“Ghosts” Making the World a Better Place

In “Bring on the Policy Entrepreneurs” (Issues, Winter 2024), Erica Goldman proposes that “every graduate student in the hard sciences, social sciences, health, and engineering should be able to learn some of the basic tools and tactics of policy entrepreneurship as a way of contributing their knowledge to a democratic society.” I wholeheartedly support that vision.

When I produced my doctoral dissertation on policy entrepreneurs in the 1990s, only a handful of scholars, most notably the political scientist John Kingdon, mentioned these actors. I described them as “ghost like” in the policy system. Today, researchers from across the social sciences are studying policy entrepreneurs and many new contributions are being published each year. Consequently, we can now discern regularities in what works to increase the likelihood that would-be policy entrepreneurs will meet with success. I summarized these regularities in an article in the journal Policy Design and Practice titled “So You Want to be a Policy Entrepreneur?”

When weighing the prospects of investing time to build the skills of policy entrepreneurship, many professionals in scientific, technological, and health fields might worry about the opportunity costs involved. If they work on these skills, what will they be giving up? It’s legitimate to worry about trade-offs. And, certainly, none of us want highly trained professionals migrating away from their core business to go bare knuckle in the capricious world of political influence.

But to a greater extent than has been acknowledged so far, building skills to influence policymaking can be consistent with becoming a more effective professional across a range of fields. The same skills it takes to be a policy entrepreneur are those that can make you a higher performer in your core work.

My studies of policy entrepreneurship show collaboration is a foundational skill for anyone wanting to have policy influence. Policy entrepreneurs do not have to become political advisers, lobbyists, or heads of think tanks. But they do need to be highly adept at participating in diverse teams. They need to find effective ways to connect and work with others who have different knowledge and skills and who come from different backgrounds than their own. Thinking along these lines, it doesn’t take much reflection to see that core skills attributed to policy entrepreneurs are of enormous value for all ambitious professionals, no matter what they do or where they work.

We can all improve our productivity—and that of others—by improving our teamwork skills. Likewise, it’s well established that strategic networking is crucial for acquiring valuable inside information. Skills in framing problems, resolving conflicts, making effective arguments, and shaping narratives are essential for ambitious people in every professional setting. And these are precisely the skills that, over and over, we see are foundational to the success of policy entrepreneurs.

So, yes, let’s bring on the policy entrepreneurs in the hard sciences, social sciences, health, and engineering. They’ll have a shot at making the world a better place through policy change. Just as crucially, they’ll also build the skills they need to become leaders in their chosen professional domains.

Michael Mintrom

Erica Goldman makes the important case that we need to better enable scientists and technologists to seek to impact policy. She asserts that by providing targeted training, creating a community of practice, and raising awareness, experts can become better at translating their ideas into policy action. We should build an academic field around policy entrepreneurship as a logical next step to support this effort.

One key reason why people don’t pursue policy entrepreneurship is, as Goldman suggests, “they often have to pick up their skills on the job, through informal networks, or by serendipitously meeting someone who shows them the ropes.” This is in part because these skills are not regularly taught in the classroom. The academic field of policy analysis relies on a client-based model, which assumes that the student already has or will obtain sufficient connections or professional experience to work for policy clients. But how do you get a policy client without a degree or existing policy network?

Many experts in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics who have tremendous professional experience—precisely the people we should want to be informing policy—do not have the skills to take on client-based policy work. Take a Silicon Valley engineer who wants to change artificial intelligence policy, or a biochemist who wants to reform the pharmaceutical industry. Most such individuals will not enroll in a master’s degree program or move to Washington, DC, to build a policy network. As Goldman emphasizes, we instead need “a practical roadmap or curriculum” to “empower more people from diverse backgrounds and expertise to influence the policy conversation.”

What if we developed instead a field designed specifically to teach subject matter experts how to impact policy from the outside, how to help them get a role that will give them leverage from within, or how to reach both goals? At the Aspen Tech Policy Hub, we are working with partners such as the Federation of American Scientists to kick-start the development of this field. We focus on teaching the practical skills required to impact policy—such as how to identify key stakeholders, how to develop a policy campaign that speaks to those stakeholders, and how to communicate ideas to generalists. By investing in the field of policy entrepreneurship, we will make it more likely that the next generation of scientists and technologists have a stronger voice at the policy table.

Betsy Cooper