Policy Research — Who Needs It?

The relationship between government policymaking and policy research changes over time and between governments. It seldom follows the orderly sequence of logical events which researchers may like to imagine. In attempting to understand the relationship between the creation of knowledge and its use by policymakers, it is essential to understand the needs and behavior of politicians, the pressures upon their time and the wide range of channels of information, informal as well as formal, open to them and to their immediate advisers. Social policy research, partly because of its frequent ambiguity and partiality, is particularly likely to be ignored by its official consumers in government. Some social and economic questions are probably not capable of effective testing by research other than by governments putting policies into effect on a national scale. Evaluation of such experiments is difficult. More attention needs to be paid to the marketing of ideas by pressure groups and think tanks. Governments can shop around for acceptable advice from a wide range of sources outside academic life. Except in highly consensual political cultures, the only decisions which are made primarily on the basis of research findings are politically unimportant ones. In considering the role of policy research it is essential to keep the primacy of politics firmly in mind.     

Corporate Monitorships and New Governance Regulation: In Theory,in Practice,and in Context

Over the last few years, it has become increasingly common for government agencies to resolve corporate criminal law and securities regulations violations through the use of settlement agreements that require corporations to improve their compliance programs and hire independent monitors to oversee the changes. Based on our interviews with corporate monitors, regulators, and others, we find that these monitorships are failing to meet their full potential in reforming corrupt corporate cultures. After reviewing potential reforms to improve monitorships from a new governance perspective, we discuss the limits of these reforms that are due to the sociological and institutional environment in which monitorships are embedded.