Liz Richardson

Who Listens to the Grass Roots? A Field Experiment on Informational Lobbying in the UK

Research on interest groups indicates that elected representatives respond positively to the informational content of a lobby campaign; but scholars also acknowledge that this claim is hard to evaluate because of the methodological challenges of establishing whether influence occurred or not. To test for the impact of informational lobbying, we deploy an experimental design, recruiting citizen interest groups in eight local authority areas to campaign on a matter of importance to them. These groups sent either information-rich or information-poor lobbying letters to 248 randomly selected local councillors in their areas, and we monitored the responses. Descriptive statistics and regressions with clustered standard errors show that the informational content of the letter does not make a difference to the response overall. But the information-rich treatment affected the quality of the response, encouraging councillors to pass on the letter to another expert or professional. Our findings indicate that elected representatives in English local government use a cue from an informational lobby to defer to other professional elites rather than to engage with the lobbyists request. These findings have implications for the study of lobbying influence in other jurisdictions.

Can we make environmental citizens? A randomised control trial of the effects of a school-based intervention on the attitudes and knowledge of young people

The aim of this study was to determine whether school-based intervention can help in making environmental citizens. A randomised control trial of 448 primary school students and their families in 27 primary schools located in Vale Royal, North West England was carried out between January and July 2008. The interventions were two types of class-based instruction on environmental issues, one long and the other short, which were designed to increase environmental awareness. Environmental attitudes and behaviours were measured by surveys completed by the students in their classes and in their homes before and after the interventions. The analysis reports school averages of the questionnaire responses, followed by regression analysis using robust clustered standard errors. The results show no statistically significant differences between schools in the intervention groups compared to the control group schools. The rising environmental awareness of the control group during the intervention may partly explain the positive results of existing non-experimental studies.

Expanding the Use of Experiments on Civic Behavior: Experiments with Local Government as a Research Partner:

Despite the acknowledged benefits of experimental methods and growing policy and academic interest in evidence-based policy, few researchers have attempted to undertake experiments at a local level in cooperation with policymakers and public service providers. This paper discusses the challenges of implementing and delivering experiments in these contexts, drawing on four successfully completed experiments and two current experiments and referring to four proposed experiments that did not take place. The completed and ongoing experiments investigated canvassing to increase household recycling, Internet deliberation to change civic attitudes, education to change children’s environmental attitudes, community support to improve quality of life for drug users, citizen pledging to donate to charity, and letter writing to influence the response of councilors to citizen interest groups. The paper concludes by assessing the benefits of co-produced field experiments against the challenges and argues that, overall, co-production has the potential to expand the scope, range, and depth of possible experiments; improve access to citizens and to data; and lead to research that is more credible to policymakers.

Dos and don’ts for involving citizens in the design and delivery of health and social care

Purpose – Involving communities, citizens and service users in the design and delivery of public services has long been a key aim of government policy and arguably has it never been more important than within times of austerity. Yet, whilst acknowledging the importance of engagement, many health and social care organisations struggle with this in practice. This paper sets out some guiding principles for engagement. Design/methodology/approach – This paper draws on conversations at a series of events in 2013 which brought together researchers, those charged with delivering on government policy at the local level and active citizens, to debate and explore evidence and practice on how to involve and mobilise citizens in local decision making in a time of austerity. Learning is distilled from these events to provide a useful guide for working effectively with communities. Findings – As with any issue as complex as this, there is no magic bullet, quick fix, simple check-list or solve-all tool. Like doing anyth...

Designing public policy for co-production: Theory, practice and change

Introduction: Why is redesign of public policy needed? Chapter One: Possibilities for policy design Chapter Two: Conventional policy design Chapter Three: Co-productive policy design Section One * Challenges and Change Within Conventional Policy Design: Can crisis ever be good for policy design? ~ Katy Wilkinson Challenges in policy redesign ~ Paul McCabe The hidden politics of policy design ~ Simon Burall and Tim Hughes Designing policy for localism ~ Robert Rutherfoord and Lucy Spurling Creative disruption for cultural change ~ Toby Blume Section Two * Vision in Co-Productive Policy Design: Establishing principles for value-driven policy ~ Teresa Cordova and Moises Gonzales Doing politics to build power and change policy ~ Jess Steele Participatory action research and policy change ~ Brett G. Stoudt, Maria Elena Torre, Paul Bartley, Fawn Bracy, Hillary Caldwell, Anthony Downs, Cory Greene, Jan Haldipur, Prakriti Hassan, Einat Manoff, Nadine Sheppard and Jacqueline Yates Section Three * Grammar in Co-Productive Policy Design: Using technology to help communities shout louder ~ Phil Jones, Colin Lorne and Chris Speed Generating community conversations ~ Amina Lone and Dan Silver Policy design as co-design ~ Michaela Howell and Margaret Wilkinson Using mediation to resolve conflict ~ Maura Rose Chapter Four: Debating co-productive policy design Chapter Five: Governance for co-productive policy designs Epilogue: Co-producing research.

