research on public policy

From Research to Policy Action: Communicating Research for Public Policy Making

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This chapter underscores the importance of engaging policy makers and other stakeholders in the research process. Recognizing that there are two dimensions, the demand and supply sides to the use of evidence in policy making, it discusses the various instruments and platforms for communicating research to make it accessible to a variety of stakeholders.

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The growing concern that scientific research and the academic community in general do not meaningfully engage the world of public policy is not entirely new. The “two communities” construct is widely used to describe the sharp disconnect between the worlds of academia and policy (Newman et al. 2015 ). This construct generally depicts the existence of an underutilization or, in most cases, non-utilization of scientific research in the policy making process. Although policy makers recognize that scientific research has the potential to largely inform and transform policy outcomes and is in fact an essential determinant of effective government decision making, wide communication gap continues to exist between both worlds.

There is a growing interest in connecting scientific research, with its rigour of methodology and finesse of analysis, to the world that it is expected to influence and change. It is indeed crucial to expand research findings beyond the boundaries of the academic community to reach policy makers as they intervene through their daily activities to solve societal problems. Furthermore, evidence from policy makers in various parts of the world shows that the quality of research does not automatically guarantee that it will make its way to the appropriate stakeholders and generate positive impact. Promoting the utilization of scientific research and supporting evidence-informed decision making at the political level requires a better understanding of the enablers. What are the major challenges that militate against collaboration and knowledge transfer from scientific research to policy making process? How can policy makers maximize the underutilized potentials in scientific research? What tools of communication are appropriate to make research accessible to various stakeholders?

A Movement for Policy-Engaged Research

Across the world the concern about evidence-informed policy making has gained traction. A few governments, like those of the United Kingdom and the United States, and non-state organizations like the International Rescue Committee and the Hewlett Foundation, have placed premium on policy-engaged research. They have invested efforts in moving relevant findings from research institutions and academic outlets to the policy process. Also, the Centre for Global Development and a few foundations have promoted the development of research through engagement with stakeholders and translating the outputs from research into forms that could reach a wider audience, especially stakeholders and strategic policy actors. Indeed, White ( 2019 ) considered the current state of the engagement as an evidence revolution. He identified four waves of the evidence revolution. He traced the first wave to the results agenda of the 1990s that came with the New Public Management or managerial movement in public administration. The emphasis was on outcome as against the previous focus on inputs. This was followed by efforts to develop indicators to measure performance. In the international development community, it witnessed the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals, later succeeded by the Sustainable Development Goals and the widespread use of the “Results Framework”. The limitations of the results framework as a measure of agency performance were that goals set by agencies were often too broad and affected by multiple factors for clear attribution.

The second wave was defined by the rise of the use of randomized control trials (RCTs) in impact evaluation and the emergence of the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation. The results from the burgeoning RCTs showed that interventions often do not work. They are often less than 20% in effect, with exception from some experiences in Africa. Wary of the duplication of dubious interventions that studies have shown to have no effects, some organizations such as the Department for International Development (DFID) and the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation demand a statement of evidence from rigorous studies to support new proposals. Furthermore, to establish buy-in, preference was given to a larger set of literature rather than a small number of studies. This led to the emergence and popularity of systematic literature reviews.

Systematic reviews marked the third wave of the evidence revolution. Systematic reviews for all their values posed problems of discoverability and accessibility by policy makers because they are long technical documents. There was need to translate lessons and ideas from these reviews for use by policy makers. He described the production of systematic reviews for use in the policy process as knowledge brokerage and knowledge translation.

He therefore named the fourth wave the brokering wave, defined by the emergence of “researchers whose incentive is to produce systematic reviews relevant for policy and practice”. These researchers are engaged in knowledge brokerage, by providing evidence as responses to the needs of government for informed decision making. Apart from doing reviews, these researchers connect with government agencies that need evidence to discuss priorities, available evidence and interpret them for decision making. They represent the part of an emerging evidence architecture that can institutionalize the use of evidence in policy making. He then described the dimensions of an emerging evidence architecture that will institutionalize the use of evidence in the policy process. Important parts of this architecture included legislation requiring evidence-based policy like the United States 2018 Evidence-based Policy Making Act, data bases that contain studies and reviews, evidence mapping and maps, evidence platforms for user-friendly products, evidence portals, guidelines and checklists. The evolving architecture has benefitted from the what works movement. The goals of the evidence movement can be advanced if the international development community invest in the evidence architecture beyond knowledge brokerage. He emphasized the need to undertake Evidence Ecosystem Assessment, Evidence gaps mapping and evidence-based budgeting. Finally, new technologies such as machine learning, big data and Artificial Intelligence constitute important factors in building the evidence architecture, according to White ( 2019 ). These technologies can facilitate systematic reviews, speed and accuracy of evidence synthesis. These mean that more investment on what works is required.

Demand and Supply Side Challenges in the Use of Scientific Research in the Policy Making Process

Despite the claim of an evidence revolution in the international development policy process, it is generally agreed that the use of evidence is not a settled matter in many countries. Indeed, the claim of an evolving architecture shows very clearly that there are major grounds yet to be covered even in the developed world. How many countries have legislations that require evidence-based policy making? In how many countries of the world can we point to an emerging evidence architecture? In Africa, a few countries have only begun to buy into establishing national evaluation policies and national evaluation systems. These mean that many African countries are still grappling with the results frameworks. As is often the case, many of the policies relating to monitoring and evaluation have been driven by donors and international development agencies such as the DFID. Thus, any engagement with research communication and the use of evidence in policy making must focus on both the demand and supply side. White’s ideas of the evidence architecture provide insight into what is emerging and future possibilities.

Studies on challenges of research communication and the use of evidence in policy have focused on three dimensions in bridging the gap between the world of research and policy (Wimberley and Morris 2007 ). The first dimension is focused on academics. The second is on practitioners and policy actors. The third is the intermediaries who broker within the policy process to promote interaction between the suppliers of research outputs and practitioners or actors who utilize research results for decision making. Thus, studies on research uptake for policy relate to both researchers who supply evidence and practitioners who use evidence in decision and policy making within the dynamic contexts of policy making processes around the world. Such studies also address various ways interventions can be made to smoothen and sustain the connections, to address the challenges of achieving evidence-informed policy making (Oliver and Cairney 2019 ). Some of these challenges are similar across the policy world, while others are contextual challenges, deriving from the nature of specific policy contexts (Wowk et al. 2017 , Phoenix et al. 2019 ).

While the academic environment is a marketplace of contending ideas, the policy process is a place of contending values and interests. These mean that the researcher who wants to take her/his ideas to the policy process must recognize that her/his ideas would face scrutiny. Thus, the quality of research is considered very important and has consequences for the goal of influencing policy. Secondly, it cannot be assumed that policy makers are impervious to research ideas (Newman et al. 2015 ). Scholars must consider the various policy networks and communities, and the effective ways to engage them. In this regard, there are several prescriptions on offer to academics who want to make an impact on the policy process. A lot of the literature on research communication have focused on the supply side. Cairney and Oliver ( 2020 ) provide a survey of such prescriptions derived from concerns about breaking barrier and overcoming obstacles to communication between researchers and practitioners and advancing collaboration, recognizing that academic research is not traditionally designed to feed the policy process. These include the following:

Researchers should produce high-quality research.

They should evolve an effective means of communicating research with the goal of making it easier for policy makers to access research. This relates to presentation of the content of research outputs: the elimination of academic and disciplinary jargons, use of simple, readable and accessible language, aimed for the general and not the ignorant or specialist reader, and the use techniques and forms that can fit into and catch the attention of policy makers.

Engagement with the policy process. Researchers are urged to connect with practitioners, be accessible to policy makers, take advantage of windows of opportunity, and use intermediaries or knowledge brokers.

Pay attention to the context and process of policy and the key actors in the process.

Scholars must be entrepreneurial or active in the policy process, seek collaboration and build relationships.

Academics should co-produce knowledge with practitioners; this is considered one of the best guarantees of the use of evidence in the policy process.

It is however recognized that there are ethical dilemmas and practical challenges around these prescriptions faced by individual researchers in higher education. Indeed, there are several reasons why concern about policy relevance may not to be a priority for these researchers. Time, effort and resources are involved in trying to implement these prescriptions. Everyone cannot be excited by the possibilities and opportunities to make an impact in solving real-world problems. Besides, the probability of making such an impact is often remote as noted from the experience with the results framework even in developed countries (Cairney and Kwiatkowski  2017 ; Egbetokun et al. 2020 ).

From the perspectives of policy context, policy theory provides us with several ideas about the policy process that requires reflection concerning our expectation of promoting the use of evidence (Cairney and Oliver 2020 ). Academic institutions do not provide incentives for those interested in making an impact. In many universities, promotion is not tied to relevance and impact of research. Promotion is tied to publishing in professional and specialized journals of the various disciplines, through which academics communicate with one another, the scientific community. However, breaking out of the ivory tower and reaching out to practitioners may even require specific training or reorientation and few universities invest in such an enterprise. The policy conscious academic would have to go the extra mile of finding ways and means of implementing such prescriptions without institutional incentive.

Policy makers are usually faced with issues that offer a limited time for decision making while scientists take years to publish research findings and they examine issues over a long period of time. There may be a misfit of priorities between scientists and policy makers. The value of communicating one’s research findings with policy makers to produce accessible reports within a short time is not as valuable as securing funding for new research and publishing it in high-status journals with a long-time lag (Cairney 2016 ). Besides, there is a risk of failure to impact regardless of the efforts invested by the individual. This is because the payoff to engagement may be affected by choices already made and reinforced over time within the policy process.

In developing country contexts, there is a challenge of access to the policy process that is already saturated with agenda-laden ideas promoted by powerful western institutions backed by resources. In other words, the challenge of the academic in a developing context is complicated by an unequal access to the policy process. In many African countries, donors and international institutions have a hold in the policy process that may stand in the way of alternative ideas. Such organizations often support their policy preferences with funding that make it impossible for policy makers to resist. In many instances, international policy initiatives have supplanted national policy making (see Mkandawire 1997 ).

In general, it must be recognized that not all researchers would become interested in making a difference in the world regardless of the available incentive to do so. Some would be interested in extending the frontiers of knowledge with the hope that those interested in impacting would pick up their ideas for use in the policy process. Pielke ( 2007 ) provides a typology of policy orientations among scientists regarding influencing public policy: the pure scientist, the issue advocate, the science arbiter and the honest broker. These draw on the typology of research, in terms of the nature and purpose of research. For instance, a distinction is often made between basic and applied research. Basic research is not focused on intervention while applied research targets practice.

The research activities of the pure scientist have no consideration for use or utility of research outputs for decision makers. The importance attached to research is the original contribution to the repository of knowledge. It is the responsibility of those who want to use the knowledge to search for it. They can then draw on the knowledge to clarify and solve issues of public interests. Thus, the pure scientist remains removed from the messiness of policy and politics. This position is particularly appealing if it is recognized that evidence is not the only factor to be considered in public decision making. As noted earlier, in many universities, scholars do not have to demonstrate the impact of their work for promotion. Many scholars are quite content with their roles as scientists and feel not burden to impact the policy process.

On the other hand, the issue advocate is concerned about a political or ideological position and deploys research to advance a cause. The issue advocate is a programmatic scholar or scholar activist who aligns with an interest group or movement seeking to advance policy and politics. For scholars in this orientation, science must be engaged with policy and seek to participate in the decision-making process. This orientation relates with scholars who question the neutrality of science, the argument that values and preferences of the scientist come to play in the choice of issues and priorities of research which we find in critical theory, standpoint epistemologies and similar schools. For such scholars, scientists should be concerned about changing the world and bring scientific knowledge to serve the cause of justice and the public interest.

The third orientation is the science arbiter, who seeks to stay away from explicit considerations of policy and politics but recognizes that as experts or technocrats in society, he or she should provide advice when called upon by decision makers. Decision makers are sometimes confronted with specific questions that require expert judgement. Although the question originates from a debate among decision makers who are faced with practical issues, they require expert knowledge. Questions that can be resolved by science have to be taken to the experts. In this context, the scientist plays no role of an advocate, but that of an adjudicator, who may be on an assessment panel or advisory committee, providing policy makers objective scientific results, assessments or findings.

The fourth type, the honest broker, seeks to pursue the expansion of policy alternatives that can inform decision making by clarifying choices available to decision makers. The aim is to integrate scientific knowledge with stakeholder concerns in the form of alternative possible courses of action. It is recognized that there may be conflict of values among stakeholders and uncertainty in science. But a diversity of perspectives can help place scientific understandings in the context of a wide range of interests. Thus, the scholar concerned about influencing policy must recognize that he or she is part of a community of scholars as well recognize the difficulties of interacting with the policy community with its challenges and opportunities.

It is critical that scientists bring their research findings to bear on the policy process. In many instances, research findings have led to the development of policy agenda and the prioritization of certain issues and effective solutions. It is central to the policy sciences that research is focused on issues that are relevant to policy and decision making. Public policy scholars necessarily seek to address policy issues. This is shown in the level of engagement with the policy actors within the research process, from the conception, execution of research and the implementation of its policy recommendations.

Contemporary social science methodology affirms the need for research to play a vital role in transforming society by advancing socially relevant research findings. Ojebode et al. ( 2018 ) in a study conducted among 400 social science and humanities researchers found that whereas researchers held different views about the type of researcher Africa needed the most, most of them agreed that Africa did not need pure scientists as much as other types (honest brokers and issue advocates) based on Pielke’s ( 2007 ) categorization of researchers.

Public policy scholars conduct research to understand and improve public policy, to advance knowledge in a variety of policy issues and to conduct public policy research for government, business, think tanks and other research organizations. They are expected to actively seek to influence public policy making. This is because public policy as field of study is problem-solving oriented and seeks to provide intervention to address concrete human problems. Such scholars seek to provide expert knowledge in the form of evidence to inform policy making. To do this effectively, they must understand where and how public policy practitioners’ and policy makers get scientific information.

It is equally important to have a clear idea who the policy makers are regarding specific policy issues. Policy makers could include anyone from the president or leader of government, the legislators, the senior public servants, judges or even ordinary citizens. We include ordinary citizens because they sometimes play key roles as implementers, catalysts or beneficiaries of public policy. Hence, knowledge is required for them to be effective players. For instance, during the covid-19 pandemic the general populace was the target of policies to stem the spread of the virus. They were expected to sit at home, wear nose masks and regularly wash their hands. They need to be informed and convinced about the scientific basis of this requirement to achieve voluntary compliance. Without this information available to the public, achieving significant compliance would have been impossible given the level of resistance experienced all over the world.

In general, the news media is a major source of information for policy makers. Politicians who are elected to make public policy on behalf of their constituencies pay attention to the news. The media sets the agenda by reporting what is of interest to the various communities. Politicians pay attention to what matters to their constituents. The news media include newspapers and magazines, the broadcast platforms of television and radio, and social media such as twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and WhatsApp of which they get regular alerts. These media are ubiquitous and are influential sources of information.

In addition to the media, government agencies and departments produce reports and white papers to guide policy makers. Governments have think-tanks, regulatory agencies that monitor developments in such areas as environmental protection, drug administration, sanitation, etc. They also set up commissions to investigate issues such as the Panel of Inquiry frequently used in Nigeria, or the various Committees, (such as the Davis Tax Committee in South Africa) and Commissions of inquiry used across Africa. These bodies provide reports as source of policy decision making for both parliament and the executive arm of government.

Another source of information is the various public hearings organized by the legislature or any of its committees. These hearings provide opportunity for individuals and groups to present written memoranda or speak on issues of concern or focus on such hearing events.

These mean that policy researchers must use these opportunities to communicate research findings. It is becoming the norm that outputs from research are translated into forms that are accessible to policy makers. These included policy briefs, press releases or opinion pieces, blogs and twits. These can be circulated through traditional or social media. The assumption is that the barriers to evidence-informed policy from the perspective of the policy makers can be classified into three:

Available evidence may not be used if policy makers are not aware of their existence and if the research evidence is not in a format that is accessible to policy maker. When policy makers do not have access to timely, quality and relevant research evidence, they resort to other sources of information beyond research. They may not be able to comprehend and identify the key messages from research outputs, not to talk of using the evidence from research outputs, including systematic reviews, if they are detailed and couched in technical language for their decision making. Policy makers may be overwhelmed by the vast amount of information they need to go through to deal with a particular case. Thus, research outputs must be presented in easily accessible format to facilitate their use.

Even when research evidence is presented in accessible format and policy makers are aware of its existence, they may resist the use of evidence if the sub-cultures of policy making grant little importance to evidence-informed solutions. Some of them may prioritize their own opinion when research findings go against their expectations or against current policy. Thus, methods to disseminate evidence must be done in a way that policy makers will be open to receive and consider. There is need to recognize that policy makers tend to interpret new information based on their past attitudes and beliefs, much like the general population. Research evidence may be disregarded if it goes contrary to the political environment or ideological orientation of the prevailing government.

Research needs to be sensitive to different contexts and the competitive environment of policy making. Several factors are implicated in the use or non-use of evidence in policy making. These factors include political and institutional factors such as the level of state centralization and democratization, the influence of external organizations and donors, the organization of bureaucracies and the social norms and values. This implies that policy makers make choices between different priorities while taking into consideration the limited resources available. When policy makers engage scientific research, they make judgements that balances different opinions, as well as claims and counterclaims from interest groups, including scientists. Policy makers do not necessarily hold the same value orientations with scientists on the drive to produce scientific knowledge. They do not see scientific knowledge as less biased than other forms of knowledge such as community and cultural knowledge (Cairney 2016 )

The various platforms listed above for the dissemination of research evidence are useful to achieve uptake because they enable research findings to be more accessible to non-scientific audiences and policy makers. A blog writing is easily accessed and digested by a broad audience who can understand and perhaps apply the key messages from the research output. In addition, a blog creates the opportunity for a more conversational interaction with the audience than an academic publication. By using techniques such as good keyword identification, it is more likely to rank more highly in search engines, increasing the visibility and uptake of blog post. Converting the research output into a blog post enables the researcher to present academic papers, including the title used, in a way that engage with the audience. By converting a research paper to a blog, researchers achieve the positive flow-on effect of research outputs, distilling and presenting some of the key messages for a defined audience. They can also amplify those messages to create a convincing story.

Policy briefs are an information-packaging documents used to support evidence-informed policy making. The name policy brief may also be used interchangeably with the technical note, policy note, evidence brief, evidence summary, research snapshot, etc. (Dagenais and Ridde 2018 ). A policy brief is easier to handle by policy makers than systematic reviews because they are precise documents, taking into consideration the time scales and simplicity required by a non-technical audience. The policy brief may be used to clarify and improve the understanding of a problem or a situation, to confirm or justify a decision or a choice, which has already been made (Arnautu, Diana and Christian Dagenais 2021 ). The policy brief presents the evidence in a manner that is easily identified, interpreted and considered to better inform the parties involved in a policy issue.

There are tools for transforming technical writing, that is the output from scientific research in easy, straightforward manner. They enable the presentation of the main points or key messages of a scientific research. These include the inverted pyramid and the message box. The inverted pyramid is a story-telling tool usually used in news reporting (Fig. 11.1 ). The inverted pyramid style presents information in a descending order of importance with the most crucial details presented first. This enables readers to get the most important information so that they can decide quickly whether to continue or stop reading the story (Scalan 2003 ).

The inverted pyramid

Similarly, the message box helps to explain what the research output is about and why it matters to the policy maker or the journalist (Fig. 11.2 ). It can be used to prepare for interviews with the media, frame a policy brief or press release, structure a presentation or an opinion piece. The message box can also serve as a tool to clarify the main issues of a research, the relevance of the research to the specific audience, and for condensing content of the research work into five to six sentences stating the problem, potential solutions and how the research relates to the concerns of the audience (Baron 2010 : 108). The resulting set of concise messages can be disseminated using channels appropriate for the end user, ranging from social media, to newspapers, to policy briefings and events.

The message box

These tools enable research outputs to be presented in a concise, easy to examine, understandable, user-friendly forms. They enable research outputs to be tailored and targeted to specific audiences with simple and clear messages focused on required information and recommendations. Usually, such presentations contain a link to the original journal article or source.

Research dissemination in contemporary times can be carried out in different ways, from long reports to policy briefs, message boxes, blog posts, social media posts, presentations and many more. Other means of disseminating research may take the form of engagement events by stakeholders to review the content and process of research. These include events in the form of round tables, town hall meetings, workshops, etc., involving exchanges and interactions among scholars, advocates and policy makers. They also include media interviews, writing blog features and data visualization, and social media content creation. However, determining the appropriate tool of communicating research is dependent on who the policy makers are and the kind of research being conducted. Communicating research work can adopt a multi-layered approach.

There is no scarcity of ideas how to engage the policy process. Several scholars have drawn ideas from their experiences in engagement with the policy process, others draw on the experiences of brokers or tease out ideas from policy theory and psychology. Engagements relates directly to the methodology of research. If research is directed at meeting broad policy objectives, then engagement with policy makers should be incorporated right from the inception of the research. Engagement facilitates the effective definition of questions to address the concerns of policy makers. When policy makers are engaged in the formulation of research questions, the research becomes more policy relevant. Evidence-based research is only relevant to policy making if it addresses the key policies at hand, is applicable to a local context and is constructed to meet policy needs. To enhance the possibility of a policy-engaged research, scientists must be open and willing to engage policy makers in the research process.

For social science research to be relevant for policy making, researchers and policy makers must understand their relevance and roles in the knowledge production process. Both parties need a shared understanding of the significance of these roles in policy making and implementation. Africa’s urgent problems require the expertise of policy-engaged researchers who would engage policy actors and politics. Engagement and effective communication of research would benefit society.

Efforts must be made by research communities to create engagement platforms between scientists and researchers. These platforms will ensure that policy makers are carried along at each step of the research process, thereby moving away from the common methods of engagement that reduces policy makers and other non-scientists to mere subjects of scientific research. A close interaction with policy makers on choice of method, design of instruments and major aspects of the research work stimulates an atmosphere of co-knowledge production between both worlds.

Although research communication involves distilling the key findings of high-quality research and presenting them in a format that non-scientists and policy makers can understand, interpret and use for decision making, the relevance of research will not be improved by mere speculations of policy needs and improvement in tools of communication. Effective communication involves developing relationships with stakeholders in the research process. The existence of good-quality research is not sufficient for evidence-informed policy making, a difficult task that requires interventions from both the demand and supply sides of policy-relevant research. Knowledge brokerage should be encouraged to facilitate the use of evidence in the policy processes of African governments by regional bodies like the African Union that has demonstrated capacity to promote policy diffusion across the continent.

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Aiyede, E.R. (2023). From Research to Policy Action: Communicating Research for Public Policy Making. In: Aiyede, E.R., Muganda, B. (eds) Public Policy and Research in Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99724-3_11

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40 The Unique Methodology of Policy Research

Amitai Etzioni is a university professor and Professor of International Relations at The George Washington University. He served as a Senior Advisor at the Carter White House; taught at Columbia University, Harvard University, and University of California, Berkeley; and served as president of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE). A study by Richard Posner ranked him among the top 100 American intellectuals. Etzioni is the author of many books, including Security First (2007), Foreign Policy: Thinking Outside the Box (2016), and Avoiding War with China (2017). His most recent book, Happiness is the Wrong Metric: A Liberal Communitarian Response to Populism, was published by Springer in January 2018.

• Published: 02 September 2009
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This article provides a unique methodology of policy research, focusing on the various factors that differentiate policy research from basic research. It identifies malleability as a key variable of policy research, and this is defined as the amount of resources that would have to be expended to cause change in a given variable or variables. The scope of analysis/factors of policy research is shown to encompass all the major facets of the social phenomenon it is trying to deal with. Basic research, on the other hand, fragments the world into abstract and analytical slices, which are then studied individually. The last two differentiating factors of policy research and basic research, which are privacy and communication, are studied in the last two sections of the article.

Policy research requires a profoundly different methodology from that on which basic research relies, because policy research is always dedicated to changing the world while basic research seeks to understand it as it is. 1 The notion that if one merely understands the world better, then one will in turn know how to better it, is not supported by the evidence.

