Tag: policymaking

Useful science (and evaluation?) for policy

“A policy problem is not usually the same as a scientific problem, and may have several scientific problems incorporated within it.”

“Scientists can be advocates, or they can provide the best possible balanced assessment of the evidence but they cannot do both simultaneously. It has to be clear to policymakers which horse they are riding. Papers seen as advocacy are likely to be discounted.”

“Since the policy process tends to be very fast, papers must be timely. An 80% right paper before a policy decision is made it is worth ten 95% right papers afterwards, provided the methodological limitations imposed by doing it fast are made clear.”

“Sensible policymakers prefer a paper they understand, including its flaws, to one they do not, however sophisticated and apparently precise it looks. It is possible to be simple whilst being rigorous.”

“Policymaking is a professional skill; most scientists have no experience of it and it shows. […] Worse, trying to work up to a policy position can unconsciously bias scientists towards trying to get a neat policy narrative from a complex picture, or downplay inconvenient facts.”

“Some scientists seem to assume a two-stage process where the individual research is conducted, and then policies made on the basis of that. The reality should be a three-stage process: that original research is conducted, then research from multiple instances and disciplines is synthesised, and then policies made on the basis of all the available synthesized evidence.”

References

Whitty, C. J. M. (2015). What makes an academic paper useful for health policy? BMC Medicine, 13(1), 301, s12916-015-0544–0548. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-015-0544-8

The Westminster Model and why it’s useful even though it’s wrong

This paper by Paul Cairney (2025) is fun.

The Westminster Model (WM) of policymaking:

“… political parties present manifestos to compete for public votes in general elections, the winner forms a government, and government ministers oversee the delivery of their manifesto by civil servants and public bodies.” (p. 297)

What’s wrong with the British Political Tradition (BPT), the UK flavour of the model:

“… politicians do not live up to the BPT; party manifestos combine some specific and many vague promises; parties don’t always gain a majority; not all MPs are easy to keep in line with government policy; ministers could not understand all of the choices made in their name; EU entry and exit was a bruising experience; and, the UK’s ability to reform devolved or subnational government is constrained in practice. In other words, the first aim of a ‘governance thesis’ is to use the WM as an ideal-type to compare with more accurate stories of the real world.” (p. 298)

Cairney then argues that “these differences between aspiration and reality provide the launching point for a more realistic story” – and goes on to have a go, e.g., noting the impact of the finite time and capacity of ministers, expanding on the range of individuals and informal and formal groups that influence policymaking

The approach reminds me of how classical logic and probability are used in the psychology of reasoning: they offer frameworks for understanding how people ought to reason, and then researchers adjust that framework to match how non‑mathematicians actually do reason, constrained by finite working memory, drawing on broader interpretations of terms like “if” than are used in logic, etc.

References

Cairney, P. (2025). Governance and the Westminster model: What exactly is the dominant story of UK policymaking? British Politics, 20(3), 295–315.