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.