Typical policy goals are the reduction of poverty, curbing crime, cutting pollution, or changing some other condition (Mitchell and Mitchell 1969, 393) . Even those policies whose purpose is to maintain the status quo are promoting change—they aim to slow down or even reverse processes of deterioration, for instance that of natural monuments or historical documents. When no change is sought, say, when no one is concerned with changing the face of the moon, then there is no need for policy research in that particular area.

Moreover, although understanding the causes of a phenomenon, which successful basic research allows, is helpful in formulating policy, often a large amount of other information that is structured in a different manner best serves policy makers. 2 Policy researchers draw on a large amount of information that has no particular analytical base or theoretical background (of the kind that basic research provides). 3 In this sense medical science, which deals with changing bodies and minds, is a protypical policy science. It is estimated that about half of the information physicians employ has no basis in biology, chemistry, or any other science; but rather it is based on an accumulation of experience. 4 This knowledge is passed on from one medical cohort to another, as “these are the way things are done” and “they work.”

The same holds true for other policy sciences. For instance, criminologists who inform a local government that studies show that rehabilitation works more effectively in minimum security prisons than in maximum security prisons (a fact that can be explained by sociological theoretical concepts based on basic research) 5 know from long experience that they had better also alert the local authorities that such a reduction in security could potentially lead some inmates to escape and commit crimes in surrounding areas. Without being willing to accept such a “side effect” of the changed security policy, those governments who introduced it may well lose the next election and security in the prison will be returned to its previously high level. There is no particular sociological theoretical reason for escapes to rise when security is lowered. It is an observation based on common sense and experience; however it is hardly an observation that policy makers, let alone policy researchers should ignore. (They may though explore ways of coping with this “side effect,” for instance by either preparing the public ahead of time, introducing an alert system when inmates escape, or some other such measure.)

The examples just given seek to illustrate the difference between the information that basic research generates versus information that plays a major role in policy research. That is, there are important parts of the knowledge on which policy research draws that are based on distilled practice and are not derivable from basic research. Much of what follows deals with major differences in the ways that information and analysis are structured in sound policy research in contrast to the ways basic research is carried out.

One clarification before I can proceed: Policy research should not be confused with applied research. Applied research presumes that a policy decision has already been made and those responsible are now looking for the most efficient ways to implement it. Policy research helps to determine what the policy decision ought to be.

1. Malleability

A major difference between basic and policy research is that malleability is a key variable for the latter though not the former (Weimer and Vining 1989; 4) . Indeed for policy researchers it is arguably the single most important variable. Malleability for the purposes at hand ought to be defined as the amount of resources (including time, energy, and political capital) that would have to be expended to cause change in a given variable or variables. For policy research, malleability is a cardinal consideration because resources always fall short of what is required to implement given policy goals. Hence, to employ resources effectively requires determining the relative results to be generated from different patterns of allocation (Dunn 1981, 334– 402) . In contrast, basic research has no principled reason to favor some factors (or variables) over others. For basic research, it matters little if at all whether a condition under study can be modified and if it can how much it would cost. To illustrate, many sociological studies compare people by gender and age and although these variables may seem relevant, they are of limited value to policy research. Other variables used, such as the levels of income of various populations, the extent of education of various racial and ethnic groups, and the average size of cities, are somewhat more malleable but still not highly so. In contrast, perceptions are much more malleable.

One may say that basic research should reveal a preference for variables that have been less studied; however, such a consideration concerns the economics and politics of science rather than methodology. Because all scientific findings are conditional and temporary and often subject to profound revision and recasting, for basic researchers, retesting old findings can be just as valuable as covering new variables. In short, although in principle for basic research the study of all variables is legitimate, in a given period of time or amongst a given group of scientists, some may consider certain variables as more “interesting” or “promising” than others. In contrast, to reiterate, for policy research, malleability is the most important variable as it is directly related to its core reason for being: Promoting change.

Given the dominance of basic research methodology in the ways policy research is taught, it is not surprising to find that the question of which variables are more malleable than others is rarely studied in any systematic way. Due to the importance of this issue for policy research, some elaboration and illustrations are called for. Economic feasibility is a good case in point. Many policy researchers' final reports do not include any, not even crude estimates of the costs involved in what they are recommending. 6 Even less common is any consideration of the question of whether such changes can be made acceptable to elected representatives and the public at large; that is, political feasibility (Weimer and Vining 1989, 292– 324) . For instance, over the last decades several groups favored advancing their policy goals through constitutional amendments, ignoring the fact that these are extremely difficult to get passed.

In other cases, feasibility is treated as a secondary “applied” question to be studied later, after policy makers adopt the recommended policy. However, the issue runs much deeper than the assessments of feasibility of one kind or another. The challenge to policy research is to determine the relative resistance to change according to the different variables that are to be tackled. And this question must be tackled not on an ad hoc basis, but rather as a major part of systematic policy research. Moreover, if the variables involved are studied from this viewpoint, they themselves may be changed; that is, feasibility is enhanced rather than treated as a given.

Another example of the cardinal need to take malleability into account when conducting policy research concerns changing public attitudes. Policy makers often favor a “public education' campaign when they desire to affect people's beliefs and conduct. Policy makers tend to assume that it is feasible to change such predispositions through a way that might be called the Madison Avenue approach, which entails running a series of commercials (or public service announcements), mounting billboards, obtaining celebrity endorsements, and so on.

For example, the United States engaged in such a campaign in 2003 and 2004 to change the hearts and minds of “the Arab street” through what has also been termed “public diplomacy.” 7 The way this was carried out provides a vivid example of lack of attention to feasibility issues. American public diplomacy, developed by the State Department, included commercials, websites, and speakers programs that sought to “reconnect the world's billion Muslims with the United States the way McDonald's highlights its billion customers served” (Satloff 2003, 18) . It was based on the premiss that “blitzing Arab and Muslim countries with Britney Spears videos and Arabic‐language sitcoms will earn Washington millions of new Muslim sympathizers” (Satloff 2003, 18) . A study found that the results were “disastrous” (Satloff 2003, 18) . Some countries declined to air the messages and many Muslims who did see the material viewed it as blatant propaganda and offensive rather than compelling.

Actually, policy researchers bent on studying feasibility report that the Madison Avenue approach works only when large amounts of money are spent to shift people from one product to another when there are next to no differences between them (e.g. two brands of toothpaste) and when there is an inclination to use the product in the first place. However, when these methods are applied to changing attitudes about matters as different as condom use, 8 the United Nations, 9 electoral reform, and so forth, they are much less successful. Changing people's behavior—say to conserve energy, drive slower, cease smoking—is many hundreds of times more difficult. This is a major reason why totalitarian regimes, despite intensive public education campaigns, usually fail. The question of what is most feasible is determined by fiat by policy makers and their staffs rather than by studies that are reported to the policy makers by policy researchers. Hence decisions are often based on a fly‐by‐the‐seat‐ of‐your‐pants sense of what can be changed rather than on empirical evidence. 10 One of the few exceptions is studies of nation building in which several key policy researchers presented the reasons why such endeavors can be carried out at best only slowly while at the same time many policy makers claimed that it could be achieved in short order and at low cost. 11

In a preliminary stab at outlining the relative malleability of various factors, one may note that as a rule the laws of nature are not malleable; social relations, including patterns of asset distribution and power, are of limited malleability; and symbolic relations are highly malleable. Thus any policy‐making body that would seek to modify the level of gravity, for example, not for a particular situation (for instance a space travel simulator) but in general, will find this task at best extremely difficult to advance. In contrast, those who seek to change a flag, a national motto, the ways people refer to one another (e.g. Ms Instead of girl or broad), have a relatively easy time of doing so. Changes in the distribution of wealth among the classes or races—by public policy—are easier than changes involving the laws of nature, but more difficult than changing hearts and minds.

When policy researchers or policy makers ignore these observations and enact laws that seek grand and quick changes in power relations and economic patterns, the laws are soon reversed. A case in point is the developments that ensued when a policy researcher inserted into legislation the phrase “maximum feasible participation of the poor.” This Act was used to try to circumvent prevailing local power structures by directing federal funds to voluntary groups that included the poor on their advisory boards, which thus helped “empower the poor.” The law was nullified shortly thereafter. Similarly, when a constitutional amendment was enacted that banned the consumption of alcohol in the United States, it had some severely distorted effects on the American justice and law enforcement systems and did little actually to reduce the consumption of alcohol. It was also the only constitutional amendment ever to be repealed.

Among social changes, often legal and political reduction in inequality is relatively easier to come by than are socioeconomic changes along similar lines. Thus, African‐Americans and women gained de jure and de facto voting rights long before the differences in their income and representation in the seats of power moved closer to those of whites (in the case of African‐Americans) and of men (in the case of women). Nor have socioeconomic differences been reduced nearly as much as legal and political differences, although in both realms considerable inequalities remain. The same is true not just for the United States, but for other free societies and those that have been recently liberated.

In short, there are important differences in which dedication of resources, commitment of political capital, and public education are needed in order to bring about change. Sound policy research best makes the determination of which factors are more malleable than others, which is a major subject of study.

2. Scope of Analysis

Another particularly important difference between basic research and policy research methodology concerns the scope of factors that are best encompassed. Policy research at its best encompasses all the major facets of the social phenomenon it is trying to deal with. 12 In contrast, basic research proceeds by fragmenting the world into abstract, analytical slices which are then studied individually.

A wit has suggested that in economics everything has a price; in sociology, nothing has a price. Policy makers and hence researchers are at a disadvantage when they formulate preferred policy alternatives without paying attention to the longer‐run economic and budgetary effects—or the effect of such policy on social relations including families (e.g. tax preferences for singles), socioeconomic classes (e.g. estate taxes), and so on.

To put it in elementary terms, a basic researcher may well study only the prices of flowers (together with other economic factors); a physiologist the wilting processes; a social psychologist the symbolic meaning of flowers; and so forth. But a community that plans to grow flowers in its public gardens must deal with most, if not all of these elements and the relations between them. Flowers that are quick to wilt will not be suitable for its public gardens; the community will be willing to pay more for flowers that have a longer life or those that command a positive symbolic meaning, and so on.

Medicine provides another model of a policy science. It cannot be based only on biology, chemistry, anatomy, or any one science that studies a subset of variables relating to the body. Instead physicians draw on all these sciences and add observations of interaction effects among the variables. This forms a medical knowledge base and drives “policy” recommendations (i.e. medical prescriptions). Indeed doctors have often been chastised when they do not take into account still other variables, such as those studied by psychologists and anthropologists. Similarly, international relations is a policy science that best combines variables studied by economists, political scientists, law professors, and many others.

In short, the scope of variables that basic research encompasses can be quite legitimate and effective but also rather narrow. Policy researchers must be more eclectic and include at least all the variables that account for a significant degree of variance in the phenomenon that the policy aims to change.

3. Private and Confidential

Basic research is a public endeavor. As a rule its results are published so that others can critically assess them and piece them together with their findings and those of still others in order to build ever more encompassing and robust bodies of knowledge. Unpublished work is often not considered when scientists are evaluated for hiring and promoting, for prizes, or for some other reason, especially not if the work is kept secret for commercial or public security reasons. Historically, scientific findings were published in monographs, books, and articles in suitable journals. These served as the main outlets for the findings of basic research both because only by making scientific findings public could they become part of the cumulative scientific knowledge base and also because publication indicates that they have already passed some measure of peer review. It is only through peer review that evidence can be critically scrutinized. In recent years findings are still made public but increasingly they are often posted on websites, most of which lack peer review foundations, which is one reason why they are less trusted and not treated as a full‐fledged publication. Publication is still considered an essential element of basic research.

In contrast, the findings of policy research are often not published—they are provided in private to one policy maker or another (Radin 1997, 204– 18) . The main purpose of policy research is not to contribute to the cumulative process of building knowledge but rather to put to service available knowledge. In that profound sense policy research is often not public but client oriented. 13 Although some policy research is conducted in think tanks and public policy schools that may treat it similarly to basic research, more often than not it is conducted in specialized units in government agencies, the White House, corporate associations, and labor unions. And often tools of policy research are memos and briefings, not publications.

Often the findings of policy researchers are considered confidential or are governed by state secret acts (which is the case in many nations that have a less strong view of civil liberties than does the United States). That is, the findings are merely aimed at a specific client or a group of clients, and sharing them with the public is considered an offense. 14

4. Communication

Basic researchers, as a rule, are much less concerned with communicating, especially with a larger, “secular” public than are policy researchers. This may at first seem a contradiction to the previously made point that science (in the basic research sense) is public while policy research is often “private” (even when conducted for public officials). The seeming contradiction vanishes once one notes that basic researchers are obligated to share their findings with their colleagues , often a small group, and that they seek feedback from this group for both scientific and psychological validation. However, as a rule basic researchers have little interest in the public at large. Indeed, they tend to be highly critical of those who seek to reach such an audience—as did scholars such as Jay Gould and Carl Sagan (Etzioni 2003, 57– 60) .

In contrast, policy researchers often recognize the need to mobilize public support for the policies that their findings favor and hence they tend to help policy makers to mobilize such support by communicating with the public. James Fishkin developed a policy idea he called “deliberative democracy,” which entailed bringing together a group of people who constitute a living sample of the population for a period of time during which they are exposed to public education and presentations by public figures, and they are given a chance to have a dialogue. By measuring the changes in the views of this living sample, Fishkin found that one is able to learn how to change the public's mind. Fishkin did not just develop the concept and publish his ideas, but conducted a long and intensive campaign through radio, TV, newspapers, visits with public leaders, and much more, until his living sample was implemented in several locations (Fishkin 1997) . Indeed, according to Eugene Bardach, policy researchers must prepare themselves for “a long campaign potentially involving many players, including the mass public” (Bardach 2002, 115– 17) .

Hence, basic researchers are more likely to use technical terms (which may sound like jargon to outsiders), mathematical notations, extensive footnotes, and other such scientific features. On the other hand, policy researchers are more likely to express themselves in the vernacular and avoid technical terms.

One can readily show numerous publications of professors at schools of public policy and even think tanks that are rather similar if not indistinguishable from those of basic researchers. 15 But this is the case because these schools conduct mostly basic, and surprisingly little policy research. For example, on 28 April 2004 Google search found only 210 entries for “policy research methodology,” the good part of which referred to university classes by that name. But on closer examination, most entries were referring to basic, not policy research methodology. For instance, a course titled “Cultural Policy Research Methodology” at Griffith University in Australia includes in its course description “basic research techniques, particularly survey methodologies, qualitative methods and a more in depth approach to statistics.” 16 Many other entries were for classes in policy or research methodology (usually basic). The main reasons for this are ( a ) because few places train people in the special methodologies that policy research requires and ( b ) the reward structure is closely tied to basic research. Typically, promotions (especially tenure) at public policy schools are determined by evaluations and votes by senior colleagues from the basic research departments at the same universities or at other ones. Thus the future of an economist at the Harvard Business School may depend on what her colleagues in the Harvard Economics department think of her work. More informally, being invited to become a member of a basic research department is considered a source of prestige and an opportunity to shore up one's training and research. Conversely, only being affiliated with a policy school (like other professional schools) indicates a lack of recognition, which may translate into objective disadvantages. This pecking order, which favors basic over policy (considered “applied”) research, is of considerable psychological importance to researchers in practically all universities. Even in think tanks dedicated to policy research, many respect basic research more than policy research and hope to conduct it one day or regret that they are not suited to carry it out. 17

People who work for think tanks, which are largely dedicated to policy research, often seek to move to universities, in which tenure is more common and there is a greater sense of prestige. Hence many such researchers are keen to keep their “basic” credentials, although often they are unaware of the special methodology that policy research requires or are untutored in carrying it out in the first place because they were trained in basic research modes instead.

At annual meetings of one's discipline, in which findings are presented and evaluated, jobs are negotiated and information about them shared, and prestige scoring is rearranged, policy researchers will typically attend those dominated by their basic research colleagues. And attendance at policy research associations (such as the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management) is meager. Most prizes and other awards available to researchers go to those who conduct basic research.

In short, although the logic of policy research favors it to be more communicative than basic research, this is often not the case because the training and institutional formations in which policy research is largely conducted favor basic research.

Bardach, E. ( 2002 ). Educating the client: an introduction.   Journal of Policy Analysis and Management , 21 (1): 115–17. 10.1002/pam.1044

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Carothers, T.   1999 . Aiding Democracy Abroad: The Learning Curve. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

DeJong, W. , Wolf, R. C. , and Austin, S. B.   2001 . US federally funded television public service announcements (PSAs) to prevent HIV/AIDS: a content analysis.   Journal of Health Communication , 6: 249–63. 10.1080/108107301752384433

Dunn, W. N.   1981 . Public Policy Analysis: An Introduction . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Etzioni, A.   1968 . The Active Society: A Theory of Societal and Political Processes . New York: Free Press.

——  1971 a . A Comparative Analysis of Complex Organizations , rev. edn. New York: Free Press.

——  1971 b . Policy research.   American Sociologist , 6 (supplementary issue: June): 8–12.

——  2003 . My Brother's Keeper: A Memoir and a Message . Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield.

——  2004 . A self‐restrained approach to nation‐building by foreign powers.   International Affairs , 80: 1–17. 10.1111/j.1468-2346.2004.00362.x

Fishkin, J. S.   1997 . The Voice of the People: Public Opinion and Democracy . New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

Free Expression Project   2003 . The Progress of Science and Useful Arts: Why Copyright Today Threatens Intellectual Freedom , 2nd edn. New York: Free Expression Project; available at: www.fepproject.org/policyreports/copyright2dconc.html (accessed 27 Apr. 2004).

Inglefinger, F. J. , Relman, A. S. , and Findland, M.   1966 . Controversy in Internal Medicine . Philadelphia: W. B. Saunder.

Lasswell, H. , and Lerner, D.   1951 . The Policy Sciences . Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Miller, D. W. 2001. Poking holes in the theory of broken windows. Chronicle of Higher Education (Feb.): A14.

Miller, J. 2004. Censored study on bioterror doubts U.S. preparedness. New York Times (29 Mar.): A15.

Mitchell, J. , and Mitchell, W.   1969 . Policy‐Making and Human Welfare . Chicago: Rand McNally.

Nelson, B.   1999 . Diversity and public problem solving: ideas and practice in policy education.   Journal of Policy Analysis and Management , 18: 134–55. 10.1002/(SICI)1520-6688(199924)18:1<134::AID-PAM9>3.0.CO;2-6

Radin, B. A.   1997 . The evolution of the policy analysis field: from conversation to conversations.   Journal of Policy Analysis and Management , 16: 204–18. 10.1002/(SICI)1520-6688(199721)16:2<204::AID-PAM1>3.0.CO;2-M

Raver, C.   2002 . Emotions matter: making the case for the role of young children's emotional development for early school readiness.   Social Policy Report , 16 (3): 3–19.

Roe, E.   1998 . Taking Complexity Seriously: Policy Analysis, Triangulation, and Sustainable Development . Boston: Kluwer Academic.

Satloff, R.   2003 . How to win friends and influence Arabs.   Weekly Standard , 18 Aug: 18–19.

Schön, D.   1983 . The Reflective Practitioner . New York: Basic Books.

Scott, J. 1994. Condom ads get direct: use them and get sex. Atlanta Journal and Constitution (3 Oct.): B1.

Star, S. A. , and Hughes, H. M.   1950 . Report on an educational campaign: the Cincinnati plan for the United Nations. American   Journal of Sociology , 55: 389–400.

Weimer, D. L. , and Vining, A. R.   1989 . Policy Analysis: Concepts and Practice . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Weiss, C.   1983 . Ideology, interests and information: the basis of policy positions. Pp. 213–45 in Ethics, the Social Sciences and Policy Analysis , ed. D. Callahan and B. Jennings . New York: Plenum.

Wilson, J. Q. , and Kelling, G.   1982 . Broken windows: the police and neighborhood safety.   Atlantic Monthly , 249 (3: Mar.): 29–38.

The first book to deal with policy sciences and consequently often cited is Lasswell and Lerner's The Policy Sciences (1951) . However this book does not address the methodological issues at hand. For an early treatment of these issues, see Etzioni 1971 b , 1968 .

For an example of how to structure and present policy research and analysis, see Dunn 1981, 322 .

For example many policy makers subscribe to George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson's criminology theories because they make sense, despite the fact that they are not grounded in academic research. See Wilson and Kelling 1982 . For criticisms of this approach to criminology, see Miller 2001 .

“Much” of medicine is not scientifically supported (Inglefinger, Relman, and Findland 1966) . “85 percent of the problems a doctor sees in his office are not in the book” (quoted from a physician in Schön 1983, 16) .

See Etzioni 1971 a , 246– 7 .

See for example Free Expression Project 2003 ; Raver 2002, 3– 19 .

See, for instance, The Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim World, “Changing minds, winning peace: a new strategic direction for U.S. public diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim world,” Oct, 2003, Edward P. Djerejian, chair.

For instance, the Centers for Disease Control conducted a ten‐year ad campaign to educate Americans about condoms and to encourage their use to prevent HIV transmission. After spending millions of dollars on these ads, a CDC study found that only 45 % of sexually active high school students used a condom the last time they had sex: see Scott 1994 . A recent evaluation of the program issued an unqualified “no” in answer to the question, “Has the U.S. federal government's HIV /AIDS television [public service announcement] campaign been designed not only to make the public aware of HIV /AIDS but also to provide appropriate messages to motivate and reinforce behavior change?” See DeJong, Wolf, and Austin 2001, 256 . Of the fifty‐six ads reviewed, fifty were created by the CDC, the other six were created by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Star and Hughes 1950 , quoted in Berelson and Steiner 1964, 530 .

Indeed unlike science, Carol Weiss has argued that in the policy field it may be impossible to separate objective knowledge from ideology or interests: see Weiss 1983 .

See Carothers 1999 ; Etzioni 2004 .

Roe 1998 . For an academic policy research perspective, see Nelson 1999 .

See “Professional practice symposium: educating the client,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management , 21 (1: 2002): 115– 36.

For instance, the Defense Department has prohibited a Washington think tank from publishing a complete report about the lack of government preparedness for bioterror attacks: see Miller 2004 .

See for instance the reports of the family research division of the Heritage Foundation, available at www.heritage.org/research/family/issues2004.cfm (accessed 29 Apr. 2004). See also “The war on drugs: addicted to failure,” Recommendations of the Citizens' Commission on US Drug Policy, available at www.ips‐dc.org/projects /drugpolicy.htm (accessed 29 Apr. 2004).

See Griffith University course catalog. Available at: www22.gu.edu.au/STIP/servlet/STIP?s=7319AMC (accessed 28 Apr. 2004).

This section is based on my personal observations of organizations such as the John F. Kennedy School of Government, the American Enterprise Institute, RAND, CATO, the Heritage Foundation, and many others.

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Article contents

Public opinion and public policy.

• Christopher Wlezien Christopher Wlezien Department of Government, University of Texas, Austin
•  and  Stuart N. Soroka Stuart N. Soroka Department of Communication, University of California Los Angeles
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.74
• Published online: 05 April 2016
• This version: 22 December 2021
• Previous version

The link between public opinion and public policy is of special importance in representative democracies, as we expect elected officials to care about what voters think. Not surprisingly, a large body of literature tests whether policy is a function of public preferences. Some literature also considers the mechanisms by which preferences are converted to policy. Yet other work explores whether and how the magnitude of opinion representation varies systematically across issues and political institutions. In all this research, public opinion is an independent variable—an important driver of public policy change—but it is also a dependent variable, one that is a consequence of policy itself. Indeed, the ongoing existence of both policy representation and public responsiveness is critical to the functioning of representative democracy.

• representation
• responsiveness
• political institutions
• electoral systems
• government institutions

Updated in this version

Extended scope of review to include new lines of research, added citations to new research, and included discussions of findings.

Introduction

The representation of public opinion in public policy is of obvious importance in representative democracies. Not surprisingly, there is a considerable body of research addressing the connection between the public and the government. This work is broad and varied. Some research focuses on “descriptive representation”—whether the partisan and demographic characteristics of elected politicians match the characteristics of the electorate itself. Other studies examine the positions of policymakers, observed, for instance, through the roll call voting behavior of politicians. Still other research focuses on policy more directly, concentrating on legislative (and budgetary) outcomes.

