The Archetypes of the Policy Process
an introduction to the creatures of policymaking
I am, contrary to some assumptions, not an economist. I am a public policy person. I have been meaning to talk about how I think about this landscape.
What is a public policy person, you might ask? Well, if you want to measure it by advanced degree, it’s the MPP/MPA folks from the Harvard Kennedy School and Hopkins SAIS1 and the Wilson School who roam the halls of Capitol Hill, the DoD, the New York Fed, and the Foreign Service. Among the MPP/MPA-holding folks (including SAIS) out there are people like former FRBNY President and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner; former general and CIA Director David Petraeus; current Icelandic Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir (from my school!); and current Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan, among many others. If you want to measure it by role or disposition, I would qualify it as a technocrat. There are technocrats-cum-politicians (e.g., Mark Carney), but they are technocrats first, almost always. Technocrats mostly exist in governments, but also in the non-profit sector and, to varying degrees, in the private sector.
It looks different to different people. For me, it means about 70% of my time and energy is spent on economics/finance/statistics, about 20% on political science and international relations, and about 10% on other stuff (e.g., ethics, foreign language, history). But my policy school class includes special forces operators, refugee resettlement experts, finance ministry civil servants, energy engineers, and even an astrophysicist. All to say, by profession, it’s all over the place, but this leads me to how I think about the pipeline of public policy. It is this pipeline that makes all the public policy folks connected.
Policy sausage-making
One way to think about the creation of public policy2 is that there are three distinct but deeply related stages of production: (1) information gathering and knowledge-generation; (2) knowledge synthesis and (yes, normative) analysis; (3) advocacy and execution. The first stage involves deep dives into topics relevant to policy and the production of sophisticated research—think randomized control trials on a cash-transfer program. The second stage involves review of that research, implementation scoping, operationalization, and analysis—think reviewing all the studies on the cash-transfer programs, designing a real-life program, outlining options to implement such a program, and briefing policymakers on the pros and cons of the intervention. The third stage involves essentially legislation, rulemaking, or decision-making—think reading the memos on the cash transfer programs, getting briefed on the approaches on the table, raising it to a Parliamentary/Congressional committee, and ultimately voting on it. There are different groups at each stage.
The first is academic and quasi-academic researchers, often economists in my slice of the policy world, but also sociologists, demographers, political scientists, and experts of all stripes (including in the hard sciences!). These people usually have PhDs and move fluidly between government, academia, and the non-profit/think tank worlds. They produce new knowledge, and disseminate it out into the world, but usually with a particular audience. Sometimes that audience is implicit, sometimes very explicit (e.g., the Congressional Research Service). In the Fed, this usually means the research departments of the reserve banks, or of the Board. In broad strokes, they write and present academic papers with most of their time; they also provide expert opinions, and sometimes cautiously advocate normatively. They love regressions. Bad writing habit: academic prose that’s 10x too long.
The second is the public policy people. These people only episodically write or contribute to academic papers (it varies by person, but usually none). But they read a lot of them. They digest papers and reports, type up 2–3 page memos with key points, brief principles, and attend meetings. They are the technocrats. In general, when they advocate it’s based on cost-benefit analyses, not ideological convictions; you’ll see them working for members of different parties. They are problem-solvers, somewhat akin to McKinsey consultants, but inside a government (incidentally, many do go into government consulting or to McKinsey, literally). They don’t love regressions, but respect them, and know how to read an output table. Bad writing habit: inscrutable acronyms and jargon.
The third group is politicians. In broad strokes, these people do not contribute to academic papers, and only very rarely read them. They read the public policy people’s memos. They are effective advocates, and among those with graduate degrees, they are unusually likely to have law degrees. They are more likely to be party-loyal and, by definition, partisan. They are astute operators of reality and the landscape of political, budgetary, and administrative constraints. I once had a colleague who had been both an advisor in the civil service (read: public policy people) and later a parliament member (read: politician) tell me, “when you’re in the civil service, you get to advocate for the best policy based on outcome; when you’re in the political arena, you have to be the fun-killer, telling those civil service people that X or Y union or lobby group will kill the proposal.” They aren’t terribly familiar with regressions in general, but they’re very adept at explaining the narrative of the stylized facts in a digestible manner. Bad writing habit: poetry that’s light on substance.
