Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Roundtable: Conditions of Government and the Impact of Policy-Relevant Research

(The Impacts of Politics on the Policy Process)

The 2016 APPAM conference theme, “The Role of Research in Making Government More Effective,” is framed from the perspective of researchers trying to speak to government for public benefit. This roundtable takes the listener’s perspective, and asks how the conditions of government and the situation in Washington are affecting government’s ability to learn from policy-relevant research and to invest in important national priority areas. The organizer, moderator, and panelists of this roundtable will lead a lively discussion that will: (1) identify a number of government barriers to research aiming to inform government in its mission; (2) review some of the academic and grey literature on related topics and identify areas in which additional research would be welcome; and (3) engage with the audience to consider how government barriers to absorbing important research findings might (or might not) be overcome. The ninety-minute session will be broken down into two 45-minute halves. In the first half, the roundtable will consider the barriers that current conditions pose to impactful policy-relevant research and what academic and grey literature may be relevant to inform a better understanding of these barriers. Barriers that will be considered are organizational, institutional, and ideological in nature and have the potential to pose a significant impediment to information-based policymaking. These include: attempts to direct funding away from long-standing research efforts to address national needs as the consensus regarding the need for evidence-based policy erodes; intermittent, uncertain federal budgets that create headaches for research management within agencies; restrictions on government professional activities, such as participation in research conferences; and a long-term shift toward outsourcing technical and programmatic work. When combined, these barriers not only adversely affect knowledge creation, they also limit “absorptive capacity,” a term used here to refer to the ability of government entities to identify, track, and utilize research assets for the public good. For example, they create disincentives for the recruitment and retention of expert personnel within executive and legislative bodies that need such expertise We note that certain challenges to congressional absorptive capacity are self-inflicted cuts to analytic programs and staff, as well as changes in the process for committee leadership appointments. In the second half of the roundtable, the focus will shift to a consideration of potential solutions and positive countervailing trends, such as Executive Order 13707, which calls for agencies to recruit behavioral scientists into federal agencies and to strengthen relationships with the research community to better use empirical findings. As APPAM represents an academic and practitioner research community, relevant actions must include the conduct of new, targeted research. But audience-members at this roundtable should expect to not merely limit their responses to these issues to the conduct of research alone, but to consider a broader set of actions that can advance the APPAM 2016 theme.