Descriptive traits, roll call voting behavior, and policy outcomes capture rather different aspects of representation, but each can be useful in gauging the nature and quality of democratic responsiveness. This article reviews the literature on representative behaviors and outputs. The mechanics by which preferences are converted to policy are considered, along with extensions of the basic model—where the magnitude of opinion representation varies systematically across issues and political institutions. For most of the article, public opinion is an independent variable—an important driver of public policy change. In a concluding section, however, we reconsider opinion as a dependent variable; specifically, we discuss its responsiveness to policy change. The ongoing existence of both policy representation and public responsiveness to policy, we argue, is critical to the functioning of representative democracy.

Opinion Representation in Theory and Practice

A fundamental expectation of democratic governance is that policy will be a function of opinion (see, e.g., Dahl, 1971 ; Pitkin, 1967 ). 1 We can express this expectation formally as follows:

where P designates policy and O opinion, say, the public’s average preference for redistribution. This is not meant to be a complete model of policy, of course, as we know that many other things also matter (Jacobs & Shapiro, 2000 ). The equation is simply intended to characterize the general relationship between opinion and policy. To be absolutely clear, we expect a positive relationship—when the public wants a lot of redistribution, for example, they should get a lot of it. Whether and the extent to which this is true is a critical indicator of effective representation. Such “responsiveness” of policy to opinion does not mean that the public is getting what it wants, however. For this, we would need to assess the relationship between policy and the public’s preferred level of policy, P * , the latter of which can be difficult to capture. 2 Not surprisingly, few studies consider whether the public actually gets what it wants, though some research examines the “congruence” between preference majorities and policy adoption, as we will see.

Representation in Positions

A substantial body of research examines the relationship between the positions held by the public and elected officials. Much of this scholarship compares results of public opinion surveys with results of surveys of politicians. Other research compares public opinion surveys with the platforms or “manifestos” of political parties. Yet other studies consider actual roll call votes, particularly in systems with single member districts, where legislators represent geographic areas.

Dyadic Representation

Early empirical work on the opinion–policy link was sparked in large part by Miller and Stokes’s ( 1963 ) “Constituency Influence in Congress.” These authors brought together data on public preferences by constituency, and both surveys and roll call voting behavior of U.S. members of Congress (MCs) on social welfare, foreign affairs, and civil rights. Correlations between constituency preferences and members of Congress’s behavior suggested that the latter was guided in part by constituency opinion. The finding was striking at the time, empirically demonstrating a mode of representation quite different from the party-centered work that had preceded it.

This seminal study spawned a vast literature seeking to establish links between the voting behavior of representatives and some combination of constituency opinion, constituency aggregate demographics, and representatives’ own demographic traits and party affiliations. The research is concentrated in the United States but has been extended to other countries with legislative districts (e.g., Converse & Pierce, 1986 ).

Referred to as studies of dyadic representation (Weissberg, 1978 ), the literature on roll call voting asserts that representation is to be found in the relationship between individual constituencies and individual representatives. A good amount of work bears out significant connections in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate (e.g., Wright & Berkman, 1986 ). Recognizing important limitations in previous research relying on correlations, Bafumi and Herron ( 2010 ) attempt to directly match the ideal points of constituencies and representatives in an analysis of congressional roll calls. This research relies on broad ideological positions that encompass multiple issues (and other things), which has its own limitations, as Broockman ( 2016 ) illustrates in his fascinating analysis.

Of course, a positive relationship between opinion in districts and the roll call votes of their representatives does not mean that public opinion actually causes policy, as it could be that policymakers are reacting to something else, including the same things that determine public opinion. Although covariates may help identify the direction of causality in observational studies, there is no escaping the omitted variable(s) problem. Since is difficult to demonstrate causality in such studies, it is important that experimental work finds evidence of causal effects of opinion on representatives’ roll call voting behavior (Butler & Nickerson, 2011 ).

Collective Representation

In countries without geographic constituencies, as in many of those that allocate legislative seats using proportional representation, scholars have examined “collective representation”—the match between public opinion and the positions of institutions, such as legislatures or executives. The first work of this type actually focused on the United States, where Weissberg ( 1978 ) proposed collective congressional representation as an alternative to dyadic representation. The relevance of collective representation even in a system that facilitates constituency-level representation is important: as Weissberg noted, concordance between individual legislators’ actions and constituency preferences is a helpful but not sufficient condition for policy representation; indeed, most individual representatives could vote against the majority opinion in their district and, so long as the various district preferences were reflected in the votes of other districts’ representatives, policy outcomes could still be representative of the (national) majority preference.

A good amount of work since has focused on other countries. Building on a decade’s work by a large number of scholars, Miller et al. ( 1999 ) examine various mass–elite linkages, including the representation of public opinion. A great deal of related research compares public opinion and the positions of parties, which Dalton et al. ( 2011 ) review and summarize. Powell ( 2000 ) assesses the match between the public’s ideological dispositions and those of governments, focusing especially on the effects of electoral systems. Budge et al. ( 2012 ) and Dalton et al. ( 2011 ) measure the positions of the public, political parties, and governments and assess their relationships, and find significant connections. While scholars have typically examined collective representation across space, a number of recent articles study dynamics and focus explicitly on the positions of the executive (e.g., Hakhverdian, 2010 ; Hobolt & Klemmensen, 2005 ; Jennings & John, 2009 ).

Representation in Policy

Research on representation in positions tells us something about the representation of opinion but tells us less about representation in actual policy. While positions and policies are related, after all, they are not the same things, and there is a growing body of work focused directly on policy. Scholarship in this area has tended to take one of five approaches: correspondence, consistency, covariation, dynamic representation, and congruence. These approaches are differentiated to a large extent by data availability, though, as we shall see, each has its advantages.

Policy Correspondence

The policy correspondence approach to the study of representation is similar to most of the research on policy positions. Scholars in this tradition are interested in the correlation between expressed public preferences and policy across geographic areas, such as states or countries. The research asks: to what extent do levels of policy vary across areas alongside public preferences for policy? Erikson et al.’s ( 1993 ) Statehouse Democracy stands out as the classic example of this kind of research. These authors examine the relationship between estimated state ideology scores and a measure of state policy liberalism; results show quite a strong relationship between the two, and the work spawned a number of studies at the state level in the United States (see, e.g., Camobreco & Barnello, 2008 ; Carsey & Harden, 2010 ).

There is similar research on very local levels of government in the United States, including cities (Tausanovitch & Warshaw, 2014 ) and school districts (Berkman & Plutzer, 2005 ). Use of the approach outside the United States has been limited, though some scholars have assessed the relationship between opinion and policy across countries (e.g., Brooks & Manza, 2007 ).

Policy Consistency

We draw the policy “consistency” designation from Monroe ( 1998 ), whose work on the United States provides an archetypal example of this line of analysis. This research asks: to what extent is policy change consistent with a prior public preference for policy change? The approach involves identifying a single survey question asking about policy change and examining the relationship between the proportion of respondents favoring that change and the existence of proximate changes in policy. “Consistency,” then, refers to the match between public preferences for change and actual policy change, what Weissberg ( 1976 ) referred to as “majoritarian congruence.” Across more than 500 cases from 1981 to 1993, for instance, Monroe finds a consistency score of 55%.

Consistency scores can be estimated for separate policy domains or for different time periods. Indeed, this is where consistency scores are most interesting—they can indicate those domains (and times) in which opinion representation is particularly good (or bad). What consistency scores cannot do is establish a clear causal connection between public opinion and policy change. As Monroe ( 1998 , p. 12) himself notes, the best this kind of analysis can do is to establish the coincidence of a public preference for change and actual policy change. A demonstration that preferences lead policy requires an analysis of data over time—data that can show, at least, that the public preference for change precedes the policy change.

The principal advantages of the consistency approach relate to the fact that it requires little data—indeed, each case requires just one survey result, and the capacity to assess whether there was a proximate change in policy in that domain. As a consequence, the approach can easily include a wide range of policy issues. Where overall policy responsiveness is concerned, the inclusion of as many policy domains as possible is critical. Polling questions deal with issues of some level of public salience, so estimated overall responsiveness will be based on a rather restricted set of policy domains. Moreover, because policy responsiveness is likely greatest for salient issues—as we shall discuss later—an estimate of overall policy responsiveness will almost necessarily be biased upward, relying as it does on only those salient issues about which pollsters ask questions (see Burstein, 2003 ). The consistency approach, by requiring just a single question, can encompass a broader spectrum of policy issues than the more data-intensive covariation or dynamic representation approaches described later.

Relatively light data requirements also mean that the consistency approach has been quite easily exported outside the United States to countries where comparatively fewer opinion data are available (e.g., Brooks, 1987 ; Petry, 1999 ). These studies compare preferences for policy change at a single point in time with actual policy change in a subsequent period—usually the next 12 months—and in so doing add much to our understanding of the opinion–policy link across countries. The ongoing interaction between opinion and policy is, however, more appropriately captured by other approaches, as we shall see.

Policy Covariation

Policy covariation studies involve a slightly more data-intensive approach to the link between opinion and policy. While consistency studies measure preference for policy change at a single point in time, covariation studies rely on cases in which the same policy question was asked at two different points in time. Changes in the distribution of responses over that period are compared with proximate policy change. Measures of policy also tend to be more comprehensive in this approach. Policy is typically examined both before and after the period of opinion change, so it is clearer when opinion precedes policy, or vice versa. The central question, then, is: to what extent do changes in policy follow related changes in public preferences for policy?

Studies of policy covariation go further than consistency studies in examining both opinion and policy over time and are thus better equipped to examine the causal order of opinion and policy change. The best-known and most comprehensive study of policy covariation is Page and Shapiro’s ( 1983 ) study of more than 300 federal U.S. policy issues from the mid-1930s to the late 1970s. These authors compare measures of covariation across domains and institutions, similar to Monroe, but with the additional advantage of being able to ascertain whether policy change followed or preceded opinion change. Indeed, a critical insight offered by this approach is that policy change often precedes measured opinion change.

The covariation approach has been used outside the United States as well (e.g., Bélanger & Pétry, 2005 ). The approach has much to recommend it: it is not so data-intensive as to be difficult to apply outside the United States, but at the same time it gathers enough information to get a general sense for the direction of causality between opinion and policy. Still, as with consistency, the limited period over which preferences and policies are measured makes it difficult to ascertain which came first. And preferences can change in part because of previous policy changes (see Wlezien, 1995 ). Such interaction over time is missed by the covariation approach but can be captured in the dynamic representation approach.

Dynamic Representation

Where regular, frequent readings of opinion and policy are available, it is possible to analyze the time-serial relationship(s) between them—that is, with a sufficient number of cases, we can statistically assess the effect of opinion on policy over time. The main research question is: does public opinion reliably influence policy change? Given the need for reasonably long time series, there is a surprisingly long history of research in the area, particularly in the United States.

Early studies of dynamic representation preceded the development of the time-series econometrics that has come to characterize the field. In The Attentive Public , Devine’s ( 1970 ) analysis includes plots of (survey-based) mean policy support measures for different publics, alongside appropriations in those domains; meanwhile, Weissberg ( 1978 ) plots opinion measures alongside spending measures for 11 different U.S. policy domains. In each case, over-time analysis consists mainly of visual interpretations of graphs. Nevertheless, these authors’ broader longitudinal outlook makes their work the clear precursor to more recent research on dynamic representation.

The term “dynamic representation” is drawn from Stimson et al.’s ( 1995 ) article of the same title, a critical and representative example of what these analyses have come to look like. The article posits a model in which policy is a function of public preferences, either directly through politicians’ reactions to shifts in opinion, or indirectly through elections that result in shifts in the partisan composition of the legislature. The authors then examine relationships between a survey-based measure of “opinion liberalism” and policy voting measures for the president, House, Senate, and Supreme Court. There is strong evidence that policymakers respond to changes in public opinion.

Wlezien ( 1995 ) developed a “thermostatic” model of the (dynamic) reciprocal links between preferences and government spending—that is, a model that examined both opinion representation over time and public responsiveness to policy change. Dynamic models such as these seemingly are best equipped for investigating the causal relationships between opinion and policy. Not surprisingly, there is a growing body of such work, including analyses of defense spending by Eichenberg and Stoll ( 2003 ); analysis of immigration policy by Jennings ( 2009 ); work looking across a range of policy domains by Erikson et al. ( 2002 ) and Soroka and Wlezien ( 2010 ); and research across various countries by Hobolt and Klemmensen ( 2008 ), Wlezien and Soroka ( 2012 ), and Soroka and Wlezien ( 2015 ).

The drawback to dynamic models is they require a good deal of data, and to date this is available across many policy domains in a very limited number of countries: the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Work on dynamic representation has thus been concentrated in polling-rich Anglo-American democracies, and mainly in salient policy domains. What the approach lacks in generalizability, however, it makes up for in the detail with which it can analyze opinion–policy relationships. This, we hope, will become clear in the sections that follow.

The research on policy discussed earlier is informative about responsiveness to public opinion but not about the actual match between public preferences and policy. Some recent work attempts to match the policy preferences of the public and policy decisions, and Lax and Phillips’s ( 2012 ) groundbreaking work stands out. 3 These scholars directly compare public support for specific policies in U.S. states and the corresponding state decisions on 39 specific policies in eight issue areas. Results reveal substantial responsiveness, but they also suggest that congruence between policy adoption and majoritarian public support is evident in only about half the cases. There is variation in congruence, and this reflects differences in issues and institutional context and is associated with issue salience, legislative professionalization, and term limits.

What Lax and Phillips have done is to be commended not only for what it shows but for the example it sets for scholars of policy representation; their approach has been adopted by others, including in other countries (Rasmussen et al., 2019 ). Even so, as Wlezien ( 2017 ) has shown, this work still cannot reveal whether the public is getting the policies it actually prefers. This requires more direct measures of the public’s preferred policies (e.g., the amount of defense spending it wants), which are difficult to come by in many areas. 4

Some scholars consider indirect ways to assess congruence, relying on relative preferences for policy —a preference for more or less policy. If people say that government spending is “about right,” they seemingly are happy with the status quo. By contrast, if they say the government is spending “too little” or “too much,” they appear to be indicating that they prefer policy change. 5 This is the assumption underlying work on majoritarian “consistency” mentioned earlier and provides the basis for Bartels’s ( 2015 ) assessment of the social welfare “deficit” and Ellis and Stimson’s ( 2012 ) characterization of “conflicted conservatives”—those who think of themselves as conservatives but support liberal spending policies. While an intriguing possibility, there are a number of problems with the assumption that the survey responses reflect congruence, the most basic of which may be question wording, which can matter a lot (see Wlezien, 2017 ). 6 Even assuming we have the right question wording, to assess congruence we need to match up preferences with spending, which is also difficult to get straight, as it depends on what the public has in mind. 7 Perhaps most importantly, using relative preferences to indicate congruence presumes that the public responds thermostatically to policy, taking into account both the level of policy it wants ( P * ) and the amount it gets ( P ) (Soroka & Wlezien, 2010 ; Wlezien, 1995 ). Otherwise, measured relative preferences really do not tell us anything about the public’s satisfaction with the policy status quo. Thus, while it may be tempting to interpret responses to relative preference items as telling whether the public is satisfied with current policy, doing so may conceal more than it reveals. 8 Responses nevertheless do provide useful information about the variation in public demand for spending over time , as much of the research on dynamic representation discussed earlier has made clear.

The congruence between preferences and policy clearly is an important scholarly concern, and there is a growing body of research on the subject. As we have seen, that research provides limited insight, and there is still work to be done on conceptualization and measurement. Thankfully, there has also been progress, particularly to improve the measurement of preferences (Barnes et al., forthcoming ; Bonica, 2015 ; D’Attoma et al., 2018 ; Kolln & Wlezien, 2016 ; see also Buchanan et al., forthcoming ).

The Mechanisms of Representation

Representation can occur in two familiar ways. The first way is indirect, through elections, where the public selects like-minded politicians who then deliver what it wants in policy. This is the traditional pathway to representation and is deeply rooted in the literature on responsible parties (Adams, 2001 ). In effect, the public chooses among alternative policy visions and then the winning parties put their programs into place after the election. The second way to representation is direct, where sitting politicians literally respond to what the public wants. This pathway reflects an active political class, one that endeavors to stay attuned to the ebb and flow of public opinion and adjust policy accordingly. The two ways to representation actually are related. That is, the first way implies the second, at least assuming incumbent politicians are interested in remaining in office or else are motivated to represent the public’s preferences for other reasons. This is how we think of representative democracy, how we think it should work—that is, we expect responsiveness. Responsiveness is dynamic—responsive politicians follow preferences as they change. Policy change is the result.

We can formally express these expectations by revising our equation 1 for policy ( P ) as follows:

where O still is opinion and I is introduced to represent partisan control of government. Here policy is conceived to be directly responsive to opinion and also indirectly responsive, through changes in partisan composition owing to elections. Of course, the indirect linkage presupposes a connection between public opinion and party control of government:

These models apply across both space and time. We can characterize the relationships between opinion and governments and policy across countries or, say, provinces or states within a country. There are relatively few studies across countries, as good comparative data are hard to come by, though scholarly explorations are underway. There is more research on the U.S. states, as we have seen, and Erikson et al.’s ( 1993 ) classic examination reveals both connections: general policy differences across states reflect the partisan composition of government and opinion, and the partisan composition reflects opinion.

We can also characterize relationships over time, as preferences change, following the study of dynamic representation. This sort of analysis allows us to more explicitly assess policy “responsiveness.” Erikson et al. ( 2002 ) do just this, focusing on the number of major pieces of legislation in the United States. They show that policy change nicely follows opinion over time independently of party control. Wlezien ( 2004 ) and Soroka and Wlezien ( 2010 ) show the same, focusing on different budgetary policy domains in the United States and also Canada and the United Kingdom. Pacheco ( 2013 ) and Caughey and Warshaw ( 2018 ) show much the same in the American states. These results do not mean that politicians actually respond to changing public preferences, as it may be that they and the public both respond to something else, for example, the perceived “need” for spending. All we can say for sure is that the research captures policy responsiveness in a statistical sense—whether and the extent to which public preferences directly influence policy change, other things being equal. There is also indirect representation owing to elections; in some studies, these effects actually exceed the more direct responsiveness (Bartle et al., 2019 ).

Of course, policy representation is an institutional outcome. In parliamentary systems, this is fairly straightforward—the government can change policy directly, assuming it does not face a realistic threat of a vote of (no) confidence. In presidential systems, agreement across institutions is usually required, as in the United States. Presidential responsiveness to public preferences is conceptually quite simple: the president represents a national constituency and is expected to follow national preferences. Congressional responsiveness is more complex, even putting aside bicameralism, as members of the legislature represent districts. Although preferences may differ across constituencies, there is reason to suppose that preferences in different constituencies move together over time, just as movement of opinion across states and various demographic subcategories of the American public (Page & Shapiro, 1992 ) is largely parallel. To the extent that they are responsive to public preferences, both the president and Congress should move in tandem, and predictable policy change is the logical consequence, possibly even in the presence of divided government. Here we have a good amount of evidence, as we have seen, though party polarization may weaken the tendency.

How exactly do politicians know what public preferences are? Elections likely provide some information, but direct representation between elections requires something further. Politicians may learn about preferences through interactions with constituents; they may just have a good intuition for public preferences (Fenno, 1978 ). Polls likely also play a critical role. We know that policymakers’ use and interpretation of polls can vary (e.g., Kingdon, 1995 ); at the same time, particularly given developments in polling technology, policymakers have relatively easy access to public opinion on policy matters and there is considerable evidence of the importance of polls, both public and private, in policymaking (e.g., Geer, 1996 ). This work is critical: it shows one means by which politicians learn about public preferences. Of course, politicians have other, more direct sources of information as well, and these may be of greater importance to them. 9

Issues and Representation

Representation does not occur in all policy domains in all countries. The characteristics of domains appear to matter, for instance. Representation is likely to reflect the political importance (or “salience”) of issues, if only due to the possible electoral consequences. Let us briefly trace the logic.

Issue Salience

In its simplest sense, a salient issue is politically important to the public. People care about the issue and have meaningful opinions that structure party support and candidate evaluation. Candidates are likely to take positions on the issue and it is likely to form the subject of political debate. People are more likely to pay attention to politicians’ behavior on an important issue, as reflected in news media reporting or as communicated in other ways. Politicians, meanwhile, are likely to pay attention to public opinion on the issue—it is in their self-interest to do so. There are many different and clear expressions of this conception of importance. In issue domains that are not important, conversely, people are not likely to pay attention to politicians’ behavior, and politicians are by implication expected to pay less attention to public opinion in these areas. This reflects a now classic perspective (see, e.g., Geer, 1996 ; Moniz & Wlezien, 2020 ). 10

This not only implies variation in representation across issues, which Lax and Phillips ( 2012 ) found in their analysis of representation in the American states; it also implies variation in responsiveness within domains over time, as salience changes. When an issue is not very salient to the public, politicians are expected to be less responsive. As salience increases, however, the relationship should increase. That is, to the extent that salience varies over time, the relationship between opinion and policy itself may vary. Though the expectation is clear, there is little research on the subject. We simply do not know whether representation varies much over time, and we still do not know much about the variation in issue importance (see Wlezien, 2005 ; see also Moniz & Wlezien, 2020 ). 11

Specific Versus Global Representation

Public preferences in the different policy domains are not entirely unique—they tend to move together over time. This patterned movement in preferences is well documented in the United States (Erikson et al., 2002 ; Wlezien, 1995 ) but is also evident elsewhere, in the United Kingdom and Canada (Bartle et al., 2011 ; Soroka & Wlezien, 2010 ). The pattern has led some scholars to conclude that the public does not have preferences for policy in different areas but rather a single, very general preference for government activity (e.g., Stimson et al., 1995 ). From this perspective, measured preferences in various domains largely represent (multiple) indicators of a single, underlying preference for government action. When compared with the more traditional perspective, this characterization of public opinion implies a very different, global pattern of representation.

Some research shows that, although preferences in different areas do move together over time, the movement is not entirely common (Wlezien, 2004 ). Preferences in some domains share little in common with preferences in others; these preferences often move quite independently over time. In short, the work indicates that preferences are some combination of the global and the specific —moving together to some degree but exhibiting some independent variation as well. This research also shows that policymakers reflect the specific variation, at least in some policy domains (Wlezien, 2004 ; see also Druckman & Jacobs, 2006 ). Not surprisingly, these domains tend to be highly salient to voters, ones on which they pay attention to what policymakers do. In other less salient domains, policy only follows the general global signal. In yet other, very low salience domains, policy seemingly does not follow preferences at all.

Institutions and Representation

Polities differ in many ways, and some of these differences should have significant implications for the nature and degree of representation. Of fundamental importance are media openness and political competition. Without some degree of media openness, people cannot easily receive information about what government actors do and thus cannot effectively hold politicians accountable for their actions. A small but growing literature considers the role of media in representation (e.g., Hiaeshutter-Rice et al., 2021 ; Neuner et al., 2019 ; Williams & Schoonvelde, 2018 ).

Without some level of political competition and debate, governments have less incentive to respond to public opinion. This is reflected in recent work highlighting the role of interest groups in encouraging representation of public preferences (e.g., Klüver & Pickup, 2019 ). It is also evident in the larger literature on electoral competition and representation. Early research on the subject focuses on dyadic representation in the United States and argues that legislators facing serious electoral competition are more likely to pay attention to their constituency. Subsequent work has identified conditions under which electoral marginality matters more or less for representative behavior—of a constituency generally, or of one’s own electorate (for a review, see Griffin, 2006 ). Work focused on policy outputs has also considered (and found evidence for) the impact of political competitiveness on representation (e.g., Hobolt & Klemmensen, 2008 ; Soroka & Wlezien, 2010 ).

Even where we have essential levels of media and political competition, institutional differences may have important implications for policy representation. Here we have a growing body of empirical work, particularly on electoral systems.

Electoral Systems

Most of this research focuses on the differences between the majoritarian and proportional visions, using Powell’s ( 2000 ) language, and mostly on how these differences matter for policy representation. Lijphart ( 1984 ) provides the first direct statement on the matter. He distinguishes between “consensual” democracies—characterized by, most notably, proportional representation, multiparty systems, and coalition governments—and “majoritarian” systems—characterized by simple plurality election rules, a two-party system, and single-party government. Most importantly, Lijphart suggests that consensual democracies provide better descriptive representation and general policy congruence than do majoritarian systems.

