If your organization works on issues, you probably have people who can explain why they matter. You have communications professionals, lobbyists, coalition partners, subject matters experts, direct service providers: people who know these issues inside and out. If you know this issue is important, why bother analyzing it?
Sometimes, you don’t need to. If what you lack is a message, a means to communicate that message, or help mobilizing people to support your issue of choice, you probably need advocacy more than you need analysis.
Analysis will not tell you how to change hearts and minds. What it will tell you is what the evidence says.
What advocacy does well
Advocacy is a key part of a democratic society. When governors, legislatures, mayors, city councils, agency leaders, or city managers are making decisions about how to prioritize policy change, they are often making these decisions based on which advocates have got their ear. When policymakers are trying to understand a new policy they haven’t come across, they usually hear the first explanation from a lobbyist, not a peer-reviewed journal or a white paper.
Advocacy is also key for larger, community storytelling. Volunteers and organizers mobilize constituencies to contact policymakers and talk to the media about an issue. Good advocacy crafts compelling stories that are retold by journalists then repeated on social media and across dinner tables. These stories tie issues to values and persuade policymakers to act.
Policy changes because of effective advocacy.
Where advocacy is insufficient
This being said, advocacy alone can’t always lead to better policy. There are times when advocacy alone will be a weaker tool than advocacy working alongside analysis.
For instance, sometimes key audiences are skeptical. If you are coming in trying to convince a key policymaker, funder, journalist, agency, or stakeholder who already has a bias against an issue, independent analysis can be a tool for helping them understand the importance of the issue and how it impacts outcomes they care about.
I think about my time in Nebraska when a bill to cover contraceptive services for Medicaid nearly passed a legislature that was hostile to contraceptive coverage due to a fiscal note from their legislative research office showing the long-term savings the state would make from investing in it. A skeptical policymaker audience was moved by a trusted, independent analysis.
Also, there are times when answers aren’t obvious. The child tax credit expansion in 2021 looked very similar to a plan put forth in the 2019 National Academies Roadmap to Reduce Child Poverty, a study undertaken because child poverty was a wicked problem that people did not have answers for. Luckily, that study was there when policymakers were ready to act.
Sometimes you need a number that can withstand scrutiny. The reason the health insurance numbers released during the debate over the American Health Care Act got so much attention was because they came from the Congressional Budget Office, an agency that had spent decades cultivating and defending its reputation as an independent analytical institution. Numbers calculated by an advocate on her own would not have carried the same weight.
And sometimes you just need to know if you’re right. Sometimes you need to learn about the intricacies of your policy and learn where you might be wrong. This seemed to be the deciding factor that led to the Reagan Administration backing the international Montreal Protocol ending ozone emissions worldwide: a cost-benefit analysis of its impact.
This is a risk around bringing an independent analyst in: you may not get the answer you expect to get. If you are looking for a study to reach a predetermined conclusion, independent analysis is probably not what you need.
What does analysis give me that advocacy doesn’t?
Analysis does some things very well that advocacy does not. Analysis lends credibility to an issue that advocacy on its own can’t command. Analysts can quantify issues, telling not just what direction an issue will push society, but how much it will, which is especially important when it comes to budgeting and regulation. Analysis helps identify and confront tradeoffs, which is a reality for policymakers but often ignored or overlooked by advocates. Analysis is also decision-oriented. While advocacy often focuses on whether policy is “good” or not, analysis focuses on when, how, and if a policy will work, along with what variations of a policy will work the best. Analysis also brings a defensible methodology to the table, forcing the conversation to happen on a different dimension than a conversation whose terms start with advocates.
An analysis done well will define the conversation in a different way than advocacy can alone.
When do you not need independent analysis?
Sometimes, you don’t need independent analysis. If your primary goal is to develop messaging or persuade supporters, if the relevant evidence already exists and you just need to communicate it, if you aren’t willing to acknowledge findings that might make you think differently about your issue, if your issue is primarily about abstract values rather than concrete outcomes, or if the cost of answering the question outweighs the importance of the decision, you might not need independent analysis.
How to decide
Analysis is not better than advocacy: they are two important and, in a functional democracy, indispensable tools for making good policy.
If you know what you want to say and you want to say it effectively, you need advocacy or communications support.
If you need to know whether a policy will have a desired effect, how large that effect will be, what the tradeoffs inherent in a policy are, or whether an argument you are making all the time will hold up to scrutiny, that is when policy analysis will be more useful.
If you are trying to figure out which of these situations you are in, I am always happy to talk about whether an analysis makes sense. Feel free to send me an email at rob@sciotoanalysis.com
