You might not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you
‘Values neutral governance’, impartial statistics and other industry fictions
How do journalists and wonks interact?
Here’s an activity that might sound familiar if you work in a think-tank doing either policy or communications.
You’ve produced some work that contains some newsworthy statistics. A journalist calls you up, interested in the findings. You spend some time speaking to them about the numbers in question - what they mean, what they don’t mean and how they might be used. The journalist then goes away, out of your view, and writes a story.
This all sounds quite mundane – and indeed it is. This is the bread and butter work of ‘informing the debate’ – the raison d’etre of many impartial think-tanks. But what is the role of statistics and other policy findings in ‘the debate’?
In a sort of idealised Socratic version of events, they are a form of information that people take in good faith, examine in the context of other bits of evidence, and then work with in order to get towards some sort of objective ‘truth’.
That’s the theory. However, in my experience, the practice is that think-tank outputs function more like ammunition. The sides of the debate in most policy areas and on most issues are already set. You have produced something that may be taken up to be used by one or both sides… but how its used will be determined by its utility to the sides, not by its utility to the debate itself.
You see this time and time again. If one side of an argument becomes incredibly enamoured by a particular report, the other side launches ad hominem attacks against those involved rather than engaging with the substance. Political parties jostle to invoke the holy name of the IFS to smite their opponents tax and spending plans – not because they care what the IFS thinks, but because they know the media do.
Where does this leave us?
We may disagree about how much this stuff goes on – but we can surely agree that it does at least some of the time. Bad faith is a feature, not a bug, in our system.
And if that’s the case, then what are the implications for that conversation I was having about statistics with that journalist?
I may consider my work to be apolitical. I may be working for an organisation that thinks of itself as independent, impartial and above any left-right, Tory-Labour, liberal-authoritarian dichotomy. However, when I take that work, and brief it to a journalist who works for an organisation that is not above those divides, and indeed, might well be an active agent in conflict across them… what exactly am I doing? Am I not helping them gear them up for battle? Have I not picked a side?
As we said before, ultimately, what journalists do with the currency of your intellectual work is beyond your control. I’ve had experiences where reporters have misrepresented things out of statistical illiteracy. But more troublingly, I’ve also had journalists flat out lie about what they are going to do with statistics and findings from work I’ve been involved with, and I’ve had experiences where they have been so open with their intention to take work and use it in ways that are intellectually hard to justify, that it feels like I’m being deliberately goaded over my powerlessness.
However, it would be wrong to present this simply as a story about devious and unscrupulous people in the fourth estate. Because the relationship between wonks and the press is more complicated than that. Some years ago I worked in a comms team for or an organisation that, whilst producing policy research, didn’t have overt campaigning objectives.
Instead, success at that organisation was defined by our ability to have ‘impact’. This meant getting our name out there, being cited by influential people and getting mentioned in the press. Of course we didn’t pursue this at all costs – but equally, we weren’t particular clear about what our boundaries really were. Because if you are not particular concerned with actual policy outcomes, why should you really care if your work is being somewhat misrepresented, if it’s influential people who are doing the misrepresenting?
‘Value’s neutral governance’
If I may digress here for a moment… there’s a video essay from the YouTuber InnuendoStudios that often pops into my mind when thinking about issues like this. Entitled “You Go High, We Go Low”, the essay skewers what it characterises as a centrist preference for ‘values neutral governance’. I find it hard not to feel the resonance of that phrase when you think about policy analysis that imagines itself as above the fray.
When you reduce your job simply to spitting out facts, you deliberately opt out of conversations about ends, and instead retreat to a theory of change that is all about endlessly refining and improving means. And when you do that, on some level, you are assuming that our systems of governance looks like something the image below:
Picture from video linked above
‘Values neutral governance’ holds that if the machine can just be fine-tuned enough, no matter who’s in the suit, and no matter what they’re feeding into the system… the democracy machine will still manage to spit out justice someway somehow.
This obviously assumes that we all agree on what good outcomes look like (a topic this blog has discussed before)… and here’s the problem: this is clearly something that isn’t true. During the pandemic we saw that we can’t even really agree on the value of human life. Therefore, if democracy is a machine, it is one that we are locked in a perpetual struggle to grab hold of the controls of.
This has big implications for where we started here, thinking about the relationship between wonks and journalists, and the use and abuse of statistics. Because if ‘values neutral governance’ is an illusion – if simply adding information to the big pile of human knowledge doesn't on it’s own lead to better outcomes in a democracy… then what does that tell us about the kind of research we should do, and perhaps more importantly, what does it tell us about how we should communicate it?
To me, what it tells us is that you must always have a plan – that you should always have a clear answer to anyone asking about what your research should mean in practice. Because even if you aren’t thinking about end goals… there are people out there who very much are.
And they’re always going to be there.
Those instances in a policy career when your work is taken and used for different ends to what you had in mind is the universe slapping you down for slipping into ‘values neutral governance’ thinking.
Don’t think you can leave the politics for someone else.