Powell ( 2000 ) provides further empirical support, focusing specifically on the differences between majoritarian and proportional election rules and their implications for representation. Powell finds that proportional representation tends to produce greater congruence between the government and the public; specifically, the general ideological disposition of government and the ideological bent of the electorate tend to match up better in proportional systems. According to Powell, this reflects the greater, direct participation of constituencies the vision affords in governing coalitions (see also Miller et al., 1999 ).

Powell’s results pertain to elections and their immediate consequences. But what about in the periods between elections? Are coalition governments more responsive to ongoing changes in opinion? Although proportional systems may provide more indirect representation, it is not clear that they afford greater direct representation. There is reason to think that governments in majoritarian systems actually are more responsive to opinion change . First, presumably it is easier for a single party to respond to changes than a multiparty coalition, as coordination in the latter is more difficult and costly. Second, majoritarian governments may have more of an incentive to respond to opinion change. Since a shift in electoral sentiment has bigger consequences on election day in majoritarian systems, governments there are likely to pay especially close attention to the ebb and flow of opinion. Thus, it may be that the two systems both work to serve representation, but in different ways, where proportional systems provide better indirect representation via elections and majoritarian systems better direct representation in between elections. Basic empirical work (Soroka & Wlezien, 2015 ; Wlezien & Soroka, 2012 ) supports the expectation.

Government Institutions

Just as electoral systems may matter, so too may government institutions. In particular, research suggests that the horizontal division of powers may structure the relationships between opinion and policy over time. 12 The concentration of powers in parliamentary systems—as opposed to presidential systems—affords voters more direct control over government on election day. This presumably aids indirect representation: to the extent election outcomes reflect public opinion, then policy representation will follow quite naturally, at least to the extent we have responsible parties.

The same seemingly is not true of direct representation, and there is reason to suppose that parliamentary governments are less reliable in their attendance to public opinion over time. Scholars have long noted the dominance of cabinets over parliaments (see, e.g., Cox, 1987 ). Scholars portray a world in which governments exercise substantial discretion, where the cabinet is the proposer, putting legislation to a legislature that ultimately has only a limited check on what the government does. Strom ( 2003 ) concludes that parliamentary government deals much better with selecting representatives—avoiding what political scientists refer to as “adverse selection”—than it does with ensuring that they actually do the right thing—avoiding what political scientists call “moral hazard.” Put simply, cabinet governments are difficult to control on a recurring basis.

This has fairly direct implications for government responsiveness. When there are differences between what the cabinet and parliament want, the latter cannot effectively impose its own contrary will. The process of amendment and veto is compromised, at least by comparison with presidential systems, especially “Madisonian” ones in which executive and legislative powers are balanced. In the latter the executive cannot effectively act without the legislature, at least with respect to statute. The legislature is the proposer—it puts statute to the executive—and while the executive can veto legislation, the legislature can typically override the veto. Most changes in policy require agreement between the executive and legislature, or else a supermajority in the latter. This can help reduce disjunctures between public opinion and policy change.

Although the separation of powers makes presidential systems more deliberate in their actions, therefore, it may also make them more reliably responsive to public opinion over time. 13 We still expect representation in parliamentary systems, of course—after all, governments in these systems are more easily held accountable for their actions, as responsibility is far clearer, particularly in a majoritarian context. In between elections, however, there is little to make parliamentary cabinets accountable except for the prospect of a future electoral competition. Though important, the incentive is imperfect, and comparative research bears out these expectations (Wlezien & Soroka, 2012 ). Recent work by Rasmussen et al. ( 2019 ) considers the competing influences of government and electoral institutions.

On Political Equality

We make regular reference to “public opinion” and “public preferences.” But what exactly is the public? Is it the collection of all of us, with each person’s preferences given equal weight? Or is it a more narrowly drawn public, including some people’s preferences but not others? Who gets what they want in policy?

In one conception, the public consists of all citizens, or at least all adults. Citizens are all, more or less, equally entitled to vote, and each person has but one vote. Perhaps then we should all have equal weight where policymaking is concerned. This is an ideal, the stuff of civics textbooks; in reality, however, there is good reason to think that preferences are not equal and that some people’s preferences are more important than others. In particular, we might expect politicians to pay special attention to the preferences of active voters. These are the people who matter on election day, after all—the ones who put (and keep) politicians in office.

The representation of voters rather than citizens would not matter much if voters were a random sample of citizens. But we know that there are differences between the voting and nonvoting publics: voters tend to be better educated, have better jobs, and have higher incomes. Not surprisingly, voters tend to be more conservative than their nonvoting counterparts, at least on some economic issues. If politicians are more attentive to this group, and follow the median voter , then policy will be more conservative than the median citizen would like. This is of obvious importance. We still know relatively little empirically, however, though scholarly interest is on the rise: Griffin and Newman ( 2005 ) reveal that U.S. politicians pay more attention to the opinions of voters than to those of nonvoters, and recent work by Dassonneville et al. ( 2021 ) suggests similar findings across OECD countries.

Much research focuses on differences relating to income. Bartels’s ( 2008 ) and Gilens’s ( 2012 ) early research on the subject suggests that U.S. politicians are most attuned to the opinions of high-income citizens, and some of the research that followed is confirming (e.g., Gilens & Page, 2014 ; Peters & Ensink, 2015 ). The results of other research are more mixed (Elkjær & Iversen, 2020 ; Rigby & Wright, 2011 , 2013 ; Wlezien & Soroka, 2011 ). Analysis here is complicated by the striking similarity in preferences across income groups (Soroka & Wlezien, 2008 , 2010 ), which has led some scholars to consider who wins when preference majorities differ (Bashir, 2015 ; Branham et al., 2017 ; Enns, 2015 ). Interestingly, that research shows little difference in the success rates of different groups, though the rich appear to do better than we would expect were politicians relying on the preferences of the median voter. For more on this, see Enns and Wlezien’s early ( 2011 ) volume on the subject and Elkjær and Klitgaard’s (forthcoming) more recent review and assessment of this literature.

Of course, there may be related sociodemographic manifestations, across race for example, that scholars are only beginning to examine. Political equality also may have explicitly partisan expressions. It may be, for instance, that politicians are more responsive to in-partisans, as Hill and Hurley ( 2003 ) and Soroka and Wlezien ( 2008 ) have suggested. Of course, effective responsiveness to public preferences depends on the accuracy of politicians’ perceptions of public attitudes, and it may be that misperceptions help produce inequality. For example, Sevenans et al. ( forthcoming ) argue that politicians may respond to a perception of public preferences that is biased toward educated and politically interested citizens. This is part of a growing literature on the ways in which biased perceptions of preferences may produce inequalities in representation, or mute representation of the average citizen (see especially Broockman & Skovron, 2018 ). Of course, it may simply be that politicians tend to see things much as the more highly educated and higher income citizens do, partly because they share those characteristics.

This and the other work on inequality in representation is important, but it only scratches the surface. We need to know more about the breadth and depth of the inequality, both at particular points in time and over time, so much work clearly remains to be done.

The Importance of Public Responsiveness

We have thus far concentrated on policy representation—the effect of public opinion on public policy. But policy representation ultimately requires that the public notices and responds to what policymakers do. Without such responsiveness, policymakers would have little incentive to represent what the public wants in policy—there would be no real benefit for doing so, and there would be no real cost for not doing so. Moreover, expressed preferences would be of little use even to those politicians motivated to represent the public for other reasons.

Despite ongoing concerns about the ignorance and irrationality of the average citizen, a growing body of recent work shows that the average citizen may be more informed than initially assumed. This is not to say that the average citizen knows very much about politics, but there is accumulating evidence that individuals may be capable of basic, rational political judgments. Moreover, even in the face of individual ignorance, aggregate preferences often react sensibly to real-world trends (Page & Shapiro, 1992 ). The public reacts to both real-world affairs and policy itself, much like a thermostat (Wlezien, 1995 ); that is, the public adjusts its preferences for “more” or “less” policy in response to policy change, favoring less (more) policy in the wake of policy increases (decreases), ceteris paribus . This conceptualization fits nicely with classic functionalist models of the policy process, where policy outputs feed back on public inputs into the policymaking process.

Empirical analysis shows that public responsiveness, like policy representation, varies across policy domains and political institutions (Soroka & Wlezien, 2010 ). That representation is likely to be greater in salient domains is largely the product of representatives reacting in domains in which publics themselves are monitoring and reacting to policy change, for instance. Salient domains are characterized by a higher degree of both representation and responsiveness; more precisely, public responsiveness and policy representation covary. This is not equally true across contexts, however. Fundamental to public responsiveness is the acquisition of accurate information about what policymakers are doing, and so responsiveness will be lower when the acquisition of information is more difficult. For instance, federalism, by increasing the number of different governments making policy and thus making less clear what each level of government is doing, may decrease responsiveness and representation. 14 The horizontal division of powers may also be important, though here our expectations are less clear. Regardless, where information is easier to acquire, public responsiveness—and by implication policy representation—should be greater.

Ultimately, we expect variation across domains and institutions in both policy representation and public responsiveness. Yet the existence of each connection between opinion and policy—indeed, the existence of both connections—is critical to the functioning of representative democracy. Insofar as research seeks to understand what public preferences are and how they are formed, then, it can be viewed as an examination of the potential for, or success of, representative democratic institutions. The literature makes a contribution to our understanding of one of the most significant and enduring questions in the study of politics: does representative democracy work? It does not work perfectly, to be sure, but in some cases it appears to work better than many of us might expect.

Acknowledgments

We thank the editor, Russell Dalton, for helpful comments, and also Robert Shapiro for his input in the past.

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• Lax, J. R. , & Phillips, J. H. (2012). The democratic deficit in the states. American Journal of Political Science , 56 , 148–166.
• Lijphart, A. (1984). Democracies: Pattern of majoritarian and consensus government in twenty-one countries . Yale University Press.
• Miller, W. E. , & Stokes, D. E. (1963). Constituency influence in Congress. American Political Science Review , 57 (1), 45–56.
• Miller, W. E. , Pierce, R. , Thomassen, J. , Herrera, R. , Holmberg, S. , Esaisson, P. , & Webels, B. (1999). Policy representation in Western democracies . Oxford University Press.
• Moniz, P. , & Wlezien, C. (2020). Issue salience and political decisions . In D. Redlawsk (Ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Political Decision-Making . Oxford University Press.
• Monroe, A. (1998). Public opinion and public policy 1980–1993. Public Opinion Quarterly , 62 , 6–28.
• Neuner, F. G. , N. Soroka, S. N. , & Wlezien, C. (2019). Mass media as a source of public responsiveness. International Journal of Press/Politics , 24 (3), 269–292.
• Pacheco, J. (2013). The thermostatic model of responsiveness in the American states. State Politics and Policy Quarterly , 13 , 306–332.
• Page, B. I. , & Shapiro, R. Y. (1983). Effects of public opinion on policy. American Political Science Review , 77 , 175–190.
• Page, B. I. , & Shapiro, R. Y. (1992). The rational public: Fifty years of trends in Americans’ policy preferences . University of Chicago Press.
• Peters, Y. , & Ensink, S. (2015). Differential responsiveness in Europe: The effects of preference difference and electoral participation. West European Politics , 38 (3), 577–600.
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• Rigby, E. , & Wright, G. C. (2011). Whose statehouse democracy? Policy responsiveness to poor versus rich constituents in poor versus rich states. In P. Enns & C. Wlezien (Eds.), Who gets represented? (pp. 189–222). Russell Sage Foundation.
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• Weissberg, R. (1976). Public opinion and popular government . Prentice-Hall.
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• Wlezien, C. , & Soroka, S. (2012). Political institutions and the opinion–policy link. West European Politics , 35 (6), 1407–1432.
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1. It is not a universal expectation, of course (see, e.g., Riker, 1982 ).

2. Following Achen ( 1978 ), we can formally represent congruence in an equation relating preferences and policy:

⤴ where the units can be either spatial or policy types. (They could also be temporal.) If there is congruence, the coefficient ( B ) for preferences would be a perfect “1.0” and the intercept ( a ) would equal “0,” that is, there would be no bias. If B were greater than 0 and less than 1, there still would be responsiveness; it’s just that policy would not match opinion.

3. There is other research that considers the congruence between public preference and the positions of government (see, e.g., Golder & Stramski, 2010 ).

4. Note also that the support for and opposition to a particular policy can be deceiving about the public’s preferences for that policy. One example is Obamacare, which has received minority public support in the polls partly because a significant percentage of opponents actually favor a greater, not lesser, government role in healthcare. See the series of CNN/ORC International polls between March 2010 and July 2014; for a summary with links to the data, see CNN Political Ticker: Is Obamacare Working? .

5. The specific question wording used by the General Social Survey is: “We are faced with many problems in this country, none of which can be solved easily or inexpensively. I’m going to name some of these problems, and for each one I’d like you to tell me whether you think we’re spending too much money on it, too little money, or about the right amount on … First, are we spending too much, too little or about the right amount on <welfare>?”

6. The archetypal case is spending on welfare versus the poor. If we ask people about “welfare,” a majority of respondents think we are spending too much; if we ask about “the poor,” by contrast, a majority think we are spending too little. Are we spending too much on people in need, or too little?

7. For instance, does “welfare” include spending on food stamps? Housing assistance? Social security? We cannot be sure what the public has in mind, and this complicates an analysis of congruence within particular countries; analysis across countries is further complicated because classification of policy, for example spending, differs.

8. That many survey questions register unconstrained preferences—that is, regardless of any trade-offs, for example, in spending on other programs or taxes or deficits—may be further limiting (Hansen, 1998 ).

9. It is important to explicitly recognize that politicians do not always aim to represent public opinion (see, e.g., Jacobs & Shapiro, 2000 ).

10. The salience of (positional) policy issues also appears to correlate with the level of partisan cleavage (see also Hill & Hurley, 2003 ).

11. There is, however, a related body of literature in policymaking that reveals variation in “attentiveness” over time (see Baumgartner & Jones, 2005 ).

12. The vertical division of powers also may be important, via public opinion itself: increasing the mix of governments involved in policymaking may dampen public information, which may in turn have consequences for representation (Soroka & Wlezien, 2010 ).

13. That said, supermajoritarian institutions, such as the U.S. Senate, can seriously dampen that responsiveness (see Enns et al., 2014 ).

14. It evidently does not preclude responsiveness. Consider work on the United States (Wlezien, 1995 ) and Canada and the United Kingdom (Soroka & Wlezien, 2010 ) and research on opinions about the European Union (e.g., Franklin & Wlezien, 1997 ).

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Law and Public Policy

Getting started, books & articles, legislation & government reports, reports & working papers, news & current awareness, agencies, think tanks & advocacy groups, data sources, getting help, ready..set...go prepare for summer success.

This guide was originally prepared for the Law and Policy Research Sessio the  Ready... Set... Go! Prepare for Summer Success event.

Reference Works

Don't forget print sources! These reference works can give quick background and cross-references when you are starting your research.

• Encyclopedia of Public Administration and Public Policy, 2d ed., edited by Evan M. Berman ; Jack Rabin, founding editor. (print) Widener WID-LC JK9 .E525 2008x
• Encyclopedia of American Public Policy/ Byron Jackson (print) Kennedy School Ref JK468.P64 J33 1999 Widener RR 3631.7
• The Oxford Handbook of Public Policy / edited by Michael Moran, Martin Rein and Robert E. Goodin (print) Kennedy School Reserve Lamont REFERENCE JA71 .O945 2006x Widener Harvard Depository H97 .O88 2006

Public Policy Research Guides

These research guides may also include useful resources.  Guides from other schools may link to protected databases or local copies of print items. Check HOLLIS to see if we have access to a particular database.

• Harvard Kennedy School Library & Knowledge Services: Public Policy
• Georgetown Law Library: Public Policy Research
• University of Massachusetts: Public Policy and Administration Research
• University at Albany: Public Administration and Policy

Subject Specific Research Guides

Public policy research often overlaps with other disciplines.  The following guides can provide a useful starting point for specific areas of research. If your subject isn't represented below, try googling your subject and the phrase (in quotes!) "research guide."

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• HUFPI Research Guide by Susan Gilroy Last Updated Feb 29, 2024 240 views this year
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Search HOLLIS Classic

Search HOLLIS+ for books and articles

Useful subject terms include:

• Social Policy
• Public Policy (Law)
• Political Planning

Not at Harvard? Try searching WorldCat

• WorldCat.org (OCLC) more... less... WorldCat is the largest library network in the world. WorldCat libraries are dedicated to providing access to their free resources on the Web, where most people start their search for information. ##WorldCat's coverage is both deep and wide. You can search for popular books, music CDs and videos—all of the physical items you're used to getting from libraries. You can also link to many new kinds of digital content, such as downloadable audiobooks you can listen to on many portable MP3 players. You may additionally find authoritative research materials, such as documents and photos of local or historic significance; abstracts and full-text articles; and digital versions of rare items that aren't available to the public.

Other Article Sources

• Academic Search Premier (Harvard Login) more... less... Academic Search Premier (ASP) is a multi-disciplinary database that includes citations and abstracts from over 4,700 scholarly publications (journals, magazines and newspapers). Full text is available for more than 3,600 of the publications and is searchable.
• Business Source Complete (Harvard Login) A database of citations to, summaries and full text of articles from academic journals, magazines, and trade publications. Citations, indexing and abstracts for the most important scholarly business journals back to 1886 are included as well as current company, industry and region reports. more... less... The EBSCOhost Interface is optimized for searching articles. The Business Searching Interface facilitates searching other types of documents as well as articles. Business Source Complete is a database of citations to, summaries and full text of articles from academic journals, magazines, and trade publications. Citations, indexing and abstracts for the most important scholarly business journals back to 1886 are included as well as current company, industry and region reports.
• ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) ERIC is an online digital library of education research and information sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education.
• JSTOR Full-text of more than 200 cross-disciplinary academic journals. Coverage begins with the first volume, but usually does not include the most recent 1 to 5 years more... less... Includes all titles in the JSTOR collection, excluding recent issues. JSTOR (www.jstor.org) is a not-for-profit organization with a dual mission to create and maintain a trusted archive of important scholarly journals, and to provide access to these journals as widely as possible. Content in JSTOR spans many disciplines, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. For complete lists of titles and collections, please refer to http://www.jstor.org/about/collection.list.html.
• HeinOnline Searchable full-text access to law reviews Coverage varies by title but generally starts with the first year of publication May not include current year more... less... http://heinonline.org.ezp1.harvard.edu/HOL/Help?topic=lucenesyntax
• HOLLIS Library Catalog HOLLIS is the catalog to all library materials at Harvard and thus a great central place to start your search. Use HOLLIS to find books, articles, databases, print and online journals, finding aids for archival materials, visual materials, and more.
• PubMed with full text more... less... Find it at Harvard
• HOLLIS Databases

Find Public Policy Articles

• PAIS International (Harvard Login) PAIS International indexes the public and social policy literature of public administration, political science, economics, finance, international relations, law, and health care, International in scope. Current:1972-present Archive: 1937-1976 more... less... PAIS International indexes the public and social policy literature of public administration, political science, economics, finance, international relations, law, and health care, International in scope, PAIS indexes publications in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. The database is comprised of abstracts of thousands of journal articles, books, directories, conference proceedings, government documents and statistical yearbooks.
• PolicyFile (Harvard Login) Description: PolicyFile provides abstracts (more than half of the abstracts link to the full text documents) of domestic and international public policy issues. The public policy reports and studies are published by think tanks, university research programs, research organizations which include the OECD, IMF, World Bank, the Rand Corporation, and a number of federal agencies. more... less... PolicyFile provides abstracts (more than half of the abstracts link to the full text documents) of domestic and international public policy issues. The public policy reports and studies are published by think tanks, university research programs, research organizations which include the OECD, IMF, World Bank, the Rand Corporation, and a number of federal agencies. The database search engine allows users to search by title, author, subject, organization and keyword.

• Proquest Government Periodicals Index (Harvard Login) Government Periodicals Index covers the publications of federal departments and agencies responsible for fundamental societal concerns: business, agriculture, national security, the environment and natural resources, health and safety, food and nutrition, transportation, and more. more... less... ProQuest Government Periodicals Index provides indexing and links to full text articles from over 300 periodicals published by agencies and departments of the United States Federal government. The index provides detailed access by subject and author. ####Updated quarterly (March, June, Sept, and December), Government Periodicals Universe covers the publications of scores of federal departments and agencies responsible for fundamental societal concerns: business, agriculture, national security, the environment and natural resources, health and safety, food and nutrition, transportation, and more. With each update, the service adds approximately 2,500 articles that reflect the enormous diversity of federal interests.
• Policy Commons Database for public policy, with more than 3 million reports, working papers, policy briefs, data sources, and media drawn from a directory of more than 21,000 IGOs, NGOs, think tanks, and research centers.

Public Policy Journals

• Harvard Law & Policy Review
• Stanford Law & Policy Review
• Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy
• Hein Online Law Journal Library: Advanced Search In the subject field, select Public Law and Policy to narrow your search to relevant journals. Note by selecting Public Law and Policy, you will be able to view a long list of policy-focused law journals.
• JSTOR Public Policy & Administration Collection of full-text journals relating to public policy. Coverage varies by title. more... less... JSTOR (www.jstor.org) is a not-for-profit organization with a dual mission to create and maintain a trusted archive of important scholarly journals, and to provide access to these journals as widely as possible. Content in JSTOR spans many disciplines, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. For complete lists of titles and collections, please refer to http://www.jstor.org/about/collection.list.html.
• Search HOLLIS for U.S. law & public policy journals

Law and Legislation

• THOMAS A resource created by the Library of Congress, THOMAS provides access to a wide range of legislative materials including public laws, pending bills, committee reports and hearings. It also provides access to the full text of legislation from 1989 (101st Congress) to the present. This is a good resource for compiling legislative history materials.
• House and Senate Hearings, Congressional Record Permanent Digital Collection, and Digital US Bills and Resolutions A major source of information about the members of Congress and their legislative activities and a primary resource for accessing the many publications of the U.S. Congress from 1789 to present
• LexisNexis State Capital Extensive access to state legislation, administrative law, and commentary more... less... LexisNexis State Capital provides access to the legislation and administrative law of all 50 states. Consult this resource to retrieve: the full text of bills, current state statutory codes and constitutions, adopted regulations as available in current state administrative codes or as initially published in state registers and proposed regulations as also located in recent state registers. Tracking reports of the status of current bills and proposed regulations are provided as well. Coverage of current legislative issues and developments by state newspapers of record and other publications is also offered by State Capital. In addition, current state legislative directory information and the Martindale-Hubbell Law Digest are included in this resource.
• Federal Legislative History (HLSL Research Guide) For more detailed links for finding legislative history, please consult our Federal Legislative History Research Guide

Congressional Research Reports

The Congressional Research Service provides background research for members of Congress.  CRS Reports are not automatically made public, so there is no single source for finding CRS Reports. Try these resources to locate CRS Reports on your issue.

• Every CRS Report Open access to selected public research reports produced by the Congressional Research Service
• Harvard Kennedy School: Research Guide to Congressional Research Service Reports

Government Research Reports and Analysis

• Proquest Government Periodicals Index (Harvard Login) more... less... ProQuest Government Periodicals Index provides indexing and links to full text articles from over 300 periodicals published by agencies and departments of the United States Federal government. The index provides detailed access by subject and author. ####Updated quarterly (March, June, Sept, and December), Government Periodicals Universe covers the publications of scores of federal departments and agencies responsible for fundamental societal concerns: business, agriculture, national security, the environment and natural resources, health and safety, food and nutrition, transportation, and more. With each update, the service adds approximately 2,500 articles that reflect the enormous diversity of federal interests.
• National Journal Group's Policy Central (Harvard Login) more... less... National Journal’s Policy Central is a collection of resources on U.S. politics and policy, including the National Journal with archives dating back to 1977; the Hotline, a daily briefing on U.S. politics; CongressDaily, a twice daily update on activity in the U.S. Congress; Technology Daily; Poll Track; Markup Reports; Ad Spotlight; and the Almanac of American Politics.
• CQ Press Electronic Library (Harvard Login) A comprehensive reference resource for research in U.S. politics, elections, government, and public policy. Includes CQ Weekly, the Washington Information Directory, Congressional, Federal, Judicial Staff Directories, CQ Researcher, the Congress Collection, Voting and Elections Collection, and more. more... less... A comprehensive reference resource for research in U.S. politics, elections, government, and public policy. Includes CQ Weekly, the Washington Information Directory, Congressional, Federal, Judicial Staff Directories, CQ Researcher, the Congress Collection, Voting and Elections Collection, and more.
• U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) The GAO is an independent, nonpartisan agency that works for Congress. GAO investigates how the federal government spends taxpayer dollars. Non-classified GAO reports are available online or via the GAO's iPhone app.

