Image: pxl.store, via Shutterstock
Parliament’s Evidence Week gives researchers a chance to boost their policy impact, says Stephen Meek
Academics sometimes get frustrated by decision-makers not building policy on the evidence base of their research. This frustration often leads to a conclusion that politicians aren’t interested in evidence.
The opaque nature of politics and policymaking can make it hard to separate evidence-based policy from policy-based evidence, however forceful the assertion “We are following the science.”
Most MPs, though, are keen to know what might inform better decision-making and to hear directly from experts. They just operate under different pressures and work differently to academics.
So ensuring findings make an impact can’t rest on a peer-reviewed publication, however prestigious; researchers must also take time to understand how policymakers think.
First, don’t wait to be discovered, but go to them with your recommendations. Second, explain work quickly and simply, and don’t be shy about giving advice, rather than expecting your audience to work out where to take your conclusions. Finally, think about timing. To do their job effectively, politicians need timely and usable insights into the immediate and future issues and opportunities facing the country.
That means they need to be briefed when the topic is relevant for them, not because someone has finally written their paper up now that lectures are over.
Even better is when researchers coordinate with others who can advise on related matters to give an overview of the current state of play.
Cutting through
Put all that together and you come up with something that looks a lot like Evidence Week in Parliament, which finished its annual run on 7 July. Leading academics from across the country travelled to Westminster to offer insight and expertise to MPs and peers. The event gives a real-time view of what effective engagement with policymakers looks like, and how policy outcomes may be improved by connecting decision-makers with researchers.
Engaging with parliamentarians means understanding their mindset and language. Policymakers face a mass of information and a huge number of interested parties competing for their attention.
Cutting through this noise means understanding their timescales, communicating in ways they will grasp quickly, and working with their priorities so they can understand the value and relevance of research evidence. Many universities, such as Nottingham, are investing in institutional support to help their academics do this better.
Not only for July
Of course, such engagement is not just for one week. Done right, researchers will always find an open door for good policy recommendations and insights.
The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology is a great gateway, making timely contributions with topical briefings and reports, as are the other in-house research-support teams, including the House of Commons and Lords libraries, committee specialists and Parliament’s Knowledge Exchange Unit.
Policy advocacy is not for the faint-hearted. A researcher who only does it to polish up the impact measure on a grant application should probably not be doing it at all. But for those who care about research making a difference, then this is not an optional add-on, but the difference between adding value and accumulating citations.
For example, Nottingham’s Economy Tracker, developed by John Gathergood to give a better understanding of how events such as the pandemic and cost of living crisis affect different communities, could live as an impressive but unused online resource—or it could be used by MPs and local governments to monitor economic developments at a granular level, enabling them to make decisions beneficial to their local constituents.
As attention increasingly turns to the next general election, you could argue that there are few more effective ways to get an MP’s attention than to enable them to understand their voters better.
Look ahead
Researchers also have a responsibility to highlight the questions our leaders should be asking. Gifted as parliamentary teams are, they can only ask about what they know, so researchers need to be proactive in engaging them and driving the debate on socially important findings.
Decision-makers need to be up to speed not only on the evidence base for current policy challenges, but also conscious of what is coming down the track. Many of the most successful participants at Evidence Week focused on this longer-term, strategic view.
A bit of homework to understand MPs’ perspectives goes a long way. If you can think a little like a parliamentarian, you may well find hooking a policy audience is easier than expected.
Stephen Meek is director of the Institute for Policy and Engagement at the University of Nottingham
UPDATED 11/7—This article was first published before Evidence Week, and has been updated to reflect its later publication in Research Fortnight