Great post, thank you! I love your work and have several comments and questions. First of all, is there something like your organisation in Germany?
I don’t know about Sweden, but in Germany politicians are deluged with policy suggestions from all manner of parties, and that includes innocuous-looking non-profits with lofty goals that are actually sockpuppets for lobbyists. You pattern match pretty well to the latter. I’m highly confident many seasoned politicians’ instinct will be to listen to you politely, agree with lots of things you say, and then do nothing and never call back because you resemble untrustworthy players so closely. Are you aware of this possibility, and how are you adressing it?
I suspect you’d gain a lot from getting some civil servants and administration workers on board. There got to be some that have been vocal about government waste in the past. These might be attracted to you because their concerns are part of yours, and they make great allies. If you can’t find them, ask at civil servants unions.
Have you looked into talking to partys’ youth organisations, rather than experienced politicians, in order to change mindsets before they’re too resistant to change and get the next genetration of politicians if you can’t get the current one?
What is your relation to the Swedish Pirate Party?
I don’t know about Sweden, but in Germany politicians are deluged with policy suggestions from all manner of parties, and that includes innocuous-looking non-profits with lofty goals that are actually sockpuppets for lobbyists. You pattern match pretty well to the latter.
Politicians do listen to lobbyists when they have policy expertise.
In this case I think the major issue would be that I politician cares about specifics. If you just say: “I want more evidence-based policy without any specifics”, you get pattern matched to being naive.
If you on the other hand say: “I really like the evidence-based policy initiative they do in country X and want this here. The initiative was popular in X. There were issues Y and Z and they fixed it by doing A.
Of course we might to change B to implement the policy here.”, then you are talking. You have to address concerns instead of calling them strawmen.
To be a valuable discussion partner for the politician you have to give the impression that you understand the relevant policy tools better than the politician.
It’s also worth thinking about if you can find a case where doing RCT’s is good politics. RCT could be useful as a way of getting rid of responsibility. If you can find a policy issue where a politician would be able to avoid blame for an issue by delegating the issue to RCT the politician might be willing to listen.
The politicians I know will certainly prefer to talk about about very specific subjects, but they will also want to choose the experts to talk to about them. Being chosen as a conversation partner for expertise is usually a matter of having been recommended by someone else. The same seems to be true for journalists.
There are a couple of people who know both the evidence-based scientific view of the world and the balancing of interest based political view of the world: economists, CEOs, political scientists. But that’s a fairly small overlap between two way larger spheres of people. Getting these two spheres to understand each other better is a project not for years but for decades.
Reaching out to a parliamentarian in Berlin isn’t hard even if you don’t have connections. Politicians want to talk to constituents while journalists don’t have the same goal of talking to readers.
Of course that only get’s you the foot in the door. Recommendations certainly have advantages.
In Berlin it also doesn’t take more than being a partner member to be able to go to political party meetings. The main factor that holds people out is that they are boring.
Sure, reaching out is easy. All the politicians I know are very friendly people who love conversation.
But this evidence-based policy thing is about not just voicing an individual voter’s concern. And it is not even about building pressure to change this policy or that, which the politician in question might actually have a tiny bit of influence over. It is about changing the whole framework in which policies are chosen. A framework that all the politician’s friends are comfortable enough with. And this comes with an undertone of “this is so obviously beneficial that you’re a fool if you don’t do this”.
For this you don’t need the foot in the door, you need to get through the door and bring lots of friends, a ton of evidence, and a bank. Before you have at least some of that, putting feet into doors and listening to very polite rejections is likely a distraction, and the last thing young movements need are distractions.
And this comes with an undertone of “this is so obviously beneficial that you’re a fool if you don’t do this”.
In the way the article is formulated it does come with that undertone. But I don’t think you have to have that undertone when you communicate about the subject.
Before you have at least some of that, putting feet into doors and listening to very polite rejections is likely a distraction, and the last thing young movements need are distractions.
If you want to change public policy understanding the way politicians think about the issue is important.
Quite many activists make a lot of strategic errors because they haven’t invested the effort to understand the positions of various stakeholders.
Thanks! I’m sure Germany and Sweden aren’t that different in this regard.
There are of course many expert groups inside and outside government working on what in a broad sense could be called “evidence-based policy” in most countries (whether or not that very term is used). Most of these groups have the problem that you mention—they have good advice, but the politicians don’t listen to them. That’s why we don’t want to be another group of that kind, but also a campaigning organization. We want to push the message of political rationality fairly aggressively in the media and on social media (though you have to be careful not to trigger the “Straw Soviet”). That way, we’ll try to force politicians’ to listen to ours and other expert organizations’ advice.
I don’t know if there is any similar organization in Germany, though I think there should be.
You’re absolutely right about getting civil servants onboard. A few has joined since we wrote the article, and we are working on recruiting more. We lack a bit of practical know-how now, since most of us are academics or students, but I’m confident we will be able to get more people onboard.
Yes, younger politicians are probably more interested in this than older, for several reasons. We are not affiliated with any party, but are independent. We do talk to the parties, though—and the Pirate Party is among them.