Working Papers

If you're looking for works in progress or articles that have been accepted, but not yet published, here are some places to search.

• SSRN: Social Science Research Network SSRN contains both full text and abstracts of forthcoming and scholarly working papers--as well as published articles--in a full range of social science disciplines: law, economics, management, negotiation, politics, etc.
• BePress BePress is another academic repository that contains both published and working papers.
• World Bank Policy Research Working Papers A collection of policy research working papers, policy research reports, and world development reports in the World Bank's Archives.
• Harvard Kennedy School Faculty Working Paper Series Index to HKS working papers on research in a number of areas related to public policy.

Grey Literature

"Grey Literature" refers to documents produced by entities that are not primarily publishers. It can include reports, memos, working papers and internal documents. These research guides give some good sources and tips for locating these types of materials. 

• Grey Literature Research Guide (University of Michigan)
• Grey Literature Research Guide (NYU)

Looking for a report written by a think tank, non-profit, or other NGO? The links below include tools that can help you search across think tank sites, find organizations by topic, and more.

If you know which organization you're looking for, you can of course go directly to an organization's website. If you have trouble finding something you think should exist on a specific site, remember it's easy to create a custom search engine with Google. For example, if you are looking for the recent Rand report Planning for an Aging Nation, you would type the following into the search box:

"Planning for an Aging Nation" site:rand.org

This will limit your search to just Rand's website. You can limit your search further to just results in PDF by running the following search:

"Planning for an Aging Nation" site:rand.org filetype:pdf

• UNC Think Tank Google Search This custom Google search engine allows you to search across 300 of the most important US and international think tanks.
• HKS Think Tanks Directory The Kennedy School Library's directory of think tanks covers US and International organizations.
• Think Tank Rankings (International Relations Program, University of Pennsylvania) Global directory of top think tanks by region, subject, and special achievement, i.e. most innovative proposals, best new think tank.
• NIRA - National Institute for Research Advancement (Japan, 2005) Directory A worldwide directory of think tanks that provides descriptions of the organizations' work, operating budgets, and officers.
• Master Government List of Federally Funded R&D Centers (National Science Foundation)

News Sources

• Nexis Uni (Harvard Key) Nexis Uni contains major newspapers and magazines with coverage for about the last 30 years.
• Proquest Historical Newspapers If you're looking for older news stories, Proquest may have it. Its coverage includes the New York Times, Washington Post, and WSJ, as well as several other major regional US and African American newspapers dating from the 19th-late 20th centuries.
• Widener Collection of Newspapers on Microfilm If you're in the Boston area, remember that Widener Library has a large collection of newspapers on microfilm including regional and local titles.
• Factiva Factiva is a database of over 8,000 business and news publications, most in full text. Sources are in 22 languages, date back as far as 1969, and include trade journals, newswires (Dow Jones, Reuters, and others), media programs, and company and stock reports more... less... Factiva is a database of over 8,000 business and news publications, most in full text. Sources are in 22 languages, date back as far as 1969, and include trade journals, newswires (Dow Jones, Reuters, and others), media programs, and company and stock reports. Find information on over 22,000 public and private companies including description, history, current stock quote, financial data, competitors, and the latest news on business activities. Search publications by title, industry, geographic locations, type, and language.
• National Journal Group's Policy Central (Harvard Login) National Journal’s Policy Central is a collection of resources on U.S. politics and policy, including the National Journal with archives dating back to 1977; the Hotline, a daily briefing on U.S. politics; CongressDaily, a twice daily update on activity in the U.S. Congress; Technology Daily; Poll Track; Markup Reports; Ad Spotlight; and the Almanac of American Politics. more... less... National Journal’s Policy Central is a collection of resources on U.S. politics and policy, including the National Journal with archives dating back to 1977; the Hotline, a daily briefing on U.S. politics; CongressDaily, a twice daily update on activity in the U.S. Congress; Technology Daily; Poll Track; Markup Reports; Ad Spotlight; and the Almanac of American Politics.

Current Awareness

If you're following an issue, there are a number of ways to keep up on developments. Lexis and Westlaw both have alerting services that will send you an email when there are new results for a search you've run. Some general academic databases listed in this guide also have alerting services. 

• Lexis alerts Set up a Lexis alert to be notified when new results are available for a search. You can set alerts in most database types and for new Shepard's results.
• Justia's BlawgSearch Find legal blogs in your research areas to follow, or search across the legal blogosphere. Either way you can subscribe to results with your favorite RSS reader.
• Google News Search news sites with Google and subscribe to the results.
• ABA Blawg Directory Browse by region to find local law blogs

U.S. Government Agencies

• Federal Agency Directory (Louisiana State University Library Online directory created as partnership between LSU and the Federal Library Depository Project
• Leadership Connect (Harvard Login) Leadership Directories, also known as Yellow Books, contain current contact information for the leaders of major U.S. government, business, professional and nonprofit organizations. more... less... Leadership Directories researches contact and biographical data for hundreds of thousands of thought leaders in America - with emails, phone numbers, addresses, and background information. It provides web-based directories with in-depth organization profiles and verified contact information from companies, government agencies, Congressional offices, law firms, news media outlets, healthcare organizations, and nonprofits.
• State and Local Government on the Web Links by state and subject.

International Agencies

• List on IGOs (Northwestern University) Comprehensive guide to Intergovernmental Organizations compiled by librarians at Northwestern Univerisity
• Duke Searchable NGO Database This is a selected searchable database of NGOs.
• International Organizations (United States Institute for Peace) Alphabetical list of international organizations.
• Yearbook of International Organizations Online Searchable database of approximately 63,000 international organizations. more... less... The Yearbook of International Organizations Online is a searchable database of approximately 63,000 international organizations. The information for each organization includes name, address, biographical information for company officers, history and aims, personnel and finances. All types of organizations are included such as formal structures, informal networks, professional bodies and recreational clubs.
• Worldwide NGO Directory

Think Tanks

Interest groups and associations.

• CQ Guide to Interest Groups and Lobbying in the U.S. Overview and analysis of interest groups and lobbying in American politics from the 18th century to the present.
• OpenSecrets Open Secrets tracks money in U.S. politics and its effect on elections and public policy, and includes federal campaign contributions, lobbying data and analysis available
• Political Advocacy Groups: A Directory of United States Lobbyists Online directory of lobbying groups organized by subject.
• data.census.gov The U.S. Census Bureau’s online tool for accessing population, economic, geographic and housing information.
• Court Statistics Project The CSP collects and analyzes data relating to the work and caseloads of US courts.
• Statistical Abstract of the United States An authoritative and comprehensive summary of historical statistics on the social, political, and economic organization of the United States. Use the Abstract as a convenient volume for statistical reference, and as a guide to sources of more information both in print and on the Web. Sources of data include the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Analysis, and many other Federal agencies and private organizations, covering the years 1889-2011. Historical supplements include statistics from the colonial era through 1970.
• ICPSR The ICPSR, Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, maintains and provides access to a vast archive of social science data for research and instruction. All ICPSR datasets at Harvard University are maintained by the IQSS Dataverse Network. (Harvard University ID and PIN required).
• The Supreme Court Database A the definitive source for researchers, students, journalists, and citizens interested in the U.S. Supreme Court. The Database contains over two hundred pieces of information about each case decided by the Court between the 1953 and 2008 terms. Examples include the identity of the court whose decision the Supreme Court reviewed, the parties to the suit, the legal provisions considered in the case, and the votes of the Justices.
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• Pew Research Center for People and the Press The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press is an independent, non-partisan public opinion research organization that studies attitudes toward politics, the press and public policy issues.

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Methods for Policy Research Taking Socially Responsible Action

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This book about responsible and evidence-based decision making is written for those interested in improving the decisions that affect people’s lives. It describes how to define policy research questions so that evidence can be applied to them, how to find and synthesize existing evidence, how to generate new evidence if needed, how to make acceptable recommendations that can solve policy problems without negative side effects, and how to describe evidence and recommendations in a manner that changes minds.

Policies are not just the decisions made by a country’s rulers or elected officials; policies are also set by corporate executives, managers of department stores, and project leaders in non-profit organizations pursuing environmental protection. The authors’ suggestion are based on the fundamental belief that evidence-based decision making is superior to decisions based purely on opinion, intuition, and emotion. Because much has happened since 1984 when the first edition was published, this is a substantially different book with a new co-author, new and updated examples, new chapters, and new frameworks for understanding.

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NEW TO THIS EDITION:

• Each chapter’s phase in the policy research voyage (depicted by artwork with a nautical theme) includes clearly defined activities, deliverables, criteria for successful performance, and workflow diagrams.
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• Chapter 1, Making a Difference with Policy Research , now reflects an action-orientation toward not just doing policy research, but also toward fostering change and doing policy research responsibly.

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This is a substantially revised edition of Methods for Policy Research, originally published in 1984. This book reframes policy research as responsible and evidence-based decision making. It describes how to define policy research questions so that evidence can be applied to them, how to find and synthesize existing evidence, how to generate new evidence if needed, how to make acceptable recommendations that can solve policy problems without harmful side effects, how to describe evidence and recommendations in a manner that changes minds. This book is meant to help individuals who want to improve the policy decisions that affect people's lives.

Responsible and evidence-based decision making is needed not just in government and social service agencies. It is also needed in businesses and in nongovernmental organizations such as charities, foundations, and non-profits. In this book, we state our values clearly: We believe that evidence-based decision making is superior to decisions based purely on opinion, intuition, and emotion. We also believe that responsible decision-making requires taking into account the possibility of harmful consequences from policy change, no matter how well intentioned those changes may be.

Each chapter now has clearly defined activities and deliverables, supported by workflow diagrams, along with tracking indicators that policy researchers can use to assess how well they are performing the activities. New frameworks are presented such as the M2 test (meaningfulness and manageability), the Policy Change Wheel, and STORM (Social, Technical, Organizational, Regulatory, and Market) context conditions to make it easier for readers to remember what needs to be done. All examples are updated, they are drawn from a variety of contexts, including international and business policy, as well as domestic policy and social service.

Each chapter was substantially revised to make the activities and outcomes of policy research clear. We've introduced new content, including an entirely new chapter on synthesizing existing evidence. We've exposed the reader to useful websites, to new ways of involving stakeholders in the Case for Change, and to ways of ensuring that recommendations derived from evidence-gathering are meaningful and manageable. A nautical theme, a conversational style, and humor are used throughout to make the reading enjoyable. (Look out for puns!)

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• Published: 12 December 2017

Rethinking policy ‘impact’: four models of research-policy relations

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• Katherine Smith 1  

Palgrave Communications volume  3 , Article number:  44 ( 2017 ) Cite this article

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A Correction to this article was published on 20 February 2018

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Political scientists are increasingly exhorted to ensure their research has policy ‘impact’, most notably via Research Excellence Framework (REF) impact case studies, and ‘pathways to impact’ statements in UK Research Council funding applications. Yet the assumptions underpinning these frameworks often fail to reflect available evidence and theories. Notions of ‘impact’, ‘engagement’ and ‘knowledge exchange’ are typically premised on simplistic, linear models of the policy process, according to which policy-makers are keen to ‘utilise’ expertise to produce more ‘effective’ policies. Such accounts overlook the rich body of literature in political science, policy studies, and sociology of knowledge, which offer more complex and nuanced accounts. Drawing on this wider literature, this paper sets out four different approaches to theorising the relationship: (1) knowledge shapes policy; (2) politics shapes knowledge; (3) co-production; and (4) autonomous spheres. We consider what each of these four approaches suggests about approaches to incentivising and measuring research impact.

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The new research ‘impact’ agenda is likely to have a profound effect on the social science research community in wide-ranging ways, shaping the sorts of research questions and methods scholars are selecting, their networks and collaborations, as well as changing institutional structures of support within higher education institutions. Yet concepts and models for defining and measuring impact have been subject to surprisingly little social scientific scrutiny. While there is an extensive literature on research-policy relations across fields of social science (notably in sociology, science and technology studies, social policy, political science and public management), only a very narrow range of these contributions have been marshalled to develop guidance and practice on ‘impact’. Indeed, prevalent guidelines and models are frequently based on surprisingly simple and linear ideas about how research can be ‘utilised’ to produce more effective policies (Smith and Stewart, 2016 ).

In this article, we seek to advance the debate on impact by setting out four different approaches to theorising research-policy relations, drawn from wider social science literature. Each set of theories is categorised according to its core assumptions about the inter-relations between the two spheres. The first approach focuses on a ‘supply’ model of research-policy relations, examining how knowledge and ideas shape policy. The second challenges the idea that research is independent of politics and policy, instead focusing on how political power shapes knowledge. The third approach takes this line further, suggesting that research knowledge and governance are co-produced through an ongoing process of mutual constitution. And the fourth approach offers a radically contrasting account, suggesting that there is no overarching causality between science and politics, but that politics only selectively appropriates and gives meaning to scientific findings. Figure  1 offers a simple representation of these four ways of modelling the relations.

Research-policy relations

This figure represents in visual form the direction of influence between research, expert knowledge and science; and policy and politics. The first panel represents theories assuming that research shapes policy. The second panel depicts the idea that policy and politics shape the production of research. In the third panel, the circular arrows convey the idea of research and policy being mutually constitutive. While the fourth panel suggests that there is no direct causal relationship between research and policy, but that instead, the two ‘systems’ only selectively pick up on signals from the other system.

This four-way schema offers a useful resource in two main ways. First, it offers a classificatory tool for mapping, comparing and analysing a range of often disparate theoretical approaches in the emerging field of knowledge-policy relations–theories that emanate from a wide set of social science disciplines, and are informed by quite divergent assumptions about knowledge and governance. The second, more applied, use of the schema is to identify the plurality of ways of conceptualising knowledge-policy relations. In doing so, we demonstrate that prevalent models of impact are based on one particular set of assumptions about the role of research in policy, and not necessarily the most theoretically sophisticated at that. By briefly setting out each of the four sets of theories, we show how each is based on quite distinct assumptions about knowledge and policy, and that each has different implications for how we might go about defining and measuring impact.

The ‘impact’ agenda in UK research funding

The emphasis on ‘research impact’ has been increasing steadily across a number of OECD countries over the past decade, notably Australia (Donovan, 2008 ; Chubb and Watermeyer, 2016 ), Canada (Canadian Academy of Health Sciences CAHS, 2009 ), the Netherlands (Mostert et al., 2010 ) and the USA (Grant et al., 2010 ) but the influence of this agenda is particularly pronounced in the UK, which can be seen as something of a pioneer in implementing these approaches (see Bornmann, 2013 and Grant et al., 2010 for useful comparative overviews). There are currently two major incentives for social scientists in the UK to demonstrate that their research influences policy. First, the national appraisal mechanism for assessing university research (which informs decisions about the distribution of core research funding), known as the Research Excellence Framework (REF), has begun awarding 20% of overall scores to institutions on the basis of case studies of research impact (UK higher education funding bodies 2011 ). Second, accounts of the work that will be undertaken to achieve research impact (‘pathways to impact’) now form a significant section of grant application processes for the UK funding councils (Research Councils UK, Undated ). The upshot is that obtaining core research funding and project-specific grants from publicly funded sources in the UK are now strongly dependent on researchers’ abilities to respond adequately to questions about the non-academic value of their work (Smith and Stewart, 2016 ).

The current focus on ‘research impact’ reflects a longer-standing concern with the societal return on public funding of science (Brewer, 2011 ; Clarke, 2010 ). This agenda was given particular impetus by New Labour government commitments to taking a more ‘evidence-based’ approach to policymaking (Labour Party, 1997 ), with official statements evoking a simple, linear conceptualisation of the relationship between research and policy (e.g., Cabinet Office, 1999 , 2000 ; Blunkett, 2000 ). It is this kind of thinking that appears to have shaped tools and guidance on impact (Smith, 2013a ). Indeed, while different public bodies have adopted a variety of models, RCUK and REF advisory documents tend to share a number of common features (AHRC, 2014 , 2015 ; ESRC, 2014a , 2014b , 2014c ; MRC, 2014 ; Research Councils UK, Undated): (i) a consensus that researchers have a responsibility to articulate the impact of their research to non-academic audiences; (ii) an assumption (most explicit in the REF impact case studies) that this impact can be documented and measured; (iii) a belief that the distribution of research funding should (at least to some extent) reflect researchers’ ability to achieve ‘impact’; and, following from this, (iv) an expectation that researchers’ own efforts to achieve research impact will play a significant role in explaining why some research has impact beyond academia and some does not.

This approach is exemplified in HEFCE’s template for REF2014 impact ‘case studies’ (REF, 2014, 2011 ). The template calls for an account of the ‘underpinning research’ that exerted impact, implying that impact is achieved through policy-makers adjusting their beliefs in response to clearly delineated research findings. The implication is that research findings are created independently of policy or politics: research is treated as an exogenous variable that feeds into policy-making. Secondly, such findings are expected to have been published as ‘outputs’ that are rated 2*, or ‘nationally leading in terms of their originality, significance and rigour’ (REF2014, 2014 ). Thus a clear link is posited between the quality of research and the desirability of rewarding impact: impactful research should meet a certain quality threshold. Thirdly, researchers are required to chart how their findings came to exert impact, and to provide evidence to corroborate their claims. Evocative of the ‘pathways to impact’ section of RCUK grant proposals (Research Councils UK, Undated ), this requirement implies that researchers can trace the effects of their work through describing a series of concrete activities and information flows – events, meetings, media coverage, and so on.

There is currently no agreed way of tracking research impacts and, in this context, some academics have identified more specific frameworks and approaches, including the ‘payback framework’ (Donovan and Hanney, 2011 ) and the ‘research contribution framework’ (Morton, 2015 ). However, others have criticised the simplistic and linear conceptualisations of research-policy relations that appear to underpin the UK’s overarching approach to research impact, particularly those with in-depth knowledge of the policy process and/or the relationship between research and policy (Greenhalgh et al., 2016 ; Smith and Stewart, 2016 ). Theories of public policy have shown that policy-making rarely occurs in such neat sequential stages (Cairney, 2016 ), and that evidence often plays a rather limited role in decision-making (Boswell, 2009a ). In the context of such criticisms and concerns, we consider the rich body of literature from political science, policy studies, sociology of knowledge, and science and technology studies, which has informed understandings of the complex relationship between knowledge and policy. Drawing on this wider literature, we now set out four different approaches to theorising the relationship, and consider their implications for the impact agenda.

Four approaches to conceptualising research-policy relations

Knowledge shapes policy.

A range of theories and models of the relationship between academic knowledge and policy were developed by US and UK scholars in the 1970s and 1980s (Blume, 1977 ; Caplan, 1979 ; Rein, 1980 ; Weiss, 1977 , 1979 ). Notably, a number of contributions produced ‘instrumental’ models of knowledge utilisation (see Weiss, 1979 for an overview), according to which knowledge either ‘drives’ policy, or policy problems stimulate research to provide direct solutions (again, see Weiss, 1979 ). Much of the work undertaken in the 1970s and 1980s demonstrated that while there are occasional examples of research feeding into policy in this manner, such simple models failed to capture the intricacies of the interactions between research and policy (Rein, 1980 ; Weiss, 1979 ). Yet, it was precisely these simple, instrumental notions of the role of research in policy that seem to have become increasingly embedded within UK policy, including higher education policy, leading Parsons to reflect that the Labour government’s commitments to ‘evidence-based policymaking’ marked:

not so much a step forward as a step backwards: a return to the quest for a positivist yellow brick road leading to a promised policy dry ground-somewhere, over Charles Lindblom - where we can know ‘what works’ and from which government can exercise strategic guidance. (Parsons, 2002 , p 45)

Understandably, official commitments to employing evidence in a direct, linear sense triggered a raft of assessments of the extent to which particular policies do reflect the available evidence. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of these found the government’s use of evidence has been highly selective (e.g., Boswell 2009a , 2009b ; Katikireddi et al., 2011 ; Naughton, 2005 ; Stevens, 2007 ) and this, in turn, has triggered renewed interest in two, more complex models of the ways in which research knowledge shapes policy, each of which has very different implications for the research impact agenda.

The first of these approaches seeks to address what is perceived as a ‘gap’ between the research and policy communities. On this account, research has the potential to be highly relevant to policy, but its impact is often reduced by problems of communication. Research may not be disseminated in a form that is relevant or accessible to policy-makers; or officials have insufficient resources to process and apply research findings. For example, Lomas ( 2000 ) and Lavis ( 2006 ) both underline the importance of achieving shared understandings between researchers and policymakers, arguing that increased interaction between the two groups will improve the use of research in policy. These authors tend to assume that research would be more frequently employed by policymakers if only they could better access and understand the findings and if the findings were of relevance. Thus the focus is on improving the mechanisms of communication, and the levels of trust, between researchers and policymakers. A stronger version of this ‘gap’ account posits that this reflects a deeper cultural gap between researchers and policy actors. Thus Caplan ( 1979 ) suggests that these actors should be seen as distinct ‘communities’ guided by different values and beliefs–a notion we discuss further in the fourth set of theories, considered later in the paper.

The weaker version of this ‘gap’ approach, however, suggests that there are various practical steps that can be taken to improve the flow of knowledge from research to policy. Indeed, several reviews of knowledge transfer provide practical recommendations for researchers seeking to influence policy (Contandriopoulos et al., 2010 ; Innvaer et al., 2002 ; Mitton et al., 2007 ; Nutley et al., 2003 ; Oliver et al., 2013 ; Walter et al., 2005 ), suggesting researchers should ensure research is accessible, by providing clear, concise, timely summaries of the research, tailored to appropriate audiences; and develop ongoing, collaborative relationships with potential users to increase levels of trust and shared definitions of policy problems and responses. In structural terms, the findings of these reviews call for improved communication channels, via ‘knowledge broker’ roles and/or knowledge transfer training and sufficiently high incentives for researchers and research users to engage in knowledge exchange. Of the various conceptualisations of the relationship between research knowledge and policy, it is this way of thinking which appears to have had most influence on current approaches to incentivising research impact in the UK. As we shall see, however, the approach is widely criticised by the alternative theories of research-policy relations we explore later in the article.

A second popular theory of how research shapes policy emerges from Weiss’ ( 1977 , 1979 ) notion of the ‘enlightenment’ function of knowledge in policymaking. This account proposes that knowledge shapes policy through diffuse processes, resulting from the activities of various, overlapping networks, which contribute to broader, incremental and often largely conceptual changes (Hird, 2005 ; Walt, 1994 ). Radaelli’s ( 1995 ) notion of ‘knowledge creep’ is one of several more recent conceptualisations to build on this idea, and we can find similar assumptions in ideational theories of policy change (Béland, 2009 ; Hall, 1993 ; Schmidt, 2008 ). The implication of these accounts is that research influences policy over long periods through gradual changes in actors’ perceptions and ways of thinking (an idea that is also evident in theories of co-production, as discussed later) rather than through immediate, direct impacts. Whilst this body of work does not discount the possibility that research might contribute to what eventually become significant shifts in policy approaches, it suggests that assessments aiming to trace the impact of research on particular policy outcomes are likely to miss a potentially broader, more diffuse kind of conceptual influence.

The implications of this way of conceptualising the relationship between academic knowledge and policy for ideas about research impact are more challenging (indeed, the ‘enlightenment’ model has been criticised by some scholars seeking to improve the use of evidence in policy for its lack of practical utility (Nutley et al., 2007 )). Taking the more conceptual influence of research seriously suggests that incentives for achieving impact ought to shift away from individual researchers and projects to consider how to support the collective diffusion of much more diverse (potentially interdisciplinary) bodies of work. Given that multiple authors are likely to be involved, and that various factors unrelated to the underpinning research (or its communication) are likely to inform when and how knowledge shapes policy, it seems to make little sense to reward individual researchers (or even teams of researchers) for ‘achieving’ research impact. Instead, research impact might be supported by encouraging groups of researchers to work together on developing policy messages from diverse studies on particular policy topics (or, to support knowledge brokers to do this kind of work).