Responsible Citizens and Accountable Service Providers? Renegotiating The Contract Between Citizen and State

New forms of governance, conditional approaches to public service access, and initiatives to engage citizens in taking on new responsibilities are being developed in the context of the scaling down of the welfare state. We examine the extent to which collaboration and multidirectional accountability can be developed between the state and citizens, with a focus on a case study of Community Contracts in England. These quasi-legal agreements, operationalised at the local level, involve citizens and service providers cooperating in tackling social problems through agreed responsibilities and behaviour. Findings from interviews and focus group research suggest that Community Contracts represent an innovation in governance. Citizens are given a voice and there are new pathways for effective service delivery and accountability; conditionality applies to citizens and service providers. However, although there was evidence of increased service accountability, the impact on civic responsibility and conditionality beyond already active citizens and beyond certain issues was less apparent. Although citizens and service providers were ready to take on new roles, the legal status of the contract was only loosely defined. Challenges remain concerning how contract-based approaches can be fully realised in practice.

The Effects of Social Information on Volunteering: A Field Experiment

Research indicates that providing social information about other people’s charitable donations can increase individual contributions. However, the effects of social information on volunteering time are underexplored. In this field experiment, we measure the effects of different levels of feedback about other people’s time contributions (very high, high, and moderate) on individuals’ hours of volunteering. The experiment was conducted with students from English universities volunteering for a variety of organizations and with a group of predominantly older people volunteering for a national charity in England. Social information did not increase volunteering for either group relative to a control group receiving individualized feedback with no social comparison. For students whose baseline volunteering time was lower than the median, social information had a demotivating effect, reducing their volunteering, suggesting that donating time is different to donating money.

Everyday stories of impact: interpreting knowledge exchange in the contemporary university

Research into the barriers of getting evidence produced by academics into policymaking processes has often highlighted the lack of research on academics and what they do, as compared to what policymakers do. This was most recently highlighted in a systematic review of the literature (Oliver et al, 2014). This paper reports on research carried out with academics who were tasked with producing evidence reviews for the UK Department for Communities and Local Government based on research funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. Using a novel co-produced methodology the academics were interviewed by an academic and a UK civil servant, with the analysis carried out by both. Using an interpretive approach, the findings identify specific meaning-making stories or practices that were enablers or barriers to producing evidence suitable for policymakers. The paper identifies three areas that affect academic behaviour at the nexus with policymaking: career biographies; disciplinary background; and the contradictory institutional pressures on academics. We conclude by arguing for a more collaborative approach between academics and policymakers. The co-produced approach also allowed us to identify the need for policymakers and civil servants to learn more about the different drivers of academics and the ways in which they work.

Craft metrics to value co-production

To assess whether research is relevant to society, ask the stakeholders, say Catherine Durose, Liz Richardson and Beth Perry.To assess whether research is relevant to society, ask the stakeholders, say Catherine Durose, Liz Richardson and Beth Perry.

How best to open up local democracy?: A randomised experiment to encourage contested elections and greater representativeness in English parish councils

ABSTRACT Interventions aimed at increasing the supply and representativeness of elected officials range from facilitative to the formally authorised. This paper reports on a field experiment aimed at testing the effect of facilitative approaches at the local level based on a collaboration between parish councils and the research team. We randomly allocated 818 parish council clerks across five counties in Southern England, either to receive information and the opportunity for member training for recruitment, or not to receive this contact. We investigated the effect of this intervention on political recruitment. Despite evidence of an effect on use of social media, our results suggest that there are significant institutional and structural barriers to participation in local politics that cannot easily be overcome using facilitative measures.