I’ll talk about this on Saturday in Berlin, by the way, at the LW meeting. Will you be there?
Great post, thank you! I love your work and have several comments and questions. First of all, is there something like your organisation in Germany?
I don’t know about Sweden, but in Germany politicians are deluged with policy suggestions from all manner of parties, and that includes innocuous-looking non-profits with lofty goals that are actually sockpuppets for lobbyists. You pattern match pretty well to the latter. I’m highly confident many seasoned politicians’ instinct will be to listen to you politely, agree with lots of things you say, and then do nothing and never call back because you resemble untrustworthy players so closely. Are you aware of this possibility, and how are you adressing it?
I suspect you’d gain a lot from getting some civil servants and administration workers on board. There got to be some that have been vocal about government waste in the past. These might be attracted to you because their concerns are part of yours, and they make great allies. If you can’t find them, ask at civil servants unions.
Have you looked into talking to partys’ youth organisations, rather than experienced politicians, in order to change mindsets before they’re too resistant to change and get the next genetration of politicians if you can’t get the current one?
What is your relation to the Swedish Pirate Party?
Politicians do listen to lobbyists when they have policy expertise.
In this case I think the major issue would be that I politician cares about specifics. If you just say: “I want more evidence-based policy without any specifics”, you get pattern matched to being naive.
If you on the other hand say: “I really like the evidence-based policy initiative they do in country X and want this here. The initiative was popular in X. There were issues Y and Z and they fixed it by doing A. Of course we might to change B to implement the policy here.”, then you are talking. You have to address concerns instead of calling them strawmen.
To be a valuable discussion partner for the politician you have to give the impression that you understand the relevant policy tools better than the politician.
It’s also worth thinking about if you can find a case where doing RCT’s is good politics. RCT could be useful as a way of getting rid of responsibility. If you can find a policy issue where a politician would be able to avoid blame for an issue by delegating the issue to RCT the politician might be willing to listen.
You make good points as usual.
The politicians I know will certainly prefer to talk about about very specific subjects, but they will also want to choose the experts to talk to about them. Being chosen as a conversation partner for expertise is usually a matter of having been recommended by someone else. The same seems to be true for journalists.
There are a couple of people who know both the evidence-based scientific view of the world and the balancing of interest based political view of the world: economists, CEOs, political scientists. But that’s a fairly small overlap between two way larger spheres of people. Getting these two spheres to understand each other better is a project not for years but for decades.
Reaching out to a parliamentarian in Berlin isn’t hard even if you don’t have connections. Politicians want to talk to constituents while journalists don’t have the same goal of talking to readers.
Of course that only get’s you the foot in the door. Recommendations certainly have advantages.
In Berlin it also doesn’t take more than being a partner member to be able to go to political party meetings. The main factor that holds people out is that they are boring.
Sure, reaching out is easy. All the politicians I know are very friendly people who love conversation.
But this evidence-based policy thing is about not just voicing an individual voter’s concern. And it is not even about building pressure to change this policy or that, which the politician in question might actually have a tiny bit of influence over. It is about changing the whole framework in which policies are chosen. A framework that all the politician’s friends are comfortable enough with. And this comes with an undertone of “this is so obviously beneficial that you’re a fool if you don’t do this”.
For this you don’t need the foot in the door, you need to get through the door and bring lots of friends, a ton of evidence, and a bank. Before you have at least some of that, putting feet into doors and listening to very polite rejections is likely a distraction, and the last thing young movements need are distractions.
In the way the article is formulated it does come with that undertone. But I don’t think you have to have that undertone when you communicate about the subject.
If you want to change public policy understanding the way politicians think about the issue is important. Quite many activists make a lot of strategic errors because they haven’t invested the effort to understand the positions of various stakeholders.
Thanks! I’m sure Germany and Sweden aren’t that different in this regard.
There are of course many expert groups inside and outside government working on what in a broad sense could be called “evidence-based policy” in most countries (whether or not that very term is used). Most of these groups have the problem that you mention—they have good advice, but the politicians don’t listen to them. That’s why we don’t want to be another group of that kind, but also a campaigning organization. We want to push the message of political rationality fairly aggressively in the media and on social media (though you have to be careful not to trigger the “Straw Soviet”). That way, we’ll try to force politicians’ to listen to ours and other expert organizations’ advice.
I don’t know if there is any similar organization in Germany, though I think there should be.
You’re absolutely right about getting civil servants onboard. A few has joined since we wrote the article, and we are working on recruiting more. We lack a bit of practical know-how now, since most of us are academics or students, but I’m confident we will be able to get more people onboard.
Yes, younger politicians are probably more interested in this than older, for several reasons. We are not affiliated with any party, but are independent. We do talk to the parties, though—and the Pirate Party is among them.
I’ll talk about this on Saturday in Berlin, by the way, at the LW meeting. Will you be there?
Yup. See you there.
Check out http://europa.eu/epic/topics/evidence-based-practices_en.htm—it’s EU, not country specific, but it’s heading in that direction.