This is a very different model from both the RCUK pathways to impact approach, which encourages individual researchers or research teams to try to achieve research impacts on the back of single studies, and the REF impact case study approach, which encourages single institutions to narrate stories of impact based solely on the work of researchers they employ. Indeed, recent assessments of the REF impact case study approach have specifically highlighted the tendency not to adequately support these kinds of synthesised approaches to achieving impact (Manville et al., 2015 ; Smith and Stewart, 2016 ). For the moment, while some of the guidance documents relating to the UK impact agenda do acknowledge conceptual forms of influence, the mechanisms for monitoring and rewarding impact seem preoccupied with ‘instrumental’ research impact achieved on the back of research undertaken by individual researchers or small groups within single institutions.

Politics shapes knowledge

Perhaps the most obvious critique of the ‘knowledge shapes policy’ model reverses this relationship to highlight the various ways in which policies and politics shape knowledge and the use of knowledge. There is a rich body of literature theorising how state-building and modern techniques of governance have shaped the production of social knowledge (Foucault, 1991 , Heclo, 1974 ; Rueschemeyer and Skocpol, 1996 ), as well as how power relations are implicated in the construction of expert authority (Gramsci, 2009 ). What these diverse contributions share is the notion that an underlying political project is driving research production and utilisation, whether that project is the production of self-regulating subjects (as some Foucauldian interpretations suggest) or the continuing dominance of ruling elites and ideologies (as Gramscian analyses tend to posit). From this perspective, research utilisation in policymaking is understood as profoundly constrained; whilst those involved in the construction of policy are not necessarily consciously aware of the forces shaping their decisions, any attempt to engage with research must be understood as part of a wider political project. At the very least, such analyses suggest that only research that can be used to support these dominant ideas and interests will be employed in policymaking, while research that challenges dominant ideas will be discounted (see Wright et al., 2007 ). A stronger interpretation would hold that the research process is itself shaped by the ‘powerful interests’ directing policy agendas (e.g., Navarro, 2004 ).

The more applied literature concerning the relationship between research and policy also provides examples of this way of thinking about the relationship. In her overview of various ‘models’ of the relationship between research and policy, Weiss, for example, describes what she calls the ‘political model’, where research is deployed to support pre-given policy preferences; as well as a ‘tactical model’, where research is used as a method of delaying the decision-making process, providing policymakers with some ‘breathing space’ (Weiss, 1979 ). In the first case, the research process itself is not necessarily informed by politics but the decision to employ research (or not) is entirely political. In other words, political ideology and/or more strategic party politics inform the ways in which political actors respond to research evidence (e.g., Bambra, 2013 ). In the second, the commissioning of research might itself be understood as a political act (or, at least, an act that creates political benefits–see Bailey and Scott‐Jones 1984 ). In either case, efforts to reward researchers for ‘achieving’ research impact would seem misplaced.

The extent to which politics can shape research is perhaps most overt in research that is directly commissioned by sources with particular political/policy interests; reviews have repeatedly demonstrated that research funded by commercial sources, such as the pharmaceutical (e.g., Lundh et al., 2012 ) and tobacco industries (e.g., Bero, 2005 ), is more likely to present findings that are useful to those interests (see also Bailey and Scott‐Jones, 1984 ). In other contexts, it has been suggested that researchers may struggle to maintain their independence where research is commissioned directly, or indirectly, by government sources (e.g., Barnes, 1996 ; Smith, 2010 ). This kind of political influence may be felt both overtly and subtly, with researchers responding to signals from research funders as to what is likely to be funded (and what is not), what they are hoping (or expecting) to be found and what they are not (Knorr-Cetina, 1981 ; Smith, 2010 ), as we discuss further in the following section.

A second group of theories which call attention to the way in which politics can shape knowledge focus on the impact of institutions and organisational structures on policymaking and research. Similar to the previous group of theories, such accounts assume that the wider structures in which actors are located are key to explaining policy outcomes. Whilst the more political accounts discussed above highlight the ways in which power relations and elite interests can shape research and its use, these theories focus on organisational and decision-making structures. The most well-known of such theories are the various forms of institutionalism, of which ‘historical institutionalism’ is one of the most widely employed forms (see Immergut, 1998 for an overview). From this perspective, rather than constituting the collective result of individual preferences, policy processes (including efforts to engage with research) are considered to be significantly shaped by the historically constructed institutions and policy procedures within which they are embedded (Immergut, 1998 ).

Those who have contributed to the development of this genre of work have emphasised that such theories do not suggest that particular policy outcomes are inevitable –and indeed, as we discussed in the previous sections, under certain conditions existing paradigms can be superseded by new ideas, leading to substantial policy change (Hall, 1993 ). However, such theories do suggest that it becomes increasingly difficult to change the overall direction of a policy trajectory as previous decisions become ever more deeply embedded in institutional structures and ways of thinking (e.g., Kay, 2005 ). Employing these kinds of theories, Smith ( 2013b ) has demonstrated how the institutionalisation of particular ideas about health and economic policy function as filters to research-based ideas about health inequalities, encouraging those ideas that support existing institutionalised ideas (or ‘policy paradigms’) to move into policy, while blocking or significantly transforming more challenging ideas.

This way of thinking about the relationship between knowledge and policy suggests that research is constantly being influenced by policy and politics and that efforts to bring researchers and policymakers closer together are like to exacerbate this in ways that may not be desirable. At best, from this perspective, the research impact agenda seems likely to reward some academics (and not others) for achieving impacts that had far more to do with political interests and agendas than the research or impact activities of those academics. At worst, the impact agenda will lead to the increasing politicisation of research (and an associated reduction in academic freedom). Indeed, some of the most critical responses to the impact agenda are informed by these kinds of concerns. Cohen ( 2000 ) and Hammersley ( 2005 ), for example, have warned that the restrictions being placed on publicly-funded research to be ‘useful’ to policy audiences is limiting the potential for academics to promote ideas that are out-of-line with government policies. Likewise, Davey Smith et al., ( 2001 ), argue that efforts to achieve evidence-based policy may, in fact, do more to stimulate research that is shaped by policy needs than to encourage better use of research in policy-making.

Co-production

A third way of theorising research-policy relations has emerged from science and technology studies (STS), and posits a much more complex inter-relationship between knowledge production and governance. This approach is encapsulated in the idea of ‘co-production’: the claim that knowledge and governance are mutually constitutive (Jasanoff, 2004 ).

Similar to the approaches discussed in the last section, such accounts see knowledge as profoundly shaped by politics. But the notion of co-production focuses not just on the social and political constitution of science. It is also attentive to the other direction of influence: the ways in which governance is itself constituted by scientific knowledge. So rather than limiting its attention to how politics shapes knowledge, the notion of co-production posits that scientific and expert knowledge contribute to the construction of political reality (an idea that is, in some ways, simply a stronger version of Weiss’ ( 1979 ) account of the enlightenment function of research, discussed earlier). Knowledge provides the concepts, data and tools that underpin our knowledge of social and policy problems and appropriate modes of steering (Voß and Freeman, 2016 ). Sheila Jasanoff ( 2004 ) is arguably the most influential exponent of this approach. In her book States of Knowledge , she explores how knowledge-making is an inherent part of the practices of state-making and governance. States ‘are made of knowledge, just as knowledge is constituted by states’ (Jasanoff, 2004 , p 3). Moreover, STS scholars have shown how science does not just produce knowledge and theories that help define social problems and appropriate responses. It also produces skills, machines, instruments and technologies that are deployed in governance (Pickering, 1995 ).

An important concept informing this approach is that of performativity. This is the idea that social enquiry and its methods are ‘productive’: rather than simply describing social reality, they help to make or enact the social world (Law and Urry, 2004 ). Indeed, social science needs to be understood as fundamentally embedded in, produced by, but also productive of the social world (Giddens, 1990 ). Social science thus has effects–it creates concepts and labels, classifications and distinctions, comparisons and techniques that transform the social world. Such concepts and techniques can also help bring into existence the social objects they describe. Osborne and Rose ( 1999 ) illustrate this idea with the case of public opinion, a social phenomenon that was effectively created in the 1930s through the emergence of new methods of polling and survey analysis, and is now thoroughly normalised as an object of social scientific enquiry. Similarly, Donald MacKenzie ( 2006 ) has explored the performativity of economic models, showing how the theory of options shaped practices in trading and hedging in the financial sector from the 1970s onwards. Similar ideas have been explored by Colin Hay ( 2007 ) in his discussion of political disaffection. He argues that public choice theory has contributed to the ‘marketisation’ of party politics, implying that such theories have been ‘performative’ (although he does not use this term).

Theories of co-production also show how science can produce social problems. Through its various scientific and technical innovations, science does not simply solve governance problems, but it also creates new ones (Jasanoff, 2004 ). The frantic pace of development and progress in science and technology produce a continuous stream of new problems and solutions, which governments often struggle to keep pace with. So new research does not just offer ways of ordering the social world, but can also destabilise existing structures and modes of governance. In areas of policy that are highly dependent on technology and science–such as energy, health, agriculture or defence - policy develops almost in pursuit of science, in an attempt to catch up with, harness and regulate the new technologies and practices it has produced. Thus science creates the very problems that need to be addressed through political intervention (Beck, 1992 ). The demand for ever more problem-solving knowledge is effectively built into the structure of policy-research relations.

What implications do these approaches have for defining and measuring impact? First, they suggest that we cannot neatly disentangle processes of knowledge production from those of governance. This is not merely an epistemological question–a challenge of finding the right methods or observational techniques to allow us to separate out how social scientific findings have influenced politics or policy (although this is of course difficult to do). It represents a more fundamental ontological problem, in that social scientific knowledge is co-constitutive of politics. Imagine, for example, trying to chart the ‘impact’ of public choice theories on politics. We would not only face the methodological challenge of charting the subtle and incremental processes through which a wide variety of social actors (including politicians, campaigners, lobbyists and the media) appropriated public choice theories about political agency. We would also need to understand the ongoing feedback effects through which such ideas brought about shifts in the behaviour of these actors, in turn gradually transforming political behaviour. If we accept the possibility of such effects, then we need to also consider how such shifts may in turn validate the theories that originally produced them, enhancing their authority and influence. The relationship between social science and politics in this example is one of continuous mutual influence and reinforcement.

Second, the notion of co-production suggests that social science may itself produce social problems that require political responses. Studies of public opinion offer a good example of this. A survey of public attitudes may ‘discover’ unarticulated claims and preferences, which produce new demands for political action. In 2014, Jeffery et al., ( 2014 ) found a strong desire on the part of the English respondents they surveyed for institutions that better represented and articulated ‘English’ views. This could be charted as ‘impact’ insofar as the findings of the survey were picked up by politicians and influenced claims-making about UK constitutional reform (and indeed it was submitted as a case study to REF2014). But the research can also be understood as producing a new set of political problems. It encouraged a number of survey respondents to articulate a set of preferences which may previously have been nascent or unspecified. These preferences were then presented as a collective and coherent political claim, which in turn implied the need for enhanced political representation and constitutional reform. Research thus contributed to the construction of a new social problem requiring a political response. As with the case of public choice theory, we can also posit a feedback effect, whereby the social and political adjustments generated by the research might in turn further validate the findings. As politicians sought to represent and mobilise these preferences, this created further political expectations and demands, thereby substantiating the initial research claim that the English desire their own institutions.

One implication of this account is that REF or HEFCE models do not do justice to the more pervasive (but often subtle) influence of social science on policy. Another is that they overlook the feedback effects described above, whereby the political adjustments enacted through social science in turn validate (or possible discredit) the authority of research findings or methods. And a third is that they may actively encourage forms of interference that create more problems than they solve. Policy impact may not always be benign, as we noted earlier.

Assuming we accept such impacts as desirable, how might these processes of co-production be best captured and accredited? They would require quite resource-intensive methodologies, as well as forms of expertise that are not necessarily available across disciplines. Each case study would effectively be a social scientific project in its own right, explored though a range of qualitative and quantitative methods, such as ethnography (as Baim-Lance and Vindrola-Padros, 2015 , argue in more detail) process tracing, discourse analysis, interviews and surveys. It is hard to imagine sufficient resource being available for such indepth enquiry, or, indeed, for buy-in to such models and methodologies from across (non-social science) disciplines.

Autonomous spheres

Our final approach to theorising research-policy relations understands science and politics as distinct spheres, each operating according to a separate logic and system of meaning. As we saw earlier, one version of this account is Caplan’s ( 1979 ) ‘two communities’ thesis, which identifies a ‘cultural gap’ between researchers and policymakers. This conceptualisation has been subject to a range of critiques, not least, as Lindquist ( 1990 ) points out, the fact that this way of thinking about the relationship excludes a range of potentially important actors, such as journalists, consultants and lobbyists. Despite this, whilst not always referring to Caplan’s ( 1979 ) work directly, many contemporary assessments of the limited use of research in policy and practice frequently mirror Caplan’s observations by highlighting perceived ‘gaps’ between researchers, policymakers and/or practitioners as a fundamental barrier to the use of research.

In this section, we focus on a more radical account of this ‘gap’, associated with the systems theory of German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (e.g., Luhmann, 1996 ). On a Luhmannian systems theory account, science and politics are both understood as self-referential or ‘autopoietic’ systems. Although mutually dependent in important ways (they could not survive in a recognisable form without one another), each operates according to its own logic or ‘communicative code’, which determines which communications are relevant to the system. There is no causality or direct influence across systems: rather, operations in one system are selectively perceived and given meaning according to the codes and logics of another system. Thus it does not make sense to conceive of flows, diffusion or causality across systems, and STS concepts such as ‘performativity’ or ‘co-production’ need to be carefully re-specified in terms of how one system ‘models’ and responds to the operations of another.

Luhmann understands the primary building blocks of modern society not as individuals or groups, but as functionally differentiated social systems. Modern societies are increasingly sub-divided into specialised, self-referential systems such as education, health, economy, religion, welfare, science or politics. Each of these systems operates according to its own distinct codes, programmes, logic and mode of inclusion. Unlike on Caplan’s account, these systems are not distinguished in terms of members or institutions. Systems do not consist of discrete groups of people, indeed one person or one organisation can participate in several different systems. However, systems are distinguished in terms of sets of differentiated roles and activities. Each system retains its distinctiveness through developing its own criteria of selection, which help it reduce complexity by only selecting those communications which are relevant to the system.

On this account, science and politics are separate function-systems. Science (including social science) operates according to a binary code of true/false. In other words, it defines relevant communication based on whether it is concerned with establishing truth claims. The system of politics, meanwhile, selects relevant communication on the basis of the binary code of government/opposition. The political system selects and gives meaning to communication based on its relevance to the pursuit of political power and the capacity to adopt collectively binding decisions. At first sight, this seems to be a very narrow way of conceiving social systems. For example, scientists are not just preoccupied with validating truth claims; they are clearly also concerned with winning grants, enhancing their academic reputation, or influencing government policies. But these preoccupations are characterised as participating in different systems. For example, a public funding decision has a distinct meaning and relevance in the systems of science, politics and the economy.

From this perspective, there can be no overarching causality operating between two systems, although it is easy to see how appealing such causal attributions might be to observers. To be sure, one event can have effects across different systems. A government research grant has meaning for both the system of politics and that of science. Yet As Luhmann puts it, the ‘preconditions and consequences of events differ completely according to system reference’, and observers should not ‘cross-identify events over boundaries’ (Luhmann, 1991 , p 1438). Instead, Luhmann conceives of the relationship as highly selective connections between systems and their environments. Systems that are reliant on other systems in their environment develop models, or assumed regularities, to help them keep tabs on the other system. For example, science will develop a certain way of observing and anticipating political decision-making relevant to science: a set of beliefs about how and when decisions are produced, what drives them, and what effects they may have on science funding or regulation. These models can be understood as internally constructed filters to help select what is relevant from what is noise or redundancy. They help the system to sort through what is expected and what is unpredicted, what is a relevant signal and what is an irritation (Luhmann, 1991 , p 1432).

If we accept that science and politics are guided by distinct logics or communicative codes, the challenge becomes one of reconstructing how each system might selectively pick up signals from the other. We need to understand what sort of perceptual filters are developed and stabilised for the purpose of screening out relevant signals from noise; and how information from the other system might be constructed and connected to the receiving system’s identities and functions. The implication is that we need to turn our attention to how the system of politics ‘models’ the system of science, and how it selectively appropriates and gives meaning to the signals produced by that system.

This segues nicely into the earlier discussion of our first set of theories, and the need for a more sophisticated theory of politics than those provided by prevalent models of research-policy relations. Such a theory would require an account of how the political system makes sense of its environment, and selectively draws on different types of resources to secure legitimacy or support (Boswell, 2009a ). A number of theories from public policy can contribute towards such an endeavour. Notably, theories of information-processing offer potential to examine how organisations in the public administration selectively pick up signals from their environment about social problems (e.g., Baumgartner and Jones, 1993 ). Cohen and colleagues’ ( 1972 ) ‘garbage can model’ of policymaking, as taken up by Kingdon ( 1995 [1984]), offers a neat way of theorising how different ideas or ‘solutions’ are picked up depending on the political and problem streams–again, an idea broadly compatible with the systems theory approach, in that it views ‘ideas’ and ‘politics’ as operating according to different temporalities and logics (Boswell and Rodrigues, 2016 ).

What are the implications of systems theory for impact? A systems theoretic approach would be wary of the attempt to demonstrate ‘impact’, as it assumes a specious causality between science and politics. Instead, we need to try to adopt the perspective of politics, and make sense of how and why the political system picks up data, methods or techniques from social science. And we can attempt to observe how, from the perspective of social science, political decisions or goals might affect the selection and framing of research questions, and the communication of research findings. But we cannot integrate these observations into a single set of causal mechanisms. Viewed from ‘inside’ of each system, the other remains a ‘black box’: an infinitely complex set of communications and operations which can only be very crudely modelled and selectively responded to.

What this implies is that an impact case study could at best chart how politics appropriated and gave meaning to particular data, methods or techniques. But the ‘underpinning research’ that produced these data or techniques, or academic efforts to promote this research, would derive rather limited credit for such take-up. Far more important would be dynamics internal to the political system, such as the political salience of the issue, or how well the research in question was attuned to dominant political framings of policy problems (Kingdon, 1995 [1984]; Cairney, 2016 ), or how far research was seen as an authoritative mode of knowledge for guiding decisions (Boswell, 2009b ). Moreover, it would remain open how far political take-up reflected a preoccupation with signalling legitimacy, rather than informing policy interventions. After all, if research is valued by politics as a means of substantiating claims or bolstering credibility, then presumably this implies a symbolic rather than instrumental rationale for using research (Boswell, 2009a ).

In short, the systems theoretic account guides us towards an interrogation of the political context of knowledge utilisation; but the more we probe the logic of knowledge appropriation in politics, the less we can accredit research. What makes for politically useful knowledge is fundamentally distinct from what makes for good science. Thus any link between high quality science and impact is exposed as contingent. It may well be that politics needs to ‘quality control’ the science it invokes to insure against its invalidation by critics–but this is only as an insurance against critique. And it may want to ensure the robustness of science as a safeguard against making mistakes that would cost political support. But again, this concern with rigour is incidental to the core concerns of politics. Politics is not fundamentally preoccupied with what is true, but with what is relevant to securing power and producing collectively binding decisions.

Current approaches to research impact appear to have been informed by simplistic supply-side models within our first category of ‘knowledge shapes policy’. As we have suggested in this article, such accounts have been widely debunked by theorists of research-policy relations, as well as by many empirical studies of research ‘impact’. And yet the REF and HEFCE models, and much of the literature on knowledge utilisation, continue to remain faithful to this problematic account. Part of the reason for the sustained commitment to these models is that they offer a reassuring narrative to both policy-makers and researchers. Politicians and public servants can demonstrate the rigour and authority of their claims by invoking research, and they can secure legitimacy by signalling that their decisions are well-grounded (Boswell, 2009a ), or they can invoke the need for research as a rationale for delaying action (Fuller, 2005 ). At the same time, researchers can secure additional resources and credit for developing compelling narratives about the impact of their research (Dunlop, 2017 ). Yet these accounts bely the complexity of research-policy relations and, indeed, of policy processes and policy change (Cohen et al., 1972 ; Smith and Katikireddi, 2013 ). If we are to avoid continually reinventing broken wheels, we suggest a new, more theoretically informed approach to thinking about research impact is required.

The existing literature on research impact has already subjected current approaches to assessing, incentivizing and rewarding impact in the UK to extensive critique, and it was not the purpose of this paper to expand on these critiques. Rather, our aim has been to set out four alternative, sophisticated accounts of the relationship between research and policy and to consider what a research impact agenda might look like if it were informed by these other approaches. Such an exercise is necessarily hypothetical and almost impossible to test in an empirical sense, since the UK’s approach to research impact has already been informed by a relatively simple and linear conceptualisation of research-policy relations (Smith and Stewart, 2016 ). This means there are strong incentives for institutions to ‘play the game’ according to the rules that have been set by providing relatively simple and linear ‘stories’ of research impact, as Meagher and Martin’s ( 2017 ) analysis of REF2014 impact case studies for mathematics attests (see also Murphy, 2017 on ‘gaming’ in REF and Watermeyer and Hendgecoe 2016 on ‘impact mercantilsm’). However, as other countries evolve different approaches to research impact, it may become possible to empirically assess both the claims we set out here and the practical implications of such alternative approaches.

The first of the four models we outline offered a subtler ‘enlightenment’ conception of how research can influence policy. It implied that research can lead to ideational adjustments through diffuse and incremental processes, typically influenced by a wide body of research rather than individual findings. This account challenges the notion that researchers or institutions should be rewarded for claims about the impact of individual studies, though potentially supports efforts to encourage knowledge exchange. The second set of theories implied that policy and politics shape knowledge production and use, and were altogether more sceptical of the impact agenda. They suggested that it was naïve to assume that researchers can speak truth to power, implying that researchers should not be rewarded for their supposed impact since policy actors employ research for political, rather than empirical/intellectual, reasons. The third set of theories on co-production implied the need for a far more sophisticated methodology for examining how research and governance are mutually constitutive. They also argued that social science should not necessarily be understood as the ‘solution’ to social problems, since it can itself create such problems. And the fourth approach, which posits that science and politics are autonomous systems, suggested that we can best understand impact through a theory of how politics selectively observes and gives meaning to communications emanating from the system of science. Viewed from this perspective, the impact agenda has been designed to suit the needs of a political, rather than scientific, system and should be treated cautiously by researchers given its potential to divert science from its core task of developing truth claims.

Both the second and fourth accounts suggest that the very idea of trying to incentivize the use of research in policy is flawed. On these accounts, we should be cautious about adopting systems that reward researchers for influencing policy. Such impacts are spurious, in that their apparent influence is down to pre-given interests or independent political dynamics; or they are the result of researchers aligning research questions and approaches to pre-fit political agendas. By rewarding researchers for achieving impact we are adopting an arbitrary incentive system that is at best decoupled from research quality, and at worst, threatens the integrity and independence of social science.

For those more sympathetic to the idea of ‘research impact’, the first and third approaches might offer more hope. Nonetheless, neither approach suggests that the current approach is likely to achieve its intended goals. Indeed, both caution against rewarding individual researchers for ‘achieving’ research impact based on narrow indicators (e.g., citations in policy documents). The enlightenment model suggests that research impact involves subtle, incremental and diffuse ideational adjustments over a long period of time, which are generated by a wide range of research insights rather than specific individual findings. This suggests that a system for rewarding impact should not focus on individual research projects or groups and their linear effects on particular policies. Rather, impact frameworks should reward collaborative endeavours that build incrementally on a wider body of work; that develop longer-term relationships with a range of non-academic audiences (not only policymakers and other ‘elites’); and that may bring about subtle conceptual shifts, rather than clearly identifiable policy changes. This in turn implies the need for more complex research designs and methodologies for charting such influence over a far longer time-frame, and avoid incentives to over-claim credit for particular groups or projects. This perspective coheres with those arguing for a shift away from trying to measure and incentivize research impacts to focus instead on incentivizing and rewarding knowledge exchange processes (e.g., Upton et al., 2014 ). From this view, Spaapen and van Drooge’s ( 2011 ) approach of focusing on ‘productive interactions’ between science and society (which emerged out of an FP7 project called Social Impact Assessment Methods for research and funding instruments-SIAMPI), seems like a more defensible means of assessing research impact. The notion of co-production similarly suggests the need for more in-depth, ethnographic or process-tracing methods for reconstructing the complex relationships between research and policy (as outlined by Baim-Lance and Vindrola-Padros, 2015 ). Systems for rewarding impact should also be aware of the two-way relationship between research and governance, including the ways in which social science can itself affect the social and political world, imagining and enacting new social problems.

Arguably, the highest impact research is that which serves to re-shape the social world it seeks to describe. This implies that models to promote engagement with knowledge users need to be attentive not just to the complex pathways to research impact, but also to the very real ethical implications of research influence (implications that do not currently appear to be considered in either REF impact case studies or RCUK pathways to impact statements–Smith and Stewart, 2016 ). Not only can the impact agenda affect the practices of social science, as is widely recognised in social science literature; social science can also instigate new policy problems. Proponents of policy impact should have a care what they wish for.

Data availability

The article does not generate or make use of any datasets.

Change history

20 february 2018.

On page 7 of the PDF, in the second paragraph under the subheading “Conclusion” the first sentence “The existing literature on research impact has already subjected current approaches to assessing, incentivizing and rewarding impact in the UK to extensive critique (e.g., ADD REFS) and it was not the purpose of this paper to expand on these critiques” has been corrected to “The existing literature on research impact has already subjected current approaches to assessing, incentivizing and rewarding impact in the UK to extensive critique, and it was not the purpose of this paper to expand on these critiques”.

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Good public policy can vastly improve people’s lives, while bad policy can lead to terrible suffering, HKS Dean Doug Elmendorf says. The difference lies in how it's made and implemented.

FEATURING Douglas Elmendorf

41 minutes and 03 seconds.

Public policy has great power, both to improve people’s lives if it is planned and executed well and to cause significant suffering if it is not, says Harvard Kennedy School Dean Doug Elmendorf , who will step back from his post this summer to resume teaching full time. In this episode, Elmendorf talks to PolicyCast host Ralph Ranalli about the crucial role policy plays in everyday life, the often-imperfect ways it gets made, and the factors that shape it—including politics, values, education, and communication. He also addresses the issue of public distrust in policy advice and the vital role that values play in policymaking and educating public leaders, even when those values—including diversity, inclusion, and economic justice—are under attack by some in the political sphere. “Our job is to enunciate our values, and to explain how those values can help us serve the world,” he says. Elmendorf became dean of HKS in 2015 after a career steeped in policy research and formulation, especially involving his chosen field of economics. He has worked as the director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Treasury Department, an assistant director of research at the Federal Reserve Board, and a senior economist at the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers. As dean, he’s seen the school through a campus expansion, the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing polarization and attacks on government and higher education in the public sphere, and the current domestic political fallout from the conflict between Gaza and Israel. And he’s done it all while diversifying the school’s community of students and scholars and affirming the important role of training public leaders and developing workable policy solutions to big public challenges. 

Episode Notes

Douglas Elmendorf was named dean and the Don K. Price Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School in 2015 and will step down to join the faculty full time this summer. He had previously served as the director of the Congressional Budget Office, assistant director of the Division of Research and Statistics at the Federal Reserve Board, deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department, and a senior economist at the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers. In those policy roles, he worked on budget policy, health care issues, the macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy, Social Security, income security programs, financial markets, macroeconomic analysis and forecasting, and a range of other topics. He has also worked as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and as an assistant professor of economics at Harvard. He earned his PhD and AM in economics from Harvard University and his AB summa cum laude from Princeton University. 

Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Communications and Public Affairs is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former journalist, public television producer, and entrepreneur, he holds an AB in Political Science from UCLA and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University.

Editorial support for PolicyCast is provided by Nora Delaney , Robert O’Neill , and James Smith of the HKS Office of Communications and Public Affairs. Design and graphics support is provided by Lydia Rosenberg , Delane Meadows , and the OCPA Design Team. Social media promotion and support is provided by Natalie Montaner and the OCPA Digital Team.  

Preroll: PolicyCast explores research-based policy solutions to the big problems we’re facing in our society and our world. This podcast is a production of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.  

Intro (Doug Elmendorf): I would like policymakers to be straight with the public. Of course, people will be boosters for their own preferred policies, but I'd love to have them occasionally say, I understand this policy is not going to solve every problem in the world. It'll have some downsides, but on balance it's good and here's why I support it. And I would like policymakers to talk with experts in an appropriately constructive, critical way, which is to say, not just to listen and take notes and follow, but to ask questions, to ask questions designed to get at the truth most effectively. And then to use that in what they do. And then I would encourage people to listen to public leaders with some empathy for the difficulty of making good policy. There are not easy solutions for any of the big problems in the world, but also I think the public should be appropriately demanding. They should expect their leaders to be straight with them, to work hard on policies that can help improve people's lives.

Intro (Ralph Ranalli): Welcome to the Harvard Kennedy School PolicyCast. I’m your host, Ralph Ranalli. If you’re a regular listener, you already know that public policy is our reason for being here at PolicyCast. We take deep dives into evidence-based policy ideas, the data and the researchers behind them, the people they are trying to help, and the problems they’re trying to solve. What we don’t get to do very often is discuss policy itself—the crucial role it plays in our everyday lives, the often-imperfect ways it gets made, why more people don’t trust it, and the role that things like politics, values, education, and communication play in its formulation. That’s why I’m so glad that Harvard Kennedy School Dean Douglas Elmendorf has agreed to come on and talk about all those things. Doug, who is also the Donald K. Price Professor of Public Policy, became dean of HKS in 2015 after a career steeped in policy research and formulation, mostly involving his chosen field of economics. He has worked as the director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a deputy assistant  secretary at the U.S. Treasury, an assistant director of research at the Federal Reserve Board, and a senior economist at the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers. As dean, he’s seen the school through a campus expansion, the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing polarization and attacks on government and higher education in the public sphere, and the current domestic political fallout from the conflict between Gaza and Israel—all while diversifying the school’s community of students and scholars and affirming the important role of training public leaders and developing workable policy solutions to big public challenges. He's stepping down at the end of this semester to rejoin the Kennedy School faculty—   with a stop here at the PolicyCast studios along the way.

Ralph Ranalli: Doug, welcome to PolicyCast.

Doug Elmendorf: Thank you, Ralph. It's great to be with you.

Ralph Ranalli: Congratulations on completing your tenure—almost—as dean. I was reading that you said the job has been, quote, even more enlightening, challenging, and rewarding than you had imagined. As I read it, I imagined an emphasis on the word challenging, because you saw us through COVID and now you're seeing us through the domestic political fallout from the Israel-Gaza conflict. Do they give graduate school deans hazard pay? How are you doing?

Doug Elmendorf: I'm doing fine, thank you. And I'd emphasize each word in that expression. I've loved doing this job. It's been terrific. It has also been hard. And among the deans, there was joking that COVID years should count at least twice. I've done more than almost nine years. But what makes these jobs challenging is also what makes them exciting, which is being part of such a vibrant intellectual community of people who are deeply committed to our mission. And that is both what makes it hard because all these forces in the world affect us and we have to deal with them and respond to them. It's also what makes the job incredibly rewarding and I feel very lucky to have it.

Ralph Ranalli: Well, today I feel lucky that we get to just talk about policy itself. Usually we're talking about a specific policy recommendation or policy research, but I've always thought that the whole notion of good policy is more important than most people realize it is. For you, what is the most important thing about well-crafted, evidence-based public policy? What would you want the average person to know about public policy that perhaps they don't appreciate?

Doug Elmendorf: Well, the first thing to understand is how important policy is. Good policy makes people's lives better and bad policy can lead to terrible suffering. And so it's very important to get policy right. And we see that in thinking about international relations—think about the war in Ukraine, think about the fighting in Israel and Gaza. We see that in economic terms: the decisions of the Federal Reserve Board, the decisions of the Chinese government about how to pursue economic growth. We see that in democracy and human rights, election procedures, protections for people under the law can change lives in dramatic ways. We see that in sustainability, how we think about the transition to reduced carbon emissions. All these aspects of policy affect people very directly for good or for ill.  

The second thing to understand is that you can't make good policy without understanding what works and what doesn't. And that means looking at the evidence. Evidence is not enough, and we'll talk, I think, about other aspects of policymaking that matter, but you have to start by understanding if you do A, does B happen or does C happen? Unless you can draw on the statistical evidence, the historical evidence analysis, you're not going to know. And then you're not going to know whether you want to push the button for A or not push the button for A. And those are the things that I hope people would understand.

Ralph Ranalli : Yeah. I've been privileged to be a part of this operation here at HKS because you get to see the research as it’s being created and the amount of work that goes into creating those evidence-based policy recommendations. And yet there's sort of this disconnect between what I see—where of course this is a good idea because it's based on the research and the research shows that it has a good shot at working—but yet there seems to be a lot of generalized distrust in policy advice, in policy recommendations. You've spent a lot of time in the policy world. You were the director of the Congressional Budget Office, you worked at the Treasury Department, the Fed, you worked at Brookings. In your experience, what are the biggest drivers of that policy distrust?

Doug Elmendorf: I think the biggest factor is that people are legitimately frustrated that a lot of what's been happening in the world over the last few decades, and in this country over the last few decades, doesn't seem very good to them. And they think that experts are responsible for the failings. And I think that charge has some truth and in some ways is false. What is true in this country, for example, is that the economic pie has increased at a strong rate. It's also true that some people's pieces of pie are getting much larger and other people's pieces of pie are not getting much larger at all. And those who don't see as much hope for their future or their children's future as they want to see blame policymakers, blame public leaders for not making different policy choices that might be more advantageous to them.  

Now, some of that I think is a mistaken impression. Policymakers can't solve all problems. Policymakers can't make everything right, they can't make gold run in the streets. But I think some of the concern is legitimate. Policymakers have made mistakes. And then the question is, as a school that's training policymakers, training public leaders, what sensibilities should we be instilling in our students to help them build trust in the future? I think part of this is that experts need to be humble. They need to admit the limitations of their knowledge. Often, a close look at the evidence does not really prove that if you did A today B will happen. It says usually something like well B will probably happen, but it could be C or it could be D, or it could be something we haven't imagined at all yet, because the world's constantly changing, the collection of evidence is not going to be perfect. And so I think experts need to say, we think that B will happen, but we don't know for sure. And I think if experts were willing to admit that, that would help people then understand what the limitations of expert knowledge is.  

I think a second thing is that experts, public leaders, our students when they graduate need to be sure that they are serving all people in their societies. They need to ensure that what they're doing is not just good for people who already have big pieces of the pie but will be good for people who don't have much pie at all. And I think all of us who are in this line of work have a responsibility to look out for others and especially for others who are less fortunate than most of us are ourselves.

Ralph Ranalli: How much do you think distrust can be addressed by expert humility versus how much is just kind of out there in the political sphere and the public discourse? Because there's not a wide agreement on the role of government in people's lives, to say the least, right? I mean on one side of the spectrum you have Ronald Reagan saying the nine scariest words in the English language are: ‘I'm from the government, I'm here to help.’ And then on the other side you have former Congressman Barney Frank saying: ‘Government is just the word we use for the things we do together.’ Can you talk a little bit about how that political gap that makes it more difficult?

Doug Elmendorf: Yeah. I think politics are intrinsic in policymaking, right? In democracies, the people who will make the policy choices have been chosen through a political process, and that's as it should be. And even in countries that aren't democracies, leaders often feel some pressure from their constituents, and that's political pressure. Politics can't and shouldn't be divorced from policymaking. At the Kennedy School, we have taught for many years that good policies satisfy three criteria. One is that they're technically appropriate and actually if you're trying to get B to happen, that you push on A and that will tend to cause B to happen.  

But secondly, we say policies need to be administratively feasible. They need to work not just on a blackboard in a classroom where you can show that A causes B, but actually be implementable by real governments in the real world where there are a lot of constraints. And the third thing we say is that good policies have to be politically sustainable. They have to meet a felt need of people, non-experts, in ways that they can make some sense of. And I think those criteria can be satisfied through policies. I think sometimes experts need to learn not to explain things only in very technical ways for other experts, but to find ways to say things to people who are not going to spend their lives studying some topic but are smart and concerned and can understand an English language version, not an expert language version of what a policy is about.

Ralph Ranalli: Right. Because you're always going to have populists on the other side talking in a message that people can understand. And if you're talking in a message that people can't understand, you are always going to be at that disadvantage. You have to meet them on that same ground of accessibility.

Doug Elmendorf: Yes, I think that's exactly right. I do also think that we are dependent on public leaders not distorting evidence that they understand. It's very possible to have different views about a policy, even having read the same evidence—and we'll talk, I think, more about that—but sometimes people trying to win an argument will say things they know aren't true or will deliberately misrepresent some piece of evidence. Then it's very hard for the average citizen who's going about their own lives to make sense of the debate. And I do think that we suffer some in this country, and other countries suffer as well, from some public leaders who are not playing it straight with their constituents who are saying things that are not true and that they know or could easily know are not true. And then it's very hard to have the informed debate that our system of government depends on.

Ralph Ranalli: That may be your mastery of understatement talking given our current political situation. I mean, you were CBO director when the speakers were Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner. Did you ever think during that time that you would eventually look back on that as the good old days given the level of dysfunction in Washington and the level of polarization out in the electorate?

Doug Elmendorf: Well, that's a good question. When I was CBO director about a decade ago, my predecessors said they felt sorry for me and my colleagues at the time because things had been more civilized in some ways in their day. And now I look at my successors and I feel sorry for them thinking back about how civilized things were in my day. I will say though, that when I spoke with members of Congress in private, outside of the glare of the TV lights and away from the sound clips, I found them to be almost always very interested in understanding more about public policy. In public, I think sometimes they felt they had to play a certain role, get a certain clip they could use of themselves or of me saying something they wanted me to say. That was less constructive in my view. But in private, they often wanted to really understand how CBO was analyzing certain prospective policies. They wanted to see why our views sometimes differed from their views. And so we need more of that private, constructive sort of exchange and less, I think, of the public posturing.

Ralph Ranalli: Let's go down that politics road for a minute. Obviously, like you said, politics is inextricably linked with policy. I mean, to me, at its best, politics is a way to determine the best policies for the country and for its people. And at worst, it's probably just about determining who wields power, right? To you, what is the most appropriate, or perhaps productive, relationship between politics and policy?

Doug Elmendorf: Politics at its best, as you say, is the way that we make collective choices. In any society people will disagree about things and we have political systems to try to manage those disagreements and find a way to move forward collectively. And that's great. That's what we want to have happen. That's how policies should be set. And values are central to this. At the Congressional Budget Office, when it was established almost 50 years ago, one of the guiding principles has been that CBO does not make policy recommendations.  

And the reason is because policy choices depend on values and experts don't have values that are any better than anybody else's values, right? And so what CBO's job was to say, well, if you legislate A, B will happen, if you legislate C, then D will happen. But the choice between B and D is not a choice that CBO should make or a choice that CBO's analysts or director have any special authority for. But what the experts can tell you is if you do A, you might get B. If you do C, you make get D. But the choice has to be made with values. And in our country, we elect leaders to use our values, essentially to represent our values, as they make policy choices. And so that's what politics should be about. It should be about choosing leaders who will take on board our collective values and will then listen to experts about what the effects would be of different policies and to choose the policies whose outcomes seem most consistent with the values that we hold collectively as members of this society.

Ralph Ranalli: Right. How much of this do you think is a media problem? And I guess by media, I mean public discourse in its current state writ large, but my background is journalism. I was in the media for 25 years, and I always had a thing for policy. Yet I often found it hard in my own job, even when I was covering government, to get traction on stories that dove into policy. There was always this push towards the political, which was sexier. It's more controversy, it drives page views and clicks. And now we're heading into an election cycle and we're going to see more horse race stories about candidate controversies and less about what policies that the people who are behind the personalities are going to push. And then along comes social media, which is basically a turbocharged and more personalized version of that whole dynamic. And sometimes I think it feels almost like shouting against a hurricane.

Is there a way to work around that, to get any traction? Because things just seem to be going the wrong direction in terms of our ability to put these good ideas out there in a way that's actually going to get to the people they're intended to get to.

Doug Elmendorf: Well, it's a hard problem and if I had a great solution, you would've heard it from me by now. Let me offer a few thoughts. I think one is that I understand why a political story is a human-interest story in a way that a policy article might not be. And I think that requires experts and journalists who write about experts to try to develop narrative approaches wherever possible. I mean, I was trained—I'm an economist—I was trained to use tables and charts, not so much to tell stories. And as I came to the Kennedy School and became the dean here and became a different kind of leader, I was advised to use fewer bullet points, fewer big tables and charts, and to talk more about stories, to create narratives that people can understand and to follow. And that does not come naturally to me, in fact. And I've strived to do that and I'm a little better than I was, but I'm not great.  

And I think that's part of what we need, which is we need to take the experts’ analysis and process them through individual stories. That's not a matter of denying the complexity. It's not trying to just make up a story, it's trying to tell a real story, but in a way that people can understand. And I think people should try—we all need to try—to do more of that. I also say that the word media is the center of the longer word intermediary. And one thing that our political science colleagues have taught me is that there are a number of intermediaries in the political world who are in some ways weaker than they were. And so for example, with unions being less important in this country, with organized religion drawing fewer regular worshippers than in the past, and in other ways, some of the intermediating institutions, places where people would go to somebody they trusted to help them understand what was going on, that some of those have weakened. And so we've lost some of the good channels and have built some unfortunate channels for conveying information and we need to try to rebuild the good ones and corral the more dangerous ones.

Ralph Ranalli: It's interesting that you mention taking information that might be hard to digest in the way that experts consume it because we did a great episode not long ago with Todd Rogers and with Lauren Brodsky about doing that exact same thing. It featured Todd Rogers talking about making information more digestible to people who read, or, more accurately, people who skim, because we’re actually skimmers more than readers these days. And then Lauren Brodsky is all about presenting data in a way that involves narrative and that people can understand, because people are wired for story.

Doug Elmendorf: Can I say about Todd, I once had Todd come and talk with me and some of the leaders of the school about how we should communicate, and I do write in a different way now because of Todd.

Ralph Ranalli: And so do I.

Doug Elmendorf: And people will say now, “Well, channeling Todd Rogers, you should cut out that paragraph and just use the single sentence.” He's having some positive effect even right here.

Ralph Ranalli: I’d like to turn now to the role of values, which you mentioned earlier. And this one to me is one of the more intriguing issues involving policy and policy education. And so take, for example, HKS's mission statement. It's to improve public policy and leadership so people can live in societies that are more safe, free, just, and sustainably prosperous. That's a fairly short sentence, but there's a lot to unpack in there. And there are a lot of values inferences there— that justice is important, that freedom is important, that safety is important. We are ideally nonpartisan, but I think sometimes defending those values can make us seem partisan. What is the best way to walk that line between defending our values yet remaining nonpartisan?

Doug Elmendorf: We are definitely nonpartisan, and we need to be nonpartisan. That's not the same thing as having no values about the world. I think our job is to enunciate our values and explain how those values can help us serve the world, and then if people align for or against some of what we do in a partisan way, that's on them, not on us. I think in general as dean, I try to enunciate what the school is trying to do. I don't try to critique what others are doing.

Ralph Ranalli: Going a little further with that values discussion, some observers of higher ed have been criticizing DEI initiatives at universities—diversity, equity and inclusion efforts—and even criticizing the qualifications of some Black faculty members. What do you make of those critiques?

Doug Elmendorf: Let me comment first on criticisms of diversity initiatives and then turn to criticisms of faculty members. Some people view the words diversity, equity, and inclusion as a cover for identity politics or deliberate divisiveness. That is not how we use those words at the Kennedy School. It's not how we think about diversity. Our work on what we call diversity, inclusion, and belonging is about broadening our intellectual community and ensuring that everyone can participate fully. We pursue those goals because they're integral to our pursuit of excellence. When we bring to the Kennedy School outstanding students with a wider range of perspectives and experiences than before, and help them interact with greater curiosity and tolerance, they learn more while they're here and they'll be more effective public leaders and policymakers when they graduate. And when we can bring to the Kennedy School outstanding faculty and staff with a wider range of perspectives and help them interact with greater understanding, they learn more and accomplish more too.

That's why we cast a wide net in recruiting people to come to the Kennedy School on our student body, our faculty, and among our staff. That's why we talk about the benefits and responsibilities that come with pluralism along many dimensions of national origin, gender, race, religion, ideology, and more. That's why we encourage candid and constructive conversations between people so that we learn from our pluralism. Our commitment to diversity, inclusion, and belonging is a crucial part of our pursuit of excellence. Now, regarding criticisms of faculty members, I am deeply distressed by what I see as a campaign targeting Black scholars and especially Black female scholars at a number of universities. Of course, Harvard and other universities take seriously any legitimate complaints about faculty members, but when allegations are focused systematically on people of a particular race or gender, we should all be offended. There should be no place for such targeting. At the Kennedy School, we are a community of faculty, staff, and students who were chosen carefully by each other. We all belong here and we will stand together.

The School will continue as best it can to safeguard our faculty's ability to do outstanding research and teaching on the issues of our time and regardless of the popularity of someone's topic or findings among some constituencies.

Ralph Ranalli: Yeah, I think that's a good example of standing up for your values.

Doug Elmendorf: Yes.

Ralph Ranalli: You've pretty much nailed all my segues so far, and you did it again with candid and constructive conversations, because not only has my writing been changed by Todd Rogers, but how I approach political conversations has been changed by a seminar I took with professors Erica Chenoweth and Julia Minson, and also the PolicyCast episode that we did with them about what we’re calling candid and constructive conversations. Can you talk a little bit about the thinking behind creating that effort and ultimately what is the hope for what it can achieve?

Doug Elmendorf: Yes, I love this topic. As I started saying before, in every society there will be disagreements, in every community, every organization, there'll be disagreements about what to do. And in order to have a society function or an organization function, those disagreements need to be managed, dealt with, recognized, resolved where possible. In many societies today, and in many organizations, there's a wider range of views than in the past because new voices have been given a chance to speak. And sometimes that happens through immigration into a country, but also has happened because in some societies women have a larger role than they were allowed to have before. Members of racial ethnic minorities can have a larger role than they had before. The voices around the table, as they become more diverse, which can be a great strength for society, also make it even more important and maybe more challenging to have a constructive conversation.

And so we've worried at the Kennedy School for several years that we were not having the right kind of disagreement, by which I mean a candid disagreement where we’re not just ducking an issue, but constructive and that we're trying to learn from each other, maybe find common ground, maybe not, but at least hear each other, understand where we're coming from. And so we've tried to build our ability to have those kinds of conversations in various ways. And this has started with when you apply to the Kennedy School as a student, you have to answer a question that is essentially, tell us about a time that you changed your mind. And if you can't think of any time in your life when you learn something that changed what you thought, then why come here because what would the point be?  

We now do this in orientation. We have workshops. I've done some myself, and every time I do one, I think I get a little better at being able myself to have that kind of conversation. People sometimes say the goal is to be tough on the issues and easy on the people. Our disagreement is not a personal one. We respect each other, we want to listen to each other. We may disagree very, very vigorously, very deeply, strongly about the issue at hand. And so we're trying to help people do that here. And then we felt a couple of years ago that we were not making enough progress. We'd done pieces of things at the School, the application uestion, the orientation sessions and so on, and we liked those, but there wasn't enough to make our efforts worthy of our view that it is a core competency of a learner, a colleague, a public leader, a public citizen, a core competency to be able to disagree in constructive ways.

And so we're trying to build that in now throughout the work of the school. I convened a group in the fall of 2022 to dig into this issue. Professor Erica Chenoweth chaired this group. They did a deep dive into the research literature about how to disagree, how to help people disagree better. As one of our guests said, they also did a deep dive into what attitudes were on campus and found many people who want to have those kinds of vigorous but respectful disagreements, but felt it was hard for them to do in one way or another.

Ralph Ranalli: Right.

