The Academic and the Policy-Maker

Of the fourteen prime ministers since 1945, British prime ministers since 1945, who attended any University, fourteen attended Oxford University.

Here in Oxford, a full service University, with very eminent scholars and practitioners across the board of all academic subjects, and extremely bright students, many of whom are interested in going into public service careers in the UK or in other countries.

We would like to be available to policy makers in as many ways as is mutually convenient and likewise we want to hear what policy makers have to say to us. And some of the ways are familiar ways that academics are used to working in.

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it’s inevitable that the relationship between academic work and government and politics is going to be messy, imperfect, problematic on both sides, in part
because the starting points for both sides are different. Academia should be concerned with the pursuit of knowledge and truth, in sometimes quite long time scales, primarily retrospective, hopefully sober and thoughtful. Politics has to be governed by decisions, it has to be in real time, it has to often jump ahead of research and faces a whole series of constraints, most of which are about
the public or politics rather than anything else. And in some ways it is not surprising that the nature of the relationship has gone through a series of very different phases.

The famous comment from Keynes is that there’s nothing governments hate more than to be well informed, because it makes the process of arriving at decisions much more complicated and difficult. And I think one of the questions for Iain and his colleagues is how do you overcome that barrier because most research, most knowledge, problematises things before it simplifies things.


There is statistical knowledge. There is policy knowledge; let’s say, what works in cutting vehicle burglary. There is scientific knowledge, for example on climate change, or oxytocins’ effect on trust levels - another interesting recent example. There is professional knowledge, the knowledge which is organised within the teaching profession, the medical profession, usually who have their own guardians within government, like the chief medical officer. There is public opinion, knowledge
of what the public thinks (quantitative, qualitative); again, another body of people within the public sector. There is political knowledge, knowledge of what will play within the ruling party, knowledge which perhaps this week has been slightly lacking in the ruling party. There’s classic intelligence, both overseas intelligence, but also domestic intelligence, so the questions of what is happening within the UK urban young Muslim population; that is a question in which, in a sense, academic
research, media research, and intelligence, and policing compete in terms of the quality of their insights and understandings. And that list can go on.

In making sense of the relationship between knowledge and action there were some fields where knowledge was reasonably stable; there was pretty broad consensus
about what was known; about how new knowledge could be created. Usually these were fields where it made sense to do a lot of piloting, a lot of testing, with very clearly specified hypotheses - fields like much of microeconomics, labour markets, some areas of medicine - where policy science was not that different from a natural science. And knowledge was generally fairly cumulative in nature, and where good new innovations or good new knowledge tended to, therefore, diffuse fairly widely
across the field. And, in some ways, those are the fields which are most clearly evidence-based in terms of policy making (macroeconomics, to some extent, would fit in that category as well).

There’s a second, though, much larger field, where there was much greater fluidity than that; where many of the best informed people actually had profound disagreements about what was known, about what worked, about even defining the key concepts, where there was not any agreement about what a research agenda should be, what counted as a success, and where the evidence – really reliable evidence which could last over ten or twenty years – was pretty thin. Much of education, I think, falls into that category. A fair amount of criminal justice or criminology policy,
much of the knowledge about public services and how they should be organised (the subject of a very big ESRC programme), I think, probably falls into that category, where there’s likely to be swings of fashion as much as cumulative development of new knowledge. And, in those fields, many of the practitioners are very strongly attached to particular beliefs and assumptions, and pretty good at resisting new claims and new knowledge, if they don’t happen to fit their existing beliefs. Now there are some methods for trying to change that and improve that at the margins, like the collaboratives in health, but my sense is that most policy fields probably are in this category.

Then, thirdly, there’s another category which is rather different, where it’s inherently impossible to have any very solid knowledge about what will work or what won’t. This is clearly the case in relation to technology, so e-government, a topic on which the British government is spending £30 billion on health alone, let alone other fields. There is no settled knowledge about what works in terms of the use of the Web, the technology to restructure services, because everyone around the
world is experimenting in tandem, and all are making lots of mistakes in tandem. The regulation of reproductive technology and bio-technology I put in the same category -there simply isn’t enough experience to have firm knowledge - and much around globalisation is in this category too; how to create viable institutions around climate change, or indeed around conflict prevention, or weapons of mass destruction.It’s quite hard to have anything like the kind of knowledge you can have on Welfare to Work programmes in these fields because they are so inherently new and there simply isn’t the track record.

Source: Dept of Politics and Intl Relation, Public Policy Unit,
http://ppu.politics.ox.ac.uk/materials/Approved_transcript.pdf