Fairalysis paralysis

A recent episode of the Paul Wells Show discussed “who talks to government”, through a panel consisting of a public-policy-oriented academic (Taylor Owen), a think tank leader and former public servant (Rachel Samson), and a journalist (Wells). The discussion had many good parts, including Owen’s opener on the meaning of almost all those words.

Today, though, I wanted to add a few thoughts to Samson’s discussion on the limitations public servants sometimes face in carrying out research, and how others (think tanks, academics, journalists, lobbyists, and so on) step in to fill that gap.

Samson’s points included:

1. Public servants have to respond to the demands of the day, and sometimes don’t have the space to think ahead to longer-term horizons.
2. Think tanks and others can take in research from academics and translate it into more concrete policy proposals—academic work isn’t often ready for policy implementation, and public servants need analysis that works in their world.
3. The public service is siloed, within and between departments—this makes it hard for public servants to access expertise that already exists within the house, let alone to access expertise from beyond it.

It’s this last point I wanted to unspool a little further, on the difficulty public servants have in accessing expertise from others.

Some of it is self-imposed—a hesitation toward talking, to putting the face forward. I’ve also seen it in the form of “we can’t ask about [topic], because then they’ll know we’re thinking about [topic]”. This applies internally and externally.

But I think it also stems from a deep cultural (and, sometimes, procedural) preference for fairness in government. You could argue that fairness has been part of the Canadian civil service’s DNA since we adopted merit-based hiring and weaned ourselves from grift-based contracting. (Look, yes, there’s bad stuff nowadays, including what you might call structural grift, but it’s nowhere near as bad as, say, the 19th century.)

In research, this preference for fairness can manifest as an aversion to speaking to outsiders, even when those people are experts in the field. There can be a fear that outreach to any particular stakeholder or expert might be seen as biasing the eventual advice—that simply speaking to someone implies endorsing or adopting their point of view. (Or, in an age where we dredge up years-old social media posts as evidence of reason to forever dismiss someone outright, that speaking to anyone who’s not completely known is a risk too big to take.)

This is how we get the stilted “consultations” of government, formal processes by which any can convey their perspectives. The same experts might appear at these as a reasonably-informed researcher would contact, but the exchange almost certainly won’t be as fruitful: a good discussion benefits from unrestricted interlocutors, and the public servants in a formal consultation come bearing restrictions.

But a good researcher knows that the perspectives of experts have much to offer. So what do they turn to instead? Any that written material experts have produced.

Here, too, we run into a fun snag: departmental libraries rarely subscribe to academic publications anymore, and it’s often functionally infeasible to make a small purchase for access to an article or such; instead, public service researchers have to turn to whatever material is available publicly. This leaves, basically, op-eds in major newspapers, and free publications (like think tank white papers, pre-pubs of academic papers, and so on).

This grants an outsized influence to those who mobilize their research into free, easily-found, publications. And this isn’t restricted to conventional experts! See, for example, the “posting to policy pipeline”:

The thing that has recently become popular is people have gotten down to—certain varieties of government officials work much more with respect to PDFs than they do with respect to “random Substack posts.” And so if you have something which is morally speaking a blog post, but you call it an essay and you make a downloadable PDF version available, and you just do the tiniest amount of print design on that downloadable artifact, that makes it much more likely that it will be formally citable in the various epiphenomena of the government, than if you had left it in the classic blog post stylings.

(Incidentally, I recall this as being top of mind in formatting Delivering digital services by 2025—it came out as a nice PDF if you printed it.¹)

Ironically, it’s this outsized influence that exposes the hypocrisy in barriers (often in the name of fairness, self-imposed or otherwise) to simply reaching out to people for advice or input: now, input is reduced to that which is easily available in written form; the result of fairalysis paralysis is, sadly, weakened analysis.

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Before we go on our way, a few words from Jack Cheng’s recent newsletter:

But it’s the feeling I’m after, of having done the thing or things you most needed to do (ideally by lunchtime) and the knowing the rest of the day is open to you, open for whatever. I need the compression before I feel the release. Maybe it’s really just the feeling of having accomplished something new, and newly challenging.

Well, the thing is done—now on to whatever. All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas