How being PolicyWISE can help you navigate election season

PolicyWISE is a policy research initiative that improves how governments and academics work together to help solve policy challenges. Dewi Knight, Director at PolicyWISE, explains how this work can help civil servants in the lead up to election season.

2024 is set to be a bumper year for elections – with a new Welsh first minister in March, local government elections for England in May and a UK general election on the horizon. In Ireland, there are European and local elections in May and a Dáil election expected this year. Residents of Northern Ireland are watching Stormont with interest following the restoration of power-sharing.

Whilst each election happens within national borders, impacts are felt on relationships and cross-administration working across Britain and Ireland.

All political parties are busy drafting manifestos, looking for solutions to challenges, asking for advice from all corners to identify interventions that will win votes. Rightfully, once the elections are behind us, people will hold politicians to account for how they uphold their commitments.

Whilst civil servants do not have an ‘input’ role for manifestos (with certain exceptions), the ‘output’ role is significant. When a new minister arrives at the department with their list of policies, programmes, and priorities, policy professionals will be expected to advise, design, and deliver, looking for new solutions to some age-old problems.

Ministers’ and politicians’ views on policy development are shaped by personal experience and interests. It’s easy, but incorrect, to overlook this. As we look ahead to the many elections this year, we know that weeks of doorstep chats, hustings and casework will inform how current and future ministers understand issues. This is true across all elections and in all our jurisdictions.

The benefits of comparative policy analysis

At PolicyWISE, civil servants tell us that when advising ministers and developing policies, they evaluate previous initiatives undertaken by their own government, look to the literature and to international examples.

They tell us that what they don’t always do is look to neighbouring nations and administrations to understand when different policy and legislative answers have been sought. So, just as civil servants shouldn’t forget about the personal dimension of a minister’s perspective, academics seeking to engage with policy must remember and respect the political context of policy making. We emphasise this in our research community training.

For PolicyWISE, we know the learning to be found from looking North, South, East, and West. We use a model of academic inquiry to explore what is happening across our governments and parliaments. This enables us to understand the key drivers of improved outcomes and learn from different policy approaches and innovations.

How do we work?

Our model is to create space, share ideas and insights, and help policy makers focus on evidence informed solutions. We aim to be forever curious, connected and collaborative, we are independent and non-partisan and are ambitious in supporting policy makers across the UK and Ireland.

Some of you may have seen us when we presented at a busy session as part of Devolution Learning Week or spotted our Wise in 5 briefings, our regular comparative guide to UK and Ireland public policy issues, a must-read for policy professionals.

Our Wise in 5 briefings focus on one policy topic per edition. It brings together the UK and Ireland context in one place, as well as related research. We finish each briefing with five suggested recommendations to consider for policy development.

We have covered a broad range of issues such as teenage vaping, relationships and sex education, tourist taxes, retrofitting residential housing, higher and tertiary education regulation, single-use plastics, and rough sleeping.

These are all important issues and ones where governments across Britain and Ireland are pursuing different policies and actions. We want to encourage policy makers to learn more about what’s happening in other places, to help with policy development, learning, evaluation, and knowledge-exchange.

As well as briefings, we offer rapid analysis, timely briefings, connecting research to policymakers, training, policy guides, and cross-nation knowledge exchange.

For each of these activities we bring in evidence from across national contexts and examine the extent to which better decisions have been made.

In the near future we will share another blog which will explore our key themes of a zero-carbon future, children’s education and well-being and innovative and fairer futures and explain how we support inter-governmental working and structures, and how this can benefit policy profession development.

Please do get in touch with us at [email protected] where you can subscribe to updates including our monthly newsletter.