A question of framing
The three groups think about different questions, with different framing.
The politician asks: What rights should an individual have to own a gun? What is the trade-off we should make between public safety and individual freedoms? How do constituents (individual, corporate, nonprofit) think and feel about this issue and what is most salient to them about it?
The public policy person asks: I’ve been tasked with reducing gun violence in area X—what does the academic literature say about driving causes, how high conviction am I on those causes, and what interventions can I implement at the highest efficacy and lowest cost, subject to the prevailing political, cultural, legal, administrative, and budgetary constraints?
The knowledge-creator asks: Controlling for as many exogenous variables as possible, can I identify a causal link between numbers of guns per capita and gun violence? Is a randomized control trial plausible here? If not, what do we know about similar causal channels in other historical episodes of comparable issues?
Wheelhouses for days
Related to the above, and unsurprisingly, the size of wheelhouses varies. Spend enough time around truly academic conferences, and you’ll hear a lot of qualification and even downright avoidance of questions that are “outside my wheelhouse.” I have a lot of appreciation for this. Ask a labor economist about health care, and they’re likely to (very honestly!) say, “I have some informed speculation, but I’m not an expert in this area, you should speak with X.” These people spend their lives becoming experts on a topic, stay in their lane, and understandably wish others would too. Sometimes that expertise is too narrow or esoteric to be useful, but it’s true expertise.
Among the policy folk, there are more opinions, but still a fair bit of qualification. They are the types that at dinner parties strike you as widely read. They are comfortable on a range of topics, and are willing to discuss them, though are often appropriately hesitant to draw generalizations and do like to toss around, “I’m over my skis on this, but…”. (This is why they make such good Foreign Service Officers.3) They have a tendency to talk too much about The Economist.
Politicians have opinions on everything, which, I assume, is exhausting. But, to be fair to them, it is literally their job. Imagine asking your elected official about their opinions on child care, and them saying, studiously: “This is a deeply complex topic and one that’s clearly cross-cutting among OECD countries, so not particularly idiosyncratic to the United States. I’m not well-read on this literature, so I’m over my skis here, but my very surface-level read is that we’ve got a supply-side issue to the extent it’s a market failure. I don’t know much about successful interventions, but I’m sure someone has done some work on it, I can get back to you.” Yuck, very uninspiring! In practice, this is why well-functioning governments of elected politicians have a deep bench of policy talent,4 and the politicians themselves have the very difficult task of public-facing synthesis and persuasion.
In many governments, you’ll have all three in the legislative branch (e.g., in the US, we have the Congressional Research Service, policy staffers, and elected officials all in the legislative). Usually, the executive branch is very policy people-heavy, save for the top levels where there are political appointments (hence “career staff” vs “political appointment”). If, for example, you go to a US embassy abroad, almost everyone there, often with the exception of the ambassador themselves, is professional staff (i.e., technocrats).
Picking your poison
I don’t like to generalize very much, and this essay has done that. Discount as appropriate—these are caricatured archetypes. Obviously in the real world it varies. I have policy friends and colleagues who flirt hard with the line of being an academic, and obviously some policy folks flirt pretty hard with politics. Some have done it all (again, see Mark Carney). I hope this is a helpful way to think about it, though, and useful for those considering a master’s degree and what types of work they might want to do.
Technically SAIS is an MA, but it’s de facto a public policy school.
Note the term creation. Equally important is execution, which falls almost all to the policy people, at various levels of seniority. In other words, when the Treasury finally makes policy (e.g., let’s issue a new bond), after that process when the bond is actually issued, it is technocrats and government staffers who do the floating of the bond.
The Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT) is famously policy person-coded and difficult, insofar as it’s sufficiently technical but covers just about anything—you can be asked about music, history, statistics, geography, math, or computer science. It’s said that the best way to study for it is to read The Economist cover to cover every week for two years.
This why there are policy people on Capitol Hill: the politicians need area experts, so they hire them as staffers. This is also true—mostly more true—in other countries, whose professional legislative staff are larger proportional to the size of the legislature.