Programme summary
This proposal is an integrated programme of research activities designed to address one of the crucial questions of the current age: how do we engage the citizens in the making of policies and in how those policies are delivered. These activities matter because, through the debate about social capital, we know that engagement is important for achieving the public policy outcomes that publics and policy-makers care about, such as low crime and the absence of anti-social behaviour, economically developed and cohesive communities, and a fully working democratic system.
While much is known about the links at the aggregate level, there is much less knowledge known about actually what works at the delivery and individual levels, about the concrete things that policy-makers can do sustain the activities of citizens as users of services and how citizens can make things happen alongside public agencies. This large grant aims to throw more knowledge about such links in a way that feeds information back to policy-makers and citizens in a timely manner.
In the best traditions of applied social science, this research aims to be methologically innovative. This is not just innovation for its own sake, but because the civicness-outcome link is notoriously tricky to tie down and to ascertain the direction of causation. For this reason, we use advanced statistics for the survey analysis, and apply the experimental method to ascertain the impact of interventions designed to improve civic engagement.
Finally, we pioneer a new type of qualitative evaluation - design experiments - which share some features of action research and of experiments. By allowing policy-makers and the researchers to alter the intervention as it is introduced allows both leverage on the causal connection and on improving the intervention.
Individual component projects
- Analysis of existing survey data to understand the civic-outcome link
- A voting experiment - a randomised control trial, whereby a randomly selected group of voters are divided into a treatment and a control group. The former are telephoned with an encouragement to vote, and from voting records we can find out whether the intervention worked from looking at the registers
- A deliberative intervention - we will randomly select a panel of internet users to discuss an important national issue, and check to see whether their political interest, knowledge and engagement has changed as a result and in comparison to a control group
- A series of design experiments linked to the policy side of implementing new measures of citizen involvement and neighbourhood decision-making
- A series of seminars to develop a heuristic with policy-makers about civil renewal and civicness
Beneficiaries
The first set of beneficiaries are policy-makers the two government departments that are co-funding this proposal, and their policies as they are being implemented by delivery agencies. They will gain extra knowledge about what works from the design experiments and from the survey analysis, as well as the other experiments and the development of a heuristic for future policy development. In a similar manner, delivery agencies, such as local authorities will gain insights into their implementation issues. More broadly policy makers in other UK government departments will benefit from the research, especially the Department for Constitutional Affairs, and the research will carry findings of value to the devolved administrations of the UK
The second set of beneficiaries are the citizens themselves who may see more connections between governments, democratic processes and what they do from being stimulated by the deliberation and voting experiments.
The third set of beneficiaries are researchers working in the filed of civil renewal across government and academia, which will learn from innovative research techniques and their use.
The methodological advances will assist government departments as they sponsor further research, and encourage the application of randomized control trials to greater sets of activities across government, which would encourage the use of more rigorous research techniques to understand public problems as advocated by the Magenta Book (2003) Guidance Notes for Policy Evaluation and Analysis (Cabinet Office Strategy Unit). The wider beneficiary will be applied social science itself, which has the potential to advance the highest standards of inquiry and to be directly relevant to the concerns of policy-makers in their current timescale.
Project investigators
- Sarah Cotterill - The University of Manchester
- Ed Fieldhouse - The University of Manchester
- Peter John - The University of Manchester
- Hanhua Liu - The University of Manchester
- Liz Richardson - The University of Manchester
- Graham Smith - University of Southampton
- Gerry Stoker - University of Southampton
- Corinne Wales - University of Southampton
Project partners
- The University of Manchester
- The University of Southampton
Project funders
- Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC)
- Communities & Local Government (CLG)
- North West Improvement Network (NWIN)
Relevant links
Publications
