policymaking: the case of UK horticulture

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Sam Frederick Scott

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘The entanglement of employers and political elites in migration policymaking: the case of Brexit and the revival of UK horticulture’s guestworker scheme’.

The UK has faced considerable labour shortages following the Brexit vote and the Covid-19 pandemic. Horticulture is one sector that has been particularly vulnerable, with fears of crops being left to rot in the fields commonly aired. In a new Evidence and Policy research article I look at the public pressure employers put on government, and indeed were invited to put on government, as post-Brexit migration policy emerged. I conclude that, in the case of horticulture, migration policy was made through the intimate entanglement of employers and political elites and that employers got what they wanted: a new seasonal guest worker visa scheme. This new scheme is unprecedented in its scale (up to 40,000 workers) and as broad as possible in scope (potentially global). However, despite this, concerns still remain over continued harvest labour shortages in 2022 and beyond.

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Breaking the fourth wall: evidence communication inside policy organisations

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Christiane Gerblinger

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Peep show: a framework for watching how evidence is communicated inside policy organisations’.

Seeing how governments formulate decisions is a crucial component of their ability to claim democratic legitimacy. This includes being seen to draw on the knowledge and evidence produced by their civil service policy advisers. Yet much of the advice provided to governments is being increasingly withdrawn from public accessibility.

With governments likely to benefit from a status quo that normalises withdrawal of policy processes and rationales from public view, it is important to find alternative ways to illuminate how policy officials communicate their evidence and how that evidence is used in political contexts by governments to make decisions on our behalf.

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On the origin of a new knowledge exchange species: engineering evidence in policy

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Adam Cooper

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article ‘Engineering advice in policy making: a new domain of inquiry in evidence and policy’

Every day in government ministries, decisions are being made that shape the world. Literally, not figuratively. Decisions are made that can move mountains, make holes in the ground, cause buildings to appear, decide where other things can land, park or moor. This shaping involves a profession of highly trained and skilled individuals known commonly as ‘engineers’. Most engineers work in the private sector but a small fraction work in government, providing advice to policy officials and ministers. In the UK, engineers in government are a hidden species, commonly clustered into the STEM acronym. Science and engineering are often used interchangeably, which may explain why there is a body of research on science advice but nothing explicitly on engineering advice.

In addition to the common failure to distinguish between scientists and engineers in policy is the way in which science advice is commonly understood: as a regulatory function that helps monitor the presence of toxic elements in the environment, and work out what to do about them. The work of Jasanoff in her book The Fifth Branch is an example of this, and it also tends to exemplify the ‘at a distance’ approach of the majority of science advice research. Engineers aren’t normally involved in this kind of ‘regulatory science’ – in the UK at least they are involved in implementation (though of course engineering, if nothing else, is a discipline of standards, as Yates & Murphy show). Instead, discovering this new evidence for policy species took a more ethnographic moment to reveal it.

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When do public-academic partnerships lead to evidence use in policymaking?

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Amy Preston Page and Christina Kang-Yi

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article ‘Public-academic partnerships to foster use of research evidence in improving youth outcomes: findings from document analysis’

Child welfare and youth mental health services in the United States are complex and often disjointed. Government policies and funders increasingly require evidence-based care from these agencies. To meet this demand, partnerships between public care agencies and academic researchers have become popular in recent years. While these public-academic partnerships or ‘PAPs’ have demonstrated a positive impact on improving use of research evidence by public care agency leaders, we still have limited knowledge about how these partnerships work and which partnership characteristics may contribute to evidence use.

In our Evidence and Policy article, ‘Public-academic partnerships to foster use of research evidence in improving youth outcomes: findings from document analysis’, we analysed documents from 23 US PAPs aiming to improve mental health and promote well-being of youth aged 12–25 years. We found that the PAPs had diverse partnership goals including implementation and dissemination of research/evaluation evidence, information sharing, and prioritising and streamlining research processes. PAPs sustained longer than 10 years had more focused goals while PAPs 10 years or newer were engaged in more diverse goals. The majority of PAPs used journal articles, presentations and multimedia as dissemination strategies. Several PAPs had a large volume of material available online while others had very little.

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PODCAST: The many faces of disability

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This podcast is based on the special issue of Evidence & Policy ‘‘The many faces of disability in evidence for policy and practice: embracing complexity’.

Carol Rivas and Ikuko Tomomatsu

In this episode of the Transforming Society Podcast, Jess Miles speaks with Carol Rivas and Ikuko Tomomatsu, two of the guest editors of a special issue of Evidence & Policy ‘The many faces of disability in evidence for policy and practice: embracing complexity’.

They discuss the problems with current representations of disability, recent examples of policy that has failed disabled people and the changes that could be made so people with disabilities can be better supported and allowed to participate in policy making.

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Pulling back the curtain: insights and a new tool for investigating the role of science in US Congress

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This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘A new measure to understand the role of science in US Congress: lessons learned from the Legislative Use of Research Survey (LURS)’

Elizabeth C. Long, Rebecca L. Smith, Jennifer T. Scott, Brittany Gay, Cagla Giray, Shannon Guillot-Wright and Daniel M. Crowley

Want to conduct surveys with national-level policymakers about their research use, but not sure how? We at the Research-to-Policy Collaboration offer a new measurement protocol to understand the role of science in national-level policymaking and provide lessons we learned based on our experiences surveying congressional staff in the US.

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