Evaluation under contract: government pressure and the production of policy research

Do governments lean on researchers who evaluate their policies to try to get them to produce politically useful results? Do researchers buckle under such pressure? This article, based on a survey of 205 academics who have recently completed commissioned research for government, looks at the degree to which British government departments seek to produce research that is designed to provide ‘political ammunition’, above all making them ‘look good’ or minimizing criticism of their policies. Looking at different stages in the research process – from deciding which policies to evaluate, shaping the nature and conduct of inquiry, and writing the results – the article finds evidence of government sponsors making significant efforts to produce politically congenial results. For the most part, researchers appear to resist these efforts, though the evidence base (researchers' own accounts of their work) suggests that this conclusion be treated with some caution

New life at the top: special advisers in British government

While the position of special advisers (SpAds) in British government has become routinised, above all since 1997, we still know little about how they affect everyday life at the top of Whitehall departments. This paper, based on the first ever survey of SpAds, explores what they do and how they interact with policy-makers. SpAds fill a mix of ‘commissar’ and ‘fixer’ roles, and there is no evidence of a sharp division of labour between different types of SpAds. The commissar role they fill might be expected to bring SpAds into conflict with civil servants, yet there is surprisingly little evidence of conflict or rivalry. A variety of features of the special adviser's job appear to create incentives among both SpAds and civil servants to avoid conflict with each other. Since the influence of SpAds appears to depend on their relationship with the minister, claims that SpAds are a new, powerful group that shapes policy, are likely to be highly misleading

The politicisation of evaluation: constructing and contesting EU policy performance

Although systematic policy evaluation has been conducted for decades and has been growing strongly within the European Union (EU) institutions and in the member states, it remains largely underexplored in political science literatures. Extant work in political science and public policy typically focuses on elements such as agenda setting, policy shaping, decision making, or implementation rather than evaluation. Although individual pieces of research on evaluation in the EU have started to emerge, most often regarding policy “effectiveness” (one criterion among many in evaluation), a more structured approach is currently missing. This special issue aims to address this gap in political science by focusing on four key focal points: evaluation institutions (including rules and cultures), evaluation actors and interests (including competencies, power, roles and tasks), evaluation design (including research methods and theories, and their impact on policy design and legislation), and finally, evaluation purpose and use (including the relationships between discourse and scientific evidence, political attitudes and strategic use). The special issue considers how each of these elements contributes to an evolving governance system in the EU, where evaluation is playing an increasingly important role in decision making

UK parliamentary select committees: crowdsourcing for evidence-based policy or grandstanding?

In the United Kingdom, the influence of parliamentary select committees on policy depends substantially on the ‘seriousness’ with which they approach the task of gathering and evaluating a wide range of evidence and producing reports and recommendations based on it. However, select committees are often charged with being concerned with ‘political theatre’ and ‘grandstanding’ rather than producing evidence-based policy recommendations. This study, based on a survey of 919 ‘discretionary’ witnesses, including those submitting written and oral evidence, examines the case for arguing that there is political bias and grandstanding in the way select committees go about selecting witnesses, interrogating them and using their evidence to put reports together. While the research finds some evidence of such ‘grandstanding’ it does not appear to be strong enough to suggest that the role of select committees is compromised as a crowdsourcer of evidence

Brexit, interest groups and changes to the ‘logic of negotiation’: a research note

Did the Brexit lead to a decline in interest group influence in British government? This research note reports on a survey of 268 public affairs professionals and examines whether the ‘bandwidth’ taken up by Brexit diminished the areas of domestic policy that groups might seek to influence and whether groups found it harder to engage with government in the 3 years up to 2020. The figures indicate that Brexit significantly displaced other domestic issues but that government did not ‘freeze out’ interest groups in the period. Moreover, the evidence points to a growing role for groups post-Brexit