Doug Elmendorf: We found a lot of interest in getting better, and they developed some recommendations, a long list of recommendations for tools to get better, and now we're going at it full blast. And so this year's admitted class got a welcome letter that said congratulations and various things including, I'm paraphrasing, come to this place because you'll get a chance to disagree with other people with different experiences and backgrounds and perspectives in a way that will help you learn.

Ralph Ranalli: Right. What I found really striking about that whole effort and how Erica and Julia were approaching it was the emphasis on listening. Because we've adopted as the show's motto a quote from former Harvard President Drew Faust, which is to “speak bravely and listen generously.” And I think listening is the counterintuitive part. It's not necessarily changing how you're speaking, although it is, but it really is changing how you're listening and your receptiveness to what the other person's saying and making them feel heard. I know that's changed for me, how I listen.

Ralph Ranalli: Has it changed for you?

Doug Elmendorf: It has, but it's changing slowly. I mean, part of why I feel the importance of this so deeply is that I don't always find this easy myself. And so the idea is not to tell people, oh, this is easy. Some people may find it easier than others. Our point is to tell people that if you don't find it easy, you can still learn and get better at it. This is a skill you can build. Sometimes people say it's a muscle that you can build.

Ralph Ranalli: That you have to exercise for it to not only become strong, but stay strong. I think that's a great analogy.

Doug Elmendorf: I think that's exactly right. And so part of what we need to do is to talk openly about the skill building and why we do it and practice building it. But part of what we need to do is to actually just do a lot of it. And that means having spirited debates here at the school. And sometimes we'll have outside guests who will spur those debates. Sometimes it'll be a faculty member or a student speaking in the class. Oftentimes there'll be a faculty member, a student, a staff member sitting in the dining area starting a conversation over lunch on a serious topic. And so we can all get better at it. We're trying to make it not a thing that you think either you have or you don't, but something that we can all be better at.  

I think you're right about the listening. I would emphasize that. Sometimes people think that when we encourage this kind of discourse that we're saying, you should just talk to somebody else and split the difference between you. And people sometimes view that as abandonment of their values. And I don't think that's the right way to think about it. What we say is that you want to be open to hearing, you want to understand where they're coming from, and that is both, I think a matter of personal respect, if you are a fellow student or a colleague, that you should respect them enough to want to hear what they think, even if you don't agree. And it's a matter of, but also practical value. If you're a lawyer, do you ever go into a courtroom without thinking through first what the other side will argue? No. If you're going to do a negotiation, would you ever go into that without thinking through what the other side will want and why? No, that would be terrible. And so it is a great practical value, even if in the end you still want to pursue exactly your view, to do better at that, you need to understand what the other views are going to be. It's both a moral and practical value.

Ralph Ranalli: It even touches on intellectual rigor too because it’s part of the process of rigorously looking at a problem and potential solutions.

Ralph Ranalli: I'd like to circle back to policy to where the rubber sort of hits the road, which is implementation.

Doug Elmendorf: Okay.

Ralph Ranalli: Bad policy implementation. I think you said this at the beginning, bad policy implementation can be really bad and it can even make a bad thing out of a good policy.

Ralph Ranalli: What comes to mind when I think about that is the recent U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Withdrawing from Afghanistan was something a lot of people supported, a lot of people thought was overdue, but the way it was carried out—we had pictures in the media of these poor Afghan people clinging to the landing gear of U.S. cargo planes as they took off. The implementation of it was just horrible. Talk a little bit about the underappreciated role of policy implementation for us.

Doug Elmendorf: Yeah, so thank you. The Kennedy School started 90 or so years ago as the Littauer School of Public Administration. We might now use the term public management. And it was, I think, meant to be about how to execute the functions of government. This school and other schools like ours became more schools of public policy, the formulation of the technically correct policy. And that's, of course, very important. As an economist, that's the part of governance that I would work on most myself. But there was a danger in that that we, I think, came to give too little emphasis to the importance of execution to the public management. How does the government actually put a policy into place? How are the goods and services delivered to people? And one thing we've done in the last several years at the Kennedy School is to put more emphasis again on public management. In our core MPP curriculum, we have a course on getting things done in the public sector. We've recruited new faculty members, both practitioners and scholars focused on public management. Our work with state and local governments is partly about policy, but very heavily about public management—that many of the government services are actually delivered at the local or state levels.  

And so I've been pleased to see the school give somewhat more emphasis to that aspect of the three-legged stool I described earlier. And I think this is important for at least two reasons. I mean, one is that if you deliver services well, if you execute foreign affairs decisions well and so on, people will be safer and freer and more prosperous. But I think secondly, it's important because good execution can help to build people's confidence in governance and in democracy in democratic states. And some of the objections to democracy, some of the skepticism you see about democracy in polls, I think come from political philosophy views. But I think much of it comes from thinking, well, the government's not doing that great a job at the things that I want the government to do.

Ralph Ranalli: How great can democracy be if it's working this poorly for me?

Doug Elmendorf: Yes, exactly. I think an important part of restoring faith in governance in this country and in some others, is better execution. And so the execution matters both for its own sake, just in terms of the direct benefits, but also helping to restore confidence in the public sector, which is crucial over time. People need to believe that their government is serving them, their government is to serve them, and they need to believe that civil society organizations are serving. And they need to believe that private sector organizations are serving them, not just serving themselves. And so the effective delivery is an important part of that.

Ralph Ranalli: Doug, to wrap up, what would you like to most see policy makers do and see the public do in their approaches to making good policy that accomplishes its mission of really helping the people it's designed to help?

Doug Elmendorf : I would like policymakers to be straight with the public. Of course, people will be boosters for their own preferred policies, but I'd love to have them occasionally say, I understand this policy is not going to solve every problem in the world. It'll have some downsides, but on balance  it's good and here's why I support it. And I would like policymakers to talk with experts in an appropriately constructive, critical way, which is to say, not just to listen and take notes and follow, to ask questions, to ask questions designed to get at the truth most effectively. And then to use that in what they do. And for the public, I would hope that they would first focus on interacting with other people in their societies, in their communities, who are different from them in a lot of ways. That may seem very exciting, as they often do to me, may also seem scary or unsettling, as they seem to other people. But still, we all need to try. And I know from my own very lucky experience at the Kennedy School, the more people I meet who come from places I don't know who have views about issues I don't share, the more I learn and the more I enjoy what I'm doing. And I would encourage all of us to do that. And then I would encourage people to listen to public leaders with some empathy for the difficulty of making good policy. There are not easy solutions for any of the big problems in the world, but also I think the public should be appropriately demanding. They should expect their leaders to be straight with them, to work hard on policies that can help improve people's lives.

Ralph Ranalli: That's great. Well, I want to thank you, Doug, for being here and talking about this and for your service to the school. I hope people take this to heart because it's always mattered to me, and I know it's always mattered to you, and I really hope it resonates with the folks out there.

Doug Elmendorf: Thank you, Ralph. This has been fun. It's been great to talk with you.

Outro (Ralph Ranalli): Thanks for listening. Please join us for our next episode and, if you haven’t already, subscribe to PolicyCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. And please leave us a review while you’re there. Editorial assistance for PolicyCast is provided by Nora Delaney, Robert O’Neill, and Jim Smith of the Harvard Kennedy School Office of Communications and Public Affairs. Design support is provided by Laura King and Delane Meadows. Our social media management is provided by Natalie Montaner. If you’d like to learn more about PolicyCast or explore previous episodes, please visit our home page at hks.harvard.edu/policycast. And until next time, remember to speak bravely, and listen generously.

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Bringing an investigator’s eye to complex social challenges

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Anna Russo likes puzzles. They require patience, organization, and a view of the big picture. She brings an investigator’s eye to big institutional and societal challenges whose solutions can have wide-ranging, long-term impacts.

Russo’s path to MIT began with questions. She didn’t have the whole picture yet. “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life,” says Russo, who is completing her PhD in economics in 2024. “I was good at math and science and thought I wanted to be a doctor.”

While completing her undergraduate studies at Yale University, where she double majored in economics and applied math, Russo discovered a passion for problem-solving, where she could apply an analytical lens to answering the kinds of thorny questions whose solutions could improve policy. “Empirical research is fun and exciting,” Russo says.

After Yale, Russo considered what to do next. She worked as a full-time research assistant with MIT economist Amy Finkelstein . Russo’s work with Finkelstein led her toward identifying, studying, and developing answers to complex questions. 

“My research combines ideas from two fields of economic inquiry — public finance and industrial organization — and applies them to questions about the design of environmental and health care policy,” Russo says. “I like the way economists think analytically about social problems.”

Narrowing her focus

Studying with and being advised by renowned economists as both an undergraduate and a doctoral student helped Russo narrow her research focus, fitting more pieces into the puzzle. “What drew me to MIT was its investment in its graduate students,” Russo says.

Economic research meant digging into policy questions, identifying market failures, and proposing solutions. Doctoral study allowed Russo to assemble data to rigorously follow each line of inquiry.

“Doctoral study means you get to write about something you’re really interested in,” Russo notes. This led her to study policy responses to climate change adaptation and mitigation. 

“In my first year, I worked on a project exploring the notion that floodplain regulation design doesn’t do a good job of incentivizing the right level of development in flood-prone areas,” she says. “How can economists help governments convince people to act in society’s best interest?”

It’s important to understand institutional details, Russo adds, which can help investigators identify and implement solutions. 

“Feedback, advice, and support from faculty were crucial as I grew as a researcher at MIT,” she says. Beyond her two main MIT advisors, Finkelstein and economist Nikhil Agarwal — educators she describes as “phenomenal, dedicated advisors and mentors” — Russo interacted regularly with faculty across the department. 

Russo later discovered another challenge she hoped to solve: inefficiencies in conservation and carbon offset programs. She set her sights on the United States Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program because she believes it and programs like it can be improved. 

The CRP is a land conservation plan administered by USDA’s Farm Service Agency. In exchange for a yearly rental payment, farmers enrolled in the program agree to remove environmentally sensitive land from agricultural production and plant species that will improve environmental health and quality.

“I think we can tweak the program’s design to improve cost-effectiveness,” Russo says. “There’s a trove of data available.” The data include information like auction participants’ bids in response to well-specified auction rules, which Russo links to satellite data measuring land use outcomes. Understanding how landowners bid in CRP auctions can help identify and improve the program’s function. 

“We may be able to improve targeting and achieve more cost-effective conservation by adjusting the CRP’s scoring system,” Russo argues. Opportunities may exist to scale the incremental changes under study for other conservation programs and carbon offset markets more generally.  

Economics, Russo believes, can help us conceptualize problems and recommend effective alternative solutions.

The next puzzle

Russo wants to find her next challenge while continuing her research. She plans to continue her work as a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, after which she’ll join the Harvard Department of Economics as an assistant professor. Russo also plans to continue helping other budding economists since she believes in the importance of supporting other students.   

Russo’s advisors are some of her biggest supporters. 

Finklestein emphasizes Russo’s curiosity, enthusiasm, and energy as key drivers in her success. “Her genuine curiosity and interest in getting to the bottom of a problem with the data — with an econometric analysis, with a modeling issue — is the best antidote for [the stress that can be associated with research],” Finklestein says. “It's a key ingredient in her ability to produce important and credible work.”

“She's also incredibly generous with her time and advice,” Finklestein continues, “whether it's helping an undergraduate research assistant with her senior thesis, or helping an advisor such as myself navigate a data access process she's previously been through.”

“Instead of an advisor-advisee relationship, working with her on a thesis felt more like a collaboration between equals,” Agarwal adds. “[She] has the maturity and smarts to produce pathbreaking research.

“Doctoral study is an opportunity for students to find their paths collaboratively,” Russo says. “If I can help someone else solve a small piece of their puzzle, that’s a huge positive. Research is a series of many, many small steps forward.” 

Identifying important causes for further investigation and study will always be important to Russo. “I also want to dig into some other market that’s not working well and figure out how to make it better,” she says. “Right now I’m really excited about understanding California wildfire mitigation.” 

Puzzles are made to be solved, after all.

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This month’s new research from our faculty experts explores partisan disparities in the use of science in policy and how immigration enforcement affects public safety. Their research also creates a comprehensive dataset of federal laws and investigates whether “skin-deep resilience” emerges in childhood.

Politics, Institutions, and Public Policy

Partisan Disparities in the Use of Science in Policy

Scientific research is essential to shape policy decisions, but little is known about how policymakers from different political parties use research. In a working paper, political scientist and IPR associate Alexander Furnas and his colleagues investigate the partisan differences in the use of science in policy across the federal government and ideological think tanks in the U.S. The researchers analyzed a dataset of 49,345 congressional committee reports and 191,118 documents published by 121 think tanks from 1995 to 2021. They matched the scientific references in these documents to a large-scale publication and citation database with over 120 million scientific citations. They find that the use of science in policy documents has increased from 5% in 1995 to nearly 30% in 2020—a roughly sixfold increase. Democratic-controlled congressional committees and left-leaning think tanks are more than five times as likely to cite science, compared to Republican and right-leaning congressional committees and think tanks, and Democrats cite science with higher impact. The two parties cite very different scientific sources, with only about 5% cited by both parties. The researchers also surveyed roughly 3,500 political elites and policymakers about their trust in scientists and scientific institutions, finding that Democrats are more likely to trust science than Republicans. The results show that science is increasingly used to inform policymaking, but there are partisan differences in trust and use of science, which could undermine bipartisan efforts for constructive policy solutions.

How Does Immigrant Enforcement Affect Public Safety?

​​Immigrant enforcement policies are often promoted as a way to improve public safety, but are they effective at achieving that goal? In a working paper, IPR economist Elisa Jácome and her colleagues study the impact of the U.S. Secure Communities (SC) program on public safety. The SC program increased information sharing between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities and was implemented across the country between 2008 and 2013 in a staggered roll-out allowing the researchers to compare the policy’s impact in different counties over time. The researchers use data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), a nationally representative survey asking individuals whether they had been the victim of a crime and whether they reported it to police. Because 90% of deported individuals are of Hispanic ethnicity, the researchers compared the impact of the SC program separately on Hispanic and non-Hispanic individuals. The authors find that Hispanic individuals were 30% less likely to report crimes to the police after SC was implemented. Contrary to the goals of the program, Hispanic residents were also significantly more likely to be victims of crimes. They estimate that the introduction of the SC program resulted in 1.3 million additional crimes against Hispanics. Non-Hispanic individuals overall were not more likely to be victims of crimes, except in areas with a high population of Hispanic residents. The researchers’ evidence indicates the decline in reporting is a key driver of the increase in crimes against Hispanics and that trust in public institutions, including law enforcement, is crucial for public safety.

Creating a Comprehensive Dataset of Federal Laws

Despite its obvious value to scholars studying American politics and law, no easily accessible, comprehensive, digital dataset of all U.S. federal laws since 1789 exists. IPR political scientist Brian Libgober offers an open-source database he built to remedy this, which he introduces in S cientific Data . While acknowledging earlier attempts at compiling a complete dataset, he notes their shortcomings, including inconsistent inclusion criteria, as well as incomplete transparency and comprehensiveness. Building the database required clearly defining what a “law” is within the context of U.S. federal policymaking over the course of centuries, as well as resolving many inconsistencies in citation systems over the years. The code in R used to create the dataset from original sources is also publicly accessible.

Social Disparities and Health

Skin-Deep Resilience in Childhood  

Individuals who exhibit positive coping skills also tend to display good mental health in adulthood, even sometimes when they experience adversity during their childhood years, such as coming from a low socioeconomic background. However, this resilience appears to primarily emerge with respect to psychological well-being, as their physical health profiles tend to indicate poorer health—a phenomenon commonly labeled "skin-deep resilience." But does this pattern appear in childhood? In the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, IPR health psychologists Edith Chen , Greg Miller , and their colleagues test this hypothesis to determine if “skin-deep resilience” emerges in childhood. The researchers collected and analyzed data from 165 Black and Latinx children aged 8–16 in July 2021–May 2022. Participants reported on their use of John Henryism coping behaviors—where high effort is used to handle challenges—along with their levels of depression and anxiety. Guardians provided information on their socioeconomic status (SES). The researchers measured participants’ blood pressure, waist circumference, blood sugar, triglycerides, and cholesterol (cardiometabolic risk). The study found that in children with high levels of high-effort coping, low SES was not associated with mental health, but was associated with increased cardiometabolic risk. In children without high-effort coping, low SES was linked to internalizing mental health symptoms, but not to cardiometabolic risk. This suggests a link between socioeconomic disadvantage and cardiometabolic risk for children with high-effort coping tendencies. Public health efforts should consider the mental and physical health consequences of challenging environments, and promoting the combination of positive physical and mental health early in childhood is crucial for youth of color.

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Published: April 24, 2024.

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What Are Americans’ Top Foreign Policy Priorities?

Protecting the u.s. from terrorism and reducing the flow of illegal drugs are top issues overall, but democrats and republicans have very different priorities, table of contents.

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• The American Trends Panel survey methodology

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to better understand Americans’ long-range foreign policy priorities. For this analysis, we surveyed 3,600 U.S. adults from April 1 to April 7, 2024. Everyone who took part in this survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for this analysis, along with responses, and its methodology .

Americans have a lot on their plates in 2024, including an important election to determine who will remain or become again president. But the world does not stop for a U.S. election, and multiple conflicts around the world as well as other issues of global prominence continue to concern Americans.

When asked to prioritize the long-range foreign policy goals of the United States, the majority of Americans say preventing terrorist attacks (73%), keeping illegal drugs out of the country (64%) and preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction (63%) are top priorities. Over half of Americans also see maintaining the U.S. military advantage over other countries (53%) and preventing the spread of infectious diseases (52%) as primary foreign policy responsibilities.

About half of Americans say limiting the power and influence of Russia and China are top priorities. A recent annual threat assessment from the U.S. intelligence community focused heavily on those countries’ strengthening military relationship and their ability to shape the global narrative against U.S. interests.

Fewer than half of Americans say dealing with global climate change (44%) and getting other countries to assume more of the costs of maintaining world order (42%) are top priorities. The partisan gaps on these two issues are quite large:

• 70% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say climate change should be a top priority, while 15% of Republicans and Republican leaners say this.
• 54% of Republicans say getting other countries to assume more of the costs of maintaining world order should be a top priority, compared with 33% of Democrats.

About four-in-ten Americans see limiting the power and influence of North Korea and Iran as top priorities. (The survey was conducted before Iran’s large-scale missile attack on Israel on April 13.) And about a third say the same about the U.S. being a leader in artificial intelligence, a technology that governments around the world are increasingly concerned about .

When it comes to goals that focus on international engagement, like strengthening the United Nations and NATO or finding a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, fewer than a third of Americans mark these as top foreign policy priorities.

Related: Fewer Americans view the United Nations favorably than in 2023

Only about a quarter of Americans prioritize promoting human rights in other countries, leading other countries in space exploration and reducing military commitments overseas. And similar shares say supporting Ukraine (23%) and Israel (22%) are top issues.

At the bottom of this list of foreign policy priorities are promoting global democracy ( a major policy push from the Biden administration ) and aiding refugees fleeing violence around the world – about two-in-ten Americans describe these as top concerns. These assessments come amid a recent global surge in asylum claims . Still, in Center surveys, democracy promotion has typically been at the bottom of Americans’ list of foreign policy priorities, even dating back to George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s administrations .

Overall, a majority of Americans say that all 22 long-range foreign policy goals we asked about should be given at least some priority. Still, about three-in-ten Americans say supporting Israel (31%), promoting democracy (28%) and supporting Ukraine (27%) should be given no priority.

The long-range foreign policy priority questions were also asked in 2018 and 2021, and since then there have been some significant shifts in responses:

• Since 2018, the public has become significantly more likely to say limiting the power and influence of China (+17 percentage points) and finding a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (+11) are top foreign policy priorities.
• Americans have also increased the emphasis they place on limiting the power and influence of Russia, particularly in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (+8 points since 2021).
• On the decline since 2018 are strengthening the UN and aiding refugees (-8 points each), reducing foreign military commitments (-6), and promoting and defending human rights in other countries (-5).
• Preventing the spread of infectious diseases is down 19 percentage points since 2021 – during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic – and about back to where it was in 2018.

These are among the findings from a Pew Research Center survey conducted April 1-7, 2024.

The survey of 3,600 U.S. adults shows that foreign policy remains a partisan issue. Republicans prioritize the prevention of terrorism, reducing the flow of illegal drugs into the country, and maintaining a military advantage over other nations. Meanwhile, Democrats prioritize dealing with climate change and preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), but also preventing terrorist attacks.

There are also stark age differences on many of the policy goals mentioned, but for the most part, young adults are less likely than older Americans to say the issues we asked about are top priorities. The exceptions are dealing with climate change, reducing military commitments overseas, and promoting and defending human rights abroad – on these issues, 18- to 29-year-olds are significantly more likely than older Americans to assign top priority.

Even with these priorities, foreign policy generally takes the backset to domestic policy for most Americans: 83% say it is more important for President Joe Biden to focus on domestic policy, compared with 14% who say he should focus on foreign policy.

Americans are even less likely to prioritize international affairs than they were in 2019, when 74% wanted then-President Donald Trump to focus on domestic policy and 23% said he should focus on foreign policy.

Americans’ foreign policy priorities differ greatly by party. The largest divide, by a significant margin, is the 55 percentage point gap between Democrats and Republicans on dealing with global climate change (70% vs. 15%, respectively, see it as a top priority).

Supporting Ukraine, aiding refugees, reducing the spread of diseases, protecting human rights, and strengthening the UN are also issues on which Democrats are at least 20 points more likely than Republicans to prioritize. For example, 63% of Democrats say reducing the spread of infectious diseases is a top priority, compared with 41% of Republicans.

Republicans prioritize supporting Israel, reducing the flow of illegal drugs and maintaining a military advantage over other countries – among other security and hard power issues – significantly more than Democrats do. For example, more than half of Republicans (54%) say getting other countries to assume more of the costs of maintaining world order should be a top focus in foreign policy. Only a third of Democrats say the same.

The priority assigned to several issues is divided even further by ideology within parties. Take support for Israel and Ukraine as examples. Supporting Israel is generally a higher priority for Republicans than Democrats, but within the Republican Party, 48% of conservatives say it’s a top concern, while 18% of moderates and liberals agree. Previous Center research shows that conservative Republicans are especially likely to favor military aid to Israel .

Supporting Ukraine, something Democrats emphasize more than Republicans, is a top priority particularly for liberal Democrats (47%), while about three-in-ten moderate and conservative Democrats agree (29%). Democrats have also shown more willingness than Republicans to provide aid to Ukraine in its conflict with Russia.

Generally, the partisan differences on the importance of several foreign policy issues have gotten smaller since 2021 , when most of these questions were last fielded. This is especially true for items related to the relative power of major countries, like the U.S. maintaining a military advantage and limiting the power and influence of both Russia and China.

However, finding a solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians – a priority that saw no partisan difference at all when it was last asked about in 2018 – has an emerging partisan gap today. The share of Democrats who call this a top priority has more than doubled, while the share of Republicans has changed little.

Age differences persist on foreign policy issues. Older Americans prioritize most of the issues we asked about at higher rates than those ages 18 t0 29.

On four issues, there is at least a 40 percentage point gap between Americans ages 65 and older and young adults ages 18 to 29. The oldest Americans are more likely to prioritize reducing the flow of illegal drugs, limiting the power and influence of China and Iran, and maintaining a U.S. military advantage.

Those in the oldest age group are also more concerned than their younger counterparts on an additional 11 issues, ranging from support for Israel to U.S. leadership in space exploration.

For their part, young adults are more likely to say dealing with global climate change, reducing U.S. military commitments overseas, and promoting and defending human rights in other countries should be top foreign policy priorities.

Even starker patterns appear when looking at partisanship within two age groups – adults ages 18 to 49 and those 50 and older.

Among Democrats, older adults place particularly high priority on supporting Ukraine, strengthening NATO, and limiting the power and influence of Russia amid its war with Ukraine. Older Democrats are also more likely than younger ones to prioritize preventing the development of WMDs, curbing the spread of diseases, strengthening the UN and promoting democracy around the world, among other issues.

Among Republicans, those ages 50 and older are more likely than those ages 18 to 49 to prioritize supporting Israel, limiting the power and influence of Iran and China, getting other countries to assume more foreign policy costs, reducing the amount of illegal drugs entering the U.S., preventing terrorism, and maintaining a